The Trump administration has officially abandoned affirmative action, having decided that African Americans and Latinos no longer need any additional breaks and can pull themselves up by their own shoelaces.
Trump forgot that his son-in-Law Jared Kushner was the beneficiary of affirmative action. As detailed by journalist Daniel Golden in a book about preferential treatment for rich boys, Kushner’s dad gave Harvard a couple of million dollars, although no one in the family ever went to Harvard. This cleared the way for Jared’s admission, who vaulted over better qualified applicants from the same high school. Golden’s Book is called “The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges—and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates.”
I’m not sure how Donald got into the Wharton School. It surely wasn’t grades or brains or even athletic skills (remember that the bone spur in his foot enabled him to avoid the Vietnam draft, his fifth deferment).
The story begins:
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration will encourage the nation’s school superintendents and college presidents to adopt race-blind admissions standards, abandoning an Obama administration policy that called on universities to consider race as a factor in diversifying their campuses, Trump administration officials said.
Last November, Attorney General Jeff Sessions asked the Justice Department to re-evaluate past policies that he believed pushed the department to act beyond what the law, the Constitution and the Supreme Court had required, Devin M. O’Malley, a Justice Department spokesman said. As part of that process, the Justice Department rescinded seven policy guidances from the Education Department’s civil rights division on Tuesday.
“The executive branch cannot circumvent Congress or the courts by creating guidance that goes beyond the law and — in some instances — stays on the books for decades,” Mr. O’Malley said.
The Supreme Court has steadily narrowed the ways that schools can consider race when trying to diversify their student bodies. But it has not banned the practice.
Now, affirmative action is at a crossroads. The Trump administration is moving against any use of race as a measurement of diversity in education. And the retirement of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy at the end of this month will leave the court without its swing vote on affirmative action and allow President Trump to nominate a justice opposed to a policy that for decades has tried to integrate elite educational institutions.
A highly anticipated case is pitting Harvard against Asian-American students who say one of the nation’s most prestigious institutions has systematically excluded some Asian-American applicants to maintain slots for students of other races. That case is clearly aimed at the Supreme Court.
“The whole issue of using race in education is being looked at with a new eye in light of the fact that it’s not just white students being discriminated against, but Asians and others as well,” said Roger Clegg, president and general counsel of the conservative Center for Equal Opportunity. “As the demographics of the country change, it becomes more and more problematic.”
The Obama administration believed that students benefit from being surrounded by diverse classmates, so in 2011, the administration offered schools a potential road map to establishing affirmative action policies that could withstand legal scrutiny. The guidance was controversial at the time that it was issued, for its far-reaching interpretation of the law. Justice officials said that pages of hypothetical scenarios offered in the guidance were particularly problematic, as they clearly bent the law to specific policy preferences.
In a pair of policy guidance documents, the Obama Education and Justice departments told elementary and secondary schools and college campuses to use “the compelling interests” established by the court to achieve diversity. They concluded that the Supreme Court “has made clear such steps can include taking account of the race of individual students in a narrowly tailored manner.”
The Trump administration’s decisions on Tuesday brought government policy back to the George W. Bush administration guidances. The Trump administration did not formally reissue Bush-era guidance on race-based admissions, but, in recent days, officials did repost a Bush administration affirmative action policy document online.
That document states, “The Department of Education strongly encourages the use of race-neutral methods for assigning students to elementary and secondary schools.”
For the past several years, that document had been replaced by a note declaring that the policy had been withdrawn. The Bush policy is now published in full, with no note attached. It reaffirmed its view in 2016 after a Supreme Court ruling that said that schools could consider race as one factor among many.
In that case, Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, a white woman claimed she was denied admission because of her race, in part because the university had a program that admitted significant numbers of minorities who ranked in the top 10 percent of their class.
“It remains an enduring challenge to our nation’s education system to reconcile the pursuit of diversity with the constitutional promise of equal treatment and dignity,” Justice Kennedy wrote for the 4-3 majority.
The Trump administration’s plan would scrap the existing policies and encourage schools not to consider race at all. The new policy would not have the force of law, but it amounts to the official view of the federal government. School officials who keep their admissions policies intact would do so knowing that they could face a Justice Department investigation or lawsuit, or lose federal funding from the Education Department.
A senior Justice Department official pushed back against the idea that these decisions are about rolling back protections for minorities. He said they are hewing the department closer to the letter of the law.
He noted that rolling back guidance is not the same thing as a change of law, so that the decision to rescind technically would not have a legal effect on how the government defends or challenges affirmative-action related issues.
The move comes at a moment when conservatives see an opportunity to dismantle affirmative action.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions has said his prosecutors will investigate and sue universities over discriminatory admissions policies. And the conservative-backed lawsuit against Harvard is being pushed by the same group, the Project on Fair Representation, that pressed Fisher.
