Trump Administration Higher Education Reforms are Sweeping but not Unprecedented
Trump’s civil rights revolution puts higher ed’s DEI empire on notice.
On Wednesday, the Trump Administration announced a major victory in its campaign to defend Americans’ civil rights. Following a Department of Justice probe, the University of Virginia (UVA) agreed to terminate a host of racially discriminatory practices and to protect women’s sports and intimate facilities from intrusion by transgender (male) athletes.
As I describe in a new report by the America First Policy Institute, President Trump has done what none of his predecessors dared to do: he has seized the reins of the civil rights state to implement a conservative civil rights agenda centered on equal treatment under the law.
To the great consternation of many academics, elite universities are ground zero in this fight. The blatant disregard these institutions showed towards the civil rights and safety of Jewish students during last year’s campus antisemitism crisis created an opening to address a much larger pattern of civil rights abuses. The Administration has also targeted free speech violations, and viewpoint discrimination—the wellspring for so much of the fanaticism that reins unchallenged on American campuses.
To the Administration’s critics, these actions raise legitimacy concerns. Specifically, they oppose linking antisemitism to other civil rights and liberties concerns and the scale of the Administration’s actions, which some have termed a “war on higher education.”
What has been missing from this conversation is a fuller picture of how prior administrations used their enforcement authorities to implement their own visions for civil rights. Unfortunately, the full picture is likely to remain obscured because many of the associated settlement agreements between universities and the government are not publicly available. However, a remarkable 2012 agreement aptly demonstrates how at least one prior administration wielded civil rights law to enact a divisive and radical agenda.
The Compton Cookout
On February 15, 2010, a group of University of California, San Diego (UCSD) college students hosted an off-campus party, which they named “the Compton Cookout.” Screen captures of the event’s Facebook flier record that attendees were encouraged to dress in stereotypical (i.e., hip-hop themed) African American attire and to expect to be served some combination of 40-ounce malt liquor, “purple drank” (a popular Dave Chappelle reference), chicken, and watermelon. The event was endorsed by an online black comedian-provocateur who went by the stage name “Jigaboo Jones.”
The Compton Cookout was certainly offensive. Although it had no official connection to UCSD (it was not sponsored by any school fraternities or sororities), it nonetheless generated campus protests, “teach-ins,” and ultimately, an Obama Administration civil rights investigation.
The resulting settlement between UCSD and the Departments of Justice and Education contained the motherload of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies, including:
A DEI instruction graduation requirement
DEI themed conferences and postdoctoral fellowships
Campus locations reserved for racial minority students
Increased staffing for African American and Chicano-Latino Studies departments (note that the incident did not involve Latino stereotypes)
A “Council on Climate, Equity, and Inclusion” (a DEI advocacy entity)
A “Multicultural Living and Learning Community” program to promote “social justice activism”
A development officer position tasked with channeling grants and gifts to “diversity-related activities”
An HR training program to develop “culturally competent managers”
Anti-discrimination training for all students, faculty, and staff
A bias incident reporting system
Annual funding and programs to recruit and retain racial minority students
Commitments to hire minority faculty members
Hiring requirements for new faculty to demonstrate their “commitment to promoting diversity” (aka, “DEI statements”)
A mural celebrating Mexican heritage (again, the motivating incident did not involve Latinos).
Good for the Goose, Good for the Gander
How does the Compton Cookout controversy and settlement compare to the Trump Administration’s civil rights enforcement actions? Let’s return to the issues of reasonableness and scale.
Beginning with reasonableness, the logic of several UCSD provisions seem strained. The Mexican heritage mural is facially absurd. Excluding white students from taxpayer-funded university locations also seems like a poor remedy for ethnic jokes occurring somewhere out in the world. How DEI-themed postdoctoral fellowships and conferences address this problem is likewise unclear. Indeed, regardless of how one feels about the party or its participants, it is far from obvious that anyone’s civil rights were actually violated.
At the same time, there is a coherent throughline to the Obama Administration’s actions, insofar as the DEI agenda is framed around tolerance, inclusivity, and most of all: a heightened sensitivity to slights directed at members of certain groups, including those mocked by the partygoers in question. It makes sense, in other words.
The Trump Administration’s civil rights agenda also makes sense. “Campus-left” antisemitism is largely driven by the same oppressor-oppressed narrative that animates DEI, cancel mobs, speech codes, and other forms of “equity-based” discrimination. Even gender ideology (transgender policies) draws on this same paradigm.
The entire crisis of campus radicalism, of which campus antisemitism is a subset, is also “downstream” of viewpoint discrimination in faculty hiring. When dissenting perspectives are systematically excluded, campuses degenerate into “echo-chambers” and fringe ideas that could never survive reasoned debate (e.g., speech I object to is “violence”) metastasize.
It is for these reasons that the Trump Administration is tackling the larger pattern of institutional support for discriminatory equity ideology in the context of combatting campus antisemitism.
What about scale? The Trump administration has concluded several agreements, including with Columbia University, Brown University, the University of Pennsylvania, and now, UVA. Other settlements are likely coming—most notably with Harvard University. When the dust finally settles on the 60 investigations it launched in response to the 2024 campus antisemitism crisis, the scale of Trump Administration’s civil rights actions on university campuses will be substantial.
Yet, these actions are less sweeping than the crisis itself. The Administration investigated 60 universities because it received credible civil rights complaints from students attending at least this number of schools. During this crisis, more than 3,100 students were arrested or detained, including for assault, harassment, and vandalism. Jewish students were subjected to death threats and genocidal slogans, all while university leaders’ fiddled.
The scope of the associated abuses is likewise daunting. Campus DEI programs are legion, despite evidence demonstrating that they worsen campus climates. These programs are inherently discriminatory, as are racial hiring preferences and “diversity statements.” Conservative faculty experience blatant discrimination in hiring, promotion, grants, and publications. Conservative speakers are routinely subjected to cancellation and violence—to say nothing of assassination.
Indeed, this toxic climate is forcing record self-censorship by students and faculty of all political persuasions. So much for academic freedom.
Even if one were to take seriously the notion that black (and somehow, Latino) UCSD students were harmed by the dress and food choices of racially insensitive off-campus partygoers, that incident pales in comparison to current civil rights abuses linked to campus left extremism.
For better or worse, presidents exercise broad discretion in their enforcement of federal civil rights law. At different times, these authorities have been wielded aggressively and timidly, and for serious and trivial reasons. One hopes that, in times of crisis, they would be wielded with the energy and dispatch our Framer’s intended for America’s chief executive—even if, at other times, they are wielded foolishly.
Christopher Schorr is the Director of Higher Education Reform Initiative at the America First Policy Institute.
DEI needs to be dismantled. Only the more qualified should be hired. Second, the indoctrination, political, biological, moral, all of it noxious and
inappropriate begins in primary school. The entire Dept of Education needs to be swept and investigated. Perhaps teaching a new generation civic history, love for their country, history of the world, non-partisan social learning, and, needless to say but not obvious still, to read and write. Perhaps good teachers should be paid more. Parents should be involved too.