So much for campus diversity and helping minority groups that suffered university-admissions discrimination in the past. The Trump administration issued a call within the Justice Department for personnel to investigate and sue universities over affirmative action policies. The administration says
So much for campus diversity and helping minority groups that suffered university-admissions discrimination in the past. The Trump administration issued a call within the Justice Department for personnel to investigate and sue universities over affirmative action policies. The administration says such policies constitute “intentional race-based discrimination” against white college applicants.
Generations of Americans have benefited from more inclusive institutions of higher education. Policies creating more diversified universities help expand educational prospects and increase employment potential for disadvantaged groups, especially blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans. Affirmative action allows race to count as one of multiple admission criteria to help expose campuses to different cultures and ideas.
With time, this advances greater tolerance on campus and, gradually, the workforce. The positive effects might seem subtle, but they’re essential to reverse a culture of white privilege that has long made college and workplace life less inviting to minorities.
In general, affirmative action helps equalize access for minorities to opportunities available to the majority population. John F. Kennedy was the first president to use the term in an executive order to government contractors in 1961.
It’s no surprise that the Justice Department is tilting conservative under President Donald Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who has a long history of opposing affirmative action and minority protections. This move follows department policy changes on voting rights, police reforms and gay rights.
The Justice Department’s plans were disclosed by The New York Times, which obtained an internal announcement in the department’s civil rights division. The Washington Post later reported that the announcement targeted political appointees because career civil servants refused to work on the project, citing concerns that it was contrary to the office’s longstanding support for civil rights in education.
The administration disputed the published reports, saying it was recruiting lawyers to investigate a single complaint involving Asian-American students in a college admissions case. The internal announcement said it was searching for lawyers to work on “investigations and possible litigation related to intentional race-based discrimination in college and university admissions.”
Vanita Gupta, former chief of the civil rights division under President Barack Obama, told The Washington Post the plan is “an affront to our values as a country and the very mission of the civil rights division.”
The U.S. Supreme Court upheld affirmative action’s constitutionality last year in a 4 to 3 ruling that the University of Texas at Austin could consider race in admissions.
Roger Clegg, a top Justice Department official during the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, called the new plan a “long overdue” development as the nation becomes increasingly multiracial. What Clegg, Sessions and Trump aren’t acknowledging is that whites seldom need a boost.
Politically, helping disadvantaged groups probably doesn’t play well with Trump’s base. But it’s the right thing to do.
— St. Louis Post-Dispatch
