Education advocates are afraid that the administration’s getting hold of admissions racial data could make colleges a more hostile place for students of color.
“The student data could be used to challenge the admission of Black students in particular under assumptions that they are presumptively unqualified because of their race,” Janel George, a law professor at Georgetown University, told HuffPost.
“Woke is officially DEAD at Brown. Thank you for your attention to this matter!” Donald Trump declared in a Truth Social post last week.
He was celebrating the fact that the prestigious Providence, Rhode Island, university had just agreed to a settlement with him. In order to restore its federal funding, the school agreed to implement anti-transgender policies and hand over its race and admissions data.
It was similar to a deal the federal government had struck with Columbia University in New York after Trump relentlessly attacked the school in the wake of on-campus pro-Palestinian protests.
And then on Thursday, Trump went further: He signed an executive order demanding that every college in the country hand over its admissions data, citing a 2023 Supreme Court decision prohibiting the use of race as a factor in college admissions. “Greater transparency is essential to exposing unlawful practices and ultimately ridding society of shameful, dangerous racial hierarchies,” the order reads.
Already, there is growing fear from legal experts and higher education advocates that he could weaponize this data in order to get higher education institutions to fall in line with his administration’s goals.
“They can misuse the data, they can interpret it in any way they want,” said Mariam Rashid, the associate director for the Center for American Progress’ racial equity and justice program. “And they can misuse it in order to misinform the public, too.”
For example, the Trump administration could use the racial data to claim a university is discriminating against a certain race, or infer that not enough Trump supporters are being admitted because the freshman class doesn’t have a high enough percentage of students from red states.
Trump’s latest strike on American institutions connects his war on diversity and his administration’s assault on colleges across the country in a way that could turbocharge both. It’s not just that Trump will have an extraordinary amount of information about colleges; it’s how he’s likely to use it to further his false narrative about both race and higher education. And it’s students who will bear the brunt of the consequences.
“Given the administration’s flawed interpretation of our civil rights law, they might use this data to accuse schools of discrimination and threaten universities,” Donya Khadem, an attorney at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, told HuffPost.
“It’s unprecedented scrutiny by the federal government.”
– Donya Khadem, attorney at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund
Some schools refused to play the game. In April, Harvard University wrote a letter to Trump saying that his demands flew in the face of free speech laws and would stifle the kind of learning and research that happens at a place of higher education. But other schools, like Columbia and Brown, bent the knee and gave Trump what he wanted.
“It’s very concerning because it’s unprecedented scrutiny by the federal government,” Khadem said.
This time, the administration is taking aim at an aspect of educational life that has long been a bugbear for conservatives. There is a widespread belief among conservatives that colleges and universities have given advantages to students of color at the expense of white students.
By allowing race to be a factor in admissions, the claim goes, schools are taking spots away from certain groups of students and instead admitting students they claim are less qualified, based solely on their race. (In reality, race has been one of many factors admissions officers consider when choosing between fully qualified applicants.)
“This is all motivated by a racist myth that Black people don’t deserve to be in these elite spaces,” Khadem said.
And now that Trump is back in office, getting his hands on this data is likely just the beginning of his attempt to turn back the clock on admitting students of color.
Asked for comment about how it intends to use the admissions data, the Department of Education directed HuffPost to a press release about the new executive order Trump signed on Thursday.
“We will not allow institutions to blight the dreams of students by presuming that their skin color matters more than their hard work and accomplishments,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said.
Students pass the statue of John Harvard in Harvard Yard on their way to baccalaureate services ahead of commencement at Harvard University on June 17, 1951.
Photo by Sam Hammat/The Boston Globe via Getty Images
Conservatives celebrated when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down race-conscious college admissions processes in Students For Fair Admissions v. Harvard in 2023, saying that schools can not use race as a factor in college admissions.
Harvard, together with fellow defendant the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, had argued that schools needed to be able to consider race as one factor among many to ensure the educational benefits of a diverse student body. The high court disagreed, saying the schools did not have a “compelling interest” in considering race as a factor and thus violated the 14th Amendment.
But education law experts say that the federal government is using that ruling and expanding it far beyond its original intent.
In the same ruling, the court expressly said that “nothing prohibits universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected the applicant’s life, so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university.”
Now, Trump’s order undermines that.
“They’re using the Students For Fair Admissions [decision] in ways that are not what the justices meant when they wrote it,” Khadem said.
Education advocates are afraid that the administration’s getting hold of admissions racial data could make colleges a more hostile place for students of color.
“The student data could be used to challenge the admission of Black students in particular under assumptions that they are presumptively unqualified because of their race,” Janel George, a law professor at Georgetown University, told HuffPost.
“This is all motivated by a racist myth that Black people don’t deserve to be in these elite spaces.”
– Khadem
It could also turn off otherwise qualified students from attending some of these colleges. “I think it’s a big deterrent,” Khadem said. “Columbia’s campus has become and will continue to become less welcoming to Black students.”
Columbia and Brown did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.
Systemic racism and inequality are already significant barriers to college attendance. Research shows that Black students and other people of color are more likely to be from low-income families and struggle to afford college. Then there’s the fact that standardized tests frequently used in college admissions are biased toward white students and those from wealthier families.
Studies have shown that race-neutral admissions processes lead to a drop in diversity. In 1996, after California voters approved a measure that would ban affirmative action at the state’s public universities, the state’s most prestigious schools saw a drastic drop in diversity. Indeed, one of the arguments made by Harvard during its legal fight was that no race-neutral admissions process offers the same diversity benefits.
The first college classes to be enrolled after the Students for Fair Admissions ruling varied in their diversity. Some schools, like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tufts University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, saw a decrease in Black and Hispanic enrollment, while other schools’ racial compositions stayed roughly the same.
Not only could these changes further hinder access to higher education for nonwhite students, but there’s a question of how making this data public could harm students. If the Trump administration publicly calls out a school for having a certain number of nonwhite students, that could become a problem for people on campus.
“I do think it’s harmful,” Rashid said. “[The data] is not going to be attached to a name, but they can make up whatever narrative they want.”
Experts warn that it could create a hostile environment on campuses, where nonwhite students feel as if their peers believe that they’re unqualified to be there. “At schools with higher admissions of Black students or faculty, some people are going to feel a certain way about how they’re perceived at school,” Khadem said.
There is a direct line from Trump’s attacks on colleges to his administration’s larger anti-diversity campaign.
In an attempt to begin removing people of color from public life, Trump signed an executive order in January that sought to end diversity, equity and inclusion programs at different institutions, including nonprofit organizations receiving federal grants, law enforcement agencies and institutions of higher education. The penalty for not ending DEI, though vague, was the loss of crucial federal funding.
The Department of Education followed up with guidance for educational institutions, telling them they must end “racial preferences” and restore “merit.”
The Department of Justice joined the crusade too, launching investigations of colleges and universities it alleged were not complying with the Supreme Court’s ruling on using race in college admissions under the pretense of combating “illegal discrimination.”
“The [DOJ] will put an end to a shameful system in which someone’s race matters more than their ability,” acting Associate Attorney General Chad Mizelle said in a press release in March.
To the Trump administration, American society, and colleges in particular, have been beset by a racial regime that disfavors white conservatives — and this executive order was intended to combat that. Others, though, see a very different agenda.
“What they want to do is make everything race-neutral,” Rashid said. “In other words, make everything white.”
The defense secretary, along with the wider Trump administration, has spent its months in office purging the Pentagon, military and federal government of anything it deems diversity related, which has been widely interpreted by the military services and many others to mean anything that recognizes women and people with minority backgrounds.
Hegseth issued a vague order for the Defense Department to remove all “news articles, photos, and videos promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), including content related to critical race theory, gender ideology, and identity-based programs.”
Display case at the U.S. Naval Academy which housed removed items that commemorated female Jewish graduates. (Photo courtesy of Military Religious Freedom Foundation)
The U.S. Naval Academy has confirmed that officials there removed items commemorating female Jewish graduates from a historic display ahead of a visit to the school by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Tuesday.
The Military Religious Freedom Foundation, or MRFF, a nonprofit group that advocates for religious freedom, first reported on the move after its members noticed the removal of the items on display at the Commodore Uriah P. Levy Center and Jewish Chapel.
Cmdr. Ashley Hockycko confirmed late Tuesday that the historical items honoring the Jewish graduates had been removed but said that it was done so “mistakenly.” “U.S. Naval Academy leadership is immediately taking steps to review and correct the unauthorized removal,” she added.
The removal appears to be the latest example of military and defense officials removing displays, websites and other materials honoring the achievements of women and minorities within the military, often with the presumption of acting on Hegseth’s orders or reacting to his preferences and beliefs.
The defense secretary, along with the wider Trump administration, has spent its months in office purging the Pentagon, military and federal government of anything it deems diversity related, which has been widely interpreted by the military services and many others to mean anything that recognizes women and people with minority backgrounds.
Hegseth issued a vague order for the Defense Department to remove all “news articles, photos, and videos promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), including content related to critical race theory, gender ideology, and identity-based programs.”
Some of that content has been restored after the removals became public. However, Hegseth’s office has not offered a full accounting of what has been removed to date.
MRFF founder and President Mikey Weinstein told Military.com in an interview Wednesday that his organization heard from 31 Naval Academy faculty, Midshipmen and staff, who were “outraged” by the removal of the items.
According to the MRFF, the displays containing items from male Jewish graduates and service members were left untouched.
However, the items were removed for only a short time, and officials told Military.com that they had been restored by Tuesday evening, having been gone less than a day.
The military academy also purged nearly 400 books from its library around the time of Hegseth’s visit as well, an official confirmed to Military.com. The books were banned under the Trump administration push to purge materials related to diversity, and were culled from library shelves before the defense secretary’s visit to the academy, according to The Associated Press.
The move comes about a week after the Capital Gazette, an Annapolis newspaper, reported that leaders at the Naval Academy didn’t think they needed to remove any books since President Donald Trump’s January executive order banning materials on diversity applied to kindergarten through 12th-grade schools that receive federal funding — not colleges.
The Navy would not offer a list of the books removed when asked.
The orders and policies claiming to target “diversity, equity and inclusion” — a term that has taken on a difficult-to-define and amorphous meaning under the Trump administration — are leaving officials in the Pentagon and the military branches frustrated. They feel that many of the policies being released by Hegseth demand urgency but lack specifics and are open to interpretation.
One official who remained anonymous to speak freely without fear of retaliation frustratedly noted to Military.com that this dynamic sets up a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation.”
If the military services and their various offices overreact and remove content that becomes a scandal, they are slammed by Hegseth and his staff for “malicious compliance.”
That dynamic played out several weeks ago when the Pentagon was forced to walk back the removal of a website honoring trailblazing baseball player and Army veteran Jackie Robinson.
In a March 21 video, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell admitted that “some important content was inadvertently pulled offline” and attributed that to “the realities of AI tools and other software.” He said content was being both “mistakenly removed” and “maliciously removed.”
Meanwhile, the official went on to note, if the services take directives at their literal meaning, which was seemingly what the Naval Academy did when it decided it didn’t need to purge its library since it was not a K-12 school, that leads to the perception of noncompliance with orders and directives.
The result, according to the official, is a very uneven and ad hoc application of policy that leaves employees and officials paralyzed, frustrated and uncertain, with little more to go on than what they see in public statements like Parnell’s videos or Hegseth’s appearances on television.
“History is not DEI,” Parnell declared in his video.
“What does that mean? What am I supposed to do with that?” the official said.
Gill, the son-in-law of notorious cultist Dinesh D’Souza, ran a fleet of clickbait fake news sites and promoted D’Souza’s debunked “2000 Mules” film before being elected in 2024.
Earlier this month Gill introduced a resolution that would replace Ben Franklin with Trump on the $100 bill.
Last month Gill earned national headlines when he called for deporting Rep. Ilhan Omar over of a fake Russian video promoted by Elon Musk.
Gill first appeared here when he called for Trump to seize Greenland and Panama by military force.
His tweet below currently has over 34 million views thanks to it being shared by Elon Musk to his 220 million followers.
Alawieh, who had worked and lived in Rhode Island previously, was detained at least 36 hours, through Friday, and was going to be sent back to Lebanon, the complaint said. Alawieh, a kidney transplant specialist, was to start work at Brown University as an assistant professor of medicine.
“Oopsie…Too late,” Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, a Trump ally who agreed to house about 300 migrants for a year at a cost of $6 million in his country’s prisons, wrote on the social media site X above an article about Boasberg’s ruling. That post was recirculated by White House communications director Steven Cheung.
Prince is the most famous mercenary of the contemporary era and the founder of the now defunct private military company Blackwater. For a time, it was a prolific privateer in the “war on terror,” racking up millions in US government contracts by providing soldiers of fortune to the CIA, Pentagon and beyond.
Now he is a central figure among a web of other contractors trying to sell Trump advisers on a $25 billion deal to privatize the mass deportations of 12 million migrants. Prince also has the ear of Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, and was a character witness for her Senate confirmation.
Politico first reported on Prince’s deportation pitch to the Trump administration late last month.
Prince, the brother of former Education Sec. Betsy Devos, appeared here in 2023 when he went on trial in Austria for arms trafficking.
In 2022, he appeared here when he told then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson that he could have prevented Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Also in 2022, he told Steve Bannon that the US should be supporting Putin because he hates LGBTQ people.
Later that year, Prince was exposed for having spied on progressive groups.
In 2021, Prince was charging Afghan refugees $6500 for seats on planes doing evacuations.
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller “orchestrated” the process in the West Wing in tandem with Homeland Security Secretary Kristy Noem. Few outside their teams knew what was happening.
A federal court’s jurisdiction does *not* stop at the water’s edge. The question is whether the *defendants* are subject to the court order, not *where* the conduct being challenged takes place.Were it otherwise, the government could act lawlessly overseas and courts would be powerless to stop it.
This paragraph says it all. They want the LGBTQ+ removed from society. They are willing to be violent and obnoxious, hurting people, property, and staff. They attack other customers demanding to know if they support the LGBTQ+ and they then badger the customer.
Target pulled some LGBTQ-themed merchandise linked to Pride Month last year, citing increased confrontations between shoppers and employees and incidents of products being thrown on the floor.
The goal is being driven by this guy. He feels the idea of anyone not a white straight cis male shouldn’t be in any position of authority or corporate rank. His view is that women and the LGBTQ+ shouldn’t be in the work force or seen and the non-white males should be in menial jobs with little or no authority. Just be base workers. He and his ilk see great dangers to the white “race” people if they can not maintain a super majority of a male dominated white straight cis society. Notice in the quote below, his calling DEI and ESG programs a risk implying some nefarious harm. Hugs
America First Legal, the conservative group that filed the lawsuit last year, in a statement on Wednesday called the court ruling a “warning to publicly traded corporations’ boards and management.” The group said the risk of DEI programs and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) initiatives “cannot be whitewashed with boilerplate language or ignored.”
(Reuters) -Target has failed to persuade a judge in Florida to dismiss a lawsuit that accused the retailer of deceiving shareholders after its sales of LGBTQ-themed merchandise for Pride Month sparked a backlash and a customer boycott.
U.S. District Judge John Badalamenti in Fort Myers ruled that the plaintiffs had presented enough information for now to pursue claims that Target misled investors about its efforts to guard against social and political risks.
The lawsuit from investor Brian Craig claims that Target’s board focused only on activist groups’ calls for diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) measures and overlooked potential negative responses to the Pride campaign in May 2023.
Target did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.
America First Legal, the conservative group that filed the lawsuit last year, in a statement on Wednesday called the court ruling a “warning to publicly traded corporations’ boards and management.” The group said the risk of DEI programs and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) initiatives “cannot be whitewashed with boilerplate language or ignored.”
Target had urged Badalamenti to dismiss the lawsuit, arguing that there was no evidence backing the allegations, that it had warned investors about a potential DEI backlash, and that the complaint was based merely on Craig’s disagreement with the company’s business decisions.
America First filed the lawsuit in Florida federal court in August 2023. The nonprofit group is headed by Stephen Miller, a close adviser to U.S. President-elect Donald Trump.
America First and other conservative groups have accused some major U.S. companies of undertaking diversity and inclusion efforts at the expense of shareholders.
Target pulled some LGBTQ-themed merchandise linked to Pride Month last year, citing increased confrontations between shoppers and employees and incidents of products being thrown on the floor.
(Reporting by Mike Scarcella; Editing by David Bario, Mark Porter and Diane Craft)
I talk about tRump’s new Sec Of Defense being a Christian nationalist fundamentalist fanatic, a white supremacist, and a hater of the LGBTQ+. I talk about how he wants to purge the ones he doesn’t like from the military and how tRump hopes to use him to purge the military of anyone not cis straight white Christian and totally loyalist to tRump, the Dear Leader.
Please remember what Stephen Miller wants to do. He is a white supremacy Nazi with Jewish heritage. His own family immigrated here. But I am sure they will be safe from the purge as was Melania and her parents. Remember he was behind the separation of children from their parents who cross the border. The parents were deported while the children were given to Christian adoption agencies to sell. Many have never been found. He was behind the lawsuits that wanted any and all DEI programs stopped in the collages and private business claim it displaced white men for every job given to a woman or brown / black person. Remember he wants to end both birthright citizenship and deport people born to undocumented people even though they are US citizen. Remember that during tRump’s first term many non-white people were deported even though they were citizens and had a hard fight getting back into the US. It is back to carry your papers if you are not white and even then it is going to be hard for many. Hugs.
Stephen Miller speaks before Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Lititz, Pa., Sunday, Nov. 3, 2024. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
President-elect Donald Trump is naming longtime adviser Stephen Miller, an immigration hard-liner, to be the deputy chief of policy in his new administration.
Confirming the appointment, Vice President-elect JD Vance posted a message of congratulations on Monday to Miller on X and said, “This is another fantastic pick by the president.” The announcement was first reported by CNN.
Miller is one of Trump’s longest-serving aides, dating back to his first campaign for the White House. He was a senior adviser in Trump’s first term and has been a central figure in many of his policy decisions, particularly on immigration, including Trump’s move to separate thousands of immigrant families as a deterrence program in 2018.
Miller has also helped craft many of Trump’s hard-line speeches, and was often the public face of those policies during Trump’s first term in office and during his campaigns.
Since leaving the White House, Miller has served as the president of America First Legal, an organization of former Trump advisers fashioned as a conservative version of the American Civil Liberties Union, challenging the Biden administration, media companies, universities and others over issues such as freedom of speech and religion and national security.
He was also a frequent presence during Trump’s campaign this year, traveling aboard his plane and often speaking ahead of Trump during the pre-shows at his rallies.
Miller drew large cheers at Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden during the race’s final stretch, telling the crowd that, “your salvation is at hand,” after what he cast as “decades of abuse that has been heaped upon the good people of this nation — their jobs stolen looted and from them and shipped to Mexico, Asia and foreign countries. The lives of their loves ones ripped away from then by illegal aliens, criminal gangs and thugs who don’t belong in this country.”
“We stand here today at a crossroads,” he went on, casting the election as “a choice between betrayal and renewal, between self-destruction and salvation, between the failure of America or the triumph of America.”
Because it is not a Cabinet position, the appointment does not need Senate confirmation. ___ Associated Press writer Jill Colvin contributed to this report.
He feels the idea of anyone not a white straight cis male shouldn’t be in any position of authority or corporate rank. His view is that women and the LGBTQ+ shouldn’t be in the work force or seen and the non-white males should be in menial jobs with little or no authority. Just be base workers. He and his ilk see great dangers to the white “race” people if they can not maintain a super majority of a male dominated white straight cis society. Notice in the quote below, his calling DEI and ESG programs a risk implying some nefarious harm. Hugs
Scottie's Playtime 