On Thursday, July 17, Trump’s Justice Department announced its plan to investigate Virginia’s George Mason University (“GMU”) for possible civil rights violations in hiring. Just a week earlier, the Education Department launched its own investigation into the very same issue. It turns out that many of the university’s own professors have complained that the school uses illegal racial preferences in hiring and promoting faculty, according to Craig Trainor, the department’s acting assistant secretary for civil rights. Such preferences are often rationalized and hidden within programs called “anti-racism” or “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI).
That puts the number of universities under investigation at 45—and that’s just on matters of race. Investigations for sex discrimination, or violations of Title IX, the Congressional ban on sex discrimination in education, number more than two dozen.
So Trump’s civil rights officials are busy indeed.
According to the July 17 Justice Department letter to GMU’s Board of Visitors, the department has records of the school’s president, Mr. Gregory Washington, “openly advocating for race- and sex-based hiring processes,” including emails in which he admits he wants to develop programs to benefit “faculty of color and women in their professional work.” The school also has a policy of listing the race of each member on a faculty hiring panel “to ensure greater non-white participation in the hiring process.” Mr. Washington has also been recorded saying he will advance an agenda of “anti-racism” and “record numbers of diverse faculty.”
Such racial preferences are illegal under federal and also under most state laws. Specifically, Congress banned race discrimination in Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and Trump reinforced that ban with his January Executive Orders Ending Radical and Wasteful DEI Programs and Preferencing. The illegality of racial discrimination, including so-called diversity programs, was recently clarified and confirmed by the United States Supreme Court in its 2023 opinion, Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard & the University of North Carolina—now simply known as “SFFA.”
The organization suing Harvard and UNC included Asian students who claimed that preferences for other ethnic groups—such as American blacks and Hispanics—were illegal and directly affected them, as they were denied spots for which they were qualified but which were set aside for students of other, favored races despite inferior qualifications—lower SAT scores and lower grades, for example.
The Court agreed and confirmed that such race-conscious admissions practices were illegal under both federal civil rights statutes—such as Title VI, which governs private universities like Harvard—and also under the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause, which governs public schools such as the University of North Carolina.
The Court also did not limit its opinion to admissions. Instead, it insisted, “Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.” Accordingly, under SFFA, schools must stop racial preferences not just in admissions but also in hiring, promoting, grading, and any other institutional action (such as school scholarships and grants).
What’s more, the Court specifically rejected “diversity” as a rationale for racial preferences or as a good in and of itself that could somehow justify otherwise illegal race discrimination. The Court elaborated: “Whether a particular mix of minority students produces sufficient” diversity is an unacceptable judgment for schools to try to make as it is “standardless.”
That means that diversity programs at universities must stop.
But American colleges and universities, including GMU, don’t plan to give this up without a fight. Their investment in diversity ideology is well documented: The Virginia affiliate of the National Association of Scholars, for example, issued a report in 2023, Should Virginians Pay for University “Diversity” Leftism?, showing $15 million taxpayer dollars spent annually on DEI at the state’s public universities in 2020, and that figure has more than doubled for at least two schools since then. The Heritage Foundation also found that Virginia’s state schools had a greater number of DEI bureaucracies than schools in any other state, with George Mason University having the highest ratio of DEI personnel to tenured faculty.
Diversity ideology looks a lot like a religion for these schools—and now that they’ve been found illegal, the schools are attempting to evade American law by simply renaming or rebranding such programs to continue business as usual. At GMU, for example, the DEI office was renamed the Office of Access, Compliance, and Community. The school’s statement about the new name said it all: “We will change the name of this office and move on … George Mason’s core values “will never change under any circumstances,” including the value of “diversity is our strength.”
Clearly, they plan to bide their time and wait out the Trump years, after which they hope a more sympathetic administration will turn a blind eye to their noncompliance—that is, breaking civil rights laws with impunity.
Peter Berkowitz, former board member of the National Association of Scholars, once described American universities as the least scrutinized institutions in the country. Even the SFFA opinion repeatedly noted that colleges historically enjoyed the benefit of the doubt regarding their actions from almost everyone—including the judiciary. Goodwill for higher education used to be high; people figured academic experts knew what they were doing and that their actions were aboveboard.
No more! Politicization, conformity, and cancel culture have eroded all that. Also, the student loan program has meant easy money for these schools, which have been enriched, while their graduates are burdened with unprecedented debt—that is, impoverished. So the loss of goodwill should surprise no one.
And it explains why Trump’s actions against universities enjoy considerable public support. The mice were at play, but the cat’s no longer away.
Those who care about the integrity of American higher education should support the Trump Administration’s scrutiny and investigations of these institutions. They have a lot of explaining to do and precious little goodwill left from citizens fed up with destructive, anti-American diversity ideology.
Teresa R. Manning is Policy Director at the National Association of Scholars, President of the Virginia Association of Scholars, and a former law professor at Virginia’s Scalia Law School, George Mason University. She authored the 2020 Report, Dear Colleague: The Weaponization of Title IX.