Students are not the only ones who have homework due this semester. Teachers, college professors, and school administrators have a civil rights assignment to turn in this Friday—a project that’s long overdue.
The responses will offer a glimpse at how serious educators are at protecting equality under the law and uncover the interest groups who are pressuring schools to keep policies that use racial favoritism.
In one of his first official acts President Donald Trump issued an executive order calling for a review of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” practices at K-12 schools and colleges.
Just weeks later, on Feb. 14, Acting Assistant Secretary of Education Craig Trainor sent a letter to schools nationwide saying that educators had two weeks to demonstrate they are in compliance with civil rights law.
Trainor said the Education Department will enforce the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard prohibiting racial preferences in school activities. While the High Court’s ruling was in response to a challenge to racial preferences in college admissions, Trainor correctly noted the breadth of the opinion as including race-based hiring and promotion, racially segregated graduation ceremonies, and more.
These forms of racial preferences and segregation are a “shameful echo of a darker period in this country’s history,” Trainor said.
Some school officials have work to do. Research has turned up evidence of drag shows funded with student tuition money at Florida State University, for example, even though lawmakers prohibited DEI in 2023. FSU still operates a Diversity and Inclusion Institute, according to the Tallahassee Democrat.
So, too, are there examples of DEI in Iowa, even after Gov. Kim Reynolds blocked taxpayer spending on DEI in state colleges in 2024. Media in Kentucky said the Education Department’s 14-day deadline “prompted widespread panic and confusion” in Louisville and state universities. Inside Higher Education says that “anxiety is radiating through the higher ed sector” with the deadline to end DEI.
Remarkable that protecting civil rights makes colleges anxious. Still, the anxiety may not be due to moral failings but pressure from other organizations.
In a letter from Gail Herriot and Peter Kirsanow, two Commissioners of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, to Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., the Commissioners explain that college accreditors have been pressuring colleges to ignore civil rights laws for years. Herriot and Kirsanow cite a research report from 1998 that found nearly one-third of law schools and nearly one in four medical schools “felt pressure” from accrediting agencies to use race in their student admissions processes.
The commissioners also say that accreditors are causing confusion in states such as Iowa by pushing colleges to keep DEI offices even as state law is defending civil rights.
Herriot and Kirsanow propose that federal lawmakers prohibit accreditors from intimidating schools into keeping DEI.
“We seek to ensure that those colleges and universities that want to follow the law are not strong-armed by accreditors into engaging in racial preferences,” Herriot and Kirsanow wrote to Cassidy.
Such a proposal is appropriate for federal officials because college accreditors must receive federal approval to accredit institutions—which explains why colleges have so few options for accreditation and accreditors are so powerful.
Heritage Foundation research has found that many regional accreditors have adopted DEI statements, statements the accreditors then say colleges should emulate for fear of losing their accredited status.
The Western Association of Schools and Colleges has held DEI training sessions for schools, the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities posts “antiracism resources” on its website, and other accreditors signed amicus curiae (“friend of the court”) briefs in favor of racial preferences in the Students for Fair Admissions’ case.
If educators are to meet their Feb. 28 deadline—a deadline for an assignment they should have already completed—they will need to ignore accreditors advocating for “antiracism.” Since accreditors are not helping the cause of equality under the law, Washington should use this opportunity to reform accreditors’ authority and give educational institutions more options than the current monopoly.
For the sake of civil rights, let’s hope schools get the assignment turned in.