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Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | Dmytro Skrypnykov/iStock/Getty Images
On Feb. 14, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights issued an extraordinary Dear Colleague letter ordering all colleges and schools, public and private, that receive federal funds to implement massive changes and repression of free speech within 14 days. As the letter repeatedly warned and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency posted, “Institutions which fail to comply may face a loss of federal funding.”
The Feb. 14 letter is a full-fledged attack on affirmative action and diversity, equity and inclusion. It is also one of the worst attacks on academic freedom by the government in the history of American higher education. This is a colossal federal onslaught designed to micromanage all colleges, public and private, and suppress speech on a massive scale using the threat of a total ban on federal funding.
A few weeks ago, I wrote an essay arguing that advocates of academic freedom on both the left and the right should be careful not to conclude that campuses today are “worse than McCarthyism” based on flawed comparisons of self-censorship surveys or awful legislation passed in a few states. The extreme actions of the Trump administration suggest that it’s time to abandon that scholarly caution. Unless the administration’s plans to suppress academic freedom are immediately resisted, rejected and overturned, they will be far, far worse than government actions during the McCarthy era.
Never before has the U.S. government sought to completely control so many aspects of what universities do: “admissions, financial aid, hiring, training, and other institutional programming,” as well as student activities, administrative work, events and even apparently the curriculum and the content of teaching when the current administration dislikes the views being expressed.
Some of the targets for suppression are explicitly named: “universities even encourage segregation by race at graduation ceremonies and in dormitories and other facilities.” Certainly, Black student centers and all similar areas would be banned by federal order. In admissions, the letter bans any consideration of applicants’ “personal essays, writing samples, participation in extracurriculars, or other cues” that reference race. To be safe from federal retaliation, colleges may need to put all applications through a “race purge” to move all references to race or racism before consideration. The letter is so extreme that it even announces a new race crime in America, reducing emphasis on the SAT or GRE: “It would, for instance, be unlawful for an educational institution to eliminate standardized testing to achieve a desired racial balance or to increase racial diversity."
The letter accuses colleges of using DEI for “smuggling racial stereotypes and explicit race-consciousness into everyday training, programming, and discipline. But under any banner, discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin is, has been, and will continue to be illegal.” This certainly suggests that all colleges must immediately ban all DEI programs and fire all employees engaged in work for racial diversity. But it goes even further in effectively banning any mention of race or racism in any “training” or “programming.” This would appear to require a ban on all extracurricular programs, events and speakers that have “race-consciousness,” which certainly means anyone conscious enough to realize that Donald Trump is a racist.
The letter clarifies that the ban on criticizing racism can go much further and extend into the classroom. It claims that DEI programs “teach students that certain racial groups bear unique moral burdens that others do not. Such programs stigmatize students who belong to particular racial groups based on crude racial stereotypes. Consequently, they deny students the ability to participate fully in the life of a school.” Clearly, if it is now a thoughtcrime to “teach students” about white privilege or systemic racism in voluntary extracurricular programs, this violation of the rights of oppressed white people would apply even more strongly to courses on campus where an instructor expresses a belief in or assigns a required reading about the continuing existence of racism in America.
The explicit demands for control and censorship in the Feb. 14 letter are bad enough that they should raise alarms across the country. Of course, it is possible that like some other examples of gross incompetence and overreach by the Trump administration, the most extreme elements of this decree banning any teaching or activities about race and racism might be quietly ignored. But even if that happens, this letter will still be the most extensive and repressive imposition of government ideological control over colleges in American history. The Trump administration is demanding unprecedented intrusion on admissions and hiring decisions and a total ban on DEI programs across all colleges.
The repressive impact of the Trump administration’s demands for censorship could even exceed its wildest ambitions, if colleges fear the broad discretion held by the Department of Education with its power to cut off all federal funds to colleges deemed to be disobedient on any measure. Trump and his minions are willing to not merely abuse government rules, but to intentionally break the law and defy the Constitution: As Trump proclaimed, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” The threat to cut off federal funds for colleges is no longer a paranoid fantasy. It’s just another weapon for an administration willing to wage war on higher education and any other perceived enemies of the president.
Under the Biden administration, when no one imagined any actual threat to federal funds, the pressure from Title VI investigations into antisemitism encouraged colleges across the country to impose the worst violations of due process rights ever seen on American campuses. The Trump administration has already promised to impose even more crackdowns on criticism of Israel, but this new letter proposes a radical redefinition of antidiscrimination law to also suppress diversity and discussion of racism. If colleges obey the Trump administration’s commands to respond to pro-diversity advocates with even more repression than colleges have already directed toward pro-Palestinian protesters, it will be a disaster for academic freedom.
It is not surprising that Donald Trump, a white supremacist and bigot, would want to prohibit any educators from mentioning the obvious fact that racism still exists in the country that elected a racist president. As an enemy of the state whose beliefs in the ongoing persistence of racism in America are now forbidden in all colleges and schools by the Department of Education, I hope that the millions of other new thought criminals will join me in denouncing and resisting our Dear Leader and his Dear Colleague letter.
Some civil liberties groups have failed to stand up forcefully enough to this threat. While the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression denounced the Obama administration’s Dear Colleague letter of 2011, claiming that it “eviscerated due process rights,” this far more severe, wide-reaching and threatening Dear Colleague letter from the Trump administration barely earned a rebuke, as FIRE mildly urged the Education Department to “provide institutions with additional clarity” because it “risks chilling speech.”
By contrast, PEN America immediately denounced the letter as “an effort to demand ideological conformity by schools and universities,” and the American Association of University Professors (which already sued the Trump administration for its earlier anti-DEI executive orders and won an injunction blocking key parts of them) condemned the letter’s “wildly broad overreach.”
In terms of government intrusion into universities, this is much worse than McCarthyism. Whether the actual level of repression on campuses exceeds the stifling atmosphere of the McCarthy era will largely depend on how campuses respond to the Trump administration’s demands for massive censorship.
Colleges must refuse to obey these illicit commands; sue to protect their rights and the rights of their students faculty, and staff against an oppressive government; publicly denounce the Trump administration’s unconstitutional acts of censorship; unite together to oppose nationwide repression; and adopt clear and consistent policies protecting free speech for everyone on campus.
