Yet as I and others have long noted, many schools (including almost all “elite” universities) view their maintenance of Kendian “discrimination for the right reasons” programs in admissions, hiring, promotions, tenure, and funding to be moral imperatives, and thus either are flatly refusing to abide by the Trump administration’s demands, and/or are continuing their discriminatory programs sub rosa. As National Association of Scholars’ President Peter Wood has observed:
“Our colleges and universities are the moral and practical equivalent of the Jim Crow South. They are privileged, in some cases immensely wealthy, and, because they act as a law unto themselves, are practically lawless. The battle at hand is whether we will have lawful higher education or rule by these well-entrenched cultural warlords. They amount to a state-within-a-state dedicated to perpetual discrimination and authoritarian illiberalism. They are, moreover, the Jim Crow South of the 1910s rather than the 1950s, which engages routinely in arbitrary persecution of dissenters and does not even follow its own laws. If we follow our ordinary rules, it will be DEI today, DEI tomorrow, DEI forever.”
To its credit, the Trump administration is employing a wide array of sanctions on such recalcitrant schools. Billions in federal funding are being frozen or withdrawn, revocation of schools’ tax exempt status is being considered, and even their eligibility to enroll foreign students may be yanked.
