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Last week, I wrote about Linda McMahon, President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Education Department, and her refusal to say whether Black history courses will be allowed under the new administration.
McMahon’s nonanswer was ominous on its own. But then on Friday, the Education Department’s acting assistant secretary for civil rights, Craig Trainor, issued an Orwellian memo warning educational institutions against “using race in decisions” related to any aspect of campus life.
Republicans have falsely portrayed diverse programming on college campuses as exclusionary to straight white men.
The memo peddles the baseless allegation that white and Asian students have faced racial discrimination, parroting the same bogus claims made by conservatives before the Supreme Court banned race-conscious college admissions back in 2023. And the memo essentially argues that the high court’s ruling also bars acknowledging race in aspects of the student experience beyond admissions.
Republicans have falsely portrayed diverse programming on college campuses as exclusionary to straight white men. And Trump, who vowed to address what he called “a definite anti-white feeling in this country,” has called for offering restitution to these nonexistent victims of diversity programming in a plan that sounds a lot like reparations for white people.
Federal law thus prohibits covered entities from using race in decisions pertaining to admissions, hiring, promotion, compensation, financial aid, scholarships, prizes, administrative support, discipline, housing, graduation ceremonies, and all other aspects of student, academic, and campus life. Put simply, educational institutions may neither separate or segregate students based on race, nor distribute benefits or burdens based on race.
The memo even includes a false claim that McMahon made during her confirmation hearing: that schools that offer culturally specific graduation ceremonies — for example, Indigenous groups that host special commencements featuring certain tribal traditions — “encourage segregation.” That’s a perverse interpretation of programming meant to celebrate the variety in a graduating class, and there’s no indication in the memo where this bigoted attack on diversity ends, if at all.
Banning race-related decisions throughout campus life, as the memo seeks to do, would seem to include things like class curricula and campus organizations, so it seems the hypothetical scenario that Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., asked McMahon about — in which public schools that teach a Black history course could lose federal funding under the Trump administration — is a disturbingly realistic scenario the country might be forced to confront in short order.
The memo says the Education Department will begin to assess compliance no later than Feb. 28 and warns that institutions that “fail to comply with federal civil rights law” are at risk of losing federal funding.