WASHINGTON – More than 50 universities are being investigated for alleged racial discrimination as part of President Donald Trumpโs campaign to end diversity, equityย and inclusion programs that his officials say exclude white and Asian American students.
The Education Department announced the new investigations Friday, one month afterย issuing a memoย warning Americaโs schools and colleges that they could lose federal money over โrace-based preferencesโ in admissions, scholarships or any aspect of student life.
โStudents must be assessed according to merit and accomplishment, not prejudged by the color of their skin,โ Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a statement. โWe will not yield on this commitment.โ
Most of the new inquiries are focused on collegesโ partnerships with the PhD Project, a nonprofit that helps students from underrepresented groups get degrees in business with the goal of diversifying the business world.
Department officials said that the group limits eligibility based on race and that colleges that partner with it are โengaging in race-exclusionary practices in their graduate programs.โ
The group of 45 colleges facing scrutiny over ties to the PhD Project include major public universities such as Arizona State, Ohio State and Rutgers, along with prestigious private schools like Yale, Cornell, Duke and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
A statement from Ohio State said the university โdoes not discriminate on the basis of race, ethnicity or any other protected class, and our PhD programs are open to all qualified applicants.โ
A message sent to the PhD Project was not immediately returned.
Six other colleges are being investigated for awarding โimpermissible race-based scholarships,โ the department said, and another is accused of running a program that segregates students on the basis of race.
The Education Department said those schools are: Grand Valley State University, Ithaca College, the New England College of Optometry, the University of Alabama, the University of Minnesota, the University of South Florida and the University of Oklahoma at Tulsa.
An initial press release from the Education Department erroneously identified the University of Tulsa as one of the schools under investigation.
The Feb. 14 memo from Trump’s Republican administration was a sweeping expansion of a 2023 Supreme Court decision thatย barred collegesย from using race as a factor in admissions.
That decision focused on admissions policies at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, but the Education Department said it will interpret the decision to forbid race-based policies in any aspect of education, both in K-12 schools and higher education.
In the memo, Craig Trainor, acting assistant secretary for civil rights, had said schoolsโ and colleges’ diversity, equity and inclusion efforts have been โsmuggling racial stereotypes and explicit race-consciousness into everyday training, programming and discipline.”
The memo is being challenged in federal lawsuits from the nationโs two largest teachersโ unions. The suits say the memo is too vague and violates the free speech rights of educators.
