On 14 February, the US Department of Education’s office of civil rights issued a letter providing notice to American educational institutions, schools and universities of the department’s new interpretation of federal civil rights law. The letter lays out new conditions for institutions to receive federal funding, including in the form of student loans or scientific and medical research.
Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color and national origin in federally assisted programs or activities. The education department’s “Dear Colleagues” letter redefines the central targets of Title VI to centrally include supposed discrimination against whites. The letter was followed, on 28 February, with a set of guidelines for its interpretation. The novel understanding of anti-white discrimination in these documents is a chilling manifestation of educational authoritarianism.
In the letter, the acting assistant secretary for civil rights, Craig Trainor, writes:
Educational institutions have toxically indoctrinated students with the false premise that the United States is built upon ‘systemic and structural racism’ and advanced discriminatory policies and practices. Proponents of these discriminatory practices have attempted to further justify them – particularly during the last four years – under the banner of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (‘DEI’), smuggling racial stereotypes and explicit race-consciousness into everyday training, programming, and discipline.
However, the United States pretty clearly is built upon systematic and structural racism. US history shows that slavery was a central factor in US wealth. The US was built on Indigenous genocide and colonialism, as seizing Indigenous land was one of the reasons for seeking independence from England and is, in any case, foundational to the country’s formation. Structural racism also persists; for example, cities are segregated because of structural injustice in housing and mortgage law. The ways in which the US was built on racism, against Black Americans and Indigenous Americans, is central both to the study of its history and its present structure. If Americans do not have an understanding of this topic, they will not be well informed.
The guidelines for what would count as a Title VI violation are vague. From the guidelines:
a racially-oriented vision of social justice, or similar goals will be probative in OCR’s analysis of the facts and circumstances of an individual case.
The most straightforward way to read the letter and the guidelines is as defining “school-on-student harassment” as including Black history. The letter treats teaching large swaths of Black and Indigenous history as akin to a white professor consistently referring to all of their Black students with a terrible racial slur.
The “more extreme practices at a university” that “could create a hostile environment under Title VI” include “pressuring them to participate in protests or take certain positions on racially charged issues”. But reason, rationality and morality are sources of “pressure”. How does one distinguish the pressure placed on people by moral arguments for racially charged issues from other kinds of pressure?
The guidelines create a culture of fear and intimidation around history. If one discusses Black history, one immediately risks endorsing the view that the United States “is built upon ‘systemic and structural racism’”. The guidelines invite students to report their teachers and their school administrators for not adhering to a state-imposed ideology about history, as well as state-imposed ideology about gender, which threatens to make teaching critically about gender identity, or including trans perspectives, into school-on-student harassment. Failure to adhere to state ideologies about history and gender fits this new definition of “school-on-student harassment”. Billions in federal funding is at stake.
The guidelines are not just vague, they are intentionally vague, in a way that would make it difficult for even a diligent administrator to interpret. They therefore allow maximum latitude for abuse. As the influential pro-Trump intellectual Jonathan Keeperman explained in the New York Times, referring to the Trump administration’s war on language:
The things they’re attacking in these executive orders are sort of loose concepts. By focusing on these key terms that the left has grabbed on to, you can, without knowing much else about what you’re doing, at the scale of the entirety of the federal budget, basically remove a lot of the rot.
The state of Florida has been a model of this strategy, leading to books being removed from school libraries because they normalize LGBTQ+ relationships, for example, and an unprecedented level of widespread fear among Florida’s professors and teachers. But it has spread to other states. The state of Tennessee has an online “divisive concepts reporting tracker” form for students who wish to report professors whose teaching can be seen as “promoting division between, or resentment of, a race, sex, religion, creed, nonviolent political affiliation, social class, or class of people”.
The Dear Colleague letter and its attendant guidelines are easily read as banning teaching the idea that many Americans have racist attitudes. But understanding that many Americans have racist attitudes is central to understanding US politics.
For example, the Republican Southern Strategy involved exploiting racist attitudes against government programs they ideologically opposed, by using the term “welfare” as a dog whistle for these attitudes. We have strong evidence from social science to explain the mechanisms here. There is a large group of white Americans who agree with racist stereotypes. Among these Americans, calling a program “welfare” decreases its support dramatically.
The letter also appeals to another racist dogwhistle, “DEI”, which is employed in a similar way to justify banning classroom discussion of a range of concepts (including, it appears, discussion of the use of dog whistles in American politics).
By executive order, Donald Trump is trying to dismantle the Department of Education. Following Project 2025’s recommendation, he appears also to be seeking to eliminate funding for Title 1, which provides crucial federal support for students in under-resourced schools in urban and rural areas, special education for disabled students and a range of other educational programs. The abolition of the education department would mean no federal oversight of drastically widening educational inequalities facing millions of students (and threatens to undermine tracking of data on racial disparities in educational resources, which could be used to substantiate the official state ideology that there are no structural disparities).
Linda McMahon, the new education secretary, issued a statement entitled “Our Department’s Final Mission” on 3 March. In it, she wrote about the motivation for this final mission:
After President Trump’s inauguration last month, he steadily signed a slate of executive orders to keep his promises: combatting critical race theory, DEI, gender ideology, discrimination in admissions, promoting school choice for every child, and restoring patriotic education and civics. He has also been focused on eliminating waste, red tape, and harmful programs in the federal government. The Department of Education’s role in this new era of accountability is to restore the rightful role of state oversight in education and to end the overreach from Washington.
From now on, the education department’s main function appears to be targeting “critical race theory”, DEI and “gender ideology”. The final mission of the education department also includes the imposition of “patriotic education”, as if the United States were trying to imitate North Korea.
Since McMahon’s announcement, the education department has launched a broad investigation into “antisemitism” at the nation’s colleges and universities. The first target was Columbia University, whose student body is over 20% Jewish; as well as pressuring Columbia to fire a distinguished law professor for pro-Palestinian statements and arresting one of the university’s students for constitutionally protected speech, on 7 March, the education department cut $400m dollars in funding for Columbia for allowing “harassment of Jewish students”. On 10 March, the civil rights office of the education department announced it was sending letters warning of potential enforcement actions to 60 universities under investigation for antisemitic discrimination and harassment, who will presumably face similar jaw-dropping cuts, under the guise of protecting Jewish students and faculty.
Universities are among the most Jewish institutions in American life, in fact and in their resonance. As the historian Tim Snyder dryly noted:
History teaches clear lessons about breakdowns in the rule of law and about campaigns against cities and universities. These are very often associated with antisemitism. It is very hard, for me at least, to think of historical examples of campaigns against universities and freedom of expression that were intended to benefit Jews.
As the US watches videos of the regime’s police handcuffing and arresting student protesters in front of their families, as well as the destruction of the world’s greatest system of higher education, all supposedly in the service of “protecting” Jewish Americans, it is past time to note: this can’t be good for Jewish people.
As I have long warned, the media have been useful dupes for fascism. After years and years of vilifying academia, first by raising hysteria about “wokeness” and too little free speech (about eg race), and then by raising hysteria about too much free speech (about Israel), the mainstream media has smoothly paved the path for educational authoritarianism. No one should be surprised by its arrival.
