Trump Unveils His "Secret Weapon" to Bring Racist Universities in Line

He's ordering federal accreditors, the bureaucrats who certify higher ed institutions as legit and eligible for federal funds and loan guarantees for students, to start requiring schools allow free speech and prioritize actual merit.

Deep State Media organization NPR:

President Trump on Wednesday signed a list of executive actions aimed at both higher education and K-12 schools.

One of the actions takes aim at college and university accreditors, organizations the White House says have "abused their authority by imposing discriminatory diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)-based standards."

Another promises new discipline guidance for K-12 schools, with the goal of "ensuring school discipline policies are based on objective behavior, not DEI," the White House said in a statement.

"Today's Executive Orders pave the way for critical innovations -- inviting more competition in the higher education accreditation system, ensuring transparency in college finances, supporting new technologies in the classroom, and more," Education Secretary Linda McMahon wrote on social media.
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The collection of orders aim to cement Trump's conservative agenda when it comes to education in America, including rolling back the policies from the Biden administration, bolstering workforce training, improving teaching about artificial intelligence in schools, and launching a new White House initiative on historically Black colleges and universities.

The order pertaining to college accreditation directs McMahon to "overhaul" the system. Accreditation is the process colleges are required to go through to receive federal financial aid, aimed at ensuring that a program meets an acceptable level of quality.

Trump referred to accreditation on the campaign trail as his "secret weapon" in his efforts to combat what he considers ideological bias in higher education. The executive action aims to use the process as a way to hold colleges accountable for "ideological overreach" and to increase "intellectual diversity" on campus.

The action directs the education secretary to recognize new accreditors in an effort to encourage more competition. Trump has previously modified the accreditation system: During his first administration, he removed restrictions that forced schools to use accreditors based on their geographic region.

"Trump's goal is to manipulate accreditors in order to force colleges and universities to do his bidding and punish them when they resist," said Todd Wolfson, president of the American Association of University Professors in a statement. "He is weaponizing the accreditation process to gain the leverage he seeks."

What a weird way to say "he's fighting blatant racial (and political) discrimination in taxpayer-funded schools."

Another executive action warns that federal grants for universities could be revoked if schools do not complete "full and timely disclosure of foreign funding."

In a briefing announcing the order, White House staff secretary Will Scharf said, "We believe that certain universities, including, for example, Harvard, have routinely violated this law, and this law has not been effectively enforced."

Federal law already requires schools to disclose gifts or contracts worth $250,000 or more from foreign entities. In a statement, a Harvard spokesperson said the school had, for decades, been in compliance with the law.

On Truth Social on Thursday, Trump dug in on Harvard again calling the university "a Liberal mess" and "a threat to Democracy."

He also is revoking Obama's and Biden's executive orders which demanded that schools not punish black kids, and/or severely punish white kids to make up for the fact that so many black kids violate school rules.

In an executive action aimed at K-12 schools, Trump requested new federal guidance on school discipline. The measure calls for revoking previous policies by Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama aimed at reducing racial disparities in, for example, suspensions and expulsions. The new guidance would prohibit using "racially preferential discipline practices."

"Trump's order empowers local school boards by encouraging real discipline," said Tiffany Justice, co-founder of Moms for Liberty and a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. "By ending federal overreach, it frees educators to focus on teaching, not chaos, ensuring kids get a quality education."

But some civil rights activists disagree.

"These executive orders are another move to dismantle civil rights protections," said Judith Browne Dianis, who runs the Advancement Project, a civil rights nonprofit. "The Administration wants to rebuild the school to prison pipeline but civil rights law is clear: schools cannot punish students more harshly because of race, color, national origin, sex, or disability."

LOL.

Princeton University's President defiantly continues racist policies which other Princeton professors admit deliberately disfavor whites, Jews, and males of all races.

Christopher F. Rufo and Ryan Thorpe report for City Journal:

Amid the ongoing showdown between the Trump administration and the Ivy League, one university president has positioned himself as a leader of the academic resistance: Princeton's Christopher L. Eisgruber.

Earlier this month, the Trump administration suspended hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded grants to Princeton as part of its investigation into racial discrimination and anti-Semitism at the New Jersey campus. Eisgruber, though, was defiant, telling the New York Times that he's "not considering any concessions" and calling for other university presidents to follow his lead.

This isn't Eisgruber's first bid for the spotlight. After the death of George Floyd in 2020, he declared that Princeton--where he has served as president since 2013--was guilty of "systemic racism." In a letter to students that September, he went so far as to claim that racism was embedded in the very "structures of the university itself."

Eisgruber was right to say that he presides over a system of racial discrimination--but not in the way he imagines. The university does not discriminate against "oppressed" groups, such as blacks and Latinos, but against those seen as "oppressors."

"At Princeton, it's totally common knowledge that there are favored groups and disfavored groups," one professor said. "And the disfavored groups are whites, Jews, males," and others commonly disliked by the Left.

A City Journal investigation confirms that Princeton has, in fact, entrenched a system of racial discrimination and segregation. We have obtained more than a dozen internal documents and conducted interviews with a half-dozen employees, who confirm that the university has flagrantly violated the principles of the Civil Rights Act in the name of "social justice."

The basic structure of this system is the university's "diversity, equity, and inclusion" bureaucracy, which has expanded dramatically under Eisgruber's tenure. An infographic circulated by Princeton shows at least 40 academic and administrative departments with established DEI committees, with the express purpose of adjusting the campus's racial composition. As Princeton's first annual diversity report noted, "Every administrative and academic leader is being held accountable for demographic evolution."

According to several Princeton faculty members, "demographic evolution" is a euphemism for racial quotas and outright discrimination in academic hiring. A 2021 internal report outlining best practices for faculty recruitment described how staff were trained to "increase the diversity of the applicants at every step in the process." The report advised search committees to discount negative references for minority candidates and to ensure that every shortlist included at least "two women and/or two underrepresented minority candidates."

The implicit message from Eisgruber and the administration: don't hire white men unless absolutely necessary. According to one professor, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal, this meant abandoning merit-based hiring in favor of race-based preferences--the only way, given the current pipeline, to accomplish Eisgruber's stated goal of increasing "by 50 percent the number of tenured or tenure-track faculty members from underrepresented groups over the next five years."

Though many of these policies relied on euphemism, some were openly and explicitly discriminatory. The university's Target of Opportunity Program, which was cancelled shortly before the 2024 presidential election, made funding available for departments to hire "candidates from groups that are underrepresented on campus." According to conversations with Princeton professors, this referred primarily to racial minorities and women. The program covered half of each hire's salary, allowing departments to bring on new faculty without bearing the full financial burden. In effect, the administration created financial incentives to prioritize hiring racial minorities.

Princeton also has an illegal policy to discriminate against white suppliers and vendors.

...

The reality is that Princeton has violated the principles of the Civil Rights Act. It may have gone further: in Morenoff's estimation, its contracting policy likely ran afoul of New Jersey civil rights law ("among the strongest, most sweeping non-discrimination statutes in the nation") and the Civil Rights Act of 1866. And its hiring preferences may have violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits racial discrimination in hiring unless the employer can fit one of a few narrow exceptions--which, Morenoff said, there is "good reason to doubt."

While Eisgruber has remained publicly defiant toward the Trump administration, he seems to recognize his vulnerability. The university has been quietly scrubbing its website of DEI materials and recently updated its page to include a statement on Princeton's ostensible commitment to "equal opportunity and non-discrimination."

One hundred Yale professors signed a statement recommending that the school freeze all new hiring and conduct an investigation into its own hiring practices. This, they hope, will forestall a federal investigation.

The statement points out that faculty hiring has "stagnated" while "administrative" staff -- mostly in DEI make-work "jobs" -- has grown by double.

Is our academics learning?

posted by Ace at 02:23 PM

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