President Trump’s executive order Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity is a tremendous step for America. The National Association of Scholars (NAS) welcomes it as the most important advance in civil rights since the passage in 1964 of the Civil Rights Act.
Since its founding in 1987, NAS has fought tirelessly for the end of racial discrimination in higher education. We have played a significant part in every major lawsuit that challenged racial preferences in college admissions, and sought every opportunity to redress racial discrimination in faculty hiring, promotion, and tenure. We have also sought to eliminate the use of racial criteria in the award of scholarships, grants, and research funding.
The new Executive Order is not limited to banning racial discrimination. It also bans discrimination on the basis of color, religion, sex, and national origin. NAS also has a long history of advocating against discrimination on the basis of religion, and especially since October 2023, opposing anti-Semitism in higher education.
The new Executive Order, of course, reaches far beyond institutions of higher education. It includes agencies of the federal government, law enforcement, financial institutions, the medical industry, and more. NAS welcomes this comprehensive approach. While our primary focus is on higher education, we recognize that racial discrimination is a pernicious force in every context where it has found a home.
The Executive Order will come into effect in various ways in different sectors of society, but in higher education it will root out race and sex discrimination from America’s universities by prohibiting these policies in any institution of higher education that accepts federal money. The Trump administration has established a plausible path to redeeming our institutions of higher education, at long last, from their generations of ever-worsening and ever-more repressive bigotry.
NAS’s agenda is broader than advocating for an end to higher education’s persistent violations of civil rights. We stand for liberal education that fosters intellectual freedom, the search for truth, and the promotion of virtuous citizenship. All of these ideals, however, are compromised when racial discrimination and other suppressions of civil rights are countenanced.
We are well aware that contemporary forms of group-based discrimination have roots in earlier efforts to overcome discrimination against racial minorities. Some of our studies, such as Neo-Segregation at Yale, have tracked the step-by-step transformation of institutional policies from initial efforts to secure fair treatment of racial minorities into institutional policies that granted exceptional treatment of racial minorities and eventually into institutional policies that discriminated against categories of people defined as outside the circle of favored racial minorities.
We were far from alone in noticing these transformations and objecting to the ways in which the new order on campus abrogated American ideals of individual merit, fairness, and equality of opportunity. But within higher education, the year was always 1877, when the federal government under President Rutherford B. Hayes withdrew federal troops from the South and effectively ended the post-Civil War Reconstruction. The leading figures in American higher education at the end of the 1960s, saw themselves as engaged in an urgent battle against racial bigotry. They took this as a moral warrant for institutionalizing a new kind of racial discrimination that favored oppressed minority groups.
In that light, the NAS and others who sought to realize the genuine racial fairness—the guarantee of equal protection under the law—embedded in the 14th Amendment faced a formidable opponent. The neo-segregationists under the banner first of “affirmative action,” then “diversity,” and most recently “DEI,” considered themselves as fighting for a cause of supreme righteousness. Many of its proponents openly declared that they would get their way “by any means necessary,” i.e., regardless of the law or violations of other principles.
There is no reason to think that those who held such views before President Trump’s Executive Order have now changed their minds. The implementation of the Executive Order will be difficult. And in this new phase of the struggle for civil rights, NAS will do its part to uphold both the spirit and the letter of the law.
More than fifty years of DEI (under its ever-changing name) have been disastrous in American higher education. Individuals from favored identity groups have leapfrogged the standards that apply to other students, faculty, and administrators. Such discrimination served neither the interests of mismatched beneficiaries, brought into institutions where they were likely to do poorly in academic endeavor, or of the broader academic community, which was forced to lower academic standards to keep from immediately flunking out large portions of the beneficiaries of race and sex discrimination.
Worse, academics and academic institutions began to lie as a matter of course. It became impossible, socially, professionally, and ideologically, to admit that one was practicing race and sex discrimination, or to admit that such discrimination had deleterious consequences for the academy. Even fewer dared to tell their colleagues or their students, you would not be here in a fair competition. After a while, academics began to lie to themselves as well, and the university became the home not only of lies but of what can only be described as a break from reality.
By 1987 the effects of race and sex discrimination already had become severe. The relatively straightforward euphemism of “affirmative action” had been increasingly replaced by “diversity” since Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978)—and “diversity” allowed race and sex preferences to metastasize. Already in 1987, and ever more intensively in the subsequent decades, the discrimination regime spread out to include new categories of group-identity beneficiaries, pitting each group against the other in a zero-sum game for power and patronage.
“Diversity” radicalized into ever more explicit prohibitions on expression or conduct to oppose race and sex discrimination, ever more baroque and extensive quota requirements, and, after a shotgun marriage with neo-Marxist theory, into a sort of identity-group Communism that divided the world into Oppressed and Oppressors and—most deadly to the academy—subordinated all intellectual activity to an “emancipatory” radical politics aiming to perpetuate these policies in all aspects of politics, society, and culture. “Diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) is one label for this radicalized offspring of race and sex discrimination.
The federal government has played a lamentably large part in fostering the growth of the DEI regime throughout the academy and beyond. Radicalized bureaucrats for generations have used the potent combination of civil rights laws and federal money to add further coercive pressure on colleges and universities first to impose race and sex discrimination and then to establish their own bureaucracies devoted both to discrimination and DEI. Many academics were willing enough to subject their institutions to this illiberal metamorphosis. But we cannot understand the thoroughness of the DEI revolution throughout academy, and society, without acknowledging the coercive role of the federal government.
The federal government played a crucial role in fostering the DEI revolution—but simply ending DEI within the federal government will not be sufficient to restore American higher education. DEI bureaucracies and a professoriate chosen by race and sex discrimination and DEI principles have infested virtually every American college and university. While federal power played a lamentable role in creating these distributed DEI bureaucracies, the solution, for now, cannot simply be the cessation of federal support for DEI. Federal power must be used, at least in the short run, to root out the distributed DEI bureaucracies from America’s colleges and universities.
Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity is the vital tool to this end. It extends the prohibition of DEI policies to a list of recipients of federal money that at least implicitly includes colleges and universities—and most colleges and universities cannot survive without federal money, whether received in the form of student loans, student grants, or research grants. It likewise directs the immediate preparation of lawsuits against notable DEI malefactors, explicitly including “institutions of higher education with endowments over 1 billion dollars,” and explicitly directs actions to ensure compliance by colleges and universities with the anti-discrimination requirements of Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College. This executive order promises to bring the weight of the federal government to bear on each and every petty DEI tyrant who corrupts American higher education.
It is, as yet, only a promise. The Trump administration, and future administrations, will have to enforce the order against a thousand evasions, and despite sabotage from within the DEI-corrupted federal government. With all the optimism in the world, we do not think this is the work of four years—it would be best to have 12 years of continuous reform, or 20, to ensure its effect. We would love to have a sudden victory over the forces of DEI—that it would melt away as swiftly as did the armies of Bashar al-Assad, that it collapse as quickly as the Soviet Union. We cannot expect such triumphs. We must gird ourselves for a long war against an enemy who has seized the commanding heights of civil society and the permanent bureaucracy. We must earn our victories trench by trench.
Nor is Ending Illegal Discrimination an ideal precedent for the role of federal government in education. We would prefer that Congress eventually repeal the Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1987, so as to reduce substantially the Education Department’s ability to use the strings of federal money to alter the behavior colleges and universities. But to disarm the federal government now would be to throw away the most effective remaining weapon against a radical establishment too deeply entrenched for internal reform to be plausible. Even the federal government likely will take a generation to tame our universities’ lawless defiance of America’s constitution and its ideals of liberty and equality. Once the DEI infestation has been rooted out, we then should turn to reducing the federal government’s power in higher education.
Neither should the federal government act alone. State governments play a vital role as equal partners in the campaign to restore higher education. State governments can and should use their powers to conduct parallel campaigns to remove DEI bureaucracies from public universities. State governments have additional powers, such as the ability to conduct program reviews that will inform defunding of hopelessly politicized disciplines in state-funded institutions. Accrediting organizations should be defanged by joint action by both federal and state governments. Ending Illegal Discrimination is a necessary but not sufficient means to restore American higher education. More broadly, the same can be said of every federal executive order. Every reforming federal executive order should be enacted into law, both by the U.S. Congress and by the states. Wonderful and praiseworthy as Ending Illegal Discrimination is, it must be written into law to ensure it endures.
In all this, we have emphasized the political dimensions of this struggle. The political dimensions are not idle, and our own struggle against race and sex discrimination in the university has been done not least to act to preserve our free and constitutional republic. But we should close by repeating that the particular horror of DEI to scholars has been that it subordinates all intellectual activity to “emancipatory” radical politics. We are scholars because we love the life of the mind—because we love anthropology, and history, and biology, and a host of other disciplines, for their own sake, and not as servants of any other master. DEI degrades and disfigures every one of these disciplines we love, to which we have dedicated our lives. We fight to remove DEI, race and sex discrimination, and every form of politicization from American universities not just as citizens, but as scholars who would restore our beloveds to their natural beauty.
We fight for scholarship—and the struggle against DEI is a means to that end. We welcome and endorse the Trump administration’s executive order Ending Illegal Discrimination because we fight for liberty and for law—and also, always, for the love of learning.
Photo by @VP - https://x.com/VP/status/1882163616646132011/photo/1, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=158426948
