In just one month, there has been a massive reset of civil rights politics in the United States that will reverberate for decades. We are still waiting to see how this is going to take precise shape in the context of higher education. Among the Trump administration’s many DEI-related executive orders, none yet outlines a detailed program to address progressive extremism in our colleges and universities (though several do touch on it directly or indirectly).

　　The first major step has now appeared in a February 14 “Dear Colleague Letter” (DCL) written by Craig Trainor, the Education Department’s Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights. Some see in this DCL a “sweeping and unprecedented” effort; but that only means they have not been paying attention to the new administration’s anti-DEI executive orders, which are even more aggressive and wide-ranging.

　　The February 14 DCL does not spell out a detailed plan of attack, but it does mention in passing (in one sentence) a list of different applications of the general principle to which it is devoted. Its primary purpose is to offer a foundational general reading of “the Department’s existing interpretation of federal law” (relying especially on Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Supreme Court’s 2023 Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) v. Harvard decision).

　　But perhaps the main message of the DCL is that the administration’s vision of civil rights law will be vigorously enforced, and enforced with some attention to the situation ofwhat the law terms “majority groups” (whites, men, etc.) in particular.

　　The DCL’s interpretation of civil rights law puts forward a time-honored ideal of color-blind non-discrimination. That principled outlook appears pervasively in the government’s anti-DEI executive orders issued to date as well.

　　In neither the DCL nor the executive orders, however, is that interpretation spelled out at great length. As we shall see, an important question looms here. Will the Trump administration’s anti-DEI campaign serve to vindicate and enshrine the noble ideal of color-blind equality for the future, or will it simply deploy the machinery of anti-discrimination extremism created by the left, now on behalf of the government’s political supporters?

　　For now, the administration seems content to lean on the Supreme Court’s articulation of key principles in the 2023 SFFA decision. That decision does offer a powerful account of color-blind constitutionalism, but only a few non-experts will recognize it.

　　The legal complexity of the high court’s Equal Protection Clause jurisprudence means that color-blind equality is bound up with its “tiers of scrutiny” doctrine, a “two-pronged” legal test (summarized in the DCL’s longest paragraph). After wading through what is or is not a “compelling governmental interest” that is “narrowly tailored” to the state’s end, the average citizen is likely to lose sight of the simple power of the moral principles that rest at the bottom of the law.

　　The DCL does include a powerful repudiation of the left interpretation of the law. Core ideas of the left’s vision of civil rights—“diversity, racial balancing, social justice, or equity”—are rejected not only because they are “nebulous goals” but also now because they are “illegal.”

　　Policies and practices of educational institutions “smuggling racial stereotypes and explicit race-consciousness into everyday training, programming, and discipline” are out. That might sound like left anti-discrimination talk, until one understands its context: “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.”

　　The forbidden racial “stereotypes” that now matter will include, perhaps most especially, those that characterize whites as racist. When “DEI programs … teach students that certain racial groups [i.e., whites] bear unique moral burdens that others do not,” they “stigmatize” those students and invoke “crude racial stereotypes.” To say the least, the “Whiteness Studies” programs of our colleges and universities are in for a reboot (plenty still exist, by the way, as a quick Google search will attest).

　　The DCL makes it clear that the administration’s vision of civil rights law will be vigorously enforced in a variety of ways. Most striking is a new role for Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, now a tool for fighting reverse racism and other forms of “anti-majority” discrimination in our colleges and universities. The simplest meaning of “Title VI” is as a threat to cut off government funding to any entity, public or private, that fails to adhere to the government’s view of non-discrimination. Unlike the SFFA decision (which deals with college admissions only), Title VI is the all-purpose genie of civil rights law, extending the reach of anti-discrimination mandates in a hundred directions at once—anywhere federal funding is deployed.

　　Now the most famous use of the funding cut-off threat to push civil rights in higher education is associated with Title IX (of the Education Amendments Act of 1972). As Shep Melnick has spelled out, Title IX’s funding cut-off threat was used in an extremely aggressive way to micromanage universities on behalf of a radical left civil rights vision. Turning one complaint of sexual harassment at a university into a broad Department of Education remit for investigating anything and everything related to sex discrimination in that institution, Title IX created a legal architecture for meddling, monitoring, and mandating that helped make the American university the most woke place on the planet.

　　Is encouraging whites (and men and straights and Christians) to think of themselves more and more as victims of discrimination, in need of the government’s help, simply and entirely a good thing?

　　Though the DCL itself does not put it in precisely this way, it seems like what the Trump administration has in mind is something like the aggressive Title IX regime, but now harnessed to attack perceived anti-white racism and other forms of reverse discrimination and woke ideology—via Title VI. (A similar Title VI approach to fighting anti-Semitism in higher ed passed in the House in May 2024 and has advanced on other fronts as well).

　　In just one sentence of the DCL, we get an amazingly terse summary of many different kinds of reform that such a deployment of Title VI by the government could bring to higher ed. To begin with, the Education Department is going to be policing affirmative action and related group-equality efforts in a serious way. “Federal law thus prohibits covered entities from using race in decisions pertaining to admissions, hiring, promotion, compensation, financial aid, scholarships, [and] prizes.”

　　But the sentence continues on, and in what follows we get an indication that the government’s civil rights campaign will extend into what one might call the “culture” of our colleges and universities. Several very different areas of university life—“administrative support, discipline, housing, [and] graduation ceremonies”—are singled out. Fittingly, the sentence ends with a blanket statement extending the reach of the government’s efforts to, simply, “all other aspects of student, academic, and campus life.” The Trump administration seems to be announcing its own long march through the institutions of higher education.

　　The DCL makes plain that this is just the beginning of what will be a wide-ranging civil rights reform project throughout all of American education: “Additional legal guidance will follow in due course. The Department will vigorously enforce the law on equal terms as to all preschool, elementary, secondary, and postsecondary educational institutions, as well as state educational agencies, that receive financial assistance.” (Note the role of “federal assistance” here, making Title VI the heart of things.)

　　Folks on the left are astonished by this. They cannot imagine that the strategies they developed to make their own radical interpretation of civil rights law stiflingly pervasive could be used by conservatives wielding a saner interpretation of the law.

　　Vigorous enforcement also means rooting out attempts to sidestep the new order, a trend to which red state reformers have been calling attention for a while. As the DCL puts it, “Although some programs may appear neutral on their face, a closer look reveals that they are, in fact, motivated by racial considerations.” Thus, for example, “a school may not use students’ personal essays, writing samples, participation in extracurriculars, or other cues” to try to detect their race in the admissions process. (This is also presumably in part an attempt to close a possible loophole left in the SFFA decision.) Similarly, “it would … be unlawful for an educational institution to eliminate standardized testing” to hit racial targets.

　　That these efforts are going to have significant practical effect is indicated already by the Education Departments cancellation, the day before the DCL was published, of $350 Million for Equity Assistance Centers and Regional Educational Laboratories housed in our public universities that have been outposts of woke educational dogma and indoctrination for decades.

　　The focus in this DCL is exclusively on race, not sex or other categories of anti-discrimination law, but the narrowness of the scope of its coverage does not diminish the rhetorical force of the letter’s recurring emphasis on the injustice of discrimination—for minority groups, but also for “majority groups.” “In recent years, American educational institutions have discriminated against students on the basis of race, including white and Asian students.”

　　Higher education indeed stands accused in the DCL of “pervasive and repugnant race-based preferences and other forms of racial discrimination emanat[ing] throughout every facet of academia.” Perversely, in the name of diversity, equity, and inclusion, our colleges and universities have been engaged in practices the civil rights revolution was supposed to end.

　　The persuasive power of such claims is undoubtedly considerable. But is encouraging whites (and men and straights and Christians) to think of themselves more and more as victims of discrimination, in need of the government’s help, simply and entirely a good thing? (See also Executive Order 14202: Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias.) Might not going down this road mean that the logic of anti-discrimination politics will drown out any other way of thinking about “group politics” in America, to include our long tradition of liberal democratic constitutional pluralism (toleration, individualism, separation of public and private, suspicion of “factions,” etc.)? Will our liberal constitutional tradition be swallowed up now by anti-discrimination and nothing but anti-discrimination?

　　However that may be, some such stance does seem to be the order of the day. Indeed, the political success of the Trump administration’s extremely important civil rights program may well depend on political support from the majority groups that have been asked until now to make sacrifices under the left’s vision of anti-discrimination.

　　To moderate or counter-balance the potentially unwieldy dimensions of what is to come, it would be very useful if the Trump administration would provide the American people with an impressive statement, prominently displayed, of the general moral and political principles underlying its understanding of civil rights law. It is not the job of an Education Department DCL to do that, but someone in the federal government needs to state some simple truths—minus the legalistic hullabaloo of Supreme Court decisions. Providing a robust positive and non-legalistic statement of the civic or moral meaning of color-blindness, equality before the law, equal citizenship, and equal opportunity would pay off because the principles in question are readily available and because they are powerful.

　　Such an effort would likely be politically beneficial as well, and successful, because the left’s vision of civil rights is a litany of moral dishonesties and evasions. “Discrimination” has been bent to include states of affairs where no deliberate or intentional action by anyone can be identified. Inequality alone is justification enough for the left to cry discrimination—and yet the left must then hide all its claims along these lines in a series of deceptions. Knowing that they cannot openly call for “quotas” or “group representation,” left-wing civil rights radicals must instead offer up obfuscating code words like “critical mass” and “equity” and “societal” injustice and “disparate impact.”

　　The legal stance articulated by the recent Trump administration statements depends upon a set of moral-political principles that have already won the day, and that will always win the day in any open and honest contest. Articulating them clearly and stating them forthrightly, so that they may contribute to civil rights reform efforts, is called for both as a matter of principle and of prudence.

　　The authors opinions are his own and are not endorsed by any institution.