02 August, 2017
The new legal project is recruiting lawyers in the DOJ, according to an internal department memo, for "investigations and possible litigation related to intentional race-based discrimination in college and university admissions". Except that this piece of paper showed that the Justice Department's civil rights division was looking for lawyers to try to end affirmative action at colleges and universities.
As his approval ratings continue to plunge, Trump has to take actions to shore up his base, and his base thinks that universities discriminate against white people.
Vanita Gupta, who led the civil rights division during the Obama administration, characterized the move as "disturbing". The Times points out that "intentional race-based discrimination" could really only refer to one type of admissions policy, that which explicitly seeks to admit higher levels of minority applicants.
"The goal here is to drum up a bunch of fear and intimidate schools who are trying to provide a pipeline to leadership for all Americans", said Bhargava, who served as chief of the educational opportunities section of the civil rights division at the Justice Department.
"The Department of Justice does not discuss personnel matters, so we'll decline comment", said Devin O'Malley, a department spokesman, told the Times.
Affirmative action programs date back to the 1960s when, at the height of the civil rights era, USA authorities attempted to increase the representation of women and historically oppressed groups in education and employment at a time when women were typically confined to gendered vocations and Latino and Black Americans suffered from outright exclusion or were "the last hired and the first fired".
The program, if implemented, would be run out of the civil-rights division's front office, The Times' report said, meaning it would be overseen by Trump's political appointees, not the division's career employees.
She slammed it as "misaligned with the division's longstanding priorities".
A spokeswoman for the Education Department did not immediately respond late Tuesday night to inquiries about whether the agency would play a role in the effort to challenge affirmative action on college campuses.
Lawsuits are pending at Harvard University, the University of North Carolina and several other large institutions, according to the report.
