Eric Tucker Associated Press Washington – The Trump administration is moving to rescind Obama-era guidance that encouraged schools to take a person’s race into account to encourage diversity in admissions, a U.S. official said Tuesday. The shift would give schools and universities the federal government’s blessing to take a race-neutral approach to the students they consider for admission. In Michigan, it has been illegal for colleges and universities to consider race in admissions since the state’s voters passed Proposition 2 in 2006. Officials at the University of Michigan expect the Trump administration’s action to have no practical effect. “We believe the U.S. Supreme Court got it right in 2003 when it affirmed our law school's approach at the time, which allowed consideration of race as one of many factors in the admissions process,” UM spokeswoman Kim Broekhuizen said in a statement Tuesday. “We still believe that. But under state law, after Proposition 2, the university is restricted from considering race in admissions decisions.” Michigan State University’s media relations office issued a similar statement, saying the school “is already prohibited from using the factors of race, gender or ethnic origins in rendering admissions and financial aid decisions.” A formal announcement was expected later Tuesday from the Justice and Education departments, according to the official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the plan had not yet been disclosed. The guidance from the Obama administration gave schools a framework for “considering race to further the compelling interests in achieving diversity and avoiding racial isolation.” That approach replaced Bush-era policy from a decade earlier. The new guidance will not have the force of law, but schools will presumably be able to defend themselves from lawsuits by following administration policy. The Supreme Court in 2016 gave affirmative action policies a narrow victory in 2016 by upholding a University of Texas program that takes into account race in deciding whom to admit. That decision was authored by Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, who announced his retirement last week. The Wall Street Journal first reported the move.<doc-sep>The Trump administration on Tuesday rescinded guidance released by the Obama administration’s education and justice departments on affirmative action in higher education. The 2011 and 2016 guidance explained how institutions of higher education should approach admissions to have a more racially diverse student body. In the 2011 guidance, the departments said there was a “compelling interest that postsecondary institutions have in obtaining the benefits that flow from achieving a diverse student body” and “These benefits greatly contribute to the educational, economic, and civic life of this nation.” This included some explanation of how institutions may “assign different weights to different diversity factors based on their importance to the program” but “race cannot be given so much weight that applicants are defined primarily by their race and are largely accepted or rejected on that basis.” In 2016, the administration officially stated this view again after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld an affirmative action program at the University of Texas at Austin in the case Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin. Advertisement Catherine E. Lhamon, assistant education secretary for civil rights during the Obama administration, said of the reported move to rescind the guidances, according to the Washington Post, “The Supreme Court has been consistent over decades in its rulings on lawful use of race in affirmative action and the guidance the Trump administration rescinds today offered nothing more than a clear and practical statement of the law and how to comply with it. Taking away that guidance undermines the steps toward equity school communities have long been taking.” The joint guidance rescinding the Obama administration guidances read, “The departments have reviewed the documents and concluded that they advocate policy preferences go beyond the requirements of the Constitution, Title IV and Title VI [of the Civil Rights Act of 1964]. Moreover, the documents prematurely decide, or appear to decide, whether particular actions violate the Constitution or federal law.” Last year, the Department of Justice said it planned to investigate and possibly sue universities over their affirmative action policies. Yet, despite arguing for years against affirmative action in admissions, conservatives have stayed relatively quiet on the consideration of legacy in admissions, or whether a student’s relatives also attended the same university. “There is also preference for children of non-alumni who are rich and likely to give a lot of money. There is preference for children of influential politicians and celebrities. There is preference for people who play sports that are almost always limited to the rich,” Daniel Golden, who wrote the 2006 book, The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges — and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates, told ThinkProgress last year. He said it the problem is only getting worse. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO) tweeted that the decision was “disgraceful.” . @realDonaldTrump, what do black people have to lose? How about admission to college, the one proven way to get out of poverty. A truly disgraceful decision. #SaveSCOTUS https://t.co/7SbnIk2MRK — Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (@repcleaver) July 3, 2018 Vanita Gupta, former head of the civil rights division for the Justice Department under Obama, tweeted that rescinding the guidance shows the department is not committed to diversity in higher education. This guidance restated the law and our national commitment to diversity. The retraction reflects that the DOJ no longer has that commitment. https://t.co/QOQewFWBmd — Vanita Gupta (@vanitaguptaCR) July 3, 2018 Ted Mitchell, the president of the American Council on Education, said in a statement before the announcement, “Colleges and universities that consider race and ethnicity as one factor in a holistic admissions review are committed to following the law of the land. And make no mistake, this is the law of the land. Today’s announcement does not change that.” Advertisement Conservatives who have long opposed affirmative action in college admissions and attempt to bolster their argument by claiming that Asian students will lose out in admissions processes that use a holistic evaluation that also considers racial diversity. Right now, Students for Fair Admissions is suing Harvard for discriminating against Asian students, and the brief filings are scheduled for later this month. The leader of the group is a man who has long fought against affirmative action, Edward Blum, a legal strategist who was involved in the Fisher case. Conseratives use the model minority stereotype to attempt to pit racial and ethnic groups against each other. As OiYan Poon, a professor of education at Loyola University Chicago, told Vox in 2016, “The racial mascot as an Asian American provides a kind of racial cover to deflect accusations of their efforts as being anti–civil rights. In fact, they can turn it around and say this campaign is for civil rights because the victims [they’re] fighting for are not white. They are a minority.” This fight has been going on for decades. In 1989, Congressman Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) introduced HR 147, which was designed to investigate undergraduate admissions processes discriminating against Asian applicants. It had bipartisan support until some groups dropped out of concern that it was really an attack on affirmative action. Many Asian American advocacy groups involved in policy discussions over race conscious affirmative action have pushed against the argument that Asian Americans would be harmed by consideration of race as part of a holistic review. These groups have also pointed out that a lot of groups under the large umbrella of Asian face economic barriers and have unaddressed educational needs.<doc-sep>
(Kevin Lamarque/Reuters) The Wall Street Journal and New York Times are both reporting that the Trump administration will be rescinding Obama-era guidance on the use of race and ethnicity in student admissions (higher education) and assignments (K–12). This is good news. As I explained on NRO as the Obama statements were issued — here and here and here, for example — they misread the law and were bad policy as well. It’s not that complicated: As a policy matter, skin color and national origin should not play a role in deciding where a student can go to school. The costs of such discrimination overwhelm any claim of “educational benefits” from having a politically correct racial and ethnic mix of students. As a legal matter, while the courts have, alas, left the door ajar for this sort of discrimination, they have also placed significant restraints on it. The federal government should not be encouraging schools to do as much of this as they can get away with, which is what the Obama administration’s guidance did. Most of the arguments against politically correct racial discrimination have been around for a long time, but I’ll mention briefly the two that have recently, and rightly, attracted greater attention. First, it is not just white students who are frequently discriminated against, but Asian-American students as well. Indeed, as America becomes increasingly multiracial and multiethnic — and as individual Americans are themselves more and more likely to be multiracial and multiethnic — it becomes more and more untenable for our institutions to sort people according to what color skin they have and where their ancestors came from. Second, the evidence is now overwhelming that, because of the “mismatch” phenomenon, it is not only the students who are discriminated against who are hurt by these policies, but also those who are supposedly receiving racial preferences. That is, if a student is admitted to and attends a school where his or her academic qualifications are significantly below the rest of the student body’s, that student is less likely to graduate and more likely to flunk out or switch majors, and will receive lower grades — all to the student’s detriment. I should also note a wonderful essay published last week by John McWhorter on why this discrimination should end. So the Trump administration is wise to set a new course and to jettison the Obama administration’s bad guidance in this area. Here’s hoping that the administration issues new guidance and, in particular, supports the lawsuit that Asian Americans have brought against Harvard and the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill for their admissions discrimination. No doubt the Left will characterize this shift as somehow racist, but in fact it is not only nondiscriminatory but also the only approach that will not divide our multiethnic and multiracial society. It’s worthy of the nation whose birthday we celebrate tomorrow. E pluribus unum.