RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/the-department-of-educations-time-has-come/

President Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has terminated nearly $1 billion in contracts with the federal Department of Education (ED) and cut 29 DEI programs costing taxpayers $101 million. While further revelations await, the people should know that ED has no constitutional foundation – education is the purview of the states – and has existed only since 1979.

In 1976, the National Education Association, the nation’s most powerful teacher union, endorsed Jimmy Carter for president. The Georgia Democrat returned the favor by establishing the federal Department of Education, which did nothing to improve student achievement. That was confirmed in 1983 by A Nation at Risk, which contended that “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and a people.”

ED was more about fattening the government payroll and boosting government power. Consider the actions of Biden education secretary Dr. Miguel Cardona, for example. Cardona’s “doctoral degree,” like Jill Biden’s, is in education, a non-discipline most useful as a bureaucratic credential. A classic zealot, Cardona used new Title IX regulations to impose gender junkthought.

“In a nutshell, the new rewrite means: – men can take academic AND athletic scholarships from women,” Riley Gaines explained. “Men will have FULL access to bathrooms, locker rooms, etc – men could be housed in dorm rooms with women – students and faculty MUST compel their speech by requiring the use of preferred pronouns If the guidelines above are ignored or even questioned, then YOU can be charged with harassment.” Cardona also deployed ED against schools congressional Democrats don’t like.

Grand Canyon University is an independent college that “reaches a broad variety of like-minded Christian congregations and organizations,” and many students want to attend. By contrast, Connecticut Democrat Rosa DeLauro called GCU a “predatory for-profit school.” The dutiful Cardona told her ED was aiming “to shut them down” and hit GCU for $37.7 million, the “largest fine in history against a school that lied about costs,” and so on. Compare Cardona’s predations with Obama ED boss Arne Duncan.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/universities-supreme-court-affirmative-action-racial-preferences

When the Supreme Court, in 2023, banned the use of racial preferences in university admissions, observers expected the number of black and Hispanic freshmen on elite campuses to fall and the number of Asian freshmen to rise. At many schools, however, that didn’t happen.

Admissions data reveal that Yale, Princeton, Duke, and several other highly selective schools enrolled fewer Asian students in their Classes of 2028—the first group admitted since the Court decided Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard—than they did in their Classes of 2027. Black enrollment at these schools, by contrast, remained virtually unchanged.

In the run up to SFFA, these elite colleges repeatedly asserted that they could not maintain racial diversity on campuses without affirmative action. Sixteen prestigious colleges filed a joint amicus brief arguing that “no race-neutral alternative presently can fully replace race-conscious individualized and holistic review to obtain the diverse student body Amici have found essential to fulfilling their missions.” Several had advanced the same argument in amicus briefs filed in 2003’s Grutter v. Bollinger and 2016’s Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, earlier cases examining the use of racial preferences.

For more than two decades, universities claimed that socioeconomic preferences, geographic sorting, and other race-neutral alternatives could not achieve the same level of racial diversity on campus as could affirmative action. Yet the demographics of many schools’ Class of 2028 suggest otherwise. It raises an awkward question: Did America’s top universities mislead the Supreme Court then, or are they breaking the law now?

Consider data from an Inside Higher Ed database that tracks the demographics of the Classes of 2027 and 2028 at 31 highly selective universities. The database includes the first-year demographics for 13 of the 15 highly selective universities that alleged, in the SFFA amicus brief, that their campuses would lose racial diversity absent racial preferences. I’ve listed the demographics for 12 of those universities below. (The University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania were not included in the database. I chose to omit the California Institute of Technology because its data appeared unclear.)