Trump Administration Will Rescind Obama-Era Guidelines on Race-Conscious Admissions

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The Trump administration plans to revoke two pieces of Obama-era guidance on race-conscious admissions, The Wall Street Journal reports. The two guidelines, issued by the Obama administration in 2011 and 2016, respectively, gave colleges a wide berth in determining whether considering applicants’ race was necessary to achieve a diverse campus.

The move is yet another signal of the administration’s opposition to the practice of race-conscious admissions, which is widely accepted at many top-tier institutions and was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2016, in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin.

But the pending retirement of the court’s swing-voting justice and author of the Fisher opinion, Anthony M. Kennedy, has thrown the legal framework that allows race-conscious admissions into doubt. With a more conservative justice filling Kennedy’s shoes, the court would very likely look less favorably on a Fisher-like case, should one appear on its docket.

The Justice Department of Attorney General Jeff Sessions has already taken action on affirmative action, beginning an investigation into alleged discrimination against Asian-American applicants at Harvard University.

The Obama administration’s 2011 guidance, issued jointly by the Education and Justice Departments, effectively encouraged colleges to consider applicants’ race as a means of achieving diverse student bodies. And it represented a departure from the George W. Bush administration’s 2008 guidance on the issue, which told institutions they could not consider race in the admissions process unless it was “essential” to achieving their missions. According to The New York Times, the Trump administration plans to restore that standard.

According to the Journal, Trump-administration officials planned to assert that the two pieces of guidance did not mesh with precedent established by the Supreme Court, and that they were misleading.

John B. King Jr., president and chief executive of the Education Trust and a former U.S. education secretary, said in a written statement that he was “deeply disappointed” by the administration’s move. “This administration’s continued and cruel attacks on civil rights and justice represent a horrific attempt to unravel the very fabric of our democracy,” he added.

In another written statement, the president of the American Council on Education, Ted Mitchell, called the Trump administration’s decision “precisely the wrong message to institutions that are committed to following four decades of Supreme Court precedent.” Mitchell, a former under secretary of education, added that considering race “as one factor in a holistic admissions review” is consistent with well-established legal precedent. “Today’s announcement does not change that,” he said.

Last updated (7/3/2018, 1:39 p.m.) with statements from the Education Trust and the American Council on Education.

Andy Thomason is a senior editor at The Chronicle. Send him a tip at andy.thomason@chronicle.com. And follow him on Twitter @arthomason.