On March 18, the nation’s schools faced a deadline to submit data on students’ race and gender. But 17 states have taken a stand against the demand and filed a lawsuit last week to block the Trump administration’s attempt to further its partisan policy objectives. New York is among the states, and Attorney General Letitia James explicitly termed the issue another “witch hunt.”
“Colleges and universities should not be forced to turn over massive amounts of sensitive student data to satisfy another witch hunt,” she said. Moreover, she said the action was illegal, and that the administration was merely seeking “to serve its own political agenda and target DEI initiatives.”
Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell took exception to the government’s “rushed and arbitrary framework,” noting that “there is no way for institutions to reasonably deliver accurate data” under these circumstances.
We agree with the attorneys general, and even if the matter were given sufficient time, we oppose any measure that interferes with efforts to diversify the student body. To this end, we join the steps being taken by the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), which recently issued a report on economic diversity in admissions, indicating that it brings students with different backgrounds and sets of experiences to campus, and increases ideological diversity, as Richard Kahlenberg of the PPI observed, “opens paths to leadership in America to more low-income and working-class students.”
When Linda McMahon, the Secretary of Education, said the new requirements were a more transparent way to scrutinize whether colleges were abiding by the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling, which outlawed race-conscious admissions, she was disingenuous and applied a narrow interpretation of the ruling. Of course, none of this comes as a surprise to the various distractions and artifices that are the stock in trade of the Trump administration.
Attorney General James was spot on in her assessment.