President Donald Trump\u2019s administration dropped its legal appeal of a court ruling blocking its campaign against DEI last week. The administration\u2019s actions against DEI threatened funding for K-12 and higher education universities.<\/p>\n
The original ruling was based on a lawsuit brought by the American Federation of Teachers against a Feb. 14 letter from the Department of Education\u2019s Office of Civil Rights.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The letter argued that any form of racial consideration \u2014 including hiring, financial aid, housing and\u00a0teaching that \u201cstigmatize students who belong to particular racial groups\u201d \u2014 is illegal and could lead to loss of federal funding. The\u00a0Office of Civil Rights used the basis of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the equal protection clause of the Constitution and the Supreme Court\u2019s ruling against affirmative action in 2023 to justify its position.<\/p>\n
UC Berkeley School of Law professor Jonathan Glater\u00a0said before the recent withdrawal of the appeal, many universities had already changed their practices to accommodate the Trump administration\u2019s legal view of DEI, referencing the Chronicle of Higher Education\u2019s DEI tracking efforts.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cToday\u2019s dismissal confirms what the data shows: government attorneys are having an increasingly difficult time defending the lawlessness of the president and his cabinet,\u201d said Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, a legal advocacy firm representing the American Federation of Teachers, in an email. \u201cWhen people show up and resist, they win. This is a welcome relief and a meaningful win for public education.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Campus faculty have pushed back against the anti-DEI initiative, with Berkeley Law faculty members, including Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, signing<\/a> a letter affirming the legality and principle of DEI.\u00a0<\/p>\n In October, Berkeley Law\u2019s Edley Center on Law & Democracy wrote a white paper on the Trump administration\u2019s interpretation of DEI, rebutting it and describing options available to organizations interacting with the federal government on DEI.<\/p>\n \u201c(The Trump administration) have simply ignored it and had federal agencies issue variously titled guidance documents (memoranda, letters, and FAQs) making broad pronouncements that appear to condemn all putatively DEI activities. None have the force of law,\u201d\u00a0according to the white paper, written by executive director of the Edley Center, Catherine E. Lhamon, and senior fellow Seth Galanter.<\/p>\n Last March, the UC system banned<\/a> diversity statements in hiring. In June, the Department of Justice began<\/a> an investigation into the UC system for their diversity hiring practices, claiming the \u201cUC 2030 Capacity Plan\u201d directs campuses to meet \u201crace- and sex-based employment quotas.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe Department has full authority under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to target impermissible DEI initiatives that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or national origin. Title VI has always prohibited schools from racial preferencing and stereotyping, and it continues to do so with or without the February 14th Dear Colleague Letter,\u201d said Julie Hartman, Department of Education press secretary for legal affairs, in an email.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"President Donald Trump\u2019s administration dropped its legal appeal of a court ruling blocking its campaign against DEI last…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":152543,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[18153,75191,75198,75200,75192,18154,75195,19442,75197,75193,75196,75201,143,145,144,75199,75194,1519],"class_list":["post-152542","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-affirmative-action","tag-american-federation-of-teachers","tag-catherine-e-lhamon","tag-chronicle-of-higher-education","tag-civil-rights-act","tag-dei","tag-democracy-forward","tag-department-of-education","tag-edley-center-on-law-democracy","tag-equal-protection-clause","tag-erwin-chemerinsky","tag-julie-hartman","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news","tag-seth-m-galanter","tag-skye-perryman","tag-trump"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152542","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=152542"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152542\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/152543"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=152542"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=152542"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=152542"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}