Duke Apparently Targeted by Dept of Education Investigation
Trump Admin 'anti DEI' crusade, or Monty Python skit?
There are several media organizations reporting that Duke is among 50ish universities facing Department of Education investigations for racial discrimination due to their involvement with “the Ph.D. Project.”
I am unfamiliar with this group, but it seems to be a private organization whose goal is to encourage people of color to get a Ph.D. in Business, which is a route to becoming a business school professor. Its webpage says under its ‘About Us’ section of the web page:
Under the benefits of membership section it says
The Ph.D. Project is 30 years old and seems to focus its efforts via three main routes:
Providing linkages to potential students with Ph.D. program application pages. Here is a link to the University of Florida’s application portal for a Ph.D. in business and the University of Alabama’s portal. The link to Duke’s Business Ph.D. program is dead. There are around 50 universities who participate
Holding an annual conference that at least partly focuses on matching students with scholarships provided by other organizations.
Providing linkages to job announcements for Business Faculty positions at Universities.
Finally, the smoking gun is perhaps the fiery radicalism of the groups that co-founded the Ph.D. Project in 1994…..KPMG and Citi along with accreditation organizations.
This is a fishing attempt to try to get universities to pre-comply with a variety of things that the Trump Administration does not like (see the Columbia example). The rolling protection racket is coming to Durham, and it always was going to do so. All the real and implied big threats—endowment tax, extra-legal removal of community members without due process, NIH indirect cost recovery, mandating changes to the curriculum, putting academic departments into ‘receivership’, etc etc—are all designed to make us comply with their wishes. And to then thank them us for not doing more to us.
Seven universities are being investigated for having race-specific scholarships, and Duke University either pre-complied or was prescient last Spring when it ended the Reginaldo Howard Scholarship (YMMV and the University insisted that it had nothing to do with the Supreme Court decision). All of this flows from the February 14, 2025 ‘Dear Colleague’ letter that is being litigated on numerous grounds, but most generally that it greatly over-interprets the meaning of the 2023 Supreme Court ruling that found the use of race-based standards in undergraduate admissions to be unconstitutional. The Trump Administration is essentially saying that decision ratifies their desire of how the world should be with respect to “ending DEI and wokeism.” The administration is not, of course, waiting for the legal proceedings to play out, they are simply trying to get us to comply.
Duke should follow the law and say when we believe the federal government is overreaching and why, while asserting our understanding of the rights of the University under the First Amendment protections of freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and expectation of due process. And somehow keep teaching and doing our research.
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To send you into the weekend on a happier vibe, this is a oil on canvas painting I did of the view out my B and B window in Dijon, France, which is a highly underrated city to visit…in addition to being a place from which to visit Burgundy vineyards and cellars. If you go to Dijon, you have to do a mustard tasting, and visit the free musuem in the city center that is a super funky collection. I love free museums.
