Trump's Anti-DEI Inquisition Targets Georgetown, a Private University
The Trump administration’s campaign against DEI is now trying to dictate the policies and even the content of teaching at private universities with a letter by the United States Attorney Ed Martin threatening Georgetown University Law School.
New York Times columnist David French describes the case:
On Monday, Ed Martin, the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, sent the dean of Georgetown University Law Center, a Catholic law school, a letter that said, “It has come to my attention reliably that Georgetown Law School continues to teach and promote D.E.I. This is unacceptable.”
Martin said that he’d begun an “inquiry” into the school and demanded to know whether it had eliminated all D.E.I.—which he does not define, but in right-wing circles tends to refer to any action at all designed to increase diversity or honor historically marginalized people—from the school and its curriculum. He also asked, “If D.E.I. is found in your courses or teaching in any way, will you move swiftly to remove it?”
This short letter, which was addressed to William Treanor, the dean of the law school, continued with the declaration that “no applicant for our fellows program, our summer internship or employment in our office who is a student or affiliated with a law school or university that continues to teach and utilize D.E.I. will be considered.”
Even a first-year law student knows that the federal government cannot dictate the viewpoint and curriculum of a private Christian school, yet here was a federal prosecutor opening an inquiry into a Jesuit school’s protected speech.
French connects this to other cases and notes the irony that an administration that claimed to be defending “free speech” is now clamping down on it—and the further irony that an administration that claimed to protect Christianity is now targeting Christians who challenge its orthodoxy.
This also serves to consolidate power by targeting a law school the administration’s lawyers view as hostile to their agenda and to the expansion of their power.
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