The Department of Education may soon be closing shop, but that doesn’t mean the Trump administration’s attempt to course-correct higher education in America is finished. Given that it is over a year since the American people elected President Donald Trump, it’s a good time to review how his administration has done on one of its most important tasks: cure elite institutions, higher education particularly, of the diversity, equity, and inclusion madness. Given how central these programs have become to elite universities, it’s no surprise they haven’t abandoned them without a fight. There is still a huge amount of work to be done. But several departments in the Trump administration have been relentless in trying to remove this destructive and illegal doctrine from our schools. Here are some of the most important steps Trump has taken so far. Executive Order on DEI The perhaps biggest blow to DEI in higher education came at nearly the moment Trump entered office when he signed a flurry of executive orders, including “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity.” It essentially repealed President Joe Biden’s Day One executive order that transformed the federal government into the primary enforcer of the “Great Awokening.” “Illegal DEI and DEIA policies not only violate the text and spirit of our longstanding Federal civil-rights laws, they also undermine our national unity, as they deny, discredit, and undermine the traditional American values of hard work, excellence, and individual achievement in favor of an unlawful, corrosive, and pernicious identity-based spoils system,” the order read. Mike Gonzalez at The Heritage Foundation called this and other similar orders the “policy equivalent of the Romans salting the Carthaginian fields after reducing their Mediterranean city-state enemy to ruins: Promoting racial preferences was after all the hallmark of the defeated and dispatched Biden administration.” The Trump executive order drastically changed how federal departments would do business, but most importantly in terms of higher education, it opened up the possibly to review the vast array of grants handed out to higher education that promoted DEI. DOGE and the Department of Education It was through the executive orders on DEI that the Department of Government Efficiency began to review grants being distributed to colleges and universities with an eye toward removing those that promoted the now-illegal DEI. This included $373 million at the Department of Education that had been funding 70 DEI training grants for teachers. One grant, according to the New York Post, was reportedly funding teachers to “engage in ongoing learning and self-reflection to confront their own biases and racism, and develop asset-based anti-racist mindsets.” While it’s certainly a huge and positive development that the Department of Education is shutting down, those keeping the light on inside have done an excellent job of continuing this work of removing bogus DEI grants. In February they canceled “18 grants totaling $226 million that were awarded under the Comprehensive Centers Program.” Among the things being funded by these grants was a “video instructing teachers to ‘flick that white man off your shoulder’ in order to resist the ‘settler patriarchy’ and the ‘white gaze.’” Instead of just running on autopilot, the Department of Education actively went about cutting off the arms of their own DEI octopus. Civil Rights Lawsuits Another way of going after DEI in higher education came from civil rights law. Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination “on the basis of race, color, or national origin.” It was through this that the Department of Education and Department of Justice threatened colleges and universities with lawsuits and withholding of funds if they did not stop programs that discriminated based on race. For instance, the Department of Education Office of Civil Rights sent a so-called Dear Colleague letter to Harvard University, informing the school that the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard disallowing race-based affirmative action programs would be enforced. The letter indicated that programs that “may appear neutral on their face” but in fact facilitate racial discrimination would be subject to scrutiny. The Trump administration has used Title VI as a means to freeze hundreds of millions of dollars in funds to universities it says are in violation of the law. The State Department has recently jumped about this effort to remove DEI from higher education too. According to a report in The Guardian, the State Department released a memo on Nov. 17 seeking to exclude 38 universities from the Diplomacy Lab federal research program because they “openly engage in DEI hiring practices.” Civil Rights Lawsuits, Title IX Edition The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, led by Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, has aggressively applied Title IX of the Civil Rights Act to root out another major component of the DEI revolution. The Department of Education has also been launching investigations of Title IX violations. DOJ has investigated schools from K-12 to university level for allowing men to infiltrate women’s sports and women’s spaces. “Title IX exists to protect women and girls in education. It is perverse to allow males to compete against girls, invade their private spaces, and take their trophies,” Dhillon said in May. “This Division will aggressively defend women’s hard-fought rights to equal educational opportunities.” The University of Pennsylvania made a deal with the Trump administration to keep federal funding by saying that it would no longer allow men to compete in women’s sports. UPenn had previously allowed Lia Thomas, a man, to compete in women’s swimming. The school was also required to issue an apology to past female swimmers. The post Here Are 4 Ways Trump Has Successfully Pressured Higher Ed to Abandon DEI appeared first on The Daily Signal.