Can I Still Teach My Yale Course on Racism?

Scholars of racism face a peculiar accusation: that studying racism causes racism. As facile as this criticism is—no one thinks that agriculture professors cause world hunger, or that cardiology professors cause heart attacks—racism scholars know that this sort of ignorant bullying comes with the territory.

A set of new directives from the Trump administration aims to supercharge that bullying, and meaningfully change what happens on campus. Perhaps most significant, at least for my classroom, is a “Dear Colleague” letter—an official government notice that provides guidance on policy enforcement—from the Department of Education’s civil-rights division. In the letter, the department extends the scope of the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard Supreme Court decision, declaring the department’s belief that when universities consider race in any decisions relating to “aspects of student, academic, and campus life,” they are violating the law.

The letter and the subsequent FAQ published two weeks later call for the elimination of Black graduation ceremonies, certain themed residences, and cultural activity centers. And, although the FAQ notes that the department may not exercise control over curricula, it also cautions schools against creating “a racially hostile environment.”

The letter comes amid a flurry of executive orders that, taken together, will shape not only individual programs but national memory. These orders have limited how history is taught in K–12, ending what one order calls “racial indoctrination”; banned funding for programs at the Smithsonian Institution that promote “improper ideology”; and directed the Department of Education to cease all funding for programs that “advance DEI or gender ideology” while requiring state education officials at public schools to verify that they have ended DEI programs. This collection of restrictions is not without precedent. In recent years, Florida has implemented a raft of policies that restricted educational freedom and empowered parents to ban books and curricula, and that led to hundreds of books being pulled from shelves.

[Christopher L. Eisgruber: The cost of the government’s attack on Columbia]

Now that this formula has been unleashed on a national scale, these policies pose a real risk of muzzling professors who wish to teach their students about injustice, and will have the effect of rewriting how race and racism are taught and understood at all levels, in the classroom and beyond. That should concern all of us, not only because understanding racism matters for our moral, social, and economic future—but because these attacks will inhibit the nation’s ability to tell the truth and hold powerful people accountable.

The Dear Colleague letter formally targets educational institutions that receive federal funds, including Yale, where I chair the department of African American studies and teach a course called “Is That Racist?” The Trump administration claims that too many of these educational institutions have “toxically indoctrinated students with the false premise that the United States is built upon ‘systemic and structural racism’ and advanced discriminatory policies and practices.” It purports to be intervening in young people’s defense.

But in seeking to maim how this nation teaches history, the administration is advancing a policy of ignorance, what W. E. B. Du Bois called the “propaganda of history,” a deliberate rewriting of the past to justify current inequalities. Du Bois’s argument, as true today as it was then, is that racism is tied up in history, and that history often provides the moral justification for public policies. If states had not explicitly prevented Black people and women from getting an education—an unambiguous example of systemic discrimination—then what justifies affirmative action? But, of course, states did that. If states had not deliberately disenfranchised Black voters with congressional maps—another unambiguous example—then what justifies restricting how some states draw up those maps today? But, of course, states absolutely did that as well.

Without historical understanding, repair looks like favoritism. If people do not understand how racism has functioned in the U.S., they are more willing to view programs combating it as nefarious efforts that privilege undeserving communities at the expense of everyone else.

The administration’s claim in the Dear Colleague letter that universities becoming race-blind will allow students to enjoy “a school environment free from discrimination” is absurd on its face. People widely understand racism to refer to folks with power abusing folks without it—injustices that many students experience well before arriving at college. The letter, in contrast, would have readers believe that racism’s greatest harm is hurting students’ feelings on campus. One cannot be a neutral observer of the world and hold this position.

Racism often operates impersonally and systemically, beyond any individual bigotry. Policies such as government redlining, discriminatory college loans, and racially disparate drug criminalization produced generational poverty that shows up in public health, student test scores, and most of the outcomes social scientists know how to measure. Diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts are meant to offset these harms—though they stand no chance of eliminating them. But the administration would rather just disappear all the evidence. As I teach in my class, ignoring race does not make racism go away. It just makes it harder to remedy.

To fully grasp the stakes, we must look at the broader erosion of truth-telling institutions.

Higher education is supposed to be the brightest star in our constellation of scholarship and accountability. A government that does not want to remedy injustice first ensures that injustice is invisible, and this administration is off to an impressive start in that regard. It has already fired 17 inspectors general—the officials responsible for accountability—at federal agencies. It dismissed the director of the Office of Government Ethics, the independent agency charged with monitoring ethics and conflicts of interest in the executive branch. It fired the head of the National Archives, the organization responsible for keeping an official record of U.S. governance. It has banned the Associated Press from the White House in a continued war with journalists. Each of these institutions is tasked with uncovering the truth about what the federal government does and making sure that those who can hold it accountable have access to that truth. And in the area I know most from my own research, policing, the Trump administration shut down the National Law Enforcement Accountability Database, which tracked officers with a history of misconduct and prevented them from quietly transferring to new departments. (This database was originally created by the first Trump administration.) No database, no knowledge, no accountability.

The philosopher Charles Mills would have called these policies part of an “epistemology of ignorance”—a deliberate refusal to examine the roots of inequality, in order to preserve the moral legitimacy of an existing power structure. The goal is not neutrality but the active production of ignorance to advance inequality. The Dear Colleague letter does not need to outlaw race-conscious education explicitly to achieve this aim. It just needs to make such education risky enough that institutions self-censor out of self-preservation.

And the risks are mounting. The University of Maine is facing a potential loss of more than $30 million for its policy on transgender athletes. The University of Pennsylvania is losing $175 million for the same. Sixty colleges and universities, including Yale, are under investigation for their responses to student protests against Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in Gaza. The administration is wagering that even wealthy institutions such as Johns Hopkins—which announced the elimination of more than 2,000 staff positions due to cuts in USAID funding—will blink; that institutions such as Yale will decide that teaching about race is not the right hill to die on given the plethora of other threats they face. With billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of staff positions at stake across the country, many higher-education leaders will understandably pause before standing up to this bullying. The message is chillingly clear: We will punish the truth with financial pain.

In this context, it is no wonder that scientists are considering leaving for counties with less adversarial approaches to education; some countries are actively recruiting U.S. scholars, and some scholars (including personal friends and colleagues) are proclaiming loudly that the political climate in the U.S. is the reason they are leaving prestigious jobs—and the country. These threats to the stature of U.S. higher education are accelerated when the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, a prestigious independent organization that advises on scientific policy, is accused of revising pending reports to remove such terms as health equity and marginalized populations, replacing them with vague language, according to a letter signed by 100 of the group’s own members. NASEM’s editing foreshadowed the case of Columbia University, which was recently told that it must put Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies under receivership—punishing faculty by stripping them of their ability to govern themselves—before it is even allowed to discuss the restoration of $400 million in federal grants. This demand to meddle in the governance of a private university is made more disturbing by the university’s recent capitulation to the administration’s demands at a speed that was startling for many faculty at Columbia and beyond.

That is because this moment transcends any single institution or funding line. Once a precedent like this is set—that the government can dictate what historical and scientific truths are—the assault will not stop at race. Next, it will be climate science, vaccines, research into authoritarianism, and even journalism. Importantly, this is a break from previous administrations’ uses of the Department of Education to advance their agenda.

Some conservatives point to Joe Biden’s Title IX rules regarding transgender athletes as precedent—but those were not ideological purges. They were not an implicit threat to academic freedom; they were narrowly tailored not to apply to “all other aspects of student, academic, and campus life”; they were intended to protect a group that is at elevated risk for violent discrimination. None of this is true of the Trump administration’s Dear Colleague letter and other related efforts. If universities fold now, they will creep toward a new norm whereby any politically inconvenient topic can be erased by executive fiat.

The question universities face, therefore, is whether they have the courage to resist. Institutions of higher education have the resources needed for a fight. They have the legal teams, the alumni networks, and the institutional influence. But more important, they also have the responsibility. Their mission is to preserve and develop knowledge, to foster critical thinking, and to prepare students to engage with the realities of the world. If they retreat, they cede that role to a government actively working to create alternative facts in service of its political agenda. But there is still time.

[Nicholas B. Dirks: Academia needs to stick up for itself]

Universities can still reject these attacks unequivocally and make clear—at least to our campus communities—that they will not compromise their commitment to truth. It is still possible to mobilize donors to ensure that the threat of losing federal funding does not force universities into submission. And it is still possible to work in coalition with civil-rights groups to defend the right to study and teach the realities of U.S. history and the social science of inequity.

All of this is still possible—and it is necessary. Because if universities do not fight back now, they risk becoming institutions where knowledge is dictated by political decree rather than scholarship, and a foundational bulwark of truth and accountability will fall.

The Trump administration is counting on academia’s capitulation to ignorant bullying. I hope, instead, that we educate it on how racism actually works—and how we combat it.