特朗普政府将鼓励大学招生忽略种族因素

　　导读:特朗普政府官员表示，政府将鼓励全国学校管理者和大学校长采用无视种族的招生标准，放弃奥巴马政府要求大学将种族视为校园多元化的一个因素。

WASHINGTON - The Trump administration will encourage the nation’s school superintendents and college presidents to adopt race-blind admissions standards, abandoning an Obama administration policy that called on universities to consider race as a factor in diversifying their campuses, Trump administration officials said.

　　Last November, Attorney General Jeff Sessions asked the Justice Department to re-evaluate past policies that he believed pushed the department to act beyond what the law, the Constitution and the Supreme Court had required, Devin M. O’Malley, a Justice Department spokesman said. As part of that process, the Justice Department rescinded seven policy guidances from the Education Department’s civil rights division Tuesday.

　　“The executive branch cannot circumvent Congress or the courts by creating guidance that goes beyond the law and - in some instances - stays on the books for decades,” O’Malley said.

　　The Supreme Court has steadily narrowed the ways that schools can consider race when trying to diversify their student bodies. But it has not banned the practice.

　　Now, affirmative action is at a crossroads. The Trump administration is moving against any use of race as a measurement of diversity in education. And the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy at the end of this month will leave the court without its swing vote on affirmative action and allow President Donald Trump to nominate a justice opposed to a policy that for decades has tried to integrate elite educational institutions.

　　A highly anticipated case is pitting Harvard against Asian-American students who say one of the nation’s most prestigious institutions has systematically excluded some Asian-American applicants to maintain slots for students of other races. That case is clearly aimed at the Supreme Court.

　　“The whole issue of using race in education is being looked at with a new eye in light of the fact that it’s not just white students being discriminated against, but Asians and others as well,” said Roger Clegg, president and general counsel of the conservative Center for Equal Opportunity. “As the demographics of the country change, it becomes more and more problematic.”

　　The Obama administration believed that students benefit from being surrounded by diverse classmates, so in 2011 the administration offered schools a potential road map to establishing affirmative action policies that could withstand legal scrutiny. The guidance was controversial at the time that it was issued for its far-reaching interpretation of the law. Justice officials said that pages of hypothetical scenarios offered in the guidance were particularly problematic as they clearly bent the law to specific policy preferences.

　　In a pair of policy guidance documents, the Obama Education and Justice departments told elementary and secondary schools and college campuses to use “the compelling interests” established by the court to achieve diversity. They concluded that the Supreme Court “has made clear such steps can include taking account of the race of individual students in a narrowly tailored manner.”

　　The Trump administration’s decisions Tuesday brought government policy back to the George W. Bush administration guidances. The Trump administration did not formally reissue Bush-era guidance on race-based admissions, but, in recent days, officials did repost a Bush administration affirmative action policy document online.

　　That document states, “The Department of Education strongly encourages the use of race-neutral methods for assigning students to elementary and secondary schools.”