AMY GOODMAN: The Trump administration has given K-through-12 schools and universities a two-week ultimatum to end DEI — diversity, equity and inclusion — initiatives or risk losing federal funding. In a letter sent on Valentine’s Day, February 14th, one week ago, to school administrators, the Education Department barred schools and colleges from, quote, “using race in decisions pertaining to admissions, hiring, promotion, compensation, financial aid, scholarships, prizes, administrative support, discipline, housing, graduation ceremonies and all other aspects of student, academic and campus life,” unquote. The Education Department has already canceled some $600 million in grants focused on training teachers on critical race theory, social justice and other related topics. Meanwhile, the department’s Office for Civil Rights has also declared race-based scholarships, cultural centers and even graduation ceremonies illegal.

The president of the American Council on Education, which represents more than 1,600 colleges and universities, said in a statement, quote, “There’s nothing specific enough for us to be able to act on in 14 days unless we just wipe the slate clean.” He added, “Overcompliance, anticipatory compliance, preemptive compliance is not a strategy. The strategy needs to be much more considered, much more nuanced,” unquote.

This comes as Trump’s pick to head the Department of Education, Linda McMahon, cleared a committee vote Thursday, and her nomination now heads to the full Senate, where it’s expected to be approved. Trump has told reporters he wants McMahon to dismantle the Department of Education.

REPORTER: Why nominate Linda McMahon to be the Education Department secretary if you’re going to get rid of the Education Department?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Because I told Linda, “Linda, I hope you do a great job and put yourself out of a job.” I want her to put herself out of a job, Education Department.

AMY GOODMAN: Linda McMahon is the former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment and a major Trump donor. During her confirmation hearing earlier this month, she was questioned by Democrat Chris Murphy on Trump’s order banning diversity, equity and inclusion, DEI.

SEN. CHRIS MURPHY: My son is in a public school. He takes a class called African American history. If you’re running an African American history class, could you perhaps be in violation of this court order — of this executive order?

LINDA McMAHON: I’m not quite certain, and I’d like to look into it further and get back to you on that.

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by education scholar Julian Vasquez Heilig, professor of educational leadership, research and technology at Western Michigan University. His new piece is headlined “U.S. Department of Education’s 14-Day Ultimatum on Equal Opportunity: Will Universities Surrender or Resist?” He also helped organize the coalition Defending the Freedom to Learn and served leader — with the NAACP on education and other issues.

Thanks so much for being with us. It’s great to have you here. Professor, can you start off by talking about the response a week ago, on Valentine’s Day, when university and college presidents across the United States got a letter that said, “End DEI” — and I want to ask you exactly what that means — “in two weeks” —

JULIAN VASQUEZ HEILIG: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — “or lose all of your federal funding”? We’re talking about hundreds of millions of dollars across the United States.

JULIAN VASQUEZ HEILIG: Right. Well, first of all, Amy, thank you so much for having me on your show. Just glad, glad to join you.

First, you know, I want to say that I think that the higher education community, also the K-12 community, understands that this letter from the U.S. Department of Education doesn’t carry the force of law. We do know, of course, that what’s happening in Washington, D.C., is that there is uses — they’re using resources, finances, as a lever. So, we’ve seen, for example, funding from the NSF, from the NIH, IES — at Western Michigan University, for example, we’ve lost $20 million in grants in the College of Education and Human Development. And so, they’re really using the power of the purse to try — to attempt to enforce these different — you know, abolishing the Department of Education with this letter.

But I think it’s been really bewildering to K-12 and higher education, which, my understanding, is the goal. I mean, the Office of Management and Budget, the director there has said that that’s really the goal of this blitzkrieg, is for all of these requests to be bewildering. And I know in higher education, it’s been very difficult. And so you have cabinets, presidents, provosts trying to understand what are going to be the impacts of this. You could see six-figure, seven-figure, eight-figure reductions in research funding. Our attempts to find the cure for cancer, to solve the teacher shortage, to create more efficient energy, all those things are under threat, because over the last hundred years or so, higher education has seen large investments from the federal government, and historically, those investments, that search to solve the teacher shortage and create more efficient energy, etc., they didn’t come with strings attached. And now institutions, higher education institutions and K-12 districts are facing millions of dollars in reductions if they don’t pause DEI.

Now, you mentioned in your lead-up, “Well, what is DEI?” And I think it’s important to talk about what DEI is, actually. DEI is not reverse discrimination. What DEI does is, as educators — and I taught fourth grade. I taught ESL. I’ve taught college students, doctoral students. What DEI does is it helps us to create more success for historically marginalized communities. So, we want to ensure that African American students, that when we bring them to our campus, that we graduate them — Latino students, students with disabilities, veterans. It’s a wide spectrum. And so, I think it’s important to understand that DEI is not reverse discrimination. It’s our attempts to ensure success for all students on our campus, close those gaps, those equity gaps, in graduation rates, in retention rates. That’s what DEI work does. That’s why we have Black graduation ceremonies or Mexican American graduation ceremonies. We want to create the climate. We want to create the opportunity for students when they come to us in higher education, when they come to us in our K-12 schools. We want them to be successful. We want all students to be successful, whether they’re Jewish or have disabilities, etc. That’s what DEI is, and so it’s not about reverse discrimination. It’s about student success, faculty success, staff success.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to a 2023 video on Donald Trump’s campaign platform website in which he proposes taking, quote, “billions and billions of dollars that we will collect by taxing, finding and suing excessively large private university endowments” to create what he calls the American Academy.

DONALD TRUMP: Whether you want lectures on ancient histories or an introduction to financial accounting or training in a skilled trade, the goal will be to deliver it and get it done properly, using study groups, mentors, industry partnerships and the latest breakthrough in computing. This will be a truly top-tier education option for the people. It will be strictly nonpolitical, and there will be no wokeness or jihadism allowed. None of that’s going to be allowed.

Most importantly, the American Academy will compete directly with the existing and very costly four-year university system by granting students degree credentials that the U.S. government and all federal contractors will henceforth recognize. The Academy will award the full and complete equivalent of a bachelor’s degree.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, this is very significant. Julian Vasquez Heilig, that Trump is proposing an alternative American education system. We already know what happened with his Trump University. He was successfully sued for this for-profit college. But talk about what he is proposing, the American Academy.

JULIAN VASQUEZ HEILIG: So, first, I want to say — and then I’ll directly address the question. First, I want to say that universities are not ideological. So, do we have folks on our campus who are on the right or on the left? Do we have students who are on the right or on the left? Do we have students who are apolitical? Absolutely. But universities are not ideological. They’re places of learning. They’re the places where the difficult conversations happen. So, I think that’s the first thing to say.

All of the politicians that you see making pronouncements about universities, they all attended universities, some of them the elite Ivy Leagues — the president and vice president, for example. So, I think that’s important to say.

I think the second important to say is that this is expected. I want to take you back in history, OK, be a scholar for a moment here. If you think about the dictator Pinochet and what he did after he took over the country of Chile, he understood that as a part of the autocratic playbook, that you have to privately control and privatize education. And so you see a push for this in K-12 education right now with school vouchers, which is that we want education to be privatized. It’s not a public good. And so what you see here, I believe, is an attempt to privatize education. And I’m sure it will be for profit. And, you know, he didn’t speak to that. And so, this is a part of that sort of classic playbook, because when something is in the public realm, it’s a public good. And so, what you see here is really an attempt to privatize education, by all indications.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to Russell Vought, head of the Office of Management and Budget, who was architect of Project 2025, the radical playbook to seize executive power, radically reshape federal agencies. Last year, undercover reporters with the Center for Climate Reporting recorded Vought discussing his plan.

RUSSELL VOUGHT: I am opposed to the Department of Education because I think it’s a department of critical race theory.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Vought speaking on television.

I want to go now, in response to the threats to DEI programs and LGBTQ outreach from the Trump administration, to the president of Mount Holyoke, Danielle Holley, who recently said, “To basically comply with things that are not within our values simply because we feel a threat of investigation is something that we should not be doing as the higher education community. Instead, we need to just say 'No! Here's what we stand for. We will continue to stand for this. And if you believe that you can legally challenge our mission or our values, that’s up to you to try to do,’” the president of Mount Holyoke said, who herself is African American.

Julian Vasquez Heilig, if you can tell us what is happening right now across the country?

JULIAN VASQUEZ HEILIG: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: This whole idea of obeying in advance, and, you know, because of the very real threat — 

JULIAN VASQUEZ HEILIG: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — of losing so much money and funding, that will hurt the very people that these university presidents are trying to protect.

JULIAN VASQUEZ HEILIG: Yeah, yes. First, let me just address Vought. So, you know, he also said, “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them not to want to go to work, because, increasingly, we want them viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down. We want them to be put in trauma.” So I think that helps us understand the blitzkrieg from political actors right now, is that they really want to put higher education in trauma. That’s almost a direct quote from from Vought. So, I think that helps sort of contextualize.

Now, we have some difficult decisions to make as higher education leaders, as K-12 leaders, some very difficult decisions, because, as I mentioned, over the last hundred years, universities have become very dependent on solving the world’s issues through research, and so that means there’s millions of dollars that the federal government has been providing without strings attached. Well, now there’s going to be strings attached.

But who’s to say that diversity is where these conversations stop? So, what if, after diversity, the question is, “Well, we don’t want you to have unions,” or “We don’t want you to have a College of Fine Arts, because we don’t think that that’s appropriate”?

And so, when there’s strings attached — so, universities have to make two decisions. One, there will have to be courage, like the president of Mount Holyoke or the president at Wesleyan in Connecticut, or, two, patronage. So, in talking with some folks, some scholars at the University of Michigan, yesterday, there’s really those two choices for higher education institutions. And so, there’s a side where we’re going to have to innovate and rethink how higher education is funded, or we’re going to have to succumb to a system of patronage where the federal government — you know, in four years, a Democrat might come in as president and say, “You won’t receive federal funding unless you have DEI programs.” So, that’s really the road we’re headed down.

And then, I think one — just one final thought, which is that when we hire leaders in higher education, we typically look at their pedigree. Did they go to Harvard or Berkeley or Stanford? Were they department chairs or deans? But now we have to have additional criteria when we’re selecting our leaders, our deans, our department chairs. It involves courage. It involves morality. It involves empathy. So, we need special kinds of leaders in this very difficult time. I would argue that higher education hasn’t faced a crisis like this since potentially McCarthyism. And so, we need a different kind of leader to address these modern challenges also.

AMY GOODMAN: And finally, are there lawsuits being planned? There’s one week to go after this letter.

JULIAN VASQUEZ HEILIG: Yeah. Well, there’s already multiple lawsuits. For example, my understanding is that the NIH funding has been paused in court, from a report that I read from President Ono.

AMY GOODMAN: The freeze has been paused.

JULIAN VASQUEZ HEILIG: Yeah, the freeze has been paused. Yeah, exactly. So, there is. I know that the APLU and the AAU — so, these are the conglomerates of the different kinds of institutions — that they’re involved in litigation, too. I suspect that you’ll see litigation from the civil rights community. And I think that’s part of the strategy for educators. And, you know, I think it’s important for us to understand that academics, educators, we have to create alliances with students and engage in political and legal advocacy, and research and document and publicize how these things are actually impacting our institutions and who they’re impacting.

And then I think it’s also — one final thought is that we have to leverage our professional associations or organizations, accrediting bodies. There’s a reason why accrediting bodies are also being targeted, because accrediting bodies set the standards for universities. So, it’s very important that we create these coalitions, and so that as this pressure continues on higher education and K-12, that we can respond, because the number one priority of our institutions is student success. And I don’t believe — my argument is that none of this is in the best interest of students.

AMY GOODMAN: Julian Vasquez Heilig, we thank you so much for joining us, from Kalamazoo, Michigan, professor of educational leadership, research and technology at Western Michigan University. We’ll link to your new piece, “U.S. Department of Education’s 14-Day Ultimatum on Equal Opportunity: Will Universities Surrender or Resist?”

Up next, Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future. We’ll speak with Yale philosopher Jason Stanley. Back in 20 seconds.