WSJ: Trump admin pulls the plug on affirmative action at Texas Tech

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that President Donald Trump’s administration is mandating that Texas Tech University stop using race-based affirmative action. 

The newspaper reported Tuesday that Texas Tech’s Health Sciences Center ended a 14-year investigation by the Education Department into the school’s affirmative action practices by agreeing to stop using race as a criterion in admissions in February.

The George W. Bush-era Education Department began investigating Texas Tech in 2005 after the Center for Equal Opportunity, a group which fights affirmative action, filed a civil rights-themed complaint against the school, according to the WSJ. Texas Tech halted its use of race-based affirmative action gradually, with its pharmacy school quitting the practice in 2008 and its undergraduate admissions office ending the procedure in 2013.

[RELATED: MIT hiring admin to expand ‘affirmative action’ efforts]

But the medical school had held out, insisting that the race of candidates was a key factor in graduating doctors who could best meet the needs of Texas’ racially diverse neighborhoods.

“This shows the Trump administration is taking seriously its responsibility to enforce civil rights in a way that protects all Americans,” Roger Clegg, general counsel of Center for Equal Opportunity, told WSJ. “The more schools that don’t use racial preferences, the harder it is for the remaining schools to justify their use of it.”

Trump’s Education and Justice Departments rescinded seven Obama-era race-based admission documents in July. Both this measure, as well as the Education Department’s compulsion of Texas Tech to drop race-based admission, occurs amid Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard University, a lawsuit in which the Ivy League school stands accused of discriminating against Asian American applicants, routinely docking them for their personality.

[RELATED: DOJ not buying Harvard’s defense in affirmative action case]

”We here at Texas Tech are very proud of our administration for listening to the White House and curtailing affirmative action,” the Texas Tech College Republicans told Campus Reform. “We believe that college admissions should be meritorious and therefore this is a step in the right direction.”

Texas Tech’s Student Dems and the school itself did not respond to requests for comment in time for publication.

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