Duke has the resources to stand up to Trump. Does it have the principles? | Opinion
One of the most striking aspects of the Trump administration’s demand that the Duke University School of Medicine and other parts of the Duke Health system end efforts to advance minorities is one of the names at the bottom of the administration’s letter – Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Kennedy, as Trump’s secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, along with Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, notified Duke Health systems may be violating the Civil Right Act by using “racial preferences in hiring, student admissions, governance, patient care, and other operations.” Pending a review, the administration has frozen $108 million in National Institutes of Health funding to Duke Health
McMahon separately notified Duke that the university and Duke Law Journal are also being reviewed for alleged civil rights violations — discrimination against white people.
The letters, despite their claims to oppose discrimination, are a repudiation of efforts to address the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow laws and broader discrimination against minorities. On Kennedy’s part, his letter is a repudiation of what his father stood for.
RFK told a group of mostly Black people in Indianapolis just hours after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., “What we need in the United States is not division ... but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.”
Duke has endeavored to compensate for that national history and its own by ensuring that its students and employees reflect not only the demographics of America, but that they also share in its promise of equal opportunity.
Columbia University embarrassed itself by giving in to the administration’s specious claim that it ignored antisemitism during campus protests against Israel’s assault on Gaza after the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas. Columbia not only paid $221 million to the federal government, but also compromised its academic freedom by agreeing to changes in its hiring and admission policies. Other prominent universities also settled antisemitism charges with the federal government.
Those capitulations seem especially craven as Israel’s killing and starvation of Palestinians have brought worldwide condemnation. That college students protested the U.S. role in supporting Israel’s extreme response now seems more justified than ever. That’s not antisemitism. It’s pro-humanity.
The Trump administration has as much interest in fighting antisemitism as it does in promoting clean energy, but it’s cynically using the charge as a way to intimidate and gain control over universities it sees as bastions of liberal ideology. That it’s now citing civil rights laws to fight alleged racial discrimination – this time against white people – is equally manipulative and Orwellian.
The question is whether Duke will cave as others have.
Duke is responding to lost federal grants and a possible tax hike on its $11 billion endowment with buyouts involving nearly 600 employees. Layoffs are expected to follow.
The cuts in staff are a necessary response to lost revenue and a likely higher tax. But, as a group of faculty, staff and alumni noted in a letter to the administration, the financial tightening should be equally shared between Duke’s top earners and its rank and file employees.
It’s not clear whether Duke will seek to restore its federal funding by giving in to the Trump administration’s demand for institutional changes. The letter from Kennedy and McMahon asks Duke to create a “Merit and Civil Rights Committee” to identify and eliminate “all of those (policies) that unlawfully take account of race or ethnicity to bestow benefits or advantages.”
Will Duke drop its commitment not only to diversity, but also to encouraging the entrance of poor and minority students into the upper ranks of U.S. professions?
Duke has the resources, the legal firepower and the public support to tell the Trump administration to go to hell. If it does, it may lose money, but keep its ideals.
If Duke needs encouragement to do the right thing, it should listen to Robert Kennedy, not his errant son. In a 1968 speech at Vanderbilt University, RFK told the audience:
“Our country is in danger. Not just from foreign enemies; but, above all, from our own misguided policies, and what they can do to this country. There is a contest, not for the rule of America, but for the heart of America.”
The outcome of that contest, he said, would “decide what this country will stand for” and what kind of people we are.
With a would-be authoritarian in the White House, the country is again in danger. What will Duke stand for?
Associate opinion editor Ned Barnett can be reached at 919-404-7583, or nbarnett@newsobserver.com