Aaron Sibarium of the Washington Free Beacon explains why a major Triangle university could run into legal trouble with the Trump administration.
Duke Medical School has adopted race-based promotion guidelines that reward doctors for recruiting and mentoring “BIPOC faculty” and “targeting specific groups of people,” language attorneys say appears to violate civil rights law and could put the school in the crosshairs of the Trump administration.
The “Appointment, Promotion and Tenure Framework for Scholarship in Justice, Equity, Diversity, Antiracism and Inclusion” guidelines—which were posted on a Duke University website as of July 3—list a slew of race-conscious efforts as “promotable activities.” Faculty can help their tenure case by “strengthening ties with Hispanic-serving institutions and historically Black colleges”; advising “BIPOC” trainees; leading K-12 programs that “foster a diverse pipeline of potential learners from BIPOC and other marginalized groups”; and devising strategies to “measurably increase the number of BIPOC learners.”
The goal, according to Duke, is to shield minorities from what the guidelines refer to as the “Black tax”—that is, the pressure institutions place on “BIPOC individuals” to “represent the marginalized.”
“Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) individuals are frequently and disproportionately burdened by institutions and communities to represent the marginalized in committees, projects, tasks, and initiatives (aka the ‘Black tax’ or ‘minority tax’),” the guidelines read. “These efforts have rarely ‘counted’ as promotable work.”
Attorneys who reviewed the guidelines said they seemed designed to encourage unlawful race discrimination and could inspire the federal government—already at war with multiple elite universities, including Harvard University and Columbia University—to make Duke its next target.
“These don’t sound like gray areas,” said Dan Morenoff, the executive director of the American Civil Rights Project. “They sound like very open violations of federal law, of the kind this administration has prioritized ending.”
