Hello and welcome back to The Markup, Inside Higher Ed’s weekly roundup of all things higher ed policy. I’m your host, Katherine Knott, IHE’s news editor.
In the last week, higher education institutions and advocates raised numerous concerns about the Trump administration’s latest effort to crack down on DEI, and Attorney General Pam Bondi is out. Bondi has played a key role in advancing the administration’s campaign against DEI, select higher ed institutions and state laws that allow undocumented students to pay in-state tuition.
President Trump also stopped by the Supreme Court, which heard arguments over the administration’s attempt to end birthright citizenship. Dozens of professors defended birthright citizenship in a brief to the Supreme Court, arguing that stripping citizenship from millions of babies will harm their ability to attain an education and afford college.
This Week’s Big Story
Since President Trump took office, Democratic-led states, faculty unions, institutions and other groups have turned to the federal courts to seek relief from what they say are unlawful actions. We’ve been closely following those efforts, and your co-host Jessica Blake has a story out today about where those lawsuits stand and the shifting strategies from both plaintiffs and the government.
Here are the highlights:
- Of the 64 lawsuits that we’re following, the government has the upper hand in just 17 of them.
- The challengers continue to rack up wins, such as vacating the Education Department’s guidance banning race-conscious programming and pushing back the deadline for admissions data collection. Minnesota also prevailed in its effort to dismiss the Justice Department’s lawsuit over the state’s in-state tuition policies for undocumented students.
- Although the Trump administration has backed down on some cases, it is going on the offensive against some universities, filing three lawsuits against two institutions in the last two months.
As Jessica notes in the piece, the lawsuits are moving from emergency phases toward trials and final judgments, so we should be getting more rulings this year on the merits of the plaintiffs’ arguments. And plaintiffs are learning from this first round of litigation—Emily Merolli, founding partner at Sligo Law Group, expects to see more targeted lawsuits. She hopes more institutions will join the fight.
“People are increasingly becoming aware that battening down the hatches is not a viable alternative … the fact that litigation is trending in favor of people who are willing to take a stand and take action against the federal government’s continued illegal actions is good,” she said.
