Via the New York Times:

The Trump administration is preparing to redirect resources of the Justice Department’s civil rights division toward investigating and suing universities over affirmative action admissions policies deemed to discriminate against white applicants, according to a document obtained by The New York Times. The document, an internal announcement to the civil rights division, seeks current lawyers interested in working for a new project on “investigations and possible litigation related to intentional race-based discrimination in college and university admissions.” The announcement suggests that the project will be run out of the division’s front office, where the Trump administration’s political appointees work, rather than its Educational Opportunities Section, which is run by career civil servants and normally handles work involving schools and universities. The document does not explicitly identify whom the Justice Department considers at risk of discrimination because of affirmative action admissions policies. But the phrasing it uses, “intentional race-based discrimination,” cuts to the heart of programs designed to bring more minority students to university campuses.

…

But Kristen Clarke, the president of the liberal Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, criticized the affirmative action project as “misaligned with the division’s longstanding priorities.” She noted that the civil rights division was “created and launched to deal with the unique problem of discrimination faced by our nation’s most oppressed minority groups,” performing work that often no one else has the resources or expertise to do. “This is deeply disturbing,” she said. “It would be a dog whistle that could invite a lot of chaos and unnecessarily create hysteria among colleges and universities who may fear that the government may come down on them for their efforts to maintain diversity on their campuses.”

Because we all know there is no dog whistle like stating the law will be applied equally, without fear or favor.

As an aside, this project is being handled by DOJ’s main office because the career SJWs in the Educational Opportunities Section will not take part:

Two people familiar with the internal discussions at the Justice Department’s civil rights division said that the move came after career staffers who specialize in education issues refused to work on the project out of concerns it was contrary to the office’s long-running approach to civil rights in education opportunities. As a result, political leadership within the department decided to run the effort themselves, these people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said. “Yet again, the Sessions Justice Department, led by the political leadership and marginalizing the career employees, is changing course on a key civil rights issue,” Vanita Gupta, former head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division under President Barack Obama, said in a statement to The Washington Post.

Some fifty years after the end of Jim Crow we are still using a program designed to remedy the effects of Jim Crow. Put into perspective, race-based admissions are awarding preferences to the grandchildren, or great-grandchildren, of anyone who was denied admission to college because of a de jure bar to their getting in. What started out as an exercise in restorative justice, that is, an imperfect attempt to make whole those who were directly hurt by racial discrimination in higher education, has turned in retribution against whites for the crime of being white. And it turned into a racial spoils system where admissions are allocated based on vague (I say vague, because there is no legal reason why my daughter could not self-identify as black should she so desire) racial criteria that have absolutely nothing to do with need (the primary beneficiary of affirmative action programs are upper-middle class black and Hispanic kids hailing from intact families and good neighborhoods, if you are the offspring of a coal miner from Appalachia, good luck) or even minority status. The two main race-based admissions cases working their way to the Supreme Court involve Harvard and University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill instituting quotas to reduce the number of Asian students admitted.

When universities talk about the “value of diversity” in a student body they aren’t really talking about bringing together Americans from all backgrounds and walks of life. If they did, parental education, income, and occupation would figure in the equation. What they are really talking about is creating a upper-middle class student body of homogeneous background and just the right mix of melanin to let the administrators pat themselves on the back.