In a sharply worded letter to U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, key Democrats on the House education committee lambasted the department for its investigations of Princeton University and the University of California, Los Angeles, for racial bias, as well as the administration’s prohibition on institutions using federal funds for diversity training.
“Such actions not only threaten to exacerbate existing structures of racism in the education system and broader society, but also infringe on an ideal the Department regularly invokes — free speech,” wrote Education and Labor Committee chairman Bobby Scott and Congresswoman Suzanne Bonamici, chair of the panel’s civil rights and human services subcommittee.
“It is also inappropriate for the department to wield its oversight powers to limit free and open discourse, even if leadership at the department does not agree with that discourse,” wrote Scott, of Virginia, and Bonamici, of Oregon.
The letter criticizes a number of recent actions by the administration, including its investigation of UCLA because it has opened a review into allegations that a professor repeatedly used a racial slur against Blacks in class. The department, according to the Democrats, is accusing the university of “improperly and abusively target[ing]” the professor, who is white.