Trump administration opens inquiry into universities over Daca scholarships
According to the announcement, the department's office for civil rights has opened investigations into the University of Louisville, the University of Nebraska Omaha, the University of Miami, the University of Michigan and Western Michigan University.
The department said that the investigations will determine whether these universities are granting scholarships exclusively to students who are recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) program, who came to the US as children, or who are undocumented 'in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964's (Title VI) prohibition against national origin discrimination'.
The investigation stems from complaints submitted by the Legal Insurrection Foundation's Equal Protection Project, a conservative legal group.
The group alleges in the complaints that certain scholarships at these schools are limited to students with Daca status or who are undocumented, which they argue is in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 'and its implementing regulations by illegally discriminating against students based on their national origin'.
In a post on X announcing the investigations on Wednesday, the education secretary, Linda McMahon, said that 'non-citizens should not be given special preference over American citizens for scholarships at American universities'.
In addition to those scholarships, the education department's office for civil rights said on Wednesday that the investigations would also 'examine additional scholarships that appear to exclude students based on other aspects of Title VI, including race and color'.
The education department's announcement on Wednesday came shortly after the US state department said it had launched a new investigation into Harvard University's 'continued eligibility' as a sponsor in a government-run visa program for international students and professors.
In the announcement, the statement department wrote: 'To maintain their privilege to sponsor exchange visitors, sponsors must comply with all regulations, including conducting their programs in a manner that does not undermine the foreign policy objectives or compromise the national security interests of the United States.'
'The investigation will ensure that State Department programs do not run contrary to our nation's interests,' the announcement added.
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Earlier this week, lawyers representing Harvard University and the Trump administration appeared in federal court for a hearing over the administration's decision to cut billions in federal funding to the university – an action that Harvard has argued is unlawful.
The Trump administration has taken various steps to restrict the entry of foreign students to the US. It has attempted to ban Harvard from enrolling them at all in a move blocked last month by the same federal judge overseeing the case over funding cuts to the university, and announced new rules scrutinizing the social media presence of international students applying for US visas.
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The Guardian
5 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Columbia's capitulation to Trump begins a dark new era for US higher education
One of the chauvinistic, self-glorifying myths of American liberalism is that the US has especially strong institutions. In this story, trotted out occasionally since 2016 to reassure those who are worried about Donald Trump's influence, the private and public bodies of American commerce, governance, healthcare and education are possessed of uncommonly robust internal accountability mechanisms, rock-hard rectitude, and a coolly rational self-interest. Trump can only do so much damage to America's economy, culture and way of life, it was reasoned, because these institutions would not bend to his will. They would resist him; they would check his excesses. When forced to choose, as it was always accepted that they one day would be, between Trump's demands and their own principles and purposes, the institutions would always choose themselves. This week put another nail into the coffin of this idea, revealing its valorization of American institutions to be shortsighted and naive. The latest intrusion of reality comes in the form of a deal that Columbia University made with the Trump administration, in which the university made a host of academic, admissions and governance concessions to the Trump regime and agreed to pay a $200m fine in order to restore its federal research funding. The deal marks the formal end of Columbia's academic independence and the dawn of a new era of regulation by deal making, repression and bribery in the field of higher education. The story goes like this. After Columbia became the centerpiece of a nationwide movement of campus encampments in protest of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, the university administration began a frantic and at times sadistic crackdown on pro-Palestinian campus speech in an effort to appease congressional Republicans, who had gleefully seized upon the protests to make cynical and unfounded accusations that the universities were engaged in antisemitism. Columbia invited police on to its campus, who rounded up protesting students in mass arrests. This showed that the university would bend to Republican pressure, but did nothing to satisfy its Republican adversaries – who demanded more and more from Columbia, making their attacks on the university the center of their broader war on education, diversity and expertise. When the Trump administration was restored to power in January, the White House partnered with the Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services, the General Services Administration, and the Department of Justice to exert further pressure on Columbia, looking to exert a level of control over the university's internal operations that is unprecedented for a private institution. This time, the university's vast federal research funding – issued in the form of grants that enable university scientists, doctors and academics to make discoveries and pursue knowledge that has enormous implications for American commerce, health and wellbeing – was held hostage. Facing the end of its functioning as a university, Columbia capitulated and went to what was euphemistically called 'the negotiating table' – really, an exchange on the precise terms of its extortion. The deal that resulted gives the Trump administration everything it wants. A Trump-approved monitor will now have the right to review Columbia's admissions records, with the express intent of enforcing a supreme court ban on affirmative action – in other words, ensuring that the university does not admit what the Trump administration deems to be too many non-white students. The Middle Eastern studies department is subject to monitoring, as well, after an agreement in March. The agreement is not a broad-level, generally applicable regulatory endeavor that applies to other universities – although given the scope of the administration's ambitions at Columbia, it is hard to say whether such a regulatory regime would be legal. Instead, it is an individual, backroom deal, one that disregards the institution's first amendment rights and the congressionally mandated protections for its grants in order to proceed with a shakedown. 'The agreement,' writes the Columbia Law School professor David Pozen, 'gives legal form to an extortion scheme.' The process was something akin to a mob boss demanding protection money from a local business. 'Nice research university you have here,' the Trump administration seemed to say to Columbia. 'Would be a shame if something were to happen to it.' That Columbia folded, and sacrificed its integrity, reputation and the freedom of its students and faculty for the federal money, speaks to both the astounding lack of foresight and principle by the university leadership as well as the Trump movement's successful foreclosure of institutions' options for resistance. With the federal judiciary full of Trump appointees – and the supreme court showing itself willing to radically expand executive powers and rapidly diminish the rights of other parties in its eagerness to facilitate Trump's agenda – there is little hope for Columbia, or the other universities that will inevitably be next, to successfully litigate their way out of the administration's threats. But nor does capitulation seem likely to put an end to the Trump administration's demands. The installation of an administration-approved monitor seems poised to offer a toehold from which the government will impose more and more limitations on scholarship, speech and association. There is, after all, no limiting principle to the Trump administration's absolutist expansion of its own prerogatives, and no way for Columbia to ensure that its funding won't be cut off again. The university, in time, will become more what Trump makes it than what its students do. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is likely to use its experience at Columbia as a template to extract substantive concessions and big payouts from other institutions. And these are not just limited to universities. On Thursday, the day after Columbia's capitulation, the Federal Communications Commission approved the merger of Paramount and Skydance. The pending merger – and the Trump administration's threat to squash it – had been a rumored motivation for CBS's decision to pay Trump millions to settle a frivolous defamation suit; it was also rumored to have caused an outcry at the CBS news magazine program 60 Minutes and the end of the evening talkshow The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, when writers, journalists, and performers on those shows stood by their critical coverage of the president or mocked the deal their bosses paid him. The shakedown, after all, is a tactic that lots of institutions are vulnerable to, and Trump is already using it effectively to stifle some of the most visible forms of dissent. The institutions are not standing firm against him; they are capitulating. They are choosing their short-term interest over their long-term integrity. Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
The Guardian
5 minutes ago
- The Guardian
The Macrons' Candace Owens lawsuit marks new phase in battle against conspiracy theories
When the French president, Emmanuel Macron, and his wife, Brigitte, took the rare step this week of filing a US defamation lawsuit against the rightwing podcaster Candace Owens, it marked a new phase in a legal battle on both sides of the Atlantic against the false claim that Brigitte Macron is a man named Jean-Michel Trogneux. The Macrons' US lawsuit attacked what it called the 'verifiably false and devastating lies' being repeated online by Owens that Brigitte Macron, 72, was born a man. The lawsuit said evidence clearly disproved this 'grotesque narrative', which had become 'a campaign of global humiliation' and 'relentless bullying on a worldwide scale'. The case prompted broader questions this week about how conspiracy theories spread worldwide, whether they can be stopped in the courts and what this false narrative, which began in France after the Covid pandemic, says about French society's distrust in politicians. 'This is now one of the biggest fake news stories worldwide in terms of popularity – a billion people have seen it,' said Emmanuelle Anizon, a senior journalist for the French weekly Nouvel Obs, who last year published a book, L'Affaire Madame, investigating the origins of the rumour in France. 'What's new is that for the first time, Emmanuel Macron has joined his wife in taking legal action.' The Macrons' US lawsuit states the accusation that Brigitte Macron was born a man named Jean-Michel Trogneux is completely false and Trogneux is in fact is her older brother. Trogneux, 80, lives in the northern French town of Amiens, where he grew up with Brigitte and four other siblings in a family famous for its local chocolate business. He was present in public alongside his Brigitte at Emmanuel Macron's two presidential inaugurations in 2017 and 2022. Owens, whose podcast and social media channels have an audience of millions, said this week she stood by her narrative. The false claim that Brigitte was a man first went viral in France in 2021, at a moment when distrust of politicians in was at a high, after the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) anti-government protest movement and the Covid pandemic that killed more than 130,000 people in France. In December 2021, a woman who used the name Amandine Roy and called herself a 'spiritual medium', broadcast a four-hour YouTube interview with Natacha Rey, 51, who had worked previously for a small essential oils business and described herself as 'an independent investigative journalist, self-taught, and not from the inner circle of mainstream media'. Rey said she had spent three years investigating Brigitte Macron, after questioning the first lady's body-shape in photos. Rey said she believed Brigitte Macron was actually a man called Jean-Michel Trogneux. Within hours, the interview had 500,000 views and the hashtag #Jean-MichelTrogneux was trending on social media in France, promoted by, among others, some far-right and anti-vaccine accounts. A small far-right newsletter had already published Rey's theories but it was the video interview that sent the claim viral. 'There was a deeper societal problem at that time in France: the mistrust of political, media and economic institutions,' Anizon said. 'There had been years of political health scandals worldwide and in France – from a contaminated blood scandal to the Mediator weight-loss drug. Many people had gradually reached a point of distrust, switching off traditional mainstream media and turning instead to online accounts – Covid and vaccine mistrust increased that.' The rumour spread in part because the Macrons' relationship had long been a topic of comment online. Brigitte Macron, who is 24 years older, first met Emmanuel Macron when she was a French teacher at his Jesuit secondary school in Amiens, directing him in a school play. The Macrons' US lawsuit this week stated: 'Through the school's theatre programme, president Macron and Mrs Macron formed a deeper intellectual connection.' It added: 'At all times the teacher-student relationship between Mrs Macron and President Macron remained within the bounds of the law.' Brigitte Macron, who has three children from her first marriage, divorced in 2006 and she and Emmanuel Macron married the following year when he was 30. In early 2022, after the first viral video allegations, Brigitte Macron and her brother, Jean-Michel Trogneux, filed a defamation case in France against Roy and Rey, who both denied wrongdoing. In September 2024, a Paris court found the two women guilty and ordered them to pay €8,000 in damages to Brigitte Macron and €5,000 in damages to Jean-Michel Trogneux. The women appealed against the verdict and, this month, they were acquitted by a Paris appeals court. The appeal court verdict did not imply that the claims that Brigitte Macron was a man were true, but instead judges ruled that the case against the women did not fit the definition of defamation. Brigitte Macron and Jean-Michel Trogneux have taken the case to France's highest appeals court, the cour de cassation. Brigitte Macron has filed a separate case for online harassment and 10 people will go on trial in Paris in October. Each time the Macrons' relationship is in the spotlight, the false allegations about gender spread again online. This was the case in May, when video images appeared to show Brigitte pushing her husband away with both hands on his face before they disembarked from a plane on a tour of Southeast Asia. Macron dismissed the incident as play-fighting, telling reporters that 'we are squabbling and, rather, joking with my wife', and that it had been overblown into 'a sort of geo-planetary catastrophe'. Brigitte Macron has not spoken publicly on the false gender claims since 2022 when she told French radio, RTL, that allegations that 'I am my brother' were an 'impossible' attack on her parents' family tree. She told TF1 TV at the time she wanted to set an example so other people would not suffer in the same way. She said fighting online bullying 'is my battle'.
Telegraph
5 minutes ago
- Telegraph
Maga's plot to restore Cold War era patriotism to ‘woke' Hollywood
In her 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand expounds her individualist philosophy by portraying a dystopian society in which titans of industry fight back against burdensome bureaucracy. Though widely panned by critics, the book has remained a cult favourite of the libertarian Right. Paul Ryan, the former Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, gave out copies to staff members as Christmas presents. Donald Trump, not widely known as a reader, has named Rand as his favourite author. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that an adaptation of Atlas Shrugged is among a handful of projects proposed by Founders Films, a new Right-wing production company aimed at restoring patriotism to Hollywood. The planned venture, which is being pitched to potential investors, comes amid a broader shift to the Right across the US media industry as the return of Trumpian politics triggers a war on 'woke'. '[Founders Films] goes against everything that we know about Hollywood, which is that traditionally it is quite Left-liberal, it is quite compassionate, it is rarely associated with blood and thunder narratives,' says media analyst Alex DeGroote. 'It's a real punch in the face for woke.' Founders Films is being launched by a handful of figures linked to the Silicon Valley data giant Palantir, including chief technology officer Shyam Sankar, early employee Ryan Podolsky and investor Christian Garrett. The company's name is a play on Founders Fund, the tech-focused venture capital fund launched by Palantir founder Peter Thiel. Documents seen by the US news website Semafor outline the tech executives' vision for the project, with the ethos described as: 'Say yes to projects about American exceptionalism, name America's enemies, back artists unconditionally, take risk on novel IP [intellectual property].' In a post on Substack late last year, Sankar wrote nostalgically about all-American blockbusters of yesteryear including Red Dawn, Top Gun, Rocky IV, and The Hunt for Red October. He argued that the US had lost the ability to leverage its film industry as soft power and called for the resurrection of the 'American Cinematic Universe' largely, it seems, by portraying Chinese communists as baddies on screen. 'Breaking out of our cultural malaise will require the studios to wake up and choose America,' he added. Cultural warfare In many ways, it is a rekindling of cinema as cultural warfare in a way not seen since the Cold War. Alongside Atlas Shrugged, other slated projects include films about the evacuation of the World Trade Center on 9/11 and the assassination of Iran's Gen Qasem Soleimani, as well as The Greatest Game, a thriller spy series that 'lays bare China's plans to replace the United States as the dominant global power'. Sankar points to examples of Chinese-ordered censorship and the fact that Disney's Mulan was filmed in Xinjiang as evidence of Beijing's growing sway over Hollywood. 'The statement is that Hollywood's been captured by a foreign adversary and there's some good evidence there,' says Dr Dominic Lees, associate professor of film-making at Reading University. Another strain of the Founders Films philosophy is rooted in the culture wars. The new studio wants to bring an injection of unashamedly conservative thinking to an industry that has long been dominated by liberals. 'What they are taking a punt on is that there is a movie-going market for films that counter what they're calling a Left-wing agenda,' adds Lees. It builds on growing criticism of Hollywood from the Right, with criticism levelled at studios for introducing heavy-handed progressive politics into films or removing anything deemed offensive. Disney has found itself at the centre of this controversy, with critics blaming the House of Mouse's political leanings for a string of recent flops, including this year's live-action reboot of Snow White, starring Rachel Zegler. Disney itself has admitted that there might be a potential 'misalignment' between the films it is making and what consumers want after splurging almost $1bn (£740m) on a string of box office failures in 2023, while boss Bob Iger has outlined plans to cut the studio's output and refocus on quality. Meanwhile, Gina Carano, the actress who was dropped from Star Wars series The Mandalorian in 2021 over her political posts on social media, is suing Disney and Lucasfilm for wrongful termination and discrimination in a lawsuit backed by Elon Musk. Carano was sacked for a post on Instagram that equated the persecution of Jews by the Nazis to the persecution of Republicans in the US. Tinsel Town takeover There are already signs that conservative ideology is gaining commercial traction in Hollywood. Am I Racist?, a Borat-style mockumentary lampooning the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) movement, became the highest-grossing documentary of 2024 after pulling in more than $12m at the box office on a budget of just $3m. Reagan, a biopic starring Dennis Quaid as the former US president, grossed $30m last year despite scathing reviews from critics. The streaming era has also opened up an opportunity for what once would have been niche sub-genres to break out and find their audience. Christian cinema, for example, has made something of a resurgence at the US box office in recent years thanks to hits such as The King of Kings and The Chosen, a multi-series drama about the life of Jesus. In one week earlier this year, three of the top 10 US box office spots were faith-based titles. Tinsel Town's rightward shift is just one part of a broader assault on the US media heralded by Trump, who earlier this year appointed Sylvester Stallone, Mel Gibson and Jon Voight as 'special ambassadors' to Hollywood, tasked with reversing what he deems to have been a period of decline. Meanwhile, controversy is growing around an $8bn takeover of Hollywood giant Paramount by Skydance, the US media group run by David Ellison, which was approved this week. Paramount's recent decision to reach a $16m settlement with Trump for a lawsuit filed against its broadcaster CBS has been widely condemned as an effort to make concessions to the president. This disquiet was fuelled by CBS's shock decision last week to cancel The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, just days after the long-serving host branded the settlement a 'big, fat bribe'. Trump has since poured more fuel on the fire after claiming Skydance had promised to give him $20m worth of free advertising and programming in a side deal. Democrat senators have opened an investigation into potential corruption. The president's sway over the Paramount deal suggests he could exert pressure over the studio's output too. It is fuelling concerns about the threat to freedom of expression across the Atlantic. DeGroote describes Trump as 'lacerating the bit of the media universe which he doesn't like', adding: 'It's a dual pincer movement. You're going after the politicians, but you're also going after the media platforms.' Patrick Spence, the TV producer behind Mr Bates vs The Post Office and The Hack, an upcoming drama about the phone hacking scandal, says: 'It feels like we're living in a Batman movie because the villains are so cartoon-like. But the trouble is it's real. It's actually happening in front of us.' Ultimately, however, a Right-wing takeover of Hollywood will depend on making hits. Lees casts doubt on whether the gun-toting style of propaganda film-making proposed by Founders Films will be effective. 'My sense is that these guys at the moment are not very culturally sophisticated,' Lees says. 'If they want to really make an impact it's going to be how they subvert the different existing genres.'
