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The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) on Tuesday urged colleges and universities to discourage racially segregated student residence halls, warning that race-based “affinity housing” runs afoul of federal anti-discrimination law.
Institutions of higher learning that promote or turn a blind eye to the “disturbing trend” of “neo-segregationist” living arrangements – often marketed as voluntary and open to all – will face “maximum accountability” from the Trump administration, the housing agency vowed in a “Dear Colleague” letter provided to The Post.
“Under the discredited idea of DEI, ideologues at our nation’s colleges and universities have perpetuated racially discriminatory housing schemes in direct violation of federal civil rights law,” HUD Secretary Scott Turner said in a statement. “Unlawful housing segregation has no place in America and certainly no place in the colleges and schools that hard working Americans send their kids for an education.
“Under the leadership of President Trump, the Department will ensure that racial discrimination in housing — including in American educational institutions — is consigned to the ash heap of history.”
A 2019 study by the National Association of Scholars, a conservative nonprofit that seeks to reform higher education, found “neo-segregation” on college campuses to be ”widespread if not pervasive”
Roughly 46% of 173 colleges surveyed “segregate student orientation programs, while 43% offered “segregated residential arrangements” and 72% offered segregated graduation ceremonies, NAS researchers Dion J. Pierre found.
Then, in 2020, heightened concerns over “systemic racism” in the wake of the death of George Floyd ushered in another wave of affinity housing offerings for minority communities on campus.
“The problem is decades old,” HUD Assistant Secretary Craig Trainor, the head of the department’s Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity (FHEO), noted in the letter sent to HUD’s network of fair housing organizations.
Trainor cited Wesleyan University’s 1996 decision to allow the campus’s Malcolm X house to remain all black; an alleged “Black-Only” “safe space” offered to California State University, Los Angeles students in 2016; and the University of California, Berkely’s use images of black students in a “segregated dormitory” that same year alongside the statement: “I enjoy being around peers who look like me.”
“In 1954, the US Supreme Court made clear in Brown v. Board of Education that separate educational facilities were inherently unequal. The neo-segregationists who argue in favor of racially segregated housing in schools now are as morally bankrupt as the segregationists who argued in favor or racially segregated schools then,” Trainor said in a statement. “As Justice Thomas wrote, ‘What was wrong in 1954 cannot be right today.’ And today, the Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity is putting educational institutions on notice: The era of tolerating unlawful racial discrimination in this nation’s schools and universities is over.”
HUD’s fair housing office, which investigates alleged violations of federal fair housing laws, intends to “pursue every available remedy to bring discriminatory institutions into compliance, including, without limitation, compensatory and punitive damages, civil penalties, and injunctive relief.”
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