Dive Brief: 

• The U.S. Department of Education announced Monday that it has opened a civil rights investigation into Duke University and its law journal, based on allegations that the institution racially discriminates to select the publication’s editors. 
• Separately, the Education Department and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services also sent a letter Monday to university officials saying they’re reviewing allegations that Duke’s medical school and Duke Health racially discriminate in their hiring, admissions, financial aid and recruitment practices. 
• The probes come less than a week after U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon said officials hoped that Columbia University’s $221 million settlement with the federal government would be a “template for other universities around the country.”

Dive Insight: 

Like with the federal government’s previous Columbia probes, the Education Department has opened an investigation into Duke University to determine whether it has violated Title VI, which prohibits federally funded institutions from discriminating based on race, color or national origin. 

The department said its probe is based on recent reporting that Duke Law Journal racially discriminates against students applying to be editors. It comes one month after The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative publication, alleged that Duke Law Journal potentially gave students applying to be editors an edge if they held leadership positions in affinity groups or if they explained how their “membership in an underrepresented group” would help them promote diverse voices. 

Duke Law Journal shared this information only with the law school’s affinity groups, according to the Beacon. 

The letter from HHS and the Education Department doesn’t provide the source of the allegations of racial discrimination against Duke’s medical school and Duke Health. However, it says Duke Health would be “unfit for any further financial relationship with the federal government” if the federal government determines they are true. 

In their letter, officials suggested they want to cut a deal with the university.

“Our Departments have historically recognized Duke’s commitment to medical excellence and would prefer to partner with Duke to uncover and repair these problems, rather than terminate this relationship,” McMahon and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote. 

The two Cabinet secretaries demanded that the university review and reform policies at Duke Health to ensure they don’t include illegal racial preferences, including by making “necessary organizational, leadership, and personnel changes.”

They also asked Duke to establish a Merit and Civil Rights Committee, which would be delegated authority from the university’s board, to conduct the review. 

“The Committee must be made up of those members of Duke’s leadership and medical faculty most distinguished in and devoted to genuine excellence in the field of medicine, and the members chosen must satisfy the federal government as to their competence and good faith,” McMahon and Kennedy said in their letter. 

McMahon and Kennedy threatened Duke with enforcement actions if the federal government and the Merit and Civil Rights Committee reach an impasse — or if they don’t change the “alleged offending policies” within six months. 

Following Columbia’s controversial agreement with the federal government — which also included vast policy changes — law and free speech scholars warned that the Trump administration may attempt to increase their pressure campaigns against other universities to cut deals. 

“The Trump administration has made clear that while Columbia is first in line, it intends to reach comparable agreements with other schools — to scale the Columbia shakedown into a broader model of managing universities deemed too woke,” David Pozen, a Columbia law professor, wrote in a blog post. “As has already occurred with law firms, tariffs, and trade policy, regulation by deal is coming to higher education.