Wall Street Journal Op-Ed: From Bob Jones to Columbia University and DEI, by James Taranto:
It seems the administrators of Columbia University are welcoming Donald Trump as their liberator from the tyranny of wokeness. “The school believed there was considerable overlap between needed campus changes and Trump’s demands,” the Journal noted Friday in reporting Columbia’s surrender to the government’s terms.
That leaves 59 other federally funded colleges and universities for the Education Department (or whatever replaces it) to investigate for violations of Jewish students’ civil rights under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In an executive order on his second day in office, Mr. Trump also directed agencies to target discriminatory “diversity, equity and inclusion” practices at federally funded universities. He has been bolder in defense of college students’ civil rights than any president since John F. Kennedy, whose desegregation efforts involved federalizing the National Guard and dispatching the Army to the University of Mississippi in 1962 and U.S. marshals to the University of Alabama in 1963.
Mr. Trump can cement his civil-rights legacy by enlisting the most fearsome agency of the U.S. government: the Internal Revenue Service. In the process, he can help the Supreme Court clean up a messy bit of jurisprudence from the Burger era: Bob Jones University v. U.S. (1983).
BJU, established in 1927, is a nondenominational Christian school in Greenville, S.C., whose founders believed that the Bible forbids “cultural or biological mixing of the races.” The school didn’t admit black students until it came under IRS pressure to do so in 1971. … [T]he IRS issued Revenue Ruling 71-447, a statutorily authorized construction of the tax code, making “a racially nondiscriminatory policy as to students” a prerequisite for an educational organization’s tax exemption. The IRS held that Section 501(c)(3) prohibited tax exemptions for groups whose purpose was “illegal or contrary to public policy.” Because “the operation of private schools on a discriminatory basis is not prohibited by Federal statutory law,” the ruling relied on “public policy.” …
The IRS revoked Bob Jones’s tax exemption in 1976, the university sued, and the case made its way to the high court, which upheld the IRS ruling over a lone dissent from Justice William Rehnquist. … [T]he court could have reached the same result without the dubious appeal to “policy.” The IRS’s 1970 finding that discrimination by private schools “is not prohibited by Federal statutory law” was outdated by 1983, thanks to Runyon. The justices could have extended that ruling to sectarian schools and deprived Bob Jones of its tax exemption because its policy was illegal. …
Mr. Trump should therefore direct the IRS to clarify that for purposes of Revenue Ruling 71-447, a “racially nondiscriminatory policy” must renounce illegal DEI measures and protect students, including Jews, from illegal discriminatory harassment. He should also direct the IRS to update its regulation defining an “educational” institution under Section 501(c)(3) to exclude any organization that advocates or condones racism (including antisemitism), terrorism or any other unlawful activity.
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