The Trump Justice Department just proved what ordinary Americans already knew: 'equity' was always a euphemism for punishing achievement. Duke University School of Law intentionally discriminated against white and Asian applicants across three admissions cycles, according to DOJ findings released Thursday — and the data is damning.
This matters because Duke didn't stumble into this. After the Supreme Court's 2023 Students for Fair Admissions ruling banned race discrimination in college admissions, Duke Law deliberately restructured its admissions process to preserve racial quotas under a different label. If an elite law school — an institution training the next generation of attorneys and judges — will flout a Supreme Court ruling outright, the rot runs deep.
The Civil Rights Division, now under Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon, found that Duke Law emphasized racial diversity in admissions post-SFFA and engaged in a 'deliberate effort to preserve race-based outcomes.' Duke rewrote its mission statement to trumpet a 'diversity of perspective and experience,' then added short-answer essay questions letting applicants discuss how they'd further that mission. Admissions reviewers were instructed to 'tag' responses to identify preferred races — a workaround designed to do exactly what the Court forbade.
The numbers strip away the euphemisms. In the 2025 admissions cycle, Black applicants had roughly 3.5 times the probability of admission as similarly qualified Asian applicants with comparable academic credentials, according to the DOJ. In both 2024 and 2025, the median LSAT scores of denied white and Asian applicants exceeded those of admitted Black applicants. Qualified white and Asian students were passed over for less qualified candidates — full stop.
'Duke Law School doesn't get a free pass to discriminate against white and Asian students simply because it thinks it has good intentions,' Dhillon said in a statement. 'Using 'diversity' essay questions to identify preferred races for admission is still illegal discrimination based on race, and this Department is committed to eliminating it everywhere we find it, including in our nation's law schools.'
The DOJ concluded Duke violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin — the same law supposedly written to protect minorities. The department's findings letter covers the 2023, 2024, and 2025 incoming classes.
The Gateway Pundit covered the findings directly; the broader establishment press has been slower to highlight the raw admissions data that lays bare the scale of discrimination.
The open question: Duke is one school. How many other institutions ran the same play — swapping explicit race preferences for coded essay prompts and mission-statement laundering — after the Court told them to stop?
