UK complies with Trump administration’s desire to turn higher ed back to 1950 | Opinion
If you were wondering what the legal eagles and apparatchiks at the University of Kentucky get up to when they’re not crafting ridiculous contracts for overpaid football coaches, wonder no more: On Tuesday, UK announced it was investigating 1,200 organizations as part of a civil rights investigation by the Trump administration.
This witch hunt started earlier this year when the U.S. Department of Education found UK and 45 other schools had violated the federal Civil Rights Act for participating in The PhD Project’s annual conference, designed for students of color completing their doctoral degrees.
So UK was forced to examine its relationships with every external organization to see if any of them “may” restrict membership based on race. In the letter from UK President Eli Capilouto to the feds, however, UK made clear they went much further.
The criteria they used to flag these 1,200 organizations — which included groups like the American College of Radiology or the American Association of Neurological Medicine— asked whether their names included “racial, ethnic, gender-based or identity-specific terms,” whether the names had recently changed or whether they’ve had DEI trainings. They are also examining websites for words such as “anti-racism,” “structural racism,” or similar concepts used to describe the historical facts of a country that used to enslaved much of its population.
Can you imagine the scene? A conference table with actual grown-ups sitting around with highlighters, overseeing every stitch of correspondence between UK employees and, say, the American Pediatric Association. “Ah ha! They shout, the word ‘woman,’ is in paragraph three and down here, it says ‘African American!’ We’ve got them this time!”
This is just a reprehensible waste of everyone’s time. If anyone had any lingering doubts about the venality, racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and ignorance of the Trump administration, then surely this Orwellian travesty would convince you.
Professional organizations are generally not university-wide affiliations. A history department, for example, might have a membership in the American Historical Association, which is on the list.
What we don’t know is how other universities have reacted to this “investigation.” Are they putting as much evident passion as UK is into meeting the Trump administration’s call to rid public spaces of everyone but white men? Certainly, UK has been a very good boy, dotting every i and crossing every t, especially if the t is in transphobia.
Sure, the university is caught between the Scylla of the Trump Administration and the Charybdis of the state legislature, two dangers with the same destructive goals in mind — turning higher education back to 1950.
But for some reason, UK officials seem a little too eager to comply in advance; nary a word about how they disagree with these measures, even as they meet them. Female and Black students would probably appreciate a small shoutout of encouragement along the lines of, “No, just because we are trying to ax the Black Student Law Association, which was created to support Black students through the harsh and often racist halls of academia, we don’t actually hate Black people.”
Those words have not been uttered by President Eli Capilouto, a man who is surely at the end of his career and could be hailed as a hero for retiring in protest against this absurd persecution. He lived through the Civil Rights era in Alabama, as he used to be fond of saying, and now he is silent.
Like McCarthyism and comic book burning, this, too, shall pass, and we will remember who stood up for the right things and who folded into the Trumpian maw of extremism and hate. That’s not much consolation for the minority and vulnerable students on campus who are living through these attacks right now, but in Kentucky, it seems that it’s all we’ve got.
This story was originally published December 10, 2025 at 10:20 AM.
