A defiant President Andrew Jackson reportedly answered an unwelcome United States Supreme Court ruling by declaring, “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.”  

Two centuries later, Duke University apparently embraces the same defiantly lawless approach:  The Supreme Court prohibits “affirmative action” racial discrimination, now let someone enforce it.  

Thankfully, the Trump Administration’s Department of Justice (DOJ) intends to do precisely that.  

Three years ago, the Supreme Court finally struck down race-conscious admissions programs in its landmark Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard decision with the unequivocal command, “Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.”  The Equal Protection Clause, the Court self-evidently reasoned, applies to all races because “the guarantee of equal protection cannot mean one thing when applied to one individual and something else when applied to a person of another color.”  

According to the Justice Department, however, Duke’s law school treated the Supreme Court’s ruling less as binding law than an obstacle to cleverly circumvent.  

Specifically, the DOJ determined that Duke deliberately discriminated on the basis of race in admissions for its 2023, 2024 and 2025 classes, violating both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Supreme Court’s recent ruling.  

Importantly, the most damning evidence supporting that conclusion arose not merely from lopsided statistical disparities, but also Duke’s own internal communications.  

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling, Duke administrators discussed strategies that could advance their racist practices, but more subtly and indirectly.  One faculty member, for instance, openly noted that one alternative allowed “lots of room for faculty to emphasize racial/ethnic diversity as well as diversity along other salient dimensions of difference, including nationality, religion, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, and ideology.”  

Other internal communications emphasized that continuing discriminatory policies remained “one of our most important values,” and promised to “work even harder” to achieve “a racially diverse class.”  Additionally, internal communications conspicuously tracked specific racial enrollment numbers, even as Duke publicly maintained that racial composition wasn’t monitored during admissions decisions.

Here’s why that’s important:  The Supreme Court itself anticipated precisely that sort of evasion.  

While nothing in its decision prohibited universities from considering how individual applicants demonstrably overcame identifiable discrimination or adversity, universities would not be permitted to simply repackage racial preferences via essays or other proxies to accomplish indirectly what the Constitution and its ruling prohibit explicitly.  

Attempting to do just that, however, Duke used applicant essays, short-answer questions and demographic characteristics that it correlated with race in order to advance its discriminatory objectives.  On that basis, the DOJ rightfully concluded that Duke’s admissions mechanisms constituted end-around “material race-related proxies in admissions outcomes.”  

As Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon summarized, “Using ‘diversity’ essay questions to identify preferred races for admission is still illegal discrimination based on race,” adding that Duke doesn’t possess “a free pass to discriminate against white and Asian students simply because it thinks it has good intentions.”  

The DOJ, however, didn’t rely upon damning Duke’s internal communications and inferences alone.  The raw numbers paralleled its internal paper trail.  

In 2024, for example, the median Law School Admission Test (LSAT) score among Duke’s admitted black applicants was 164 (83rd percentile), compared with 173 (98th percentile) for admitted Asian applicants and 172 (97th percentile) for admitted white applicants.  In 2025, those figures were 166 (87th percentile) for admitted black applicants and 173 for both admitted Asian and white applicants.  

Conspicuously, the median LSAT score among rejected Asian and white applicants exceeded those of admitted black applicants over both years.  

On a statistical basis controlling for LSAT scores, undergraduate grade point averages (GPAs) and race, the DOJ showed that in 2025 black applicants enjoyed a 3.5 times higher probability of admission than Asian or white applicants of identical credentials.  

That’s not “diversity,” it’s denial of more qualified applicants simply because of their race.  

After all, as the Supreme Court emphasized in its ruling, admissions are inherently zero-sum:  Granting racial preference to one applicant in turn disadvantages another person based upon race.  

No matter how well-reasoned, however, a Supreme Court ruling means nothing if institutions continue to evade it by simply replacing explicit racial classifications with subjective essays, coded terminology, socio-economic proxies or other mechanisms employed to reach the same discriminatory result.  

For decades, colleges operated under the belief that racial discrimination was acceptable when self-righteously practiced by the right admissions officers, for the right reasons, in favor of the right groups and to the disadvantage of the wrong groups.  

The Supreme Court finally rejected that illusion in 2023, applying the logic of Chief Justice John Roberts from an earlier ruling when he wrote, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”  

Duke University apparently thought that they could casually evade that constitutional command.  

The Trump Justice Department just responded:  No, you can’t.