Colleges across America have indulged in blatant racial segregation in their dorms for decades — yet only last week did the feds start to make a stink about it.

Sure, it’s liberal racism — but “no whites allowed” offends the Constitution every bit as much as “no blacks allowed.”

And this (relatively) innocuous segregation, practiced on half the nation’s campus, is only the tip of the iceberg of the plainly pernicious racism plaguing US higher education.

“We’re trying to do good” doesn’t matter; the old-school segregationists, for what it’s worth, thought they were doing right.

Start with the crackdown that Housing Secretary Scott Turner announced in a “Dear Colleague” letter warning schools that race-based “affinity housing” violates federal anti-discrimination law.

Colleges market it as “voluntary” — but discrimination is by definition not voluntary for those being discriminated against, and the Supreme Court rejected the “separate but equal” claim long ago.

And while universities first embraced liberal racism with such dorms, they gradually went much, much further.

De facto racial quotas dominated most university admissions at least until the landmark 2023 Supreme Court ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.

And no, it’s not mere “affirmative action”:

Discovery in that case (and a companion one against the University of North Carolina) proved it beyond any doubt: Colleges discriminate massively and systematically against white and (especially) Asian applicants to admit more blacks and Latinos.

Harvard (and the rest of the Ivies have the same policies) rejected Asian kids with SAT scores hundreds of points higher than black students it admitted, a toxic approach it “justified” by pretending all the Asians had loser personalities.

And these racists don’t want to stop: Soon after the Supremes ruled, universities across the country began dropping use of SATs and other objective measures (using COVID as an excuse).

That is, they wanted to make their racism harder to prove: Prestige administrators like Erwin Chemerinsky, the U. Berkeley Law dean, and Timothy Lynch, U. Michigan general counsel, got caught on tape plotting “plausibly deniable” ways to keep on discriminating.

The race games go far beyond student admissions: Faculty hiring has grown increasingly racist, especially over the last decade — straight white need not apply, at least not ’til all the ones already tenured die off.

So oblivious were the educrats to the illegality of these schemes, the Manhattan Institute’s John Sailer has found massive evidence of this institutionalized racism in colleges’ public postings and internal records.

Who does all this help? Not the kids who get admitted thanks to liberal racism: Damning 2016 data from the University of California system, for example, shows that of minority admits who went into the sciences, less than a quarter graduate with a science degree in five years — and more than 40% don’t graduate at all in that timespan. 

Cue a race to the bottom to “help” the strugglers by watering down standards: Grade inflation got so bad at Harvard, with As becoming 60% of grades awarded, that the school just imposed a per-course cap. 

Faculty are revolting in other ways, too: More than 1,400 profs at Berkeley now demand a return to the SAT (ditched in 2020) as a UC admission requirement so the schools will stop admitting kids who can’t hack even entry-level courses.

MIT and most Ivies have already restored those exams. 

Yet ending the worst admissions racism will be a lot easier than repairing faculties formed by rank discrimination: Too many tenured profs will fight, whether because they’ve benefited or because decades of political discrimination mean they’re mostly far-lefties.

Reclaiming American academia for the purposes and principles it’s supposed to serve will be a brutal task, but one of the first key steps is calling out the institutional racism that pervades it.