By COLLIN BINKLEY, JOCELYN GECKER and CHEYANNE MUMPHREY, Associated Press Education Writers

WASHINGTON (AP) — Schools and colleges across the U.S. face a Friday deadline to end diversity programs or risk having their federal money pulled by the Trump administration, yet few are openly rushing to make changes. Many believe they’re on solid legal ground, and they know it would be all but unprecedented — and extremely time-consuming — for the government to cut off funding.

State officials in Washington and California urged schools not to make changes, saying it doesn’t change federal law and doesn’t require any action. New York City schools have taken the same approach and said district policies and curriculum have not changed.

Leaders of some colleges shrugged the memo off entirely. Antioch University ’s chief said “most of higher education” won’t comply with the memo unless federal law is changed. Western Michigan University’s president told his campus to “please proceed as usual.”

A memo issued Feb. 14 by President Donald Trump’s administration, formally known as a Dear Colleague Letter, gave schools two weeks to halt any practice that treats people differently because of their race.

Opponents say it’s an overreach meant to have a chilling effect. The guidance appears to forbid everything from classroom lessons on racism to colleges’ efforts to recruit in diverse areas, and even voluntary student groups like Black student unions.

Education organizations have been urging a measured approach, warning institutions not to make any hasty cuts that would be difficult to undo. Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, is telling colleges that if they were in compliance with federal law before the memo, they still are.

“There’s nothing to act on until we see the administration or its agencies try to stop something,” Mitchell said. “And then we’ll have the argument.”

Investigations rarely come close to cutting schools’ federal funding

A loss of federal money would be devastating for schools and colleges, but imposing that penalty would not be quick or simple.

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The Education Department office that conducts civil rights investigations had fewer than 600 employees last year — before the Trump administration began cutting staff — while the U.S. has more than 18,000 school districts and 6,000 colleges.

Even when a school or state faces an investigation, it can take years to terminate funding. Under former President Joe Biden, the Education Department tried to pull federal money from Michigan’s education agency after finding it violated the rights of students with disabilities. The investigation began in 2022 and is still tied up in federal court.

“I hope very much that schools charged with providing inclusive, equal education to every student in their school community will stand for that principle,” said Catherine Lhamon, who led the department’s Office for Civil Rights under Biden.

Still, some education leaders say resistance is too risky. At the University of Cincinnati, President Neville G. Pinto said officials are evaluating jobs related to diversity, equity and inclusion, and removing DEI references from school websites.

“Given this new landscape, Ohio public and federally supported institutions like ours have little choice but to follow the laws that govern us,” Pinto wrote.

Tony Frank, chancellor of the Colorado State University system, wrote in a campus letter that he weighed taking a stand against the department. But he advised the system’s campuses to comply, saying there’s too much at stake for students and staff. “If we gamble here and are wrong, someone else will pay the price,” he wrote.

New guidance brings a shift in interpretation of nondiscrimination laws

In many Republican-led states, education chiefs applauded the memo.

“We never felt it was appropriate to use race in making these types of decisions in the first case, so I do not foresee any interruptions in our day-to-day business,” Alabama’s state superintendent, Eric G. Mackey, said in a statement released by the Trump administration.

The memo said schools have promoted DEI efforts often at the expense of white and Asian American students.

It doesn’t carry the weight of law but explains how the new administration will interpret nondiscrimination laws. It dramatically expands a 2023 Supreme Court decision barring the use of race in college admissions to all aspects of education — including, hiring, promotion, scholarships, housing, graduation ceremonies and campus life.

The guidance is being challenged in court by the American Federation of Teachers, which said the memo violates free speech laws.

While some schools are keeping quiet out of fear of being targeted, many leaders also are still struggling to grasp the implications.

“We are looking to our attorney general for guidance because it’s very confusing,” said Christine Tucci Osorio, superintendent of the North St. Paul School District in Minnesota. When a teacher asked if their school could still mark African American History Month, she assured them they could.

Despite concerns that schools would rush to comply, it appears “cooler heads are largely prevailing,” said Liz King, senior director for the education equity program at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.

“Once a school sends the message that they are not going to stand up for a member, a community within their school, that is broken trust, that is a lost relationship,” King said.

Like no president before him, Trump wields funding threat to support his agenda

Trump has vowed to use education funding as political leverage on several fronts, threatening cuts for schools that do not get in line with his agenda on topics including transgender girls’ participation in girls’ sports and instruction related to race.

Usually, civil rights investigations by the Education Department take at least six months and often much longer. If a school is found in violation of federal law, department policy offers a chance to come into compliance and sign a resolution — typically a 90-day process.

Only if a school refuses to comply can the department move to revoke federal money. That can be done in the Education Department through a court-like process decided by an administrative law judge. If the judge decides the penalty is justified, the school can appeal it to the education secretary and, after that, challenge it in court.

Instead of handling it internally, the department can also refer cases to the Justice Department for prosecution. That route is no faster.

The last time the Education Department was granted approval to cut federal funding was in 1992, against the Capistrano Unified School District in California, which was found to have retaliated against a teacher for filing sex discrimination complaints.

Before the penalty was carried out, the district reinstated the teacher and effectively ended the case. It never lost any money.

Gecker reported from San Francisco, and Mumphrey from Phoenix.

The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

By TARA COPP, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Pentagon revealed the specifics of its new transgender troop policy in a court filing Wednesday that says any service member or recruit who has been diagnosed with or treated for gender dysphoria is disqualified from serving — unless they can prove they meet a specific warfighting need and adhere to severe restrictions on their day-to-day behavior.

The policy memo was included in the latest court filing in a lawsuit challenging President Donald Trump’s executive order against transgender military service, one of many hot-button issues the president made a priority to address on his first days in office.

Like the executive order, the policy filed Wednesday suggests that the lethality and integrity of the military “is inconsistent” with what transgender personnel go through as they transition to the gender they identify with, and issues an edict that gender is “immutable, unchanging during a person’s life.”

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The policy provides two exceptions — if transgender personnel who seek to enlist can prove on a case-by-case basis that they directly support warfighting activities, or if an existing service member, who was diagnosed with gender dysphoria, can prove they support a specific warfighting need and never transitioned to the gender they identify with and proves over 36 months they are stable in their biological sex “without clinically significant distress.”

If a waiver is issued in either case, the applicant would still face a situation where only their biological sex was recognized for bathroom facilities, sleeping quarters and even in official recognition, such as being called “Sir” or “Ma’am.”

Gender dysphoria occurs when a person’s biological sex does not match up with their gender identity.

While the number of transgender troops serving is small compared to the size of the total force, it’s taken up a large amount of time and attention both at the White House and within the Pentagon. The military services due to medical privacy laws do not provide an exact count of transgender troops, but a 2018 independent study by the Palm Center, which researched LGBTQ issues, assessed there were an estimated 14,000 transgender troops among the more than 2 million troops serving.

It was a policy Trump tried to overturn in his first term in office but the issue ended up mired in lawsuits until former President Joe Biden was elected and he overturned the ban.

ATLANTA — Alton Brown is in his sun-filled Atlanta kitchen on a Monday morning, prepping biscuits inspired by his grandmother, and asks Siri to set the timer for 20 minutes.

“I’ve set the timer for 10 minutes,” Siri replies in a male British accent.

Brown grimaces. “Twenty minutes! Shut up!” Brown yells, exasperated. “Cancel!” He tries again and this time, Siri complies.

“The British accent makes yelling at it so much more civil and satisfying,” he says with characteristic dry wit.

Brown, 62, has embraced his professorial look with a preference for button-down vests, tweed suits and silk neckerchiefs. He has carefully crafted his public mad scientist persona over the past quarter century while imparting culinary knowledge to the masses. He created the groundbreaking edutainment show “Good Eats,” added tasty commentary on “Iron Chef America” and then hosted his sadistically sardonic sabotage-packed game show “Cutthroat Kitchen” where he said he played a “Darth Vader” version of himself.

But since the Food Network ended his revived “Good Eats Reloaded” in 2021, and a reboot of “Iron Chef America” on Netflix in 2022 failed to get a second season, Brown has been focusing on non-TV pursuits.

“I got the last swallow of cable television,” said Brown, referencing cable’s heyday in the 2000s and early 2010s before streaming consumed its essence. “The model for what we know as content has changed. Netflix and Amazon have these algorithms. They’re fine. I just don’t think it’s very organic. I haven’t really enjoyed working within these venues. It’s not natural for me.”

On tour

Brown has released his first book of essays, “Food for Thought” (Gallery Books), and is launching his fourth and final incarnation of his live culinary variety show, “Last Bite.”

For the uninitiated, the 60-plus city tour features a goulash of wild scientific experiments, cooking demonstrations, food-themed music, audience participation and Brown’s trenchant observations and anecdotes.

On previous tours over the last 12 years, this Renaissance man with a University of Georgia drama degree made chocolate ice cream in 10 seconds using a CO2 fire extinguisher, built a mega Easy Bake Oven with 54 high-powered theater lights to make pizza and dressed as a “Food God” in a sparkly toga, golden spoon crown and oversized whisk scepter to declare the abolition of children menus at restaurants and Sriracha use without a permit. Guitar in hand, he sang facetious songs with titles like “TV Chef” and “Pork Chop Blues.” And for the high-minded, he once displayed flatulent sock puppets.

Brown’s inspirations included a wacky live tour by the “Mythbusters” crew and warm memories of cheesy 1970s variety shows such as “The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour,” “The Carol Burnett Show” and “The Donny & Marie Show.”

“It allows me utter creative freedom,” Brown said. “Nobody gives me notes. I do what I want.”

The spontaneity of audience members on stage provides Brown a particular thrill. “I remember one show, a grandmom type had been hitting the bar pretty hard and she absolutely wouldn’t keep her hand off my backside like, through the entire demo,” he said. “Once, I accidentally chose two volunteers from different sections of the theater who turned out to be each other’s exes.” (For better or worse, no “Springer”-like fight ensued.)

Lee Marshall, CEO of MagicSpace Entertainment, oversees Brown’s tours and has worked with legendary magician David Copperfield, Michael Flatley of “Lord of the Dance” fame and astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. He said he normally gets deeply involved with tour production but, in the case of Brown, “I just let Alton be Alton … I take no credit for his insanity. He has an intuition on how to entertain people. He could just sit on a stool for 90 minutes and tell stories and people would be enthralled. He’s a thespian at heart.”

The new tour will be packed with fresh technology including a moving LED screen and an over-the-top contraption he won’t reveal until showtime but that will involve steam and thermodynamics.

Not that Brown is a man full of boastful confidence. He admits to “constant, unrelenting self-doubt.” He never feels fully satisfied by anything he does. “Only the process gives me any satisfaction,” he said. “The second that it’s over, the results are meaningless outside of financial gain.”

His restless insecurity, many have observed, is what fuels him.

Marshall is often on the receiving end of Brown’s said insecurity. “I’m his chief psychologist and trusted adviser,” he said. “He’s on the ledge all the time. It’s what makes him brilliant. He has never not delivered on what he says he does. He’s a man of his word.”

Brown said he is indeed assiduously organized for work projects but his daily life can be a mess. “I typically spend at least an hour a day looking for my keys,” he said. And, yes, he said, “I’m not a great cook. I only learned to cook, really, so that I could tell stories.” At best, he will acknowledge, “I’m an OK cook.”

A new chapter

Brown, who has an adult daughter from his first marriage who is now attending law school, said his life has become immeasurably better following a painful divorce in 2016. That year, he became so impressed with award-winning interior designer Elizabeth Ingram’s work at Atlanta Westside steakhouse Marcel, he hired her to design his post-divorce loft in a converted Marietta textile mill.

That relationship quickly evolved, and they married in 2018. “I duped her into staying with me forever,” he said.

Ingram became entranced by the way Brown’s mind works: “He will devour books on thermodynamics to learn how to cook a hot dog better. And he can regurgitate it to me so I can understand it. It’s an amazing thing to witness. His left and right brains are really well connected.”

She also marvels over his broad appeal when he runs into fans, especially in Manhattan where they have a small apartment. “I have been literally brought to tears by the reverence some people have,” Ingram said. “It could be a woman from behind the counter at MoMA from Lagos, Nigeria, or a hipster with a lip ring in the East Village. People tell him he’s the reason they went to film school.”

Brown, in turn, said Ingram has been a positive influence on his life because “I tend to bring grenades to fistfights.”

“I’ve learned to shut up and listen and to, above all, strive for kindness,” he said. “ I don’t know if that’s extended outward but maybe.”

Brown splits time between his Marietta abode and Ingram’s century-old home in Atlanta, which was her parents’ place for 30 years and is now amid a complete renovation. They plan to move in town permanently once it’s finished. He already shops regularly at Candler Park Market, a “giant bodega” that contrasts sharply with grocery stores, which he abhors. (“I get weepy seeing what people buy.”)

“I’m a loner yet I feel a need for community,” he said. “Candler Park Market is where I can feel that connectivity, that sense of belonging.”

Alton Brown, 62, cuts chanterelle mushrooms to add to scrambled eggs at his newly renovated kitchen in Atlanta that includes a beloved induction range. (Arvin Temkar/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution/TNS)

His in-town home kitchen was fully functional by December, giving Brown the chance to cook breakfast for this reporter. Besides biscuits, which the ever-perfectionist Brown found a tad overcooked, he offered scrambled eggs with local golden chanterelle mushrooms.

“When raw,” he said in his astutely observed style, “they smell a little like apricots.” He also noted that “eggs and mushrooms form one of the great culinary gestalts. And what a lot of people don’t realize is that mushrooms are damn near impossible to overcook … unlike biscuits.”

39 essays

After writing numerous cookbooks, Brown was finally convinced to try his hand at essay writing. Eric Simonoff, his longtime book agent, said they would meet up in New York City and not even talk about food or business. “We’d often talk about poetry or movies or cigars,” he said. “He is a man of multitudes.”

That is very much reflected in his 39 essays. There are stories about his childhood love of Cap’n Crunch, a comical moment involving yeasty bread dough in a hot dumpster, his favorite movie scenes involving food (think metaphors and “Apocalypse Now”), an ode to the kitchen table, the search for the perfect way to create a Thanksgiving turkey, dumb kitchen tools, the magic of chopsticks, terrible ChatGPT recipes and what he learned doing his improvised YouTube cooking show “Quarantine Quitchen” with his wife during the pandemic.

The essays vary in tone and structure, some purely comical, some dead serious. “You have to drop your pants. You have to be willing to expose yourself. That’s not something I had ever done,” he said, adding, “I wrote this essay about being a fat kid, about body image and food. I read it to Elizabeth and I was sobbing. I was wrecked!”

Tom Straw, a friend of Brown’s and author of the spy novel “The Accidental Joe: The Top-Secret Life of a Celebrity Chef,” got an early read of Brown’s book and was impressed by his depth as a writer. He also was surprised by Brown’s essay in which he described how difficult it was in the early going to get the hang of hosting “Iron Chef America” more than two decades ago.

“He made it look easy,” Straw said. “Who knew?”

In the book, Brown drew his own doodles and wrote the entire first draft on a 60-year-old Hermes 3000 manual typewriter because he enjoys the clickety-clack feel of being in a “Mad Men” episode.

“My parents bought a radio station in Cleveland, [Georgia],” he said. “My mom would type up the radio logs on paper… That sound was huge for me. And you can see the physicality of the strikes on the paper. You know where you were when you did it. Did you type with gusto? Did you back up and x something out? My penmanship is terrible, but I can type like a beast!”

If readers like this book, Brown is open to writing more essays. “As I bitch and moan as I get closer to the grave, I can finally look at certain aspects of my life I didn’t understand previously and put them in context,” he said. “I’ll know how to dig deeper holes the next time around.”

A deep lover of cocktails (especially martinis), Brown has also taken a self proclaimed “sabbatical” from drinking alcohol: “I don’t plan on doing the whole ‘sober’ thing, but I’m at a point of life where focus and clarity are key, and that’s not something alcohol helps me with.”

Next?

Once the “Last Bite” tour is finished, he is unsure what his next step will be. While a YouTube show would give him creative independence, he said the pressures to pump out content constantly is unappealing. “It’s like a rock skipping across the pond,” he said. “You can never get immersed.”

Regardless of his next professional move, Brown said he has other priorities: “I care most of all about being a good husband and a decent father to my daughter. If those improvements end up extending out into the rest of the world, fantastic.”

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In the spring of 2007, I interviewed Václav Havel on a bench in the garden of Prague’s Czernin Palace. The playwright and former Czech president discussed his shifting views on the war in Iraq, the role of art in unfree states, the dangers of political obsession and indifference — and his yearning, 11 years after he had quit smoking, for a cigarette.

We also spoke about the importance of truth, particularly in matters of international diplomacy. “I think we can talk to every ruler but first of all it is necessary to tell the truth,” Havel said. Turning to Vladimir Putin — or “Ras-Putin,” as he called him — he added: “With me, he gets more and more suspicious. We have to tell him plainly what we think of his behavior.”

Havel’s comment — which followed the murders of journalist Anna Politkovskaya and prominent critic Alexander Litvinenko but preceded Russia’s invasion of Georgia, its seizure of Crimea, the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, the poisoning, imprisoning and death of the opposition leader Alexei Navalny, the massacre at Bucha and the obliteration of Mariupol — comes to mind after the single most shameful vote ever cast by the United States at the United Nations.

On Monday, for the third anniversary of Russia’s brutal lunge toward Kyiv, the Ukrainian government put forward a resolution in the General Assembly demanding Russia’s withdrawal of its forces and accountability for its war crimes as the basis of a “comprehensive, lasting and just peace.” Ninety-three countries supported the resolution; 65 abstained, including China. Among the 18 who opposed it were Russia, North Korea, Nicaragua, Belarus, Equatorial Guinea and, vomitously, Israel and the United States.

Later, the United States won a wan 10-0 approval for a Security Council resolution (with five abstentions, including from Britain and France) that called for an end to the war without mentioning who started it. This is supposed to be a mark of realism, on the view that scolding Moscow for its sins will do nothing to advance a diplomatic end to the war.

On a broader level, it’s also meant as one in a series of moves to woo Putin back toward the West and away from his partnership (as the junior member) with China’s Xi Jinping — what foreign-policy pundits are calling a “Reverse Nixon,” in contrast to the 37th president’s efforts to detach China from the Soviet orbit.

But the effort is bound to fail, and not just because Moscow, with its no-limits friendship with China and a pliant administration in the United States, finds itself today in a very different strategic position than the one Beijing was in the early 1970s, when it had blown up its society in the Cultural Revolution while coming close to full-scale war with Russia.

Havel would have understood the deeper reasons.

In his 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless,” Havel explained the ways in which communist regimes like the one in Czechoslovakia maintained control. It wasn’t simply, or even primarily, through the threat of force. Rather, it happened through the construction of a “panorama” of mutually reinforcing slogans that most people found relatively easy to go along with, even if, at some level, they knew they were based on outrageous distortions and obvious lies.

Putin spent the first part of his career as a low-level enforcer of that system. He’s spent 25 years in power perfecting it from the top, creating a world in which his dictatorship is “sovereign democracy,” political opposition is “terrorism,” the Jewish president of Ukraine is “a neo-Nazi” and the biggest war in Europe in 80 years is just a “special military operation,” undertaken as a defensive measure against an aggressive NATO.

At nearly every turn, he’s been able to get away with it, often with the reluctant acquiescence of Western leaders, from George W. Bush to Angela Merkel, who looked away from his misdeeds for the sake of diplomatic comity. But he’s never had a bigger accomplice in deceit than Donald Trump.

By participating in the moral and factual inversions that Putin has deployed for his invasion of Ukraine, the Trump administration isn’t setting itself up as some sort of evenhanded broker to end the war. It is turning the United States into an accessory to Russia’s crimes — or at least to the lies on which the crimes are predicated. Unlike Nixon, who moved China toward our corner, at least for 30 years, Trump is moving America toward Russia’s corner, while betraying an ally and breaking the Atlantic alliance.

At this point, Tucker Carlson, Putin’s preferred poodle, may as well be secretary of state.

In his essay, Havel movingly described the ways in which tyrannies are brought down: when a handful of brave souls decide to “live within the truth,” which gives their “freedom a concrete significance.” Their early acts of truth-telling — like refusing to participate in sham elections or other regime fictions — will exact an initial price as the government amps up its means of repression. But over time the regime’s panorama of lies will gradually, then suddenly, fall apart. It’s exactly what happened just 11 years after Havel foresaw it, with the fall of communism and the Berlin Wall.

This administration, like its predecessor, had the opportunity, through an easy U.N. vote, to live within the truth when it came to Russia and its malevolence. Instead of working to deconstruct Putin’s panorama of lies, it opted to keep it in place, to reinforce it, to build on it. It’s a choice that will haunt, and shame, America for years.

Bret Stephens writes a column for the New York Times.

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