Last week, the U.S. Department of Education announced it is investigating 52 campuses in 41 states for everything from race-based degree programs and race-based scholarships for students to race-based hiring and promotions for faculty and staff.
“Students must be assessed according to merit and accomplishment, not prejudged by the color of their skin,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a statement. “We will not yield on this commitment.”
The Office for Civil Rights, a division of the DOE, is leading the investigations. Citing the landmark Students for Fair Admission ruling two years ago, it warned higher ed. in a Feb. 14 letter to end race-based preferences or "face potential loss of federal funding."
According to an Associated Press story, 45 campuses are being investigating for partnering with a race-based doctoral program called the PhD Project. That non-profit program, which began in the 1990s, helps women and minorities pursue an advanced degree in the business field. It is now under scrutiny for plainly excluding white male students over the last 30 years it has existed.
A timeline published online traces PhD Project's origins to its first-annual conference, held in Chicago, to celebrating its 1,764th faculty member in 2023. That recognition went to Dr. Mauricio Mercado. He is now a postdoctoral research fellow at the Lender School for Social Justice at Syracuse University.
A PhD Project Facebook post, found online by AFN, celebrates Mercado’s achievement with hash tags such as “BridgingtheDiversityGap” and “RepresentationMatters.”
“We’re thrilled to have sextupled the number of Black/African American, Latinx/Hispanic American and Native American professionals earning business PhDs in the United States, growing from 294 in 1994 to 1,764 today,” the Facebook post reads.
With its name suddenly in the news, the PhD Project told the media in a statement its mission is to “create a broader talent pipeline of current and future business leaders.”
That “broader talent pipeline” appears to be achieved by excluding white males up until now, an admission the PhD Project all but acknowledged in a second statement to the media.
“This year,” the statement reads, “we have opened our membership application to anyone who shares that vision."
According to an NPR story, the schools tied to the PhD Project include two Ivy League schools, Cornell and Yale, as well as private colleges such as Duke, Emory, Georgetown, Vanderbilt, and more.
NPR reports six other campuses are being investigated for allowing “race-based scholarships” for some students. Those campuses were identified as Grand Valley State University; Ithaca College; New England College of Optometry; University of Alabama; University of Minnesota, Twin Cities; University of South Florida; and University of Oklahoma, Tulsa School of Medicine.
Lynn Pasquerella, president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, told liberal NPR there is a “deep sense of moral distress” among the campuses being investigated.
Richard Land, president emeritus of Southern Evangelical Seminary, tells AFN a crackdown is long overdue for institutes of higher learning that have been discriminating in the name of diversity.
“DEI is the spear-point of Marxist critical race theory,” he says. “It has anti-patriotic roots and it perpetuates racism in our country.”
