Illinois Runs a Scholarship That Excludes White Applicants

The Illinois Board of Higher Education runs a scholarship program for graduate students that explicitly excludes white applicants, a move lawyers say is unconstitutional and could jeopardize the federal funding of more than two dozen participating universities, including Northwestern University and the University of Chicago.

The program, Diversifying Higher Education Faculty in Illinois (DFI), was established by state law in 2004 and provides financial aid to “members of traditionally underrepresented minority groups” pursuing masters or doctoral degrees. Those groups include “African American, Hispanic American, Native American, Asian American, Alaskan Native, and Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander,” according to the program’s landing page.

Students apply to the program through their universities, each of which has an “institutional representative” who helps “verify … that applicants for the fellowship meet all eligibility criteria.” That structure means that participating institutions, which include the top public and private universities in the state, are directly involved in an application process that violates federal law, according to five attorneys who reviewed the program requirements.

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Illinois is already fending off a lawsuit over a similar program, the Minority Teachers of Illinois Scholarship, that provides financial aid to minorities pursuing teacher licenses. A separate lawsuit, this one focused on racial hiring quotas at University of Illinois Chicago (UIC), was filed last month by a former professor at the school.

The DFI program could be yet another liability for the state’s embattled education bureaucracy—one with the potential to bankrupt Illinois’s most prestigious universities in the event of litigation.

David Bernstein, a professor of constitutional law at George Mason University law school, said that any schools participating in the program “run the risk of losing all federal funding, including eligibility for student loans and other financial assistance.” William Trachman, the general counsel for Mountain States Legal Foundation, said that officials facilitating the program could be held personally liable for “violating clearly established law.”

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The applications revealed a scholar-activist pipeline at the heart of Illinois’s flagship public university, which requires all departments to submit “racial equity” plans to the school’s diversity office.

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In thousands of pages of applications reviewed by the Free Beacon, students tout their “antiracism efforts,” describe a commitment to “equity,” and decry the “systemic threats” of “racism, sexism, patriarchy, colorism, featurism, [and] texturism” to “inner-city women.” One applicant even likened a professor’s suggestion that she get tested for a learning disability to slavery, adding that his words displayed a “lack of compassion and cultural responsiveness.”

“Nevertheless, as an American Descendant of Slavery (ADOS) with recurring experiences of adversity, I managed to weather storms of marginalization like my ancestors,” she wrote in her application, one of the hundreds obtained by the National Association of Scholars through a public records request and shared with the Free Beacon. “Fast-forward, despite my professor’s unwarranted judgment, I found myself stepping into his world.”

Another applicant stated that she would “like to be a black queer psychology professor who could bring more diversity into academia and new perspectives on everyday life.” Still another referenced the “residue of post traumatic slave syndrome.”

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