California University Drops Race-Based Scholarship in Big Blow to DEI

This month saw yet another win against DEI in higher education, as a major California university recently dropped a racial scholarship under threat of lawsuit.

In July, I wrote about how the University of California at San Diego had been skirting California and federal law against affirmative action via the Black Alumni Scholarship Fund, as was reported by The Washington Free Beacon’s Aaron Sibarium. The scholarship was set up to be only available to black students.

It was a clever move by the school to dodge Proposition 209—an anti-affirmative action law passed by voters in 1997—by essentially offloading its discrimination on a separate, private organization.

Here’s how it worked, according to Sibarium:

With help from private donors, UCSD transferred the scholarship to an off-campus nonprofit, the San Diego Foundation, that was not subject to Prop. 209. The move allowed the scholarship to continue operating under the auspices of a private institution, even though the program is only available to UCSD students and uses racial data provided by the university.

Several other programs in other states have used similar programs to sidestep the push to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion.

But this workaround turned out to be too clever by half. The Californians for Equal Rights Foundation nonprofit group and its legal representative, the Pacific Legal Foundation, sued the school using the Ku Klux Klan Act on behalf of student Kai Peters.

Peters said he was denied the scholarship because he wasn’t black. Peters had called the use of the scholarship “institutionalized racism,” a phrase frequently used by the Left with no meaning. But in this case, it seemed quite applicable.

The Ku Klux Klan Act was designed, among other things, to ban conspiracies between public and private actors to deprive citizens of their equal rights under the law.

That appears to have worked, as UC San Diego changed the name of the program to the Lennon Goins Alumni Scholarship Fund and made it available to students of all races.

The school issued a statement after making the change.

“We are grateful to all of our community supporters who have generously given to fund scholarships for UC San Diego students, and we are committed to complying with all federal and state anti-discrimination laws,” the statement read.

The Pacific Legal Foundation was quick to declare victory.

“This victory proves that the Constitution’s promise of equality before the law still has teeth,” said PLF attorney Jack Brown on the legal organization’s website. “The Ku Klux Klan Act was written to stop government actors from conspiring with private parties to discriminate—and that’s exactly what happened here. When faced with the law, UCSD and its affiliates had no choice but to retreat. The action here is exactly what we demanded in our lawsuit.”

The story is a big deal beyond UCSD. While the case was never brought to conclusion, it means that the threat of using the Ku Klux Klan Act has teeth in the battle against DEI. And if we’ve learned anything, higher education is extremely resistant to change discriminatory practices unless the threat of lawsuit and huge monetary losses hang over them.

California has been the locus of innovation regarding skirting laws that stop affirmative action. That the lawsuit worked there is a good sign elsewhere.

“The outcome is proof of concept for a creative legal strategy that could spell the end of similar programs across the country,” Sibarium wrote Monday. “Several public universities, including the University of California [at] Berkeley and the University of Texas at Austin, have outsourced race-based scholarships to private foundations in an effort to insulate themselves from legal risk. While such foundations can dole out money based on race, they cannot do so at the direction of the state.”

It’s a rare situation these days where it’s good that something happening in California will reach the rest of the country.

Unlike corporate America, which has been scrambling to remove and erase various likely illegal DEI programs since President Joe Biden left office, elite universities have been putting up a fight to keep things as they are.

What’s clear is that there is now a huge amount of popular and legal pressure against racial discrimination, even in the name of correcting alleged historical injustices. Perhaps we will finally have institutions that respect the ideal of equal rights under the law as most Americans want.

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