Lawsuit Over California School’s Race-Based Scholarships Could Deal Massive Blow to DEI

No matter how many times elite institutions of higher education are rebuked by the American people or the courts, they remain fanatically dedicated to racial discrimination in the name of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

A recent lawsuit brought by the Pacific Legal Foundation against the University of California at San Diego highlights this point. How the lawsuit pans out could have major implications for DEI in higher education.

Aaron Sibarium at The Washington Free Beacon reported on Thursday about the foundation’s lawsuit over UCSD’s use of the Black Alumni Scholarship Fund to skirt California laws against affirmative action.

UCSD created the fund in 1983 to subsidize the tuition of black students. Then in 1996, California voters passed Proposition 209. This law mandated that the state “shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.”

Suddenly all race-based programs attached to public universities came into question. The school in part dodged the new law by creating a loophole for the Black Alumni Scholarship Fund scholarships.

From 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.

That’s quite a clever workaround.

Pacific Legal Foundation is now taking up the case of several students who say that they are being denied access to the scholarships because of their race. The case in part relies on a 19th-century law, the Enforcement Act of 1871—also known as the Ku Klux Klan Act—that bans the use of both public and private entities from conspiring to deprive Americans of their civil rights.

The law prevents public entities from essentially outsourcing their discrimination to private entities, much as it seems UCSD is doing.

“The complaint’s novel application of a 150-year-old law could have implications for a host of race-based scholarships run by private nonprofits,” Sibarium wrote, citing a Pacific Legal Foundation lawyer. “In theory, those foundations can hand out cash to whomever they please as long as the gifts do not create a contractual relationship. But if they use race-based criteria at the behest of the state—with the express goal of circumventing civil rights law—the KKK Act comes into play …”

As Sibarium wrote, if this lawsuit proves successful, it could impact schools and programs in California and other states where similar race-based scholarship programs financed by the private sector could be sued on similar grounds. If it fails, other schools may take the chance to double down on these types of scholarships.

The University of California has been an innovator in clever forms of racial discrimination against mostly whites and Asians since Prop. 209 passed.

Instead of dropping the practice, as most Californians wanted it to, it simply concocted new ways to build on a foundation of subtle and not-so-subtle DEI.

For instance, it was the University of California that created the system of using diversity statements to mass hire people based on race and ideology. Schools around the country copied that blueprint. That practice has been crumbling as the Supreme Court has ruled against affirmative action, and the Trump administration is putting pressure on universities to drop race-based programs.

Again, that doesn’t mean that the powers that be in higher education have tapped out on DEI. They are just scrambling to make it as stealthy as possible with perhaps the hope that in four years there will be a new presidential administration, and they can go back to the way things were.

It should be clear now that no argument will convince elite universities to create more intellectual diversity or to fully abandon discrimination in the name of racial diversity. They are left-wing institutions guided by a racialist ideology and filled with true believers. The only thing that will make them change their course is the acute threat of lawsuits, defunding, and other forms of hard political power.

That’s why it’s important for the Trump administration and various organizations committed to breaking up DEI’s lock on elite institutions to keep up maximum pressure now while its excesses during the Great Awokening are still fresh in the mind of the public.

The Daily Signal contacted UCSD but it did not respond.

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