Notoriously Liberal University’s ‘Environmentalist Of Color’ Scholarship Is Illegal, Watchdog Claims

One of the most notoriously liberal universities in the country maintains an “environmentalist of color” scholarship program, prompting a formal complaint from an education watchdog group. 

Defending Education on Wednesday filed a complaint with the Education Department alleging that University of California, Berkeley’s scholarship program violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prevents federal funding from going toward institutions that discriminate on the basis of race.

Defending Education Vice President Sarah Parshall Perry told The Daily Wire that the scholarship was “an express federal financial benefit granted unapologetically to students on the basis of race” in violation of federal law. 

“Eliminating race discrimination means eliminating all of it, as the Supreme Court has noted,” she said. “We look forward to the office for civil rights’s investigation of race discrimination in federally funded programs at UC Berkeley.”

The complaint urges the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights to open an investigation into the university over the program. UC Berkeley is already under investigation by the Trump administration for potentially racially exclusionary practices in its graduate programs. 

The yearly scholarship criticized in Defending Education’s complaint — administered by the Student Environmental Resource Center and funded by the university’s Green Initiative Fund — gives five students who identify as a “person of color” $2,000. 

Program goals include bridging “institutional gaps in resources and funding for students of color to increase retention, and build radically inclusive social and environmental justice spaces on campus,” financially supporting “passionate students of color working in the environmental field at UC Berkeley,” and “eliminating barriers to entry and focusing on healing, joy, and growth rather than trauma.”

Student Environmental Resource Center.

To qualify for the scholarship, a student must “identify as a POC” and be “passionate about environmentalism,” according to the university. 

The university said that the definition of “person of color” goes beyond skin color, though it is unclear what this means. The university did not respond to requests for comment on whether a white person could be eligible for the award. 

“While navigating the complexities and nuances of this question, SERC recognizes that being a ‘person of color’ goes beyond just skin color, and can include an intersectional expanse of racial, ethnic, and cultural experiences and identities. If you identify as a ‘person of color,’ we encourage you to apply,” the Student Environmental Resource Center said. 

The university encourages students to focus on “joy” in their applications for the scholarship. 

“We recognize that BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, Persons-of-Color) are frequently asked to exclusively call upon their experiences with racial trauma and violence in applications,” the university says. “We aim to resist that tokenization by making space for applicants to consider their identities from the lens of radical healing, joy, and growth.”

The Student Environmental Resource Center offers a similar scholarship, called the Brian Gialketsis SERQueer Scholarship, for students who “identify as queer.” The university specifies that applicants can be “undocumented” or “formerly incarcerated.”

The goal of the scholarship is to “financially support queer-identifying students working in and passionate about the environmental field at UC Berkeley.”

President Donald Trump’s Education Department has warned universities across the country to comply with federal discrimination law and the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down race-based affirmative action programs. Already, 45 graduate universities are facing probes over racially focused programs.