Exclusive | Top California school under federal investigation over race-based scholarships, student centers
The U.S.Department of Education has opened a civil rights investigation into UC Berkeley over three student programs and two scholarships after a February complaint alleged discrimination based on race, color or national origin.The investigation was disclosed in a Nov.
3 letter from the department’s Office for Civil Rights, obtained exclusively by the California Post.The department verified the letter and confirmed it is investigating the university for alleged violations of federal civil rights law.The probe stems from a complaint filed Feb.
10 by the Legal Insurrection Foundation, which targets the African American Student Development Office, the Black Resource Center, the Latinx Student Resource Center, the African American Initiative Scholarship and the Lloyd A.Edwards Scholarship.The complaint argues that even if the three programs don’t turn students away, their names and descriptions would likely discourage students outside the named racial or ethnic groups from participating.
It alleges the two scholarships have eligibility criteria that exclude applicants based on race, color or national origin.“Not all cases get open for investigation,” William A.Jacobson, president of the Legal Insurrection Foundation, the group that filed the complaint, told the Post.
“So when we get a case open for investigation, we interpret that as a sign that the department views the allegations as both factually and legally serious and worthy of investigation.”Jacobson, who described the open investigation as a”extremely significant step,” said the way a program is marketed can be discriminatory on its own.“Even if you don’t physically turn people away because you have scared people away, you have signaled that you will be discriminating,” he said.“It is not a defense to an unlawful promotion of a program based on race or ethnicity to say, ‘Well, we did promote it that way, but we never physically turned anybody away.’”UC Berkeley said in a statem...