The University of Colorado’s Colorado Springs campus is among more than 50 universities under investigation for alleged racial discrimination as part of President Donald Trump’s campaign to end diversity, equity and inclusion programs that his officials say exclude white and Asian American students.
The U.S. Department of Education announced the new investigations Friday, one month after issuing a memo warning America’s schools and colleges that they could lose federal money over “race-based preferences” in admissions, scholarships or any aspect of student life.
“Students must be assessed according to merit and accomplishment, not prejudged by the color of their skin,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a statement. “We will not yield on this commitment.”
Most of the new inquiries are focused on colleges’ partnerships with the PhD Project, a nonprofit that helps students from underrepresented groups get degrees in business with the goal of diversifying the business world. Department officials said the group limits eligibility based on race and that colleges that partner with it are “engaging in race-exclusionary practices in their graduate programs.”
The Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights sent CU Colorado Springs Chancellor Jennifer Sobanet a letter Thursday informing her that the federal agency had received a complaint Jan. 21 alleging the campus discriminated against students because it “supported” a conference this academic year from the PhD Project that was only available to students “who identify as Black/African American, Latinx/Hispanic American or Native American/Canadian Indigenous.”
CU Colorado Springs spokeswoman Jenna Press acknowledged the federal investigation in a statement Friday afternoon, but did not address the allegations about the PhD Project conference — or respond to follow-up questions from The Denver Post.
“At this point, we believe we have only used this platform to advertise open faculty positions, one tool of many our college uses to recruit qualified faculty,” Press said. “Like universities across the country, we use various platforms to seek and recruit the best teaching and research talent for our students. We are in the process of gathering additional information about this complaint and will comply with the request from the department in a timely manner. We want to say clearly, however, that UCCS does not discriminate in its recruitment or hiring practices.”
In a statement, the PhD Project said it aims to “create a broader talent pipeline of current and future business leaders who are committed to excellence and to each other.” The nonprofit added, “This year, we have opened our membership application to anyone who shares that vision.”
The PhD Project’s website on Friday morning listed CU’s Boulder campus — but not Colorado Springs — among its university partners, but the nonprofit removed that feature later in the day.
Representatives of CU Boulder and CU’s system administration did not respond to requests for comment Friday.
The letter to CU Colorado Springs from Sarah Morgan, program manager for the Office of Civil Rights, requests the name, job title, address, telephone number and email address of any university employee with information relevant to the PhD Project investigation.
The agency is also seeking the answers to a number of questions, including whether CU Colorado Springs has “has a legal justification for the nature of its relationship with the PhD Project.” It asks the campus to provide a list of the students selected to participate in the PhD Project, along with each student’s race and national origin or ethnicity.
The group of 45 colleges facing scrutiny over ties to the PhD Project also includes major public universities such as Arizona State, Ohio State and Rutgers, along with prestigious private schools like Yale, Cornell, Duke and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Arizona State said its business school is not financially supporting the PhD Project this year, and on Feb. 20, told faculty that the school would not support travel to the nonprofit’s conference.
A statement from Ohio State said the university “does not discriminate on the basis of race, ethnicity or any other protected class, and our PhD programs are open to all qualified applicants.”
Six other colleges are being investigated for awarding “impermissible race-based scholarships,” the department said. Those schools are: Grand Valley State University, Ithaca College, the New England College of Optometry, the University of Alabama, the University of South Florida and the University of Oklahoma at Tulsa.
Additionally, the University of Minnesota is being investigated for allegedly operating a program that segregates students on the basis of race, the department said.
The Feb. 14 memo from Trump’s Republican administration was a sweeping expansion of a 2023 Supreme Court decision that barred colleges from using race as a factor in admissions.
That decision focused on admissions policies at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, but the Education Department said it will interpret the decision to forbid race-based policies in any aspect of education, both in K-12 schools and higher education.
In the memo, Craig Trainor, acting assistant secretary for civil rights, had said schools’ and colleges’ diversity, equity and inclusion efforts have been “smuggling racial stereotypes and explicit race-consciousness into everyday training, programming and discipline.”
The memo is being challenged in federal lawsuits from the nation’s two largest teachers’ unions. The suits say the memo is too vague and violates the free speech rights of educators.
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