Urbana-Champaign's 'diversity of discrimination' with scholarships violates Civil Rights Act: Law professor

A law professor helping push a complaint against the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign for 42 “illegal” scholarships that “discriminated” against applicants said it’s “crystal clear” that they violate the Civil Rights Act.

The Legal Insurrection Foundation’s Equal Protection Project, a civil rights organization, filed the complaint, arguing the scholarships are in violation of Title IX or Title VI. 

“We think it’s crystal clear that these do violate the Civil Rights Act,” Cornell Law School professor and founder of the Legal Insurrection Foundation William Jacobson told Fox News Digital. “For some of them, they use terms like ‘minority,’ and so we have included a definition that the school uses of ‘minority’ to make clear that that is a racial and color designation.” 

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Jacobson said the scholarships appear to reflect “a systemic problem” with the university “ignoring the discrimination.” 

“The fact that there were so many of them which discriminated in so many different directions,” Jacobson told Fox News Digital. “Men are discriminated against in some of them, women in other ones; Blacks in some, Whites in others. So, it’s a real diversity of discrimination going on that it raised in our mind, what is going on at this university? They could not possibly not have known about it. There is just too many of them.” 

He said the preferential scholarships send a message to students not to bother applying. 

“Under federal law, the discrimination is the harm. When you set up a barrier based on race or sex, you have harmed people,” Jacobson explained. “Imagine a store that had a sign, ‘No Blacks allowed.’ That is illegal and causes harm in and of itself. It does not matter if someone attempts to enter the store and is turned away by erecting the barrier.” 

Jacobson said the hope of the complaint is to stop discrimination and have the Department of Education provide options to students who were barred from applying to preferential scholarships. 

“If a scholarship in the past was discriminatory and they only gave one award each year, maybe the school at its own cost needs to increase that to give people who were shut out an extra opportunity to apply,” he explained. “So maybe that scholarship needs to make two, or three, or four awards available, then that would cost the school money, but I think that’s a fair remedy.” 

Jacobson said in most cases, when schools are faced with “a clear complaint showing their legal violation,” they do change their eligibility requirements. 

“Our first hope is that the University of Illinois, recognizing the major problem that they have, would for each and every one of these scholarships, change the eligibility requirements to open it up to everybody,” he said.  

The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign did not respond to Fox News Digital’s requests for comment.