The Illinois Board of Higher Education runs a scholarship program for graduate students that explicitly excludes white applicants, a move lawyers say is unconstitutional and could jeopardize the federal funding of more than two dozen participating universities, including Northwestern University and the University of Chicago.
The program, Diversifying Higher Education Faculty in Illinois (DFI), was established by state law in 2004 and provides financial aid to “members of traditionally underrepresented minority groups” pursuing masters or doctoral degrees. Those groups include “African American, Hispanic American, Native American, Asian American, Alaskan Native, and Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander,” according to the program’s landing page.
Students apply to the program through their universities, each of which has an “institutional representative” who helps “verify … that applicants for the fellowship meet all eligibility criteria.” That structure means that participating institutions, which include the top public and private universities in the state, are directly involved in an application process that violates federal law, according to five attorneys who reviewed the program requirements.
“This isn’t a hard one,” said Gail Heriot, a law professor at the University of San Diego and a commissioner on the U.S Commission on Civil Rights. “The program was illegal and unconstitutional since its inception.”
Illinois is already fending off a lawsuit over a similar program, the Minority Teachers of Illinois Scholarship, that provides financial aid to minorities pursuing teacher licenses. A separate lawsuit, this one focused on racial hiring quotas at University of Illinois Chicago (UIC), was filed last month by a former professor at the school.
The DFI program could be yet another liability for the state’s embattled education bureaucracy—one with the potential to bankrupt Illinois’s most prestigious universities in the event of litigation.
David Bernstein, a professor of constitutional law at George Mason University law school, said that any schools participating in the program “run the risk of losing all federal funding, including eligibility for student loans and other financial assistance.” William Trachman, the general counsel for Mountain States Legal Foundation, said that officials facilitating the program could be held personally liable for “violating clearly established law.”
And Dan Morenoff, the executive director of the American Civil Rights Project, said that the program was a perfect target for the Trump administration, which has promised to root out racial preferences at colleges and universities. “Every listed institution has tasked an individual employee with affirmatively discriminating based on race in who and how to help obtain financial aid,” Morenoff told the Free Beacon. “That seems certain to violate Title VI”—the law banning race discrimination by recipients of federal funds—”and promises to draw the attention and ire of any number of federal agencies.”
Northwestern and the University of Chicago, the two most prominent schools participating in the program, did not respond to requests for comment. A spokesman for the Illinois Board of Higher Education, Jose Garcia, said he did not “have relevant information” about the program and referred the Free Beacon to the office of the state’s Democratic governor J.B. Pritzker, which approves funding for the program. The governor’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
While some states and universities have paused their race-based programs in the face of legal threats from the Trump administration, Illinois does not appear to have done so. An application for the DFI scholarship indicates that schools are in the process of nominating candidates—all from minority backgrounds—for a statewide selection committee, which must receive the applications by March 21. The document was still online Wednesday morning, weeks after the deadline set by the Education Department for schools to cease all forms of race-based programming.
“Institutions that fail to comply with federal civil rights law,” the department warned in a Dear Colleague letter in February, “face potential loss of federal funding.”
The Trump administration made good on that threat last week when it canceled $400 million in grants and contracts to Columbia University, citing the school’s “inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.” It has also canceled smaller grants to other schools over their diversity initiatives, such as a program at Minnesota’s University of St. Thomas that drilled educators on “white privilege” and made them pledge to be “brave equity warriors.”
More cancellations could be coming. On Monday, the Education Department sent letters to 60 universities, including Brown and Yale, warning that they could lose funding if they do not address anti-Semitism on their campuses. One of those universities, Northwestern, is also a participant in the DFI program. In 2024, it received more than $455 million in federal aid.
After the Supreme Court banned affirmative action in college admissions, many experts assumed that race-based fellowships and scholarships were next on the chopping block. Those programs have persisted into the early days of the Trump era, however, and have brought with them a host of activist scholars on the taxpayer’s dime.
At the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, grants from the National Science Foundation were used to hire minority academics in “Critical Dance Studies.” And at UIC—one of the 30 schools participating in DFI—a separate race-based program recruited scholars to teach courses on “antiracism” and “train the next generation of Biomedical Engineers in DEI principles,” according to program applications reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.
The applications revealed a scholar-activist pipeline at the heart of Illinois’s flagship public university, which requires all departments to submit “racial equity” plans to the school’s diversity office.
The DFI program appears to have created a similar conduit. Applicants must explain how their “underrepresented status” shapes their ambitions and aligns with the program’s objective—to “increase the number of minority full-time tenure track faculty and staff at Illinois’ two- and four-year public and private colleges and universities.”
In thousands of pages of applications reviewed by the Free Beacon, students tout their “antiracism efforts,” describe a commitment to “equity,” and decry the “systemic threats” of “racism, sexism, patriarchy, colorism, featurism, [and] texturism” to “inner-city women.” One applicant even likened a professor’s suggestion that she get tested for a learning disability to slavery, adding that his words displayed a “lack of compassion and cultural responsiveness.”
“Nevertheless, as an American Descendant of Slavery (ADOS) with recurring experiences of adversity, I managed to weather storms of marginalization like my ancestors,” she wrote in her application, one of the hundreds obtained by the National Association of Scholars through a public records request and shared with the Free Beacon. “Fast-forward, despite my professor’s unwarranted judgment, I found myself stepping into his world.”
Another applicant stated that she would “like to be a black queer psychology professor who could bring more diversity into academia and new perspectives on everyday life.” Still another referenced the “residue of post traumatic slave syndrome.”
In 2023, the latest year for which data are available, 102 students obtained aid through the program. Though Illinois says that scholarships are awarded through a “rigorous competition,” applicants only need a 2.75 GPA to apply.
This article was originally published at freebeacon.com
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