Editor’s Note: The following article was originally published by the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal on February 17, 2025. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission.
Eleven universities across North Carolina have partnered with the PhD Project, which has been discriminating on the basis of race and ethnicity since approximately 1994. Although the PhD Project recently scrubbed its website, many universities had already, with clear knowledge of what they were doing, become paid partners to advance its discriminatory mission and activities.
The most recent application round for the PhD Project—for the conference to be held March 20-21, 2025—stated that eligibility was limited to those who “Identify as Black/African American, Latinx/Hispanic American, or Native American/Canadian Indigenous.” In previous years, eligibility was similarly limited to “Black/African American, Latinx/Hispanic American or Native American” applicants—with Canadian Indigenous applicants excluded. These restrictions by race and ethnicity violate civil rights laws.
Universities that partner with the PhD Project have been violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Most of all, universities that partner with the PhD Project have been violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Universities partner with the organization and become eligible for “partnership benefits” by paying $5,000 per year if a doctoral-granting institution or $3,000 per year if not. The students of partner universities become eligible to apply for conference participation—if they are of the right race or ethnicity.
Or at least that was true until the PhD Project scrubbed its website. Participants from prior years, anyway, continue to be part of the PhD Project’s network. These participants, over decades, were filtered on the basis of race or ethnicity.
Each participating university paid the partnership fee on the basis of the old eligibility rule.
What did partner universities get themselves into? They knew: “The PhD Project is a network of Black/African Americans, Hispanic/Latinx and Native Americans/Canadian Indigenous (U.S. citizens, permanent U.S. residents, or DACA recipients) who are interested in getting more information about business doctoral programs.”
What else did university partners know? There was no ambiguity: “The conference provides a rare networking and information gathering opportunity for Black/African Americans, Latinx/Hispanic Americans and Native Americans/Canadian Indigenous.”
The original deadline for the 2025 conference was November 30, 2024. Each participating university paid the partnership fee and made the opportunity available to its students on the basis of the eligibility rule in effect prior to that date.
Texas A&M University (TAMU) went further, acknowledging that it also sends its own “representatives” to the conference each year. We know this because the program gained attention on January 13, 2025, when an email from TAMU leaked to the Manhattan Institute’s Chris Rufo. TAMU officials were claiming that the clearly, blatantly discriminatory program somehow was allowed, even under Texas’s strict law against supporting race-based programs.
After TAMU got caught and senior members of Texas government got involved, every public university in Texas withdrew from membership. The PhD Project also removed the discriminatory language from its website and extended the application deadline to February 7, 2025.
The PhD Project used to admit that it “was founded in 1994 with the goal of diversifying corporate America by diversifying the role models in the front of classrooms.” It claimed success in that it “more than quintupled the number of historically underrepresented business professors” in the United States, and that about 300 “diverse doctoral students” are “currently receiving our help to pursue their academic careers.”
Presumably, past racially and ethnically selected students are still receiving such help. But now the PhD Project claims that its goal all along has been nondiscriminatory: “The PhD Project was founded in 1994 with the goal of creating more role models in the front of business classrooms.” This claim is misleading and false. The goal was not more role models per se; the goal until very recently was “diversifying corporate America” by selecting role models and conference participants on the basis of race and ethnicity.
No amount of website scrubbing can alter the actual mission of the PhD Project—officially the PhD Project Association. This mission, as the organization tells the government through its Form 990, is “to increase workplace diversity by increasing the diversity of business school faculty who encourage, mentor, support and enhance the preparation of tomorrow’s leaders.” On the Candid.org website where one can view such forms, under “population served,” the field reads “ethnic and racial groups.” The Form 990 for the year 2022—the most recent on record there—adds that “the organization attracts black/African Americans, Latinx/Hispanic Americans, and Native Americans to business PhD programs and provides a network of peer support on their journey to becoming professors.”
This is the discriminatory mission that the PhD Project’s partner universities signed onto. To the extent that the organization continues to provide mentoring and networking to past participants—again, people who were eligible only if they had the right race or ethnicity—the partner universities continue to pay for such benefits, which they knowingly expect to do through their annual partnership fees.
On January 19, 2025, I filed Title VI federal civil rights complaints against every U.S. college or university that was still listed as a university partner. These included 11 universities in North Carolina—public and private—all of which remain listed as partners:
- Duke University
- East Carolina University
- Elon University
- North Carolina A&T State University
- North Carolina Central University
- North Carolina State University
- UNC Charlotte
- UNC Greensboro
- UNC Wilmington
- Wake Forest University
- Western Carolina University
For each listed partner, the PhD Project also links to the unit of the university that has partnered with it—typically the business school or college of business. For example, the UNCW listing links to its Cameron School of Business, and the UNCG listing links to the Bryan School of Business & Economics.
My complaints went to all 12 regional offices of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR). Acknowledgment of a complaint usually occurs within a few weeks. At the time of this writing, seven regional offices have acknowledged the complaints. The other five have not yet responded. Among those not responding is the DC Metro office, which handles federal civil-rights complaints regarding educational opportunities at North Carolina universities.
OCR complaints can be handled quickly or very slowly—from days to years—even when the applicable facts and law are straightforward. Justice tends to be served more quickly when others act ahead of the agency. At any rate, North Carolina universities should stop discriminating immediately rather than waiting for OCR to make a determination, which risks their federal funding.
The right move in this situation, therefore, is for each North Carolina university to cancel its membership in the PhD Project and stop sending representatives and applicants. The whole idea of the project is, and always has been, to have a disparate impact on the basis of race. Until and unless the organization changes its official mission in its formal documents and changes its actual activities—not just cosmetically changing its public website—there is really no other choice.
Federal law and regulations against discrimination are not the only things for North Carolina universities to worry about.
Besides, federal law and regulations against discrimination—not to mention the Equal Protection Clause in the U.S. Constitution itself—are not the only things for North Carolina universities to worry about. State and local laws ban discrimination. Ironically, participation in the PhD Project also violates the universities’ own nondiscrimination policies.
For example, UNCW’s Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action Policy claims that UNCW “is committed to and will provide equality of educational and employment opportunity for all persons regardless of race.” UNCW adds, however, that “a results-oriented equal opportunity/affirmative action program has been implemented to overcome the effects of past discrimination and to eliminate any artificial barriers to educational or employment opportunities for all qualified individuals that may exist in any of our programs.”
Such efforts are no longer allowed. For one thing, the Students for Fair Admissions opinion from the Supreme Court made clear that such a results-oriented approach is off limits. For another thing, “the effects of past discrimination” cannot be claimed as an excuse for discriminating forever, not for decades after any purported discrimination by UNCW, and not to redress general discrimination across society. To be safe against discrimination claims for partnering with the PhD Project, UNCW would have to claim and acknowledge its own recent discrimination, if any, against black and Hispanic students in order to justify discriminating today in favor of such students.
Trustees of North Carolina universities should be working to ensure that discriminatory policies no longer exist at their institutions.
The trustees and senior officers of North Carolina universities should be working to ensure that discriminatory policies no longer exist at their institutions. Comporting with current case law and common sense means ending partnerships, especially paid partnerships, with organizations that explicitly discriminate.
Each university also should initiate a civil-rights audit to ensure full compliance. Intentional disparate impact by race—far worse than unintended disparate impact—remains pervasive in U.S. colleges and universities. Honest, comprehensive civil-rights audits must get illegal discrimination out of our institutions of higher education for good.
Image of North Carolina State Line & Marker by Jimmy Emerson, DVM on Flickr
This article was originally published at www.mindingthecampus.org
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