Last week, the University of Illinois’ (Urbana-Champaign) student-run newspaper, the Daily Illini, reported that the Equal Protection Project has submitted a federal complaint to the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights alleging that the university has engaged in illegal discrimination that violates Title IX and/or Title VI.
These alleged violations of anti-discrimination laws take the form of scholarships that discriminate based on sex, race, or nation of origin. The scholarship eligibility requirements violate not only federal anti-discrimination laws but also the university’s own policy, which states as follows:
The commitment of the University of Illinois System to the most fundamental principles of … equality of opportunity, and human dignity requires that decisions involving students and employees be based on individual merit and be free from invidious discrimination in all its forms.
The University of Illinois System will not engage in discrimination or harassment against any person because of race, color, religion, sex, national origin … and will comply with all federal and state nondiscrimination, equal opportunity and affirmative action laws, orders and regulations.
The complaint alleges that the university offers a whopping forty-two scholarships in violation of federal law and university policy.
The University of Illinois isn’t the only Illinois university on the wrong side of law, policy, and history. On July 2, 2024, America First Legal issued a press release announcing that it “along with co-counsel Jonathan F. Mitchell and Stone Hilton PLLC” have “sued Northwestern University for discriminating against white men in its faculty hiring and the Northwestern University Law Review for discriminating against white men when selecting its articles, editors, and members.”
Even more astoundingly brazen (and ironic), the former dean of Northwestern Pritzker School of Law urged secrecy to conceal the law school’s lawbreaking:
Since 2012, under the leadership of then-Dean Daniel Rodriguez, Northwestern’s law school allegedly propagated and enforced a mandate to hire as many non-white and non-male faculty candidates as possible. Dean Rodriguez knew that this discriminatory hiring edict was illegal and would expose the university to lawsuits. So he ordered members of the Northwestern faculty members to never discuss candidates for hiring over the faculty listserv, and explicitly mentioned litigation risk as his reason for banning listserv discussions of faculty candidates.
The press release alleges that the law school gives “discriminatory preferences to women, racial minorities, homosexuals, and transgender individuals when selecting its articles, editors, and members.” To be clear, ‘homosexuals, and transgender” individuals are a group of people defined by subjective feelings and volitional acts. Will Northwestern’s law school preferentially treat other groups similarly constituted, like zoophiles and infantilists?
American First Legal makes clear that it intends to expand its lawsuit to include other universities that engage in illegal discrimination:
- “Race and sex discrimination are illegal even when they are popular. Educational institutions acting under the banner of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ cannot avoid the consequences of their lawlessness. We will pursue prominent universities and law schools in court until they finally end their odious race- and sex-based discrimination” (Chicago attorney Judd Stone).
- “This is the first of many lawsuits that will be filed against universities that refuse to implement colorblind and sex-neutral faculty-hiring practices. Our client has standing to sue any university we want, and any professor who has incriminating evidence should reach out to us” (Lead counsel Jonathan F. Mitchell).
The discrimination monster that was slowly dying in much of America has continued to be fed and watered in our institutions of leftist indoctrination—those institutions governed and staffed by elitists who see themselves as the virtuous arbiters of morality. But now that the dirty little CRT/DEI secrets have escaped those laboratories of cultural experimentation, the hunt is on to kill the institutional virus of discrimination that masquerades as justice.