3 NSF programs violate the Constitution, Justice Department finds

“Three National Science Foundation programs to increase racial minority student involvement in the hard sciences are unconstitutional, the U.S. Department of Justice ruled Wednesday.  These ‘race- and sex-based programs administered by the National Science Foundation violate the Constitution’s equal-protection guarantee, the department wrote in the decision,” reports The College Fix:

The department determined that the NSF should end the programs, each of which target college students and university faculty in the science, technology, engineering, and math fields, or STEM.

The decision quoted the 2023 U.S. Supreme Court ruling Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard: “Racial discrimination is invidious in all contexts. … [It] demeans the dignity and worth of a person to be judged by ancestry instead of by his or her own merit.”

One of the three programs at issue, the Louis Stokes Alliances for Minority Participation program, supports projects that aim to increase the number of “Black, Hispanic, American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander” students who pursue STEM degrees.

The department found similar discrimination issues with the other two programs: the Improving Undergraduate STEM Education program and the Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate program.

About $104 million was budgeted for the three programs this year.

The Justice Department has also rescinded race-conscious regulations it concluded were not in accord with federal civil-rights statutes.

In December, the Justice Department got rid of its harmful, legally-invalid disparate impact regulations, which were used to pressure local governments to get rid of merit-based standardized tests in hiring, and to pressure police departments and reform schools over crude racial disparities that didn’t show any individual was being racially mistreated.

Those regulations were issued under a law, Title VI, that the Supreme Court has long said only bans “intentional discrimination,” yet those regulations targeted neutral, evenhandedly-applied selection criteria that produced statistical disparities, even when those statistical disparities did not reflect any racist intent or intentional discrimination.

Last month, the Education Department got rid of its harmful disparate-impact regulations, which had been used to undermine school safety in some places.