“North Central University’s George Floyd scholarship violates federal civil rights law because it is only open to black students,” according to a complaint with the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights.
By excluding non-blacks from the scholarship, the university “engages in invidious discrimination on the basis of race, color and national origin,” alleges the complaint filed by the Legal Insurrection Foundation.
The complaint was filed on March 25. It alleges a violation of 42 U.S.C. § 2000d (Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964), which bans discrimination based on race in all educational institutions that receive federal funds, or let their students receive federal student loans.
The George Floyd Memorial Scholarship, created in June 2020, is restricted to students who are “Black or African American, that is, a person having origins in any of the black racial groups of Africa.”
“The George Floyd Scholarship eligibility requirements are openly racially discriminatory,” says William Jacobson of the Legal Insurrection Foundation’s Equal Protection Project. “Regardless of the purpose of the racial discrimination, it is wrong and unlawful.”
“NCU needs to come up with a remedial plan to compensate students shut out of the George Floyd Scholarship due to discrimination,” says Jacobson, who is a professor of clinical education at a law school.
The complaint also states in a footnote that the race-based scholarship violates Minnesota’s Human Rights Act: “Similarly, the [scholarship] defies the civil rights protections of Minnesota’s Human Rights Act, which makes it a criminal offense for an educational institution to limit access to any educational program on the basis of race.”
The complaint doesn’t cite the federal appeals court ruling that struck down a scholarship for black students, Podberesky v. Kirwan (1994), perhaps because that ruling was from the Richmond-based federal appeals court, while NCU is located in Minneapolis, in the jurisdiction of the St. Louis-based Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Instead, it cites a 2023 Supreme Court ruling that struck down admissions policies that gave blacks preference and discriminated against whites and Asians, a case known as Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023). That ruling is binding on universities across the country.
“After the Supreme Court’s decision in Students For Fair Admissions, it is clear that discriminating on the basis of race to achieve diversity is not lawful,” said Jacobson. “As Chief Justice Roberts wrote in the Court’s opinion, ‘eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.’”
The complaint also quotes the concurring opinion of Justice Gorsuch, who observed that it does not “matter if” discrimination by a college would “promote equality at the group level,” if the discrimination treats an individual applicant worse because of his or her race. Such discrimination is still illegal, regardless of its putatively egalitarian purpose.
