
The Equal Protection Project filed a civil-rights complaint against Grand Valley State University for offering 11 race-based scholarships. The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights received the complaint on January 13. It alleges that the school, based in Allendale, Michigan, is violating Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act by offering scholarships that exclude whites and are restricted to members of certain races.
“Regardless of GVSU’s reasons for offering, promoting, and administering such discriminatory scholarships, GVSU is violating Title VI by doing so,” explains the Equal Protection Project in its complaint. “It does not matter if the recipient of federal funding discriminates to advance a benign ‘intention’ or ‘motivation.’”
“Saying scholarships” are “only open to Blacks and other non-Whites is about as discriminatory as you can get,” says lawyer William Jacobson, the founder of the Equal Protection Project. “If they had a scholarship that said, ‘we’re only open to Whites,’ there’d be an absolute uproar, and there should be.”
Most of the 11 scholarships have strict race-based eligibility criteria. For example, the Johnny C. Burton Memorial Scholarship is exclusively for African American students. The Steelcase Inc. Scholarship is only for “persons of color.”
The GVSU Social Work Minority Scholarship is only for students who are ”Black/Non-Hispanic, Hispanic, Asian/Pacific Islander or Native American.”
The Supreme Court has ruled that Title VI of the Civil Rights Act generally forbids racial discrimination against whites, in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College (2023).
A federal appeals court ruled that it was illegal for a university offer a scholarship for blacks only, in Podberesky v. Kirwan (1994).