Professor William A. Jacobson is a warrior against wokeness, censorship, and anti-American policies. The Chronicle of Higher Education profiles him in “This Professor Is Committed to Rooting Out DEI From Higher Ed, One Complaint to the Office of Civil Rights at a Time.” He has identified so many college programs that contain illegal racial preferences that exclude whites, that The Chronicle calls him “the Diversity Detective.”
In 2020, left-wing students and law professors
tried — unsuccessfully — to get Jacobson fired for a series of [conservative] blog posts they perceived as creating a hostile learning environment for Black students. Undeterred, Jacobson started one of the nation’s most aggressive campaigns to suss out and report race-conscious programs in higher education.
He and three other lawyers have filed 60 complaints with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights against identity-focused programs and scholarships. That includes an MBA fellowship program for Latino students, a George Floyd memorial scholarship for Black students, and a training course exclusively for white parents to learn how to fight white supremacy. Of those 60 complaints, 35 cases resulted in schools and colleges changing eligibility requirements for various programs or ending them altogether.
Jacobson manages four websites, publishes a weekly podcast, has written op-eds in The New York Times, and has been featured on Fox News more than 10 times. He has mobilized dozens of professors from across the country to track on his website criticalrace.org hundreds of social-justice statements, staff diversity trainings, and courses he says indoctrinate students with false ideas about American racism. His site has been cited more than 170 times by mainstream-media outlets.
The Legal Insurrection Foundation, Jacobson’s nonprofit, collected $1.2 million in revenue from donations and grants in 2023, according to tax filings. “There is no good that can come in our universities or our society by making people focus on their skin color and their ethnicity and by doling out particularly government-funded benefits based on race or ethnicity,” Jacobson said in an interview. “I think it’s setting people against each other, and it is not advancing us.”
That view is ascendant in Washington. Hours into his second administration, President Trump signed two executive orders banning all DEI initiatives in the federal government, calling the efforts “pernicious discrimination.” OCR has also said it would start withholding federal funding within 14 days from any college that has a program that could seemingly exclude white and Asian students or faculty.
In a virtual event hosted by his foundation in February, titled “Reports of the Death of DEI Are Greatly Exaggerated,” Jacobson acknowledged that “enormous progress has been made,” but added a note of caution: “This fight is not over.”
Recently, Jacobson’s Legal Insurrection Foundation challenged 42 racially-discriminatory scholarships at the University of Illinois. It challenged the George Floyd scholarship at North Central University.
It also challenged a program at Jefferson Community College that excludes all males, even economically-disadvantaged males.
