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Black Student Achievement Program and Black Male Initiative violate law, complaint alleges 

A civil rights complaint has been filed against Northern Illinois University for two programs that appear to only be open to black applicants.

The complaint targets NIU’s Black Student Achievement Program and Black Male Initiative, hosted by the university’s Center for Black Studies.

It was submitted Nov. 25 to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights by the Equal Protection Project, an offshoot of the conservative watchdog group Legal Insurrection Foundation.

The project is described as working to oppose “discrimination done in the name of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” and “devoted to the fair treatment of all persons without regard to race or ethnicity.”

According to the complaint, the two programs constitute violations of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and Titles VI and IX of the 1964 Civil Rights Act as both programs, the complaint alleges, discriminate on the basis of race and ethnicity while the Black Male Initiative also discriminates on the basis of sex.

The Black Student Achievement Program webpage states the program “aims to support the retention and graduation of Black identified students” through various forms of academic and personal support, mentoring, and assistance.

The stated purpose of the Black Male Initiative, according to its webpage, is to assist “collegiate black males in achieving their academic, social and personal goals on their journey to graduating with their chosen academic degree.”

Cornell Law School professor and Legal Insurrection Foundation founder William Jacobson said the titles and descriptions of the programs signal “they are inherently exclusionary.”

“Take a reasonable student standard,” he said in a telephone interview. “What would a reasonable student looking at that think?”

“We think that at least upon the evidence we gathered as of the time of the complaint a reasonable student looking at the…Black Male Initiative would understand that it is for black males only.”

“A person looking at the Black Student Achievement Program would understand it’s for black students,” he said.

“We don’t think there’s any lack of clarity there,” said Jacobson. “It violates the law. It violates the Constitution. And it violates Northern Illinois’ own rules.”

The College Fix reached out via email to NIU’s Center for Black Studies’ interim co-directors, T. Ajewole Duckett and Christopher Mitchell, with requests for interviews. Duckett replied that she had forwarded The Fix’s request to a marketing and communications contact. As of the time of publication, The Fix has not heard from this contact.

Moving forward, Jacobson said, what happens next is mostly in the hands of the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.

“In its procedure, the first determination they will have to make is whether to open a formal investigation,” he said, adding the length of the investigation is impossible to predict. “Sometimes you hear back in two or three weeks. Sometimes things sit for six or twelve months or longer.”

However, “it is fairly routine for them to reach out to the school to see if the school wants to resolve [the complaint] prior to them making a decision,” he said.

Jacobson and the Equal Protection Project have submitted numerous similar complaints against schools such as North Central University and Indiana University, as well as school districts such as that of Ithaca City.

“In about half of the cases we filed,” Jacobson said, “the school has changed their program either based on the negative publicity or as part of a resolution with the OCR.”

Although Jacobson said he is not interested in telling schools such as NIU how to run their programs, changing the names and eligibility criteria for the Black Student Achievement Program and Black Male Initiative, he stated, likely would be the most straightforward way to address the issues he and the EPP raised.

“Since the complaints we write only address very open and clear discrimination, most schools don’t want to defend it,” he added.

When asked whether he expected the outcome of the recent elections would influence how the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights would handle the complaint, Jacobson said, “In theory, it should be irrelevant. In theory the enforcement of the anti-discrimination laws should be the same under both administrations.”

“But, I think the reality is that…the incoming Trump administration has made very clear that DEI and DEI discrimination is something they’re going to focus on,” he said.

“Our hope,” he said, “is that the current OCR will take this seriously and quickly open the investigation.”

MORE: U. Rhode Island hit with civil rights complaint over 51 race, sex-based scholarships

IMAGE: Equal Protection Project

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