AU receives letter threatening suit over minority scholarships – Opelika Observer

by The Observer Staff | Jul 29, 2025 | Education
BY ANITA STIEFEL
MANAGING EDITOR
AUBURN — On July 23, Auburn University administrators received an email from a Texas-based legal group claiming the university’s scholarships aimed at increasing a racial diversity are illegal.
“We write to you today to inform you that it appears that Auburn University and its supporting foundation maintain and administer illegal, race-based scholarships,” read the letter, sent from Daniel Morenoff, executive director of The American Civil Rights Project (www.americancivilrightsproject.org), to AU President Christopher B. Roberts, Provost & Senior VP of Academic Affairs Vini Nathan and Foundation Board chair Beth Thorne Stukes.
“The American Civil Rights Project is a public-interest law firm that… exists to protect and where necessary — as is the case on many of the nation’s college campuses — restore the primacy of all Americans’ shared civil rights,” the letter stated.
“Public universities may not give or withhold benefits based on students’ skin color. This follows in part from the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, which forbids all governmental entities from engaging in racial discrimination. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 extends the same prohibition to any institution, public or private, that receives federal funds (including almost all American universities). That statute ‘prohibits a recipient of federal funds from intentionally treating one person worse than another similarly situated person because of his race.’
“These equal-protection principles most clearly prohibit public schools, along with private schools that accept federal funding, from considering race during the admissions process. The same principles equally prohibit the same entities from maintaining race-based scholarships. To the extent those scholarships are administered through contracts, [the law] also prohibits any decision by any party to contract or fail to contract with a counterparty based on their race. Nonetheless, Auburn appears to continue to award race-based scholarships, either alone or through its nominally private foundation,” the letter stated.
“As recently as April, the Auburn University Scholarship Opportunity Management (AUSOM) reflected 64 scholarships either openly preferring or expressly limiting their benefits to only those ‘from underrepresented groups.’ While the university has seemingly stripped that search functionality from the AUSOM website, the scholarships themselves remain on the AUSOM page. For example (and without our purporting to have identified all such examples), the AUSOM page continues to describe each of the following scholarships just as it did previously, with each maintaining racial preferences or expressly racial criteria for eligibility:
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