Legal expert says she is still concerned about the program
The “Environmentalists of Color Scholarship” at University of California Berkeley has been renamed following a federal civil rights complaint, but this does not resolve the issue, according to the advocacy group which first raised concerns.
Now called “Rooted in Joy,” the scholarship includes the goals of bridging “institutional gaps in resources and funding for students to increase retention” and “[building] radically inclusive social and environmental justice spaces on campus,” according to its website.
It also aims to “financially support passionate students working in the intersection of communities of color and the environmental field at UC Berkeley.”
The university, up until recently, said the scholarship aimed to “financially support students of color working in the environmental field at UC Berkeley.”
The university is “aware of media reports that a complaint has been filed with [Office for Civil Rights] regarding this matter,” spokeswoman Janet Gilmore told The College Fix via email.
“As a first step, [the university has] updated the program website,” Gilmore said. “UC Berkeley is committed to complying with all state and federal laws regarding discrimination and related matters,” and is “looking into the matter regarding this particular program,” she also said.
“If it is out of compliance, we will correct it promptly,” the university told The Fix.
The changes followed a federal civil rights complaint by Defending Education, which alleged the scholarship violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race.
According to the Defending Education complaint, the scholarship previously stated: “BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, Persons-of-Color) are frequently asked to exclusively call upon their experiences with racial trauma and violence in applications. [The scholarship administrators] aim to resist that tokenization by making space for applicants to consider their identities from the lens of radical healing, joy, and growth.”
The website also previously included a definition of “person of color” in its Q & A section, as being a state of being that “goes beyond just skin color, and can include an intersectional expanse of racial, ethnic, and cultural experiences and identities.”
Still, concerns remain, according to Sarah Perry, vice president and legal fellow at Defending Education.
She told The Fix on a phone interview, “the fact that they’ve renamed [the Environmentalist of Color scholarship] the ‘Rooted in Joy’ scholarship doesn’t necessarily have direct impact on where the money is being spent and the qualifications for how it’s being spent.”
To Perry, the relabeling of the scholarship and the removal of certain information from the website simply signal that the university “know[s] which way the [political] winds are blowing.”
Perry said this is an “implicit recognition that what [the university was] doing was racial[ly] discriminatory.”
UC Berkeley is far from alone in this use of racially discriminatory scholarships, according to Perry. She said Defending Education has now launched “four total civil rights complaints against institutions of higher education,” listing the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Indiana University, as three other recipients of federal complaints.
Moreover, Defending Education is creating a study examining “where DEI is still working at American institutions of higher education.”
Perry says that many universities use tactics such as the renaming of scholarships to “fly underneath the radar.” Universities “have rebranded diversity, equity and inclusion offices to other names, many of them have renamed scholarships, as UC Berkeley has done, many of them have sort of retooled some of their programs.”
Perry says that the goal of Defending Education is closely connected to reducing discrimination of any kind in elementary, high school, and institutions of higher education: “We are trying to get politics and divisive ideologies out of American education.”
While 8th grade students in American education are averaging “about a 30 percent literacy rate in math and English,” Perry says the government is “spending hard-earned taxpayer dollars on race essentialism.”
What the country needs, according to Perry, is “to be predominantly concerned with academic excellence and making sure that individuals who graduate from institutions of higher education can go on to live fruitful, flourishing lives in the career that they desire.”
The university offers other scholarships based on identities, such as a scholarship for “Queer identifying students and allies and/or students working at the intersection of LGBTQIA+ and the environment.”
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IMAGE CAPTION AND CREDIT: The previous page for ‘Environmentalists of Color,’ at UC-Berkeley; University of California Berkeley
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