Presidents Hall on the University of Alabama campus in Tuscaloosa. (Ben Flanagan / AL.com)Ben Flanagan
A national organization has filed a civil rights complaint against the University of Alabama, saying a scholarship for Black students is discriminatory.
The Equal Protection Project, a national organization that opposes race-based affirmative action, said the university should not require applicants for an English scholarship be a certain race or ethnicity.
“Regardless of UA’s reasons for offering, promoting, and administering such a discriminatory scholarship, UA is violating Title VI by doing so,” The Equal Protection Project wrote in its complaint. “It does not matter if the recipient of federal funding discriminates in order to advance a benign ‘intention” or “motivation.’”
The group filed the complaint with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights on April 25.
The subject of the complaint is the Norton-Textra Endowed Scholarship for Minority Students in English, which the complaint said requires that applicants be full-time African-American students pursuing degrees in English in the College of Arts and Sciences.
The group said that scholarship applications that specified race as a criteria were live as of April 22. On UA’s website on April 26, the scholarship only specifically lists enrollment and GPA requirements.
The group claims the scholarship violates Title VI Title VI of the Civil Rights Act by discriminating on the basis of race, color, and/or national origin. Title VI prohibits intentional discrimination on the basis of race, color or national origin in any “program or activity” that receives federal financial assistance.
A 2023 Supreme Court decision said that American universities should not specifically take race into consideration during college applications. In the last two years, some colleges have also stopped offering race-conscious scholarships and programming.
President Donald Trump’s administration has also issued guidance that universities should stop using race in decisions related to admissions, hiring, promotion, compensation, financial aid, scholarships, prizes, administrative support, discipline, housing, graduation ceremonies, and all other aspects of student, academic and campus life.
“Put simply, educational institutions may neither separate or segregate students based on race, nor distribute benefits or burdens based on race,” a Feb. 14 “Dear Colleague” letter stated.
The Equal Protection Project asked the Office of Civil Rights to investigate the university and look into whether it is “engaging in such discrimination in its other activities.”
The University of Alabama did not immediately return a request for comment on Saturday.
The university and other Alabama colleges already have been under scrutiny over diversity practices.
The Trump administration is investigating the University of Alabama at Birmingham over “race-based scholarships.”
Schools around Alabama closed DEI offices and programs for specific groups in 2024 in response to a state law that said state-funded organizations could not promote “divisive concepts.”
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