A sunset over the Denny Chimes on the campus of the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa on Thursday June 20, 2024. The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights said Friday that UA was one of seven schools under investigation for allegedly offering “impermissible race-based scholarships” and engaging in “race-based segregation.” The department did not share the specific allegations against the university. (Will McLelland/Alabama Reflector)
The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) said Friday that the University of Alabama was under investigation by the Office for Civil Rights for allegedly offering “impermissible race-based scholarships” and engaging in “race-based segregation.”
UA was one of seven universities facing the allegations. The OCR also accused 45 other universities of engaging in “race-exclusionary practices in their graduate programs.”
“Students must be assessed according to merit and accomplishment, not prejudged by the color of their skin. We will not yield on this commitment,” U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said in a press release.
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Messages seeking comment were left with OCR and UA on Friday. OCR did not say in the release which scholarships are classified as race-based or provide any examples of race-based segregation by the University of Alabama. A list of undergraduate scholarships offered at UA does not include any with explicit racial components.
Craig Trainor, the acting assistant secretary for civil rights in the OCR, sent a letter to universities on Feb. 14 to reiterate schools’ civil rights obligations to end the use of racial preferences and stereotypes in education programs and activities. The letter claimed that American educational institutions “have discriminated against students on the basis of race, including white and Asian students.”
The letter from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights called the existence of systemic and structural racism “a false premise.”
“Proponents of these discriminatory practices have attempted to further justify them—particularly during the last four years—under the banner of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (“DEI”), smuggling racial stereotypes and explicit race-consciousness into everyday training, programming, and discipline,” the letter said.
The University of Alabama closed dedicated spaces for its Black Student Union and an LGBTQ+ resource center last year after the state passed a law banning publicly-funded DEI programs and the teaching of so-called “divisive concepts.” UA professors and students at the University of Alabama Birmingham have sued to overturn the law, saying it violates their due process and free speech rights.
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