As part of the National Association of Scholars’s (NAS) ongoing reporting on “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI), I’ve been FOIAing DEI practices—scholarships, fellowships, hiring programs, trainings, strategic plans, etc.—and in August, I came across a massive DEI hiring program, the Diversifying Higher Education Faculty Initiative (DFI).
The DFI is a faculty hiring program that discriminates on the basis of race. It is massive compared to most DEI fellowships, which are funded and administered by an individual institution. In terms of size and funding, it is rivaled by only New York State’s PRODIG+ program and California’s PPFP and AFD programs.
I rattled off a request to the Illinois Board of Higher Education (IBHE), seeking the applications for the Diversifying Higher Education Faculty in Illinois Fellowship submitted during the 2023-2024 application cycle. Within a month, I received 1000 pages of documentation from the program.
In February, Aaron Sibarium was doing ongoing reporting on a number of DEI higher education programs in Illinois, and I approached him about running a story on the DFI. He expressed interest, so I provided him with a cache of FOIA’d documents from the DFI I had received. On March 13th, his article on DFI came out, titled “Illinois Runs a Scholarship That Excludes White Applicants. It Could Get the State’s Top Universities Defunded.”
[RELATED: Florida and NAS Forge New K-12 Standards to Expose Communism’s Dark History]
Less than one month later, on April 11th, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that it had acted to end the state of Illinois’s unlawful minority-only scholarship program administered by the IBHE. Outside reporting confirms this was in reference to the DFI.
The Justice Department reports that “the state and six universities suspended the program.” The IBHE DFI application page has yet to change to reflect this, so we can hope that Illinois will continue to comply with the DOJ’s suit. It was only 100 days into the Trump presidency, and one of the biggest racially discriminatory hiring programs in higher education appears to have been eliminated.
In a recent Wall Street Journal piece, “Investigate DEI at the UC Schools,” I suggested that the DOJ keep this record going and look at the Advancing Faculty Diversity and President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program at the University of California. Hundreds of racially discriminatory faculty hiring programs still exist, and NAS will continue as, with Illinois’s DFI and California’s AFD, to advocate for their investigation.
Follow Louis Galarowicz on X, and if you would like to support our work, please consider donating here.
Image: “Pam Bondi” by Gage Skidmore on Flickr
