A compliant filed by the the Equal Protection Project, claims that 23 campuses at California State University operated a consortium open only to men of color.
California State University changed a program that was only open to men of color to now be open to all students, following a complaint filed to the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights.
“Cal State, like most universities, has very large bureaucracies devoted towards preventing and remedying discrimination,” Cornell professor William Jacobson and founder of the Equal Protection Project, told Fox News Digital. “So how is it that the university as a system engages in open discrimination?”
The complaint, filed Nov. 19, 2024, by Jacobson and the Equal Protection Project, claimed that 23 campuses at California State University operated a “Young Males of Color Consortium.”
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According to the consortium’s website, it was instituted to “create systematic changes in higher education and improve outcomes for Black, Latinx, Asian Pacific Islanders and Native American males.”
“Because the discrimination … is presumptively illegal, and since CSU cannot show any compelling government justification for it, the CSU system’s exclusions based on race, skin color, national origin and sex violate federal civil rights statutes and constitutional equal protection guarantees,” the complaint from EPP reads.
“The Cal State system at the highest level needs to look into how this happened to make sure it doesn’t happen again,” Jacobson said. “It should not take a group like mine, a small nonprofit like mine, to bring this sort of issue to attention and to get it resolved. This is something they should self-police. But apparently they didn’t.”
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The Jan. 15, 2025 closing letter from the Office for Civil Rights says that California State University cannot lawfully discriminate based on sex under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972.
Title IX prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex or gender for entities that receive federal funding. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination over race, color, and national origin for any activity or program receiving federal funding.
The complaint alleges that at least eight of the 23 programs violated Title VI and Title IX, such as “The Cal Poly San Luis Obispo Men of Color Success Initiative Male Success Initiative.” The initiative was only open to students who self-identify as men of color.
In the closing letter, the Office of Civil Rights said that CSU has changed the consortium to be open to all students.
“OCR confirmed that, since you filed your complaint, the University made changes to the Consortium and its programs/initiatives such that they are open to any student regardless of race, color, national origin, and sex,” the closing letter reads. “Because OCR has obtained credible information indicating that allegations are resolved, the facts underlying the allegations are no longer present, and OCR has no evidence the law is violated.”
The California State University System didn’t respond to a request for comment.
However, Jacobson told Fox News Digital that it remains to be seen if the issue is resolved.
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“When a school changes the language for a program and opens it up to everybody, are they really doing that,” Jacobson said. “Is that how they’re practicing? Is that what they’re doing when they think nobody is watching? And that’s a huge concern because one of the problems we have is we often feel like we’re playing Whac-A-Mole. We knocked down this program and get them to open it up and another one pops up someplace else and you deal with that and then another one pops up someplace else.”
He added that the public plays a significant role in oversight and accountability.
“We need people to be vigilant because you can’t just accept at face value that a school says, ‘We’re not going to do that anymore,’ and just assume they’re not going to do that anymore,” he said. “So that’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to teach the universities not to do this and hope that they don’t. But we rely on the public to alert us if they’re not fulfilling their obligations.”
