Editor’s Note: The following is an article originally published on the College Fix on April 7, 2025. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission.
A controversial nationwide PhD initiative criticized for excluding white scholars recently removed racially exclusionary wording from its website.
The U.S. Department of Education is currently investigating 45 universities alleged to be in violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act through partnerships with The PhD Project.
The organization made national headlines earlier this year after Texas A&M backed out of plans to send some of its faculty and staff to a PhD Project conference that excluded white and Asian attendees.
The Phd Project in early 2025 edited its list of participating universities amid scrutiny by conservative education reform activist Christopher Rufo and the U.S. Department of Education (ED), but a watchdog provided the College Fix with its full list of partners posted on the website in 2024.
According to The PhD Project’s website, the organization currently has nearly 300 university partners. However, the ED’s Office for Civil Rights is only investigating 45 of those partnerships.
The department’s press office did not respond to a question from the College Fix on its decision to investigate just those 45 schools but not others with ties to The PhD Project.
The investigations are part of a larger probe of 52 Title VI investigations launched by the department in mid-March targeting schools allegedly engaged in racially exclusionary or segregated practices.
Forty-five are based on The PhD Project, but three of the other seven were spurred by complaints filed by the Equal Protection Project, a conservative watchdog group that describes itself as opposed to DEI and “devoted to the fair treatment of all persons without regard to race or ethnicity.”
Two of the seven complaints centered on allegedly discriminatory scholarships offered by Grand Valley State University and Ithaca College. A third concerns the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities’ College of Design Initiative’s Design Justice program, which the Equal Protection Project claims offers racially exclusionary or segregated programming and events.
The EPP published letters it received on March 13 from the ED’s Office for Civil Rights regarding its complaints against Grand Valley State University and the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.
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William Jacobson, the president of the Equal Protection Project and its parent organization, the Legal Insurrection Foundation, told the College Fix in a telephone interview that he is “glad that the OCR is focused on segregationist practices in higher education, as well as discriminatory scholarships.”
As for the PhD Project, the current version of its website touts “Enriching Education for All” with vague statements about envisioning a “broader talent pipeline of current and future business leaders committed to excellence and each other” and “support[ing] the development of business PhDs from [sic] increasing the number of brilliant educators from all communities.”
However, archived pages from January boast of “Building a stronger, more diverse workforce” and “support[ing] the creation of business PhDs from historically underrepresented groups,” as well as “Data-Driven DEI” and how the organization’s “member network has proven invaluable in supporting minority groups which have been underrepresented in doctoral programs.”
These partners, the site states “can promote open job positions to [The PhD Project’s] network which includes more than 1,800 faculty and doctoral student members.”
This differs from older versions of the site that read, “Our university partners are committed to diversifying their own campuses, the academic world as a whole and corporate America. Over 300 doctoral and non-doctoral granting university partners can promote open job positions to our network of more than 1,700 Black/African American, Latinx/Hispanic American and Native American/Canadian Indigenous faculty and doctoral students.”
Older versions of the site also contained a drop-down menu listing many of the organization’s university partners.
An examination of archived pages from The PhD Project website indicates attempts to scrub the site for references to race-based practices of exclusion began in January around the time of President Trump’s inauguration.
The PhD Project did not respond to an email inquiry from the College Fix regarding recent changes to their website.
Professor Jacobson said the Equal Protection Project had previously filed OCR complaints against some of the 45 universities partnered with the PhD Project, but for different reasons.
Regardless of the reason for the investigations, however, Jacobson said the Trump ED’s decision to launch these investigations is significant as “it is something [that] may signal greater civil rights enforcement.”
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to add information about The PhD Project’s partner universities in 2024.
Image: “Yale University Old Campus” by Ad Meskens on Wikimedia Commons. Yale is one of the 45 campuses under investigation.
