The University of Minnesota has been hit with a federal civil rights complaint regarding a race-based program—and it isn’t the first time the feds have been called in to investigate.
Bill Jacobson, president of the Legal Insurrection Foundation and its Equal Protection Project, joined Liz Collin Reports to speak about the latest complaint his group has lodged against the U of M Twin Cities.
“The University of Minnesota Twin Cities has a program called Design Justice and that Design Justice program has different elements, but they actually segregate the students by race. The program in general is open only to BIPOC—Black, Indigenous, People of Color is the acronym of the day on college campuses—and within that program, they do have some events for so-called ‘white allies,’ but they’re segregated events. The white ally events are open to everybody. The BIPOC events are only for BIPOC students. So it’s a segregated, racially discriminatory program at a public university in Minnesota,” Jacobson explained.
Alpha News reached out for comment from the school on the Design Justice program and the latest federal civil rights complaint but did not hear back.
One description from Design Justice explains that “open events are meant for all identities/university affiliations and closed events are intentional spaces for BIPOC students.” There are separate “white ally affinity space events” designed for “white allies/accomplices within the College of Design.”
“This is one of the more outrageous programs that we’ve seen at the Equal Protection Project. We filed almost 50 of them so far, including several in Minnesota. I’ve rarely seen anybody quite so brazen as the University of Minnesota Twin Cities is here, where they literally have segregated openly,” Jacobson said.
“There are multiple levels of violation. The first is because this is a public university, this violates the equal protection guarantee of the 14th Amendment, which provides that no one shall be denied equal protection of the laws and on account of race or other factors. So, this is a violation of equal protection. You have different standards for different students in a public university,” he continued.
“You also have the Civil Rights Law of 1964 Section 6, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race or color, which this does, and that applies to the University of Minnesota because it receives federal funding, and the Department of Education itself provides federal funding to the University of Minnesota so Title 6 applies. So this is also a statutory civil rights violation.
“Those are the two claims we’ve asserted because we’ve asserted them at the Department of Education, which does not normally or may not even have jurisdiction over state law claims. But we do cite in our complaint in a footnote that this violates Minnesota law and it also violates the University of Minnesota’s own rules and regulations. By filing this complaint, all we’re really saying is, ‘How about you live up to your own rules in addition to federal law,’” Jacobson concluded.
When he launched the project in 2023, the University of Minnesota was one of their first few complaints for something similar. This will now be the sixth his organization has filed in Minnesota.
“Hopefully that will change under the second Trump administration and that federal funding will be put on the line,” Jacobson said.
Liz Collin
Liz Collin has been a truth-teller for 20 years as a multi-Emmy-Award-winning reporter and anchor. Liz is a Worthington, Minnesota native who lives in the suburbs with her husband, son and loyal lab.
