The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) announced in an April 11 press release that the state of Illinois and several educational institutions, including UChicago, had suspended participation in a state-run scholarship program for minority students pursuing graduate degrees. In a statement to the Maroon, the University said it has not participated in the program since 2023.
In the release, the DoJ said an unspecified scholarship program had “unconstitutionally discriminated on the basis of race in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment,” citing the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellow of Harvard College.
Multiple Chicago-area institutions, including the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, and Loyola University of Chicago, “informed the Justice Department that they had ended their participation in the program” after being notified of the DoJ’s findings, the press release stated.
The DoJ did not respond to a request for comment.
A UChicago spokesperson confirmed to the Maroon that the program in question was the Diversifying Higher Education Faculty in Illinois program (DFI).
“In 2023, the University informed the program’s administrators that it would no longer be accepting new fellows,” the spokesperson wrote in the statement to the Maroon.
The DoJ’s actions to end the DFI initiative are part of a wave of anti-DEI actions directed at higher education by the Trump administration.
In February, the Department of Education distributed a letter to colleges and universities instructing them to end DEI programs and policies or risk losing federal funding. Last month, the University of Chicago became one of 45 schools under investigation by the Department for violations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits race-based discrimination in programs receiving federal financial assistance.
DFI was established in 2004 to diversify tenure-track faculty at Illinois institutions of higher education. The program offers up to four years of need-based financial aid for minority students pursuing graduate degrees, with the condition that fellows must agree to accept a teaching or staff position at an Illinois institution of higher education or an education-related position in a state agency after they receive their degree.
Before the program began, African-American faculty made up 5 percent and Latino faculty 2 percent of all faculty at Illinois institutions of higher education, according to a 2003 report from the Illinois Board of Higher Education (IBHE), which oversaw the DFI program.
“For underrepresented students, in particular, a diverse faculty creates a more welcome campus climate and provides increased opportunities for students to find mentors who can also serve as role models,” the report said.
The IBHE did not respond to a request for comment.
In 2022, ABC7 reported that the percentage of non-white faculty still lagged behind the percentage of non-white students at multiple Chicago-area universities, including Northwestern University, the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC), and Loyola University of Chicago. For instance, while roughly 57 percent of UIC’s students were non-white, people of color accounted for only 33 percent of faculty. The University of Chicago declined to share faculty demographics with ABC7.
From 2021 to 2023, a total of ten DFI graduate fellows in fields including political science, social work, anthropology, Middle Eastern studies, and cinema and media studies studied at the University of Chicago, according to the IBHE website.
Rick V / Apr 20, 2025 at 8:25 pm
Imagine DEI if applied to the Universe.
How about the office of U. S. President.
Apparently DEI would require the Democrat and Republican Parties to select a non White, female Presidential candidate in most Presidential elections for years to come since nearly all Demoncrat and Republican Presidential candidates in history have been White males.
How about pro sports.
How would DEI address the complete racial imbalances in pro football, men’s basketball, women’s basketball, hockey?
Apply DEI to the pro sports noted above.
DEI supporters cannot cherry pick the venues THEY want to showcase the wonders of DEI.
No one can deny the obvious:
Nature does not produce Exceptional physical and mental skills equally among human beings by skin color, nationality, religion, or other categories
DEI is wrong and must be buried in the garbage dump of other really bad ideas.
Ashlynn Wimer / Apr 23, 2025 at 2:03 pm
I’m sorry, aren’t these posts supposedly hand-filtered by some sort of mods? Why the hell is a comment *directly advocating for race based differences in “Exceptional physical and mental skills” present here?
Reformed Rocket Scientist / Apr 23, 2025 at 11:14 pm
The current administration replaced a black 4-star Regular Army General Secretary of Defense with a (checks notes) white, alcoholic, Fox News host that washed out of the Army Reserve as a Major after being designated an insider threat. That’s, of course, replacing an unqualified DEI hire with the best and brightest in their eyes. He then placed his brother and personal lawyer in DoD positions and shared OPSEC details with them over an unsecured social media app.
They then replaced a black 4-star Regular Army General Chairman of the JCS with a (checks notes) white 3-star General who pledged loyalty to the administration over the Constitution and again, that’s supposedly replacing an unqualified DEI hire with the best and the brightest.
The AG is a former personal lawyer for the current POTUS. The new FBI Director seems to be missing something important for the job although I can’t quiet put it in words. RFK, Jr., an anti-vaccination advocate, is put in charge of HHS during a measles outbreak that has killed kids.
They hired people in important governmental positions whose only experience seems to be a billion-dollar bank account.
They fired nuclear weapons’ scientists and then didn’t know how to contact them to hire them back.
They installed a guy in a sensitive area of the State Department who didn’t get out of high school without stealing sensitive information from an employer.
They put guys in charge of “governmental efficiency” who had to be told by numerous federal judges to stop stealing the private information of hundreds of millions of people.
They are attempting to obtain fascist control over private universities like Harvard and now the University of Chicago and Northwestern.
And on and on and on and on in a never-ending saga of the first idiocracy in the United States.
They are crashing the economy and GDP with the economic policies of a person who bankrupted a casino, and they are worried that somewhere, somebody be offering fellowships that conflict with their ideal hiring practices that allegedly emphasize only the best and the brightest in their view who just happen to be white people.
I think the DoJ should be far more concerned about the qualifications of some recent new government hires at the federal level than what the University of Chicago might have done years ago in a program designed to increase minority participation in higher education in Illinois.
By the way, pro sports teams are not a good example since they routinely refused to hire blacks for decades.