Twenty New England Universities Challenged By Equal Protection Project Over BIPOC Fellowship

Twenty New England Universities Challenged By Equal Protection Project Over BIPOC Fellowship

Things are moving quickly for our Equal Protection Project (EqualProtect.org). I’ve mentioned many time that we have filed over 60 (probably over 70 at this point) cases through the Office for Civil Rights of the U.S. Department of Education, with over 30 ‘wins’ and tremendous media impact.

Since the inauguration OCR has opened investigations based on our complaints against the Ithaca City School District, Ithaca College, Grand Valley State University, and U. Minnesota – Twin Cities. The Department of Justice reportedly also has opened a case against the Providence (RI) Public School District and Rhode Island Department of Education (which took over PPSD because it was so mismanaged) based on our complaint about the Educator of Color Loan Forgiveness Program.

But we are not resting on past laurels. This past week we filed a Civil Rights Complaint (full embed at bottom of this post) against twenty (20) New England universities and colleges over racially restrictive faculty BIPOC fellow ship run by the North Star Collective of the New England Board of Higher Education (a quasi-govrnmental entity comprised of representatives from the New England States. NEBHE interestingly took down its website pages on the program sometime after February 13, 2025, but we had them archived.

From the Complaint:

We make this civil rights complaint against the twenty (20) higher education institutions (“Collective Members”) comprising the 2024-2025 North Star Collective (“Collective”), for administering and promoting the North Star Collective Fellowship (“BIPOC Fellowship”) which provides educational opportunities and programming to faculty and discriminates on the basis of race, color, and/or national origin in violation of Title VI. 2

The BIPOC Fellowship operates in a manner similar to the “Ph.D. Project” that was the focus of recent OCR action.3 The following institutions were listed on the Collective website as 2024-2025 Institutional Members. 4

Boston University
Bridgewater State University
Endicott College,
Framingham State University
Goodwin University
Rhode Island College
Roger Williams University
Sacred Heart University
Salem State University
Simmons University
University of Bridgeport
University of Hartford
University of Maine
University of Massachusetts Amherst
University of Massachusetts Boston
University of New Hampshire
University of Southern Maine
University of Vermont
Westfield State University
Worcester State University

***

Collective members receive up to two seats in the BIPOC Fellowship. The BIPOC Fellowship “promotes healing and repair by providing a nourishing community of care, mentorships and professional development for early career BIPOC faculty in New England.” It was “…created by BIPOC faculty for BIPOC faculty to support their professional development.”9 Although Collective members may only send two (2) faculty members to the BIPOC Fellowship, there is no limit on the number that may apply.10 ….

Fellows receive a $1,000 stipend, admission to two (2) multi-day writing retreats, attendance at a biweekly virtual writing accountability group, closing ceremony, networking opportunities, and research promotion.9

Further, Collective Members must pay a yearly membership fee of $6,500 as well as promote the BIPOC Fellowship…..

The BIPOC Fellowship requires Faculty to be “Self-identifying BIPOC faculty.” BIPOC faculty is defined by the Collective as “… those who are Black/African/African American, Latinx/Hispanic, Native/Indigenous, Arab/Middle Eastern, Asian/Asian American/Pacific Islander, and Multiracial.”12 Faculty members who are white need not apply.12

We then go through each school member with screenshots and sources as to its participation. As always, we then explain why a race-based designation like BIPOC violated Title VI.

The filing has received significant media attention in New England, running on several regional television news programs, including WABI5 in Maine:

The University of Maine is one of 20 institutions named in a civil rights complaint submitted to the U.S. Department of Education Wednesday.

The non-profit Legal Insurrection Foundation’s Equal Protection Project initiated the complaint. They allege UMaine and 19 other institutions, including the University of Southern Maine, are in violation of Title VI. That’s the part of federal law which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin in programs that receive federal funds.

Equal Protection Project says the 20 colleges and universities make up the 2024-2025 North Star Collective, which administers a BIPOC Fellowship. “BIPOC” stands for Black, Indigenous, and people of color.

The complaint alleges by not accepting applications from white faculty members, this amounts to a Title VI violation.

“A lot of the programs that we’ve challenged seem to take their view that in order to remedy past discrimination — which there certainly has been in this country, nobody’s disputing that — you need to engage in current discrimination. And that’s essentially what the BIPOC Fellowship at the North Star Collective does; it discriminates presently because it believes there has been past discrimination,” said William Jacobson, Cornell Law professor and founder of EqualProtect.org.

[click image to watch video]

“It is a program which is the BIPOC fellowship, so it is only open to people that are black indigenous people of color, so it includes everybody except for white people and that’s discrimination. Civil rights laws protect everybody. not just certain groups,” Jacobson said.

Western Mass News obtained documents from that complaint filed by Equal Protect, and out of the 20 colleges listed, 10 of them are in Massachusetts, and two of them are located in western Mass. Besides Westfield State, the other university mentioned was UMass Amherst.

“Because they receive federal funding, they are subject to civil rights laws. They also are subject to the U.S constitutional guarantee of equal protection of the laws when you are racial classifications and color classifications and ethnic classifications that very clearly violating the civil rights laws,” Jacobson added.

He tells us his organization is not in search of any monetary compensation they just want to end what they’re calling discrimination.

“In every of the cases we’ve brought the schools have their own nondiscrimination policies so we are not asking Westfield or any of the other 19 schools to do anything other than live up to their discrimination policies. They have these policies on the books they should be enforced, and they should be honored,” he stated.

[click image for video]

“One of the points of the North Star Collective is to advance programming and educational opportunities for non-White faculty, what they call BIPOC: Black, Indigenous, people of color,” said William Jacobson, president of the Legal Insurrection Foundation. “Anybody who’s been on campus in the last decade would be familiar with what that is, it basically means non-Whites.”

The North Star Collective offers a fellowship program exclusively to BIPOC faculty members which includes mentoring opportunities, seminars, networking opportunities, and a stipend. The main qualification for people interested in applying for the fellowship is either to be a person of color, or to “identify” as a person of color.

“They should have just said, ‘We have this program. It’s meant to help everybody except White faculty,’” Jacobson said.

The North Star Collective is a joint effort of 20 schools within the New England Board for Higher Education membership, including UNH. The university declined to comment on Thursday, saying it had not yet seen the complaint.

Nearly all of the member schools named in the complaint are state universities that rely on federal funding, according to Jacobson. Programs like the North Star Collective, which discriminate based on race, violate federal equal protection laws and the U.S. Constitution.

“We are alleging that it violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act because it’s discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin, and for the public universities who are among these 20, it also violates the 14th Amendment equal protection guarantee,” Jacobson said.

The NEBHE is not named in the complaint, since it does not get direct federal funding. State Sen. David Watters, (D-Dover) is a member of the NEBHE’s board of regents. He did not respond to a request for comment. Jacobson told NHJournal the NEBHE removed North Star Collective information from its website sometime in February.

“Fortunately, we had already archived a lot of them in the so-called Wayback Machine,” Jacobson said.

The lawsuit is just the latest in a series of legal efforts to end race-based policies — sometimes called “affirmative action” — by taxpayer-funded entities like universities, as well as public schools and government agencies. For example, when it was discovered that New Hampshire schools and state agencies were using materials that described White people as uniquely and inherently racist, the state passed a law banning that content. (A federal judge struck down the law as too vague in 2o24.)

And in 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Harvard University’s race-based admissions policies and practices violated the Fourteenth Amendment.

In some of his first executive orders, President Donald Trump directed the Justice Department to target initiatives like the North Star Collective that use racism to combat past racism. Jacobson said he found out about the group from a Sacred Heart University press release promoting professors who were accepted into the North Star program.

“I think they maybe didn’t get the message of Trump being elected, that this is not something you’re supposed to be bragging about,” Jacobson said.

I also appeared on the NH Journal Podcast (my segment starts at 30:42) with Michael Graham, a friend of ours since the early blogosphere days:

Reminder: we are a small organization going up against powerful and wealthy government and private institutions devoted to DEI discrimination. Donations are greatly needed and appreciated.

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