Equal Protection Project Hits 100-Case Milestone

Equal Protection Project Hits 100-Case Milestone

The Equal Protection Project (EqualProtect.org) recently reached a milestone — our 100th school, college, or university challenged over DEI discrimination.

I discussed this mileston and where EPP is headed as part of our recent full Legal Insurrection Podcast. Here’s the excerpt.

(Transcript auto-generated, may contain transcription errors, lightly edited for transcription clarity)

So earlier this week, we filed at equalprotect.org, the Equal Protection Project, our 100th challenge to a university or college, or I should say we challenged the 100th university or college, comprising 71 actual legal cases, because some involve more than one university.

So so that’s a big benchmark for us.

We have now challenged discriminatory programs at 100 colleges and universities. We have comprised in that those hundred challenges, because many involve multiple programs and scholarships, over 400 programs and scholarships that have been challenged, and this is all in two years.

So we’re very proud of that and I think it’s one of the reasons we’ve now been widely recognized in mainstream media, conservative media, liberal media, left wing media, as really the leader in challenging these discriminatory programs and scholarships nationally. So we’re very happy about that and proud that we’ve gotten to that moment.

Post-Inauguration 2025 has been the busiest we’ve ever been. We are filing basically two legal challenges a week up from one a week, one every two weeks, uh, in prior years. And what we do at Equal Project, most of what we do is filing civil rights complaints at the Office for Civil Rights at the US Department of Education. We have filed other sorts of legal complaints and we expect that there will be more avenues for us this coming year now that we have a friendly administration. But that’s mostly what we’ve been doing. We combine that with a very intense media push, and in many times the universities are shamed into changing their programs in approximately half of our cases. That is the initial result that the university changes its program, removes the discriminatory barriers. We have a lot that is still pending, so we don’t know the results there.

But of the ones that have concluded of the cases we filed in the last two years that have concluded come to a resolution, almost all of them have resulted in the university changing its programming and removing the barriers.

In a handful of cases, they actually terminated the program or scholarship. That’s not our primary goal. Our primary goal is to get the students the money from the scholarships, but to open those up on an equal basis without regard to race or color or ethnicity or sex.

Most of ours have involved racial and ethnic discrimination, but increasingly we’re filing sex discrimination cases also, and I think that’s going to be an area of expansion for us.

I think we’ll also be doing more in the K through 12. We have filed K through 12 cases with great success. One of them against the Providence City School District has resulted in the Department of Justice opening a formal investigation. So that’s a big step.

With the Ithaca City School District, the Department of Education has opened a formal investigation and I think we’ll be doing more on public school districts.

Although our focus to date has been higher ed, we do have a lawsuit, a major lawsuit pending against the State of New York for a program that runs at 56 colleges and universities to provide programming for high school and middle school students. That’s pending in the Northern District of New York federal court. We’ve already survived a motion to dismiss and we think we’ll be victorious there. You never know and can’t predict things, but we’re very solid ground.

And we’re always looking to bring more lawsuits as well, but we’re very cautious about those because they’re time consuming and they’re expensive. But I think you can foresee us doing more in the lawsuit realm moving forward.

Of course, having a friendly administration, it feels kind of strange to us because we’ve always had a hostile administration, at least as long as Equal Protection Project has existed for two and a quarter years. Now we have people who are willing to look at it, people to talk to, people who are on the same page as us ss to the destructive nature of DEI discrimination in higher ed.

I should make a distinction. We don’t challenge programs merely because they’re DEI. We only challenge them where there’s a civil rights violation, and that’s how we’re a little bit different. We think that we want to be on very firm legal ground. I’m not saying we won’t challenge things under the executive orders in the future, merely based on DEI, but we haven’t so far.

And that’s what the Equal Protection Project does.

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