An advocacy group has filed a federal complaint accusing 30 elite colleges and universities of using a third-party program to get around the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision banning race-based admissions.
The Equal Protection Project says the schools are recruiting students through what it calls a “racially discriminatory pre-screened pool” of applicants supplied by the Institute for Recruitment of Teachers (IRT) Consortium, a program founded in 1990 to increase diversity among educators.
“There is inconsistent compliance with the Supreme Court’s affirmative action decision nationally, not just limited to particular schools, and so this jumped out at us,” said William Jacobson, president and founder of the Equal Protection Project. “What this consortium allows them to do is to recruit from a pool of applicants, which has already been screened for race and ethnicity.”
On Thursday, the group filed a complaint with the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, alleging the 30 member schools violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars institutions receiving federal funds from discriminating based on race.
The complaint cites the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which found that race-conscious admissions practices violate both Title VI and the Fourteenth Amendment.
Jacobson acknowledged that the IRT program operates as a scholarship rather than direct university funding. “This is a scholarship; no university money is funding it,” he said. “That’s actually not a legal excuse.”
According to the complaint, IRT data shows more than 90% of participants in its 2026 cohort identify as people of color. The program’s application reportedly asks candidates to write an essay on “diversity advocacy.”
“We believe that this warrants a full investigation,” Jacobson said. “We do not have access, obviously, to the internal workings of each of these schools to see whether they did, in fact, take race into account through this method.” He added that the schools’ participation in the consortium alone is “troubling.”
Schools Named in the Complaint
The list includes Boston College, Brandeis University, Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Duke University, Emory University, Harvard University, New York University, Purdue University, Princeton University, Rice University, Rutgers University, Stanford University, University of Arizona, and University of California, Berkeley.
Also named are the University of California Davis, University of California San Diego, University of Connecticut, University of Kentucky, University of Maine, University of Maryland College Park, University of New Hampshire, University of Notre Dame, University of Pennsylvania, University of Rochester, University of Vermont, Washington State University, and Yale University.
The schools and the IRT Consortium have been contacted for comment, according to the original reporting.
A Broader Campaign
Jacobson founded the Equal Protection Project in 2023 to challenge race-based practices in education. He said the group has challenged roughly 900 programs since then and succeeded in about 350 cases.
“We were successful even under the Biden administration, but we’re seeing, I think, greater success now under the [Trump] administration,” Jacobson said. He added that the group is selective about which programs it targets. “We only bring cases where we believe we have very strong evidence of a civil rights violation. We don’t challenge DEI programs just because they’re DEI. We only challenge them if we believe there’s a legal violation.”
“Our philosophy is that race or ethnicity should never be a factor in educational opportunities,” he said. “We do not accept that the answer for past racism is more racism.”
