(RoyalPatriot.com )- A doctoral fellowship program set up by Google that includes strict caps on the number of white and Asian students that can be nominated likely violates civil rights law and could threaten the federal funding of participating schools, civil rights experts warn.
The Google Ph.D. Fellowship, which gives promising computer scientists around $100,000, allows participating universities, including most elite schools, to nominate up to four students annually.
However, each participating university nominating four students must ensure that two of them “self-identify” as black, Hispanic, Indigenous, female, or disabled.
But according to civil rights lawyers who spoke with the Washington Free Beacon, this criterion would almost certainly make the program illegal both for Google and for the participating universities.
According to Adam Mortara, the lead trial lawyer in the Harvard affirmative action case which will be heard in the Supreme Court, Google entering into contracts based on race violates the Civil Rights Act of 1866.
Mortara also noted that it is illegal for universities that receive federal funds to nominate students based on race because it violates Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
The universities that have participated in Google’s fellowship program include such prestigious institutions as Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Princeton, MIT, Columbia, Cornell, Duke, Johns Hopkins, UPenn, University of Michigan, UNC Chapel Hill, UC Berkeley, and NYU.
All of these prestigious schools run the risk of losing their federal funding for violating Title VI by following the criteria outlined in the Google fellowship program.
Every one of those schools also has policies banning discrimination by race, gender, or disability, the very discrimination Google is demanding they do.
Edward Blum, the founder of Students for Fair Admissions told the Washington Free Beacon that the Google program is “a blatantly unlawful and immoral quota plan,” pitting one student against another “by skin color and ethnic heritage.”
US civil rights laws were enacted specifically to forbid this kind of discrimination, Blum added.
Read the full report at the Washington Free Beacon HERE.
