WASHINGTON — The Justice Department launched an investigation Thursday into the University of California system to determine if it ran afoul of federal law by engaging in racial or sex-based discrimination when hiring faculty.
President Trump’s DOJ said that it was taking particular issue with the “UC 2030 Capacity Plan,” which seeks to “diversify its faculty,” specifically identifying “underrepresented minorities” and “female faculty” as two areas of special emphasis.
The 10-campus UC system, which takes more than $17 billion in federal funding, launched the program in 2022 as part of its efforts to increase racial and gender diversity on campus.
Included in the UC 2030 Capacity Plan’s roadmap to “grow and diversify its faculty” are two programs designed to expedite the entry of women and minorities into the faculty: the UC President’s Pre-Professoriate Fellowship Program and the UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship.
According to the Pre-Professoriate Fellowship’s info page, the program “aims to enhance faculty diversity and pathways to the professoriate for historically underrepresented students from California Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs).”
The webpage also specifies the demographic groups the fellowship “particularly” seeks to aid, listing the following categories: “Chicanx/Latinx, African Americans, American Indians/Native Americans, Filipinx, and Pacific Islanders in all disciplines; women in STEM; and Asian Americans in the humanities and social sciences.”
Recipients of the fellowship are allotted a $37,000 stipend, California resident tuition and fees, and a $10,000 “professional development grant.”
The goal of the President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship, per its website, is “to provide research opportunity and career development for scholars whose work will enhance the diversity of the academic community at the University of California,” specifically women and minorities.
The Trump administration, without immediately disclosing any incriminating information, implied the larger Capacity Plan, which includes the fellowship programs, was violating Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The postdoctoral program also creates a “massive incentive” to hire recipients of the fellowship, including when departments are already overstaffed, a UCLA professor who wished to remain anonymous revealed to The Post.
“You have units that are hiring people who they wouldn’t otherwise hire, because they basically get them for free,” said the professor.
According to the UCLA faculty member, when the fellowship was first created, there were many “conventional, completely rigorous, completely scholarly” fellowship participants engaged with the program.
Over the years, however, the professor began to notice that the number of “good scholars” coming through the fellowship was dwindling.
“I’ve also seen some f–king crazy people come through the Presidential Post-Doc, and it’s increasingly a program, not just for the focus on diverse populations, but for CRT [critical race theory] psychos,” the professor added.
Another factor that could be under consideration by the DOJ is that some UC campuses are designated as “Hispanic Serving Institutions,” which the UCLA professor said entails many “cluster hires specifically for Latino faculty,” among other things.
The UC system said in a statement it was “committed to fair and lawful processes in all of our programs and activities, consistent with federal and state anti-discrimination laws. The University also aims to foster a campus environment where everyone is welcomed and supported. We will work in good faith with the Department of Justice as it conducts its investigation.”
The investigation is only the latest Trump admin probe to target US higher education institutions, with DOJ and Department of Education probes of antisemitic discrimination within the UC system, at Columbia University and other schools still ongoing.
The University of California, Berkeley, was also hit with an ED investigation in April for allegedly failing to disclose hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign funding from China, which may lead to subsequent “enforcement” actions, according to Education Secretary Linda McMahon.
Trump’s administration has also yanked federal funds from Columbia and other schools for failing to address anti-semitism on campus.
Separately, the UC system was slammed with a lawsuit earlier this year by the group Students Against Racial Discrimination, which accused the California schools of secretly continuing race-conscious admissions despite the practice’s illegality.
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