Chronicle of Higher Education, The Diversity Detective: William A. Jacobson Is Committed to Rooting Race Consciousness From Higher Ed, One Program at a Time:

William A. Jacobson thinks America has a race problem.

Anti-Black racism, the Cornell University law professor says, is wildly exaggerated. Some Black Lives Matter activists are anti-American fascists. And it’s white people who are now more likely to be the victims of discrimination.

In 2020, students, alumni, and law professors tried — unsuccessfully — to get Jacobson fired for a series of blog posts they perceived as creating a hostile learning environment for Black students. Undeterred, Jacobson started one of the nation’s most aggressive campaigns to suss out and report race-conscious programs in higher education.

He and three other lawyers have filed 60 complaints with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights against identity-focused programs and scholarships. That includes an MBA fellowship program for Latino students, a George Floyd memorial scholarship for Black students, and a training course exclusively for white parents to learn how to fight white supremacy. Of those 60 complaints, 35 cases resulted in schools and colleges changing eligibility requirements for various programs or ending them altogether.

Jacobson manages four websites, publishes a weekly podcast, has written op-eds in The New York Times, and has been featured on Fox News more than 10 times. He has mobilized dozens of professors from across the country to track on his website criticalrace.org hundreds of social-justice statements, staff diversity trainings, and courses he says indoctrinate students with false ideas about American racism. His site has been cited more than 170 times by mainstream-media outlets.

The Legal Insurrection Foundation, Jacobson’s nonprofit, collected $1.2 million in revenue from donations and grants in 2023, according to tax filings. It’s not clear who has donated to his cause.

“There is no good that can come in our universities or our society by making people focus on their skin color and their ethnicity and by doling out particularly government-funded benefits based on race or ethnicity,” Jacobson said in an interview. “I think it’s setting people against each other, and it is not advancing us.”

That view is ascendant in Washington. Hours into his second administration, President Trump signed two executive orders banning all DEI initiatives in the federal government, calling the efforts “pernicious discrimination.” OCR has also said it would start withholding federal funding within 14 days from any college that has a program that could seemingly exclude white and Asian students or faculty.

In a virtual event hosted by his foundation in February, titled “Reports of the Death of DEI Are Greatly Exaggerated,” Jacobson acknowledged that “enormous progress has been made,” but added a note of caution: “This fight is not over.”

Jacobson, 65, describes himself as an “old-school liberal” who believes in small government and free speech.

After receiving his law degree from Harvard University in 1984, he spent 20 years in private practice focusing on investment, employment, and business disputes in the securities industry. In 2007, he was hired by Cornell University as a law professor to teach about the legal rights of investors.

A year later, he grew upset at what he perceived as widespread bias in the media against conservatives leading up to the 2008 presidential election. He launched a blog, LegalInsurrection.com, where he occasionally griped about Obama’s handling of the economy, the liberal media, and what he called false accusations of racism. …

With the onslaught of anti-DEI state laws, Trump’s executive orders, and the recent “Dear Colleague” guidance from OCR, colleges have accelerated their dismantling of race-specific efforts to recruit and retain minority students and staff.

Jacobson, however, believes that colleges are mostly just masking their DEI initiatives under different names while being run by the same people with the same agenda.

Many of his OCR complaints originate from tips sent in from professors around the country. …

Jacobson is hopeful that his OCR complaints can become test cases for the Trump administration to threaten colleges that partake in race-conscious programming with federal funding cuts.

“That’s the only thing the schools are ever going to care about. Otherwise, we’re essentially playing Whack-a-Mole,” he said. “We stop one program, another one pops up.”

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