Do you know that 167 colleges and universities in California are certified “Minority Serving Institutions (MSI),” a federal program that rewards schools that enroll certain percentages of minority students with “in-kind services, volunteerism, diverse hiring, grants and contacts” ? [Note: only Asian American and Pacific Islander Serving Institutions (AANAPISI) and Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSI), not Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), are counted here.] 167, or nearly a quarter of all higher education institutions in the Golden State, is a shocking number!

In other words, these schools enjoy a federally bestowed advantage over the rest for having achieved demographically significant student bodies, even though the qualifying number of minority students may have vastly different individual backgrounds. Some may come from wealthy, new immigrant families while others come from poverty perpetuated generationally. Therefore, are the sort of MSI programs based on crude race and ethnicity consideration fair?

Leaders of CFER ally American Civil Rights (ACR) Project – Professor Gail Heriot, Mr. Peter Kirsanow and Mr. Daniel Morenoff – are now challenging the constitutionality of MSI programs in their letters to Congress. Addressing the U.S. House Budget Committee, House Committee on Education & Workforce and their Senate counterparts, the ACR Project criticizes these programs as “racially and ethnically discriminatory programs [that] shovel about a billion dollars annually,” of which Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs) are “the largest and best funded.” The ACR Project has asked Congress to repeal these unconstitutional programs and “replace [them] with increased funding for a program that subsidizes colleges and universities that serve low-income students, or with programming to support the needs of actual English-language learners.”

Of the 167 MSIs in California, many are public universities governed under Prop. 209, which bans racial preferences in public education. Notably, of the 23 California State University campuses, 21 are touted as HSIs. The University of California system celebrates five of its nine undergraduate campuses as HSI-designated. These taxpayer-funded institutions use the federal MSI designation to claim exemptions from Prop. 209. They should not be allowed to do so.

This timely proposal to defund MSI and fund programs based on economic/linguistic needs is a sensible one. Not only does the race/ethnicity-based requirement (i.e. having a student body that is at least 25% Hispanic) fail to satisfy the longstanding constitutional doctrine of strict scrutiny, MSI programs are also not narrowly tailored to address any past discrimination. Nor are these programs a justifiable “supplement to help schools whose students are struggling with English as a second language.” To make matters worse, the lure of more federal funding, contracts and other favors has created a counterproductive, anti-excellence incentives for many schools, such as the UC San Diego and the University of San Diego, to become obsessed with racial balancing at the expense of academic standards.

We hope you support the “Defund MSI” proposal. It is a necessary initiative for devising public policies to incentivize both equal treatment and merit-based government assistance (for higher education). It is about time that we as a country seriously confront the poison of race/ethno-centric policies/thinking. If you agree with the ACR Project’s legislative proposal, you can contact your congressional representatives and alert them to this initiative. As for CFER, we will further support this project with media outreach and awareness building. You can also support our work with a kind donation today!

As always, thank you!