by ALEXA SCHWERHA at dailycaller.com
Former economics professor Mark Perry is challenging college and university programs and scholarships that use race as a requirement, he told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Perry, currently a Senior Fellow at medical watchdog group Do No Harm, has filed 801 civil rights complaints with the Department of Education (DOE) Office for Civil Rights (OCR) against colleges and universities that offer any programming that considers race or gender as a factor, he explained to the DCNF. The complaints include more than 2,000 violations of and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits race-based discrimination, Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which prohibits sex-based discrimination.
“To date, OCR has opened 362 federal civil rights complaints against colleges and universities and has resolved more than 300 of those investigations, mostly in my favor,” Perry explained to the DCNF. “The OCR often moves pretty slowly so I have hundreds of complaints that are still in the evaluation stage, even though the OCR promises a 30-day decision on whether or not to investigate. I fully expect that the OCR will open hundreds of investigations in the future based on complaints that are still in the evaluation stage.”
Perry filed his first complaint in 2016 against Michigan State University for having a female-only lounge in the student union, he told the DCNF. It was not only a legal violation, but also “morally objectionable to favorably accommodate one group of students with preferential treatment while denying that favoritism to the other half of the student [sic] today.”
The lounge was closed for remodeling, but later reopened as a co-ed space, Perry recounted. His complaints have resulted in “hundreds, if not thousands, of scholarships, fellowships, awards, and programs” being “open to thousands of students and faculty who were previously excluded from those educational opportunities on the basis of their sex or race.
”There have been approximately 70 schools that operated K-12 summer STEM programs for girls and “several dozen” schools that offered female-only awards have been opened to students regardless of sex, Perry said. There are also “more than a dozen programs, scholarships, and fellowships that were previously offered exclusively to Black, Hispanic, or BIPOC students, staff, or faculty [and] are now open to everybody on a colorblind basis regardless of their race and ethnicity. ”