MIT faces civil rights complaint over program for women of color

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) faces a civil rights complaint over a program marketed for "Black, Indigenous, Hispanic/Latinx, Asian, Pacific Islanders, and other minoritized ethnicities."

The Equal Protection Project (EPP) this week filed the challenge to the school's Creative Regal Women of Knowledge program, contending that it runs afoul of Title VI and Title IX of the Civil Rights Act and "engages in invidious discrimination on the basis of race, color and sex."

The CRWN program's webpage currently features a disclaimer, stating that "[w]hile our program is designed to support and celebrate undergraduate women of Color, participation is open to all students regardless of race, gender, ethnicity, and national origin." An earlier, archived version of the page, however, has no such disclaimer.

EPP Founder William Jacobson, for his part, celebrated the apparent backtrack of MIT.

"MIT appears to be backing down on its racially and sexually exclusionary CRWN program by adding a new non-discrimination statement on the CRWN home page," he said. "That statement was added only after EqualProtect.org filed a Civil Rights Complaint, which generated enormous media coverage. Clearly, MIT is reacting to the negative publicity."

"Contrary to MIT's newly-added non-discrimination statement, the CRWN program was not, in fact, open to everyone as MIT now claims. The entire structure of the CRWN program is exclusionary and limited to women of color. Race and sex discrimination were baked into the structure of the CRWN," he went on. 

"MIT is trying to rewrite the exclusionary and discriminatory history of the CRWN program. This raises questions as to whether MIT is sincere in opening up the program to all students regardless of race or sex," he continued. "MIT needs to appoint an outside monitor of the program to make sure the website language change is now just window dressing. The Equal Protection Project would be willing to serve as a monitor in order to ensure compliance, at no charge to MIT."

Ben Whedon is an editor and reporter for Just the News. Follow him on X formerly, Twitter.