HOUSTON – The U.S. Department of Education announced on Friday that it is opening investigations into two Texas universities, including Houston’s Rice University, for allegedly engaging in race-exclusionary practices in their graduate programs.
The DOE alleges Rice University and the University of North Texas-Denton violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act by partnering with the PhD Project, an organization that provides insights and networking opportunities to doctoral business students.
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The organization described itself as being founded “with the goal of diversifying corporate America by diversifying the role models in the front of classrooms.” It said it had increased “the number of historically underrepresented business professors in the U.S. from 294 in 1994 to over 1,700 today,” according to a Jan. 14 capture on the Internet Archive as reported by the Texas Tribune.
The PhD Project has been in the spotlight recently as in January, a conservative activist shared an emailed exchange between professors at the Mays Business School at Texas A&M University in College Station where they were discussing attending a PhD Project conference on March 20 in Chicago.
The emails led to Gov. Greg Abbott threatening the job of A&M President Mark Welsh III, who later said the school would not be participating in the conference. Eight other Texas public universities who had been listed as the organization’s partners followed suit, either pulling out of the conference or disavowing the PhD Project.
According to the Texas Tribune, it appears the PhD Project has scrubbed language from the “About Us” section page of its website amid the controversy.
Right now, the project’s “About Us” section says it was founded in 1994 with the goal of creating more role models in the front of business classrooms.
The website says the project has helped more than 1,500 members earn their doctoral degree and they currently have 240+ students in PhD programs. It claims ninety percent of members complete their business PhD, compared to the national average of 70%.
The Texas Tribune contributed to this report.