Critics Slam “Racist” Illinois Plan to Fund Colleges Based on Skin Color

By Alex Newman

Critical Race Theory and systemic racism in education are going to a whole new level in Illinois. In fact, under a proposed new scheme supposedly aimed at fighting alleged “disparities” in higher learning, people with darker complexions (or lower grades) will literally be worth more than those with lighter skin.

State education policymakers recently unveiled a controversial plan to offer additional government funding for college students based on skin tone and ancestry. The proposal drew outrage and ridicule from critics who warned that the plan was illegal, unconstitutional, and ridiculous. Opponents are also warning it could put federal funding for Illinois colleges at risk.

Under the proposal, darker-skinned students of African, Indian, or Middle Eastern ancestry would be worth $6,000 more in tax funds to colleges and universities in the state than lighter-skinned students of European or East Asian ancestry. Hispanic and biracial students would bring in $4,000 more than pale-skinned Americans.

All of that new race-based funding would be in addition to the various scholarships — many of them tax-funded — that are only available to students with darker skin tones.

The naked racism, ironically, is supposed to help fight racism. According to the Commission on Equitable Public University Funding behind the scheme, its goal is to combat what officials claim is the systemic racism of the state’s Democrat-dominated university system.

“The Funding Commission has worked intentionally since November 2021 to put forth a funding model that is grounded in equity, is student-centered, and is informed by data,” said Illinois Board of Higher Education Chairman Pranav Kothari, who also co-chairs the commission that proposed the new race-based funding schemes.

The goal, Kothari continued, is to “ensure institutions receive funds needed to support the diverse needs of their student bodies and remove barriers to student access and success.”

But Illinois State Senator Chapin Rose (R-Champaign), blasted the racist plan to have schools receive taxpayer-funded financial rewards for discriminating against prospective students based on their “race.”

“There is a per-enrolled student bonus that will be paid for an African American student enrolled, for example, or a Hispanic student enrolled,” he said on a popular Illinois talk-radio program. “Leave it to the academics of the world to bring us a solution to ‘end systemic racism’ by creating a new system that is systemically racist.”

According to Senator Rose, among the first critics to denounce the racist scheme, this obvious violation of federal education and civil-rights laws could put all state universities in Illinois at risk of losing federal grant money.

The statute creating the commission that proposed the race-based funding took alleged systemic racism for granted. “Historical and continued systemic racism has created significant disparities in college access, affordability, and completion for Black, Latinx, and other underrepresented and historically underserved students in this State,” it declared without evidence.

Bizarrely, the proposal would also reward universities with additional financial incentives for accepting students with low Grade Point Average (GPA) scores in high school. Critics said this would result in an influx of students who are not prepared for college-level work and would be more likely to drop out.

The commission behind the racist proposal was made up of 33 members, including representatives from the Illinois General Assembly, each of the 12 state universities, far-left advocacy organizations, a student, a legal expert, a healthcare expert, and others. It remains to be seen whether the legislature will act on the recommendations.

Even if lawmakers do put the funding proposals into state law, critics from across the political spectrum warned that it would likely be struck down by federal courts.

“The highly credentialed academics spent two years on their plan,” noted Jeanne Ives, former Illinois representative and host of The Real Story radio broadcast. “But a simple reading of the Civil Rights Act and the recent Supreme Court decision forbidding race-based admissions should have prevented them from wasting their time.”

Ives also argued that the true purpose of the proposal was to secure more funding for government universities. “To sell that increased funding, the bureaucrats wrapped their findings in equity arguments and asserted that universities are currently underfunded,” she said.

Ironically, perhaps, Illinois taxpayers already pay more than twice the national average per student in support of the state university system — one of several elephants in the room that the commission avoided entirely. In fact, at $23,000 of state taxpayer spending per student, Illinois ranks number one in America. The national average is around $10,000.

Also ironic is that Illinois is the only state in the nation to have lost enrollment since 1980 as more and more people flee the state.

Former Illinois lawmaker Ives ridiculed the state’s rationale for claiming racism is responsible for slightly lower enrollment and graduation levels in some populations. “In actuality, Illinois public universities are bending over backward to take in minority students and give them fully funded educations, and they have been doing so for years,” she noted.

“Rather than focusing on equity and letting diversity faculty run a funding commission, maybe instead the University of Illinois can have their professors at their highly regarded business school sharpen their pencils and get to work on optimizing operations,” Ives continued.

Even those sympathetic to the commission’s supposed goals were skeptical. Speaking to The College Fix, Paul Vallas, a Democrat and former CEO of Chicago’s notoriously terrible government school system, noted that the U.S. Supreme Court had already ruled clearly on the issue of race-based discrimination in tax-funded higher education.

“Given the Supreme Court issued a decision declaring university enrollment based on race is unconstitutional, I would believe that providing supplemental public support to universities based on race may also be unconstitutional,” he explained.

Even setting aside the unconstitutional race-mongering, academia in Illinois and nationwide is now dominated by totalitarians and anti-Christian zealots. Many of them are working fiendishly to destroy what remains of liberty, civilization, family, and decency.

Considering the sorry state of “higher learning,” it may be time for taxpayers to ask whether all that money spent on “higher education” is a wise investment. In fact, at this point, adding more funding fuel to the dumpster fire that is Illinois’ “higher education” system is only going to make the crisis worse.

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Alex Newman is an award-winning international journalist, educator, author, and consultant who co-wrote the book “Crimes of the Educators: How Utopians Are Using Government Schools to Destroy America’s Children.” He writes for diverse publications in the United States and abroad. This article originally appeared at Liberty Sentinel.