The campus of Yale University seen in New Haven, Conn. Yale is one of 45 colleges that are under investigation for allegedly engaging in “race-exclusionary practices.”
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Joe Buglewicz/Bloomberg via Getty Images
When Leyland Lucas was a Ph.D. student at Rutgers University, there weren’t a lot of professors in the business department who looked like him. He’s Black and originally from Guyana, in South America.
He says a small nonprofit, called the Ph.D. Project, helped him successfully navigate and complete his Ph.D.
“I am incredibly grateful to the program, which was fulfilling a very critical role,” says Lucas, who is now a dean at the University of Guyana.
For about 30 years, the Ph.D. Project has provided support, mentorship and guidance to students from underrepresented groups who are earning doctoral degrees in business.
Before returning to Guyana, Lucas was a professor at Morgan State University in Baltimore, where he helped mentor other students through the Ph.D. Project.
“If you see people like you who understand some of the challenges you are facing, and you can see them and see how they have overcome those challenges, that serves as an incentive for you,” Lucas says.
But with its goal of diversifying academia, this small nonprofit has now drawn the attention of the Trump administration.
The U.S. Education Department announced it was investigating 45 universities with graduate schools that partner with the program, including the University of Kansas, the University of Utah and Ivy League schools like Cornell and Yale Universities. The department alleges these schools are violating the 1964 Civil Rights Act because the Ph.D. Project limits eligibility based on race, and therefore engages in “race-exclusionary practices.”
This comes as some universities have already begun to reexamine their DEI-related partnerships, scholarships and programs. Since taking office in January, President Trump has issued a number of executive orders banning DEI initiatives, and sent guidance to schools and colleges outlining how they must “cease using race preferences and stereotypes” in all aspects of campus life including admissions, hiring and activities. Some universities have shut down their diversity offices, discontinued the use of “diversity statements” in hiring or changed staff or department titles to eliminate DEI references.
The Ph.D. Project hasn’t escaped this purge. Just a few weeks ago the University of Iowa discontinued its partnership with the organization after the state’s Board of Regents voted to eliminate all programs with DEI functions. After the federal investigation announcement, the University of Kentucky also cut ties with the Ph.D. Project, even though it does not currently have any doctoral students actively engaged in the program.
In February the nonprofit issued a new mission statement removing the word diversity and adopting a broader approach.
“This year we opened up our application to anyone who is interested in helping to expand and broaden the pool of talent, both at the university level through faculty, as well as in corporate America,” says Alfonzo Alexander, the president and CEO of the Ph.D. Project.
“We’re really evolving so that we are able to do our work in today’s environment,” he explains. “And if that means that we can no longer specify certain requirements, then we just evolve in a way that we can still create opportunities.”
What the Ph.D. Project does
More than 1,500 Ph.D. students have participated in the Ph.D. Project over the last three decades. The organization holds annual conferences with sessions on how to write a dissertation, how to cope with the stress and challenges of a Ph.D. program and how to get work published in academic papers. Alums have gone on to become university provosts, deans of business schools, professors and business leaders.
“The PhD Project has changed my life because I was able to interact with individuals who looked like me and understood the journey that we were embarking on,” Adrian Mayse said in a statement posted to the organization’s website. Mayse got his Ph.D. at Jackson State University. He has worked as a professor at Howard University and Talladega College.
“They were an important transformation to my life,” explains Miles Davis, who first got involved with the Ph.D Project in 1995.
He had been working as a managing consultant when he decided to pursue a Ph.D. at George Washington University. He says the Ph.D. Project introduced him to the possibility of a career in higher education.
“I did not know one full-time Black faculty member. And so the idea of academia as a path was not even a consideration.” Davis has since worked as a professor, a dean and a university president.
Leyland Lucas and other alums of the program told NPR they didn’t get any special treatment or preferences based on their race. “We had to face the same guidelines as everyone else. And once we got into those Ph.D. programs, we had to perform and we have performed.”
He says, “I would really hate to see the Ph.D. Project somehow become misunderstood.”
Business school faculty are overwhelmingly white. Data from 2020 show less than 4% of faculty are Black, less than 3% are Hispanic, and just 0.3% are Native American or Alaska Native, according to the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, the country’s main business school accreditor. Those numbers don’t reflect the diversity of students enrolled in colleges, federal data show.
Lucas explains the main goal of the Ph.D. Project was to close those gaps, and he worries about what will happen when the work of “transforming the front of the classroom becomes misunderstood.”
How the Ph.D. Project got on the Trump administration’s radar
In late February, the administration launched an online form, at enddei.ed.gov, where people could submit reports of discrimination in schools or colleges. The form says submissions will be used “to identify potential areas for investigation.”
“My assumption is that it came through the tip line,” says Wil Del Pilar, a leader at Ed Trust, a left-leaning organization that studies equity in education. He has a Ph.D. and says he had never heard of the Ph.D. Project before the department announced the investigations.
“We’ve effectively created a tool where people can tell on people and report anything that they believe to be discrimination or DEI. I expect we’re going to see more investigations based on this.”
It’s not uncommon for federal investigations to originate from online tips. Historically, many Education Department investigations have stemmed from complaints.
According to Inside Higher Ed, one complaint filed in 2018 flagged a number of programs aimed at creating more opportunities for women in STEM at the Rochester Institute of Technology. The complaints came from a professor emeritus in Michigan who self-identifies as a serial complainer, having filed hundreds of complaints to the Education Department about programs he believes discriminate based on sex or race. The federal government investigated, and ultimately RIT opened up the STEM programs to men.
Research has shown that, up until recently, many investigations have been closed without finding violations. If corrective action has been deemed necessary by the department, schools often choose to change or eliminate a program or policy, and in rare cases, face a fine.
And while the department has the authority to withhold federal funding, it has rarely happened.
But the climate surrounding recent investigations appears to have higher stakes than in years past. Trump has said colleges that don’t get in line with his administration’s priorities may also lose large amounts of federal money. It’s a threat he’s already delivering on, at Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania.
That fear was palpable at the Ph.D. Project’s latest conference, held over the weekend in Chicago.
“It can be really scary for members of our organization to hear that their university may not continue partnering with us because of threats from the federal government of losing funding,” says Alexander.
But he says being all together and hearing how the organization has positively impacted its members helped remind him and others how important their work has been.
“These times have caused us, just like many other entities, to pivot and transition,” he says. “We may have to do it a little bit differently than what we’ve done in the past. But we will make sure that we continue on a path to where we’re impacting people in a positive way.”
He says he wakes up every day optimistic and recharged, and is convinced, “when we look back a year or two years from now, we’ll be better and stronger as an organization than we were before this current environment.”
