Aaron Sibarium of the Washington Free Beacon documents a lingering problem in American higher education.

In September 2022, the Department of Industrial Engineering at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) made a bold promise to the school’s Office of Diversity, Equity, and Engagement: From then on, the department said, 50 percent of all faculty hires would be either women or minorities.

Citing the need for “culturally relevant pedagogy,” the department explained that “minoritized” professors “tend to have a greater sense” of “the human, social, and communal nature of teaching and learning.”

That is why the department was applying to UIC’s Bridge to Faculty program, which funds the recruitment and mentorship of postdoctoral scholars from “underrepresented” groups.

The money would help the engineering program hit its diversity targets, the department wrote in its application, and, by boosting the number of minority faculty, “enable students” to change “oppressive systems, discriminatory practices, and eventually society as a whole.”

The pitch paid off: When UIC announced its fourth cohort of Bridge scholars in 2023, industrial engineering was one of 10 departments chosen to host one.

Other winners included the History Department, which pledged in its application to “hire a Black or Native American scholar of colonial Latin America who specializes in the study of slavery or Indigenous peoples,” and the Department of Urban Planning and Policy, which said it would hire “a scholar with expertise in environmental justice and environmental racism who comes, precisely, from a community of color.”

Nearly 40 departments have applied to the Bridge to Faculty program since 2020. In most of those applications, which were obtained via a public records request by the National Association of Scholars, departments say outright that they will use program funding to hire minorities only—written pledges that appear to violate federal law.

“It’s illegal for employers to hire or refuse to hire anyone because of their race,” said Dan Morenoff, the executive director of the American Civil Rights Project, a conservative public interest law firm. “UIC looks to be openly flouting its legal obligations.”