(The Center Square) – Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti filed a lawsuit against the Department of Education challenging a grant program for Hispanics that he said is discriminatory.
Skrmetti raises questions about the Hispanic-Serving Institution program that provides substantial federal funding for needy students only to colleges and universities that have a student body comprised of 25% or more Hispanic students.
“Despite their general eligibility, no Tennessee public institution of higher education is eligible for the HSI program. The reason? Tennessee’s colleges and universities each have an enrollment of undergraduate full-time students that is lower than 25 percent Hispanic students,” Skrmetti said in the lawsuit provided by his office. “The University of Memphis, for example, is ineligible for the grant despite its 61% minority enrollment because its student body is insufficiently diverse according to the federal government’s arbitrary requirement.”
The Department of Education awarded $45.7 million in grants for the Hispanic-Serving Institution program in fiscal year 2022. The grants, given to 78 schools, are worth up to $600,000 a year for five years, Skrmetti said. Congress allocated $228.9 million for the program in fiscal year 2024.
“The HSI program also puts Tennessee’s colleges and universities to an unconstitutional dilemma. Either they continue to serve their Hispanic students lawfully, in which case they are ineligible for grants under the program, or else they engage in affirmative action to satisfy the program’s discriminatory criterion, which is illegal,” Skrmetti said in the suit.
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The nonprofit Students for Fair Admissions is joining Tennessee in the lawsuit. The organization sued Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which led the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down the schools’ affirmative action admission policies in 2023.
“Chief Justice John Roberts unequivocally articulated in SFFA v. Harvard that ‘the student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual – not on the basis of race,’” the attorney general’s office said in a news release. “Tennessee’s Office of the Attorney General and Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. echo that same fundamentally American principle throughout this lawsuit.”
The suit is filed in the U.S. District Court’s Eastern Tennessee division in Knoxville.
