Penn Carey Law’s decision to pause scholarship, close equal opportunity office draws fire: ‘A racial attack’
Critics included the daughter of Sadie Alexander, for whom the Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander scholarship was named. It was given to students who wanted to focus on racial justice.
The head of the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission said he will ask his commissioners to consider holding hearings on the decision by the University of Pennsylvania law school to pause scholarships in honor of its first Black female graduate and close its equal opportunity office.
“It just seems like that is a racial attack,” said Chad Dion Lassiter, the commission’s executive director, who earned his master’s degree in social work from Penn in 2001 and cofounded the School of Social Policy and Practice’s Black Men at Penn group.
“It hurt. ... You don’t expect to see that from the University of Pennsylvania,” he said.
Lassiter said people from the Penn community and the greater Philadelphia area have reached out to him, asking whether there is anything that the commission can do. The commission holds public sessions to hear concerns but has no power to penalize Penn.
Since Penn Carey Law announced last week that it would close its equal opportunity and engagement office this summer and acknowledged that it had paused its full tuition scholarship program named for civil rights activist and alumna Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander, opposition has been mounting from student, alumni, and faculty groups, as well as the Philadelphia branch of the NAACP.
“Penn Carey Law’s capitulation marks a dangerous retreat from its proclaimed commitment to ‘advance belonging through community support, dialogue across differences and expert guidance,’” the executive board of the Penn Carey Law’s Black Law Students Association said in a statement. “It evinces a return to a calculus that historically treats Black students as dispensable.”
The board members said they “vehemently condemn” the move.
“The university has severely undermined its proclaimed values of equity, inclusion, and collegiality,” the group said.
The changes at Penn Carey Law come as President Donald Trump’s administration pushes for an end to diversity, equity, and inclusion programs at universities nationwide. The White House has threatened to pull federal funding from those that do not comply.
Penn, like some other colleges nationally, began removing references to diversity initiatives in February in response to Trump’s executive order. The U.S. Department of Education also issued a “dear colleague” letter that ordered schools to stop using racial preferences as a factor in their admissions, scholarships, and other areas to comply with a Supreme Court decision striking down race-based admissions.
Attorney General Pam Bondi has specifically called out race-based scholarships and said they are prohibited. Penn Carey Law’s scholarships were open to entering law school students who wanted to focus on racial justice and honoring Alexander’s legacy.
The law school declined Monday to comment on the opposition, other than referring to its statements from last week. Dean Sophia Z. Lee said that though the office is closing, the school remains committed “to ensuring access and opportunity for all” and that the office’s work would be “integrated into broader school-wide initiatives.”
» READ MORE: Penn scrubs diversity initiatives from its website to comply with Trump order
Alexander’s daughter criticizes pause of scholarship
Of the scholarship pause, the school said in a statement to The Inquirer that current scholars would continue to receive funding and programmatic support and that “details about the program’s future will be shared as the Law School continues to assess next steps.”
Penn Carey Law launched its Sadie T.M. Alexander scholarships in 2021, as the law school coped with fallout from comments made by professor Amy Wax, questioning the academic performance of Black students, and as the nation’s racial and economic inequities were thrust into the spotlight during the pandemic and after the 2020 killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police.
Rae Alexander-Minter, daughter of Sadie Alexander, called the decisions by the law school “shocking” and said she would be reaching out to Penn about it.
Alexander-Minter previously publicly criticized the change in demographic makeup of the West Philadelphia public school that bears the name of her mother and was started in partnership with Penn near its campus in 2002. Its student body at one time was 57% Black, but in 2023, that percentage had fallen to 13%.
» READ MORE: Sadie Alexander’s daughter is ‘heartbroken’ at the state of the Philly school named for her mother
“What is distressful is that we are repeating history,” said Alexander-Minter, 88, a retired academic who lives in New York and obtained her doctoral degree from Penn in education and anthropology, a special program that she designed. “Why are we turning back the clock?”
Penn, she said, “is tarnishing their legacy.”
She said her parents would have wanted her to speak out about the Penn Carey law decision. As an undergraduate at Penn, Alexander faced discrimination. William E. Mikell, who was law school dean when she was a student, tried to stop her from participating on the university’s Law Review, the oldest and one of the most prestigious law journals in the country, even though her high grades meant she should have been allowed.
But through the support of her classmates and professors, she became the first Black woman to serve on the Law Review’s editorial board.
If her mother were still alive, Alexander-Minter said, she would have said: “I thought I had broken that ice, but it’s still there.”
Other criticism of Penn’s actions
The executive committee of the Penn Chapter of the American Association of University Professors also was critical of the law school’s actions, calling them “part of a disturbing trend of anticipatory obedience on diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts at Penn.”
The president of the NAACP’s Philadelphia branch cited “deep concern and disappointment” and called on Penn to reconsider.
“This decision sends a troubling message: that institutional memory and moral responsibility are negotiable,” said president Catherine Hicks, “that the support of historically marginalized students — those who continue to face barriers to higher education — is somehow expendable."
Lassiter, of the Human Rights Commission, said Penn needs to share its thinking behind these decisions and whether it considered the trauma they might cause. Responding to orders or pressure from Trump’s administration is not an adequate explanation, he said.
“The moment calls for courage,” he said.
Lassiter said that his grandmother, Thelma Patterson, was a housekeeper for Alexander and that when he was a child, he recalls visiting Alexander’s home. He still keeps a photo of Alexander that he got from his grandmother and said having that influence in his early life may have been one of the reasons he chose a degree path that would help him fight for social justice.
J. Huntley Palmer, a 1979 Penn Law graduate and retired attorney from Wyncote, said the law school’s decision is particularly difficult to understand, given that Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle L Parker last month announced that a statue honoring Alexander would be designed and erected in front of the municipal services building.
And, he pointed to Georgetown Law School Dean William M. Treanor’s decision to resist pressure from then-Interim U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Ed Martin in March when he said his office would not hire the school’s graduates unless it rolled back diversity initiatives.
“I have to give Dean Treanor a lot of credit for the position he took,” Palmer said.
The Black law students group called on Penn to continue the scholarship in its previous form.
The equal opportunity office, which administered the Sadie Alexander scholarships, fostered “what Penn Carey Law could be: a site of camaraderie, leadership, and coalition building,” the group said.
“In a profession that has systematically wielded its tools to suppress Black advancement and where only five percent of lawyers are Black, the Office of Equal Opportunity and Engagement and the Sadie Scholarship were steps towards reminding Black students that they are deserving of their place in the legal world,” the group said.