The University of Nebraska-Lincoln faces accusations of racial discrimination over its residency program for Black filmmakers, according to the Washington Examiner.
The Equal Protection Project, a group that was involved in the Supreme Court decision on affirmative action, has filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights claiming that UNL's Black Public Media Residency program in in violation of the law.
The class, which was offered in 2022 and 2023, was a partnership between UNL's Johnny Carson School of Emerging Media Arts and the nonprofit Black Public Media that was intended to help "Black filmmakers, artists and creative technologists" learn to use equipment and software.
The program "seeks to develop the talent of producers of color" for projects in which "a person of African descent is in a key creative position."
William Jacobson, a professor at Cornell University and the founder of the conservative blog Legal Insurrection that created the Equal Protection Project, complained about a requirement that at least one person on the creative team be Black.
"The racial discrimination of the (UNL) program is particularly pernicious because it requires that student teams organize themselves around race, with one team member required to be Black," Jacobson said in a statement. "This puts students in the position of choosing among their peers focused on race. Making students complicit in the discrimination is offensive and troubling."