Ohio State is under a second federal investigation from the Trump administration.
This investigation is part of President Donald Trump’s campaign to end diversity, equity and inclusion programs that his officials say exclude white and Asian American students.
As part of the investigation, more than 50 universities are being investigated for alleged racial discrimination.
In addition to Ohio State, the group of institutions facing scrutiny over ties to the PhD Project include major public universities such as Arizona State and Rutgers, along with prestigious private schools like Yale, Cornell, Duke and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
A statement from Ohio State said the university “does not discriminate on the basis of race, ethnicity or any other protected class, and our PhD programs are open to all qualified applicants.”
A message sent to the PhD Project was not immediately returned.
The Education Department announced the new investigations on Friday, one month after issuing a memo warning America’s schools and colleges that they could lose federal money over “race-based preferences” in admissions, scholarships or any aspect of student life.
In an effort to comply with Trump's anti-DEI directives, Ohio State recently closed two campus offices, the Office of Diversity and Inclusion and the Office of Student Life's Center for Belonging and Social Change.
“Students must be assessed according to merit and accomplishment, not prejudged by the color of their skin,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a statement. “We will not yield on this commitment.”
Most of the new inquiries are focused on colleges’ partnerships with the PhD Project, a nonprofit that helps students from underrepresented groups get degrees in business with the goal of diversifying the business world.
Department officials said that the group limits eligibility based on race and that colleges that partner with it are “engaging in race-exclusionary practices in their graduate programs.”
Six other colleges are being investigated for awarding “impermissible race-based scholarships,” the department said, and another is accused of running a program that segregates students on the basis of race.
The Education Department said those schools are: Grand Valley State University, Ithaca College, the New England College of Optometry, the University of Alabama, the University of Minnesota, the University of South Florida and the University of Oklahoma at Tulsa.
An initial press release from the Education Department erroneously identified the University of Tulsa as one of the schools under investigation.
The Feb. 14 memo from Trump's Republican administration was a sweeping expansion of a 2023 Supreme Court decision that barred colleges from using race as a factor in admissions.
That decision focused on admissions policies at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, but the Education Department said it will interpret the decision to forbid race-based policies in any aspect of education, both in K-12 schools and higher education.
In the memo, Craig Trainor, acting assistant secretary for civil rights, had said schools’ and colleges' diversity, equity and inclusion efforts have been “smuggling racial stereotypes and explicit race-consciousness into everyday training, programming and discipline."
The memo is being challenged in federal lawsuits from the nation’s two largest teachers’ unions. The suits say the memo is too vague and violates the free speech rights of educators.
Ohio State has also recently come under scrutiny by the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights as part of an investigation by the Trump administration into what it calls failure to deal with claims of "antisemitic harassment and discrimination" against Jewish students on campus. OSU was one of 60 schools to receive letters from the Trump administration in relation to the investigation.
Ohio State said it has not received a letter from the Department of Education.
“Ohio State has no tolerance for antisemitism, discrimination or hatred,” university spokesman Ben Johnson said in a statement.
The University of Cincinnati was the only other Ohio college or university to receive a letter.
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