As the Trump administration has taken sweeping action to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts at colleges, a little-known national nonprofit that has long sought to increase the racial diversity of business-school faculty members has become collateral damage.
The PhD Project has for three decades encouraged business professionals from underrepresented backgrounds to pursue doctorates in the discipline. For years, its work was seen as uncontroversial; its annual conference introduced midcareer business professionals of color to the academy, offering resources and a support network to those interested in switching jobs. Eventually, some of those prospective students would become professors themselves, helping diversify a traditionally homogenous discipline.
It’s been a successful model, according to data shared by the project last year: Since its inception in 1994, the number of Black, Latino, and Native American professors and administrators earning doctorates in business has increased sixfold, from 294 to more than 1,700.
Now, the organization is at the center of a probe announced in March by the U.S Department of Education, which accuses 45 universities of violating Title VI, the law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin. The alleged violation? Partnering with the PhD Project. Because the project limited participation to Black, Hispanic, and Native American students, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights alleged, the institutions’ graduate programs were “engaging in race-exclusionary practices.”
The investigation seems to have prompted some campuses to distance themselves from the PhD Project. About 30 percent of the project’s 230 member institutions have stopped working with it since the investigation was announced, its president and chief executive, Alfonzo Alexander, told The Chronicle.
Thus, the plight of the PhD Project has come to illustrate some of the emerging trends of the second Trump administration: the reframing of discrimination in terms of its impact on white and Asian people; the vigor with which the government has wielded the investigative process as a way to stamp out all manner of DEI work; and the speed with which many institutions of higher education are complying, even when it’s unclear what enforcement mechanisms, if any, have been put in place.
The federal investigation is also premised on old information, said Alexander, a longtime PhD Project board member who took the organization’s reins in January. The organization this year opened participation to anyone, regardless of race and ethnicity, bringing it into compliance with federal regulations. That change has been in the works for a while, Alexander said.
Still, the mass exodus of institutional partners leaves the nonprofit to confront a declining revenue stream and a broader remit. While Alexander says he’s heard criticism that expanding the project’s scope to serve students of all racial and ethnic backgrounds contradicts its original mission — to prioritize diversifying the ranks of business-school faculty — Alexander said the choice was an existential one. “One track leads us to potentially not being able to serve anyone,” he said. “The other track leads us to being able to serve those whom we’ve historically served, plus some others.”
Leaders of many DEI-oriented efforts face similar questions in the wake of a series of executive orders taking aim at that work and a February Dear Colleague letter that called for an end to all race-conscious programs. How the PhD Project fares under its new mission could serve as a bellwether.
Under the Radar
The notion that the PhD Project would attract controversy or cause its university partners to be federally investigated makes little sense to its founding president, Bernard J. Milano. In addition to its annual conference, the organization offers resources on applying to doctoral programs, though it does not grant its participants guaranteed admission to doctoral programs or preferential treatment of any sort, he said. “It’s not taking anything away from other people. It’s not taking spots that otherwise might go to nonminority individuals. It’s none of that,” Milano said. “It’s just a way to provide information and support to people who otherwise either wouldn’t know about the career or would be in it by themselves, totally alone, not knowing where to turn for information.”
Milano called the federal investigation “disappointing.” Historically, he said, the project has had “no enemies. The corporate world loves what we’re doing; the higher-education world loves what we’re doing. The people who come to our conference, even if they choose not to come and get a Ph.D., they feel so much better knowing that an organization like this exists.”
Its impact on individual universities can be modest. At the University of Utah, for example, 170 doctoral students have been admitted to the business school in the past 14 years; it is only aware of two who were involved with the PhD Project. The university spent nearly $300,000 on recruitment efforts and ad campaigns for its graduate school last year; of that amount, $5,000 went to the PhD Project’s annual fee. Several of the institutions under investigation don’t grant doctoral degrees and therefore aren’t recruiting students; they told The Chronicle their involvement has been limited to posting open faculty positions on the PhD Project’s public job board.
The Project’s work had largely flown under the radar until January, when the conservative activist Christopher F. Rufo posted on X that Texas A&M University was “supporting racial segregation and breaking the law” by sponsoring trips to the PhD Project’s national conference, which, at the time, allowed only Black, Latino, and Native American prospective students to attend. Rufo included a screenshot of an email from a Texas A&M associate dean affirming that participating in the project “is permissible under recruitment exemptions” in Senate Bill 17, a state law that bans DEI at Texas public institutions. Hours after Rufo’s tweet, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, wrote on X that “it will be fixed immediately or the president will soon be gone.”
Coincidentally, the next day was Alexander’s first at the helm of the nonprofit, and multiple institutions in Texas soon began withdrawing their partnerships. “We are an organization that has been doing great work helping our country and the academy for 31 years,” he said, “and then all of a sudden, that work is now deemed illegal, and we know that that’s a matter of opinion, so that’s frustrating.”
Still, Alexander, who had spent the previous two years as the PhD Project’s board chair, chose not to respond publicly, instead focusing on internal efforts to put out the fire in Texas. But within days, a newly inaugurated President Trump signed a series of executive orders that threw colleges’ ability to participate in DEI work into question. Sometime after that, but before the notification letters to its partners were sent out, the organization officially changed its mission and vision statements to be open to anyone, though it did not publicly announce the change and would not specify the date to The Chronicle. (A search of an internet archive confirms that the switch occurred by late February.)
But, Alexander said, “I really stop short of saying that our changes were in direct response to the executive orders.” The PhD Project had, in fact, been considering expanding its audience since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down race-conscious admissions in June 2023. “The reality is, there was nothing programmatically that could cause problems,” he said. Instead, the project’s leaders decided to change how it was marketed, focusing on outcomes rather than the demographics it serves.
The Office for Civil Rights letters announcing its investigation followed about a month after the project recast its mission; Alexander said he learned of it from a Google Alerts notification and has not yet been contacted by the government. Spokespeople for several of the institutions under investigation told The Chronicle their campuses had responded to the office’s initial request for information but had not received any further communication. “We have not been asked to cut ties with The PhD Project or been subject to enforcement related to the request for information,” a spokesperson for the University of Oregon wrote in an email, though it remained unclear as of press time whether the university was still working with the project.
The Education Department did not return a request for comment.
‘Level of Regret’
In the days following the March 14 announcement of the Office for Civil Rights’ investigation, about 70 institutions ended their $5,000-a-year partnerships with the PhD Project. Each departing institution expressed a “level of regret” in cutting ties, Alexander said, with some saying that a decision by the institution’s president or a state board of regents forced their hand.
The PhD Project’s federal tax filings show it brought in about $2 million in 2023; annual fees for 70 institutions would account for 17.5 percent of that sum. The project may look to corporate partners to make up that difference; it offers three tiers of support ranging from $10,000 to more than $25,000 per year. Past sponsors have included LinkedIn, the professional-services firm KPMG, and several investment firms.
Meanwhile, Alexander said, the project is working to ensure its remaining members are aware of the organization’s pivot. Its annual conference in March, for instance, was open to all. “We made a strategic decision to change so that we would be compliant, and we want those universities to know that and to feel confident that that they won’t be in harm’s way by working with us,” he said.
Some institutions remain committed to working with the PhD Project, among them the University of California at Irvine, which was not one of the 45 institutions named in the OCR investigation.
For Ian O. Williamson, the dean of Irvine’s business school, the matter is personal. Williamson, who is Black, pursued a doctorate after attending the PhD Project’s second annual conference in 1995. “That was my first exposure to the academy. The idea that being a professor was a job — I literally did not know any of that,” Williamson said. He’d had only one Black professor in his own undergraduate education, a disparity that persists today, according to data from the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, or AACSB. Of full-time business-school faculty members, 4 percent are Black, 3.5 percent are Hispanic or Latino, and 0.2 percent are American Indian or Alaskan Native. (AACSB, an international accrediting body, is a founding partner of the PhD Project.)
Williamson said the PhD Project is one of American business schools’ primary sources of domestic doctoral applicants, regardless of race or ethnicity. It’s also a reliable pipeline for both faculty members and students: About 10 percent of Irvine’s business-school professors are PhD Project alumni, while at least two or three of its doctoral students at any given time are associated with the project, he said. And the project boasts a 90-percent completion rate, compared with a 70-percent national average, according to AACSB data cited on the project’s website. All of that makes the project “an example of what to do to enhance the success of our academy, as opposed to an example of what not to do,” Williamson said. “This is a best case. This is one of those examples you would want to teach as to how you evolve doctoral education in this country.”
