William A. Jacobson thinks America has a race problem.
Anti-Black racism, the Cornell University law professor says, is wildly exaggerated. Some Black Lives Matter activists are anti-American fascists. And it’s white people who are now more likely to be the victims of discrimination.
In 2020, students, alumni, and law professors tried — unsuccessfully — to get Jacobson fired for a series of blog posts they perceived as creating a hostile learning environment for Black students. Undeterred, Jacobson started one of the nation’s most aggressive campaigns to suss out and report race-conscious programs in higher education.
He and three other lawyers have filed 60 complaints with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights against identity-focused programs and scholarships. That includes an MBA fellowship program for Latino students, a George Floyd memorial scholarship for Black students, and a training course exclusively for white parents to learn how to fight white supremacy. Of those 60 complaints, 35 cases resulted in schools and colleges changing eligibility requirements for various programs or ending them altogether.
Jacobson manages four websites, publishes a weekly podcast, has written op-eds in The New York Times, and has been featured on Fox News more than 10 times. He has mobilized dozens of professors from across the country to track on his website criticalrace.org hundreds of social-justice statements, staff diversity trainings, and courses he says indoctrinate students with false ideas about American racism. His site has been cited more than 170 times by mainstream-media outlets.
The Legal Insurrection Foundation, Jacobson’s nonprofit, collected $1.2 million in revenue from donations and grants in 2023, according to tax filings. It’s not clear who has donated to his cause.
There is no good that can come in our universities or our society by making people focus on their skin color and their ethnicity.
“There is no good that can come in our universities or our society by making people focus on their skin color and their ethnicity and by doling out particularly government-funded benefits based on race or ethnicity,” Jacobson said in an interview. “I think it’s setting people against each other, and it is not advancing us.”
That view is ascendant in Washington. Hours into his second administration, President Trump signed two executive orders banning all DEI initiatives in the federal government, calling the efforts “pernicious discrimination.” OCR has also said it would start withholding federal funding within 14 days from any college that has a program that could seemingly exclude white and Asian students or faculty.
In a virtual event hosted by his foundation in February, titled “Reports of the Death of DEI Are Greatly Exaggerated,” Jacobson acknowledged that “enormous progress has been made,” but added a note of caution: “This fight is not over.”
Jacobson, 65, describes himself as an “old-school liberal” who believes in small government and free speech.
After receiving his law degree from Harvard University in 1984, he spent 20 years in private practice focusing on investment, employment, and business disputes in the securities industry. In 2007, he was hired by Cornell University as a law professor to teach about the legal rights of investors.
A year later, he grew upset at what he perceived as widespread bias in the media against conservatives leading up to the 2008 presidential election. He launched a blog, LegalInsurrection.com, where he occasionally griped about Obama’s handling of the economy, the liberal media, and what he called false accusations of racism.
“The Obama campaign, its supporters, and the pro-Obama mainstream media, play the race card the way Vladimir Horowitz played the piano, at times subtle and nuanced, at times dramatic and intense,” he wrote in one of his first posts. “But play the race card they do, time and again.”
Among the topics he has covered in over 800 posts, one consistent target over the years has been the weaponization of race for personal gain.
When a former Black employee of Benjamin Moore filed a lawsuit claiming the paint company named a brown paint color after him and then fired him when he complained, Jacobson blogged, “Politically correct speech has become an Albatross around our necks.”
When the NAACP claimed a Black flight passenger was asked to pull up his sagging pants, though a man wearing only women’s underwear was allowed to board another flight without comment, he blogged, “In America, men can wear womens’ underwear in public, but not saggy pants. Love it or leave it.”
His tone fluctuated between serious and sarcastic.
“Would I be subjected to an accusation of racism for using a word which itself is not racist, but if taken apart and out of context, could lead to such a charge?” Jacobson wrote in a post about Al Sharpton accusing the New York Post of publishing a racist cartoon depicting two police officers shooting a chimpanzee. “One has to worry about these things, as witnessed by controversies over the word ‘niggardly’ (which means ‘cheap’ but sounds like a pejorative for blacks).”
By 2012, Jacobson had amassed thousands of readers and a growing roster of contributors. He also received several threatening emails and phone calls. That year, at his request, he was accompanied by a security guard to Cornell’s commencement ceremony.
After the murder of George Floyd in 2020, Jacobson turned his attention to the Black Lives Matter movement. In a blog post titled “The Bloodletting and Wilding Is Part of an Agenda to Tear Down the Country,” he wrote: “The goal is to destroy capitalism, and to seek revenge. The Black Lives Matter movement, founded based on fraudulent narratives of the Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown cases, is led by anti-American, anti-capitalist activists.” A week later, more than 20 Cornell law professors wrote a letter to The Cornell Daily Sun complaining about Jacobson’s blog posts without using his name.
“These commentators are the defenders of institutionalized racism and violence,” the letter read. “They are entitled to their viewpoints. We do not name them, so as to deprive them of a larger platform for their racist speech. But as clinical teachers who have spent our lives promoting social justice, combatting discrimination, and teaching tolerance, we cannot allow their hateful vitriol to go unchallenged.”
(Faculty members who signed the letter did not respond to The Chronicle’s request for comment.)
Two days later, more than 100 Cornell Law School alumni signed an open letter calling for the university to terminate Jacobson, who is not tenured.
We tried to sound the alarm. Nothing happened.
“As one of only a few securities law specialists at Cornell Law School and the only professor running the securities clinic, Professor Jacobson’s writings alienate Black students and their allies, thereby discouraging them from participating in his clinic and depriving them of a valuable opportunity,” the letter read.
In response, Jacobson doubled down on his claims about the Black Lives Matter movement and insisted that he is not racist.
“I have always treated my students as individuals, without regard to race, ethnicity, or other such factors,” Jacobson wrote. “I condemn in the strongest terms any insinuation that I am racist, and I greatly resent any attempt to leverage meritless accusations in hopes of causing me reputational harm. While such efforts might succeed in scaring others in a similar position, I will not be intimidated.”
He then challenged the Black Law Students Association and a faculty member of their choice to an in-person debate over the Black Lives Matter movement. (The debate never happened.)
In response to the uproar, the law school’s dean at the time, Eduardo M. Peñalver, wrote in a statement that, though Jacobson’s comments did not reflect the values of Cornell Law School, he would not be fired for expressing his views or disciplined in any way.
“I found his recent posts to be both offensive and poorly reasoned,” Peñalver wrote. “We can simultaneously affirm our commitment to diversity and inclusion and equal justice while employing someone who has written the sorts of things about the protests that Professor Jacobson has, because, as an institution of higher learning, we also value academic freedom, which prevents us from censoring the extramural writings of faculty members.” Jacobson said he feels ostracized by his liberal colleagues, but acknowledges that the university has never censored him.
Some Black students at Cornell Law School said they found it hard to separate Jacobson’s provocative extracurriculars from his role as a professor.
“We tried to sound the alarm,” Matthew Traylor, a Black 2017 Cornell law-school graduate, said. “Nothing happened.”
With the onslaught of anti-DEI state laws, Trump’s executive orders, and the recent “Dear Colleague” guidance from OCR, colleges have accelerated their dismantling of race-specific efforts to recruit and retain minority students and staff.
Jacobson, however, believes that colleges are mostly just masking their DEI initiatives under different names while being run by the same people with the same agenda.
Many of his OCR complaints originate from tips sent in from professors around the country.
Jacobson complained about two programs at Northern Illinois University designed to boost Black student retention and graduation rates by providing students with mentors, community-service programs, and a sense of community with other students. Some alumni of the university’s 20-year-old Black Male Initiative said it kept them from leaving the university.
The university did not say whether any changes would be made to either program in response to Jacobson’s complaint. “NIU’s focus remains on supporting every student and their individual pathway to achieving their academic and personal goals,” a university spokesperson wrote in a statement.
I always tell people, If you know of any programs out there that discriminate in favor of whites, please bring them to us.
Though the majority of Jacobson’s complaints target programs that he believes discriminate against white students, faculty, and staff, he says that he’s determined to fight all forms of discrimination. “I always tell people, If you know of any programs out there that discriminate in favor of whites, please bring them to us,” Jacobson said.
In 2023, he complained about a workshop at New York University focused on teaching white parents of public-school students how to be better allies to people of color. Parents paid $360 to attend the workshop series, titled “From Integration to Anti-Racism: How We Show Up as White Parents in Multiracial NYC Public Schools.” Participants explored “readings, podcasts, and reflections on the impact of white supremacy on our thinking and practices,” according to the program’s archived website.
The program intentionally excluded parents of color, according to Barbara Gross, a professor at NYU, to shield them from additional “trauma.” “People of color are dealing with racism all the time,” Gross, who led the program, said in a video published in the Washington Free Beacon. “Like every minute of every day. … It’s a harm on top of a harm for them to hear our racist thoughts.”
Gross did not respond to a request for comment. NYU administrators discontinued the workshop following the OCR complaint, according to an NYU spokesperson.
“There are true believers who really, honestly, truly believe that what they are doing is virtuous,” Jacobson said on his recent webinar. “That what we are doing in trying to gain a race-neutral posture is not virtuous. You should see my inbox.”
This past December, Jacobson filed a complaint to OCR against the University of Rhode Island for offering more than 31 scholarships exclusively given to minority students. Mentioned in the complaint was the Miya Brophy-Baermann scholarship, which provides $1,500 to speech-language-pathology students who are racial minorities, men, or the first in their families to attend college.
Miya, who was white, always advocated for civil rights, said her mother, Michelle Brophy-Baermann, an associate political-science professor at Rhode Island College. Growing up in a predominantly Black and Latino neighborhood in Providence, R.I., Miya’s favorite book was about Martin Luther King Jr. She wanted to name her children Martin and Coretta.
Miya received her bachelor’s degree in communicative disorders from the University of Rhode Island and a master’s from Northeastern University in speech-language pathology.
The field of speech pathology is more than 95 percent white and female. Some research suggests that, partly because of bias, Black children are more likely to be diagnosed for speech impairments but less likely to receive speech-pathology services. Miya wanted to do something about it.
Three weeks after starting her first job as a clinician at a rehabilitation center, and hours after having dinner with her family, Miya was killed in a drive-by shooting while talking with her boyfriend outside of his Providence apartment.
How can you look at what we have going on currently and say that there’s not a need for things that help level the playing field?
In her honor, Michelle Brophy-Baermann and her family raised more than $70,000 to set up a scholarship in Miya’s name.
“My daughter was murdered,” Brophy-Baermann said. “I want her values to somehow be recognized, and this is the way of doing it.”
Brophy-Baermann only learned of Jacobson’s complaint and the subsequent OCR investigation after being contacted by The Chronicle.
A University of Rhode Island spokesperson said in a statement, “The university works diligently to comply with the regulatory landscape, and we remain committed to our foundational values, including fostering an inclusive community and respect for the rights and dignity of all.”
Brophy-Baermann is unsure if the scholarship will be taken off the university’s website or if the language will have to be changed.
“People want to act like history doesn’t matter,” she said. “How can you look at what we have going on currently, and say that there’s not a need for things that help level the playing field?”
For his part, Jacobson is hopeful that his OCR complaints can become test cases for the Trump administration to threaten colleges that partake in race-conscious programming with federal funding cuts.
“That’s the only thing the schools are ever going to care about. Otherwise, we’re essentially playing Whack-a-Mole,” he said. “We stop one program, another one pops up.”
