Penn State Law School Hit With Civil Rights Complaint Over ‘Antiracist’ Strategic Plan

Penn State Law School Hit With Civil Rights Complaint Over ‘Antiracist’ Strategic Plan

  • May 18, 2026

Aaron Sibarium, Free Beacon

Penn State Dickinson Law School on Monday was hit with a civil rights complaint over its “antiracist” strategic plan, which calls to expand “employment opportunities” for “underrepresented” groups.

The complaint, filed with three federal agencies by the conservative nonprofit Protect the Public’s Trust, alleges that the plan violates Titles IV and VII of the Civil Rights Act. It comes as Penn State’s law school is facing blowback for a host of anti-racism initiatives, including a mandatory first-year course in which students were required to “acknowledge the reality of systemic racism.”

“It is discrimination to force white students to reflect on their perceived wrongs with a goal of them having to reshape their views and behaviors,” the complaint reads. “It is discrimination to hire with a preference of having lower qualified teachers and staff of a certain race over higher qualified teachers and staff of certain other races.”

Protect the Public’s Trust filed the complaint after the Washington Free Beaconpublished a copy of the strategic plan, which pledges to “recruit, retain, teach and research according to antiracist principles.” Replete with references to “critical pedagogy” and “iterative historicity,” the plan reads like a relic of academic argot churned out at the height of the George Floyd era and is set to govern the law school for the next five years. It is one of several diversity initiatives spearheaded by Danielle Conway—the law school’s dean and the director of its Antiracist Development Institute—who was elected president of the American Association of Law Schools this year.

Conway also led the creation of a required first-year class, “Race and the Equal Protection of the Laws,” which the school touts as “the foundation of an antiracist legal education.” In audio of the course obtained by the Free Beacon, instructors said that they work to “dismantle systems that racialize, subordinate, and oppress.”

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