Fairly easy to fix, using the Liz Warren rule: Anyone who has the same amount of Cherokee heritage as Liz or more may be declared to be American Indian…”
I know the poster meant to be facetious but there is a serious issue raised in that post. When Elizabeth Warren, an obviously white woman, claimed Cherokee ancestry to secure a job at a highly prestigious law school, an appointment that her modest academic pedigree would have otherwise excluded her from, no one at either Penn or Harvard questioned it.
One wonders if a man as white appearing as … oh … say … Lee Bollinger … were to claim to be African-American by virtue of 1/32 blood if the claim would go as unquestioned and be as eagerly embraced in the academe as Warren’s was?

Fairly easy to fix, using the Liz Warren rule: Anyone who has the same amount of Cherokee heritage as Liz or more may be declared to be American Indian. By the same rule, every person considered for employment has at least one female parent, so using this rule they may be considered female for the purposes of hiring.
See, easy.

I work in a STEM field. There are virtually no viable candidates who belong to favoured minority groups in my field. Affirmative action applies almost exclusively to women in this context.
I have watched its progress over the years. At first it was principally a mechanism for low calibre men to exert influence and get goodies that were otherwise beyond their reach. For instance, many low quality proposals by low quality male researchers were funded because they attached female collaborators to their teams. Such men won favour with federal funding agencies and used that favour to exert influence in academic politics.
Gradually the level of discrimination against men has been ratcheted up. At this point, I refuse to participate in NSF panels because the funding rates for new male PIs are about 1/5 of that for new female PIs. There is a significant difference in the quality of the proposals offered by the two groups, but it favours the men (this is an understatement).
Hiring men is now impossible. Our department has been told that only women and minorities need apply. The message wasn’t sent directly, of course, but it was sent.
Increasingly, non-bureaucratic measures for the evaluation of work are being eliminated. This is being done for a number of reasons, but part of the justification is that such measures are “biased.” We had a dean tell us that “funding records aren’t subjective” whereas our faculty’s assessment of the technical quality of a piece of work is subjective and likely biased.
R.I.P. American scientific establishment.
One doesn’t do science by bureaucracy, by consensus, or by fiat. We are already seeing the results of trying to do so: increasing consensus and decreasing relevance.

time to sue Columbia. Any takers out there in Legal-land?

So who has standing for a lawsuit against racist Columbia?
If it is the Holder Justice Dept, then no lawsuit will ever happen.
If it is a job applicant, then that is likely as the job applicant, even if they win, will be banned from almost all universities in the US.

I was a University of Michigan law student back in the mid-1970s, when Bollinger was a mere professor. I noticed then, and continue to notice now, that he was/is strongly committed to affirmative action, so long as it did/does not interfere with his own employment and advancement. At the time, a number of U of M professors, including Bollinger, were bemoaning the lack of law professors who were minorities. When some of us suggested they resign to make way for minority professors, they were very silent. There remains a shortage of minority presidents of major Law Schools, I await Bollinger’s immediate resignation to make way for a minority replacement.

Content of their character? Nope.
Academic excellence? Nope.
Outstanding intellectual achievement? Nope.
Right skin color? You’re hired!
You know what? The United States is turning into a racist society. And it begins in academia.
Next, we’ll be setting aside commercial airline pilot and surgeon jobs for minorities only. After all, the standards for those sorts of jobs are merely a patriarchal construct with no correspondence to reality.

I wonder how my white male liberal friends in academia feel about this. Since they all have tenure they probably think it’s just fine. Liberal compassion is the ultimate oxymoron.

When and why have these Social Justice freaks decided to go to War against me because I’m a white male?
The time is well past to end this nonsense and get Govt the he-ll out of our way…