Editor’s Note: The following is the introduction to the author’s comprehensive compilation, featuring excerpts from 170 sources, including news articles, op-eds, books, speeches, letters, conference summaries, panel discussions, policy statements, and legislation. These documents collectively explore race-based preferences in student admissions and faculty hiring, as well as the broader racialization and politicization of universities and societal institutions. You can access the full compilation in PDF format here.
We are again in the process of a great national awakening. This was powerfully memorialized by the June 29, 2023, findings by the U.S. Supreme Court that the use of racial preferences in student admissions by Harvard University and the University of North Carolina has been unconstitutional. It was amazing to see how quickly anger in some quarters rose to oppose two Supreme Court decisions that amount to nothing more than an affirmation of the letter and spirit of the Constitution’s 14th amendment and the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
The present document is a somewhat eclectic compilation of excerpts from 170 documents, the diversity of which precludes an executive summary. These include news articles, op-eds, books, speeches, letters, conference summaries, panel discussions, policy statements, and legislation relating to race preferences in student admissions and faculty hiring and the racialization and politicization of universities and societal institutions. The excerpts are given, unannotated, in chronological order of publication. Topics include “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) bureaucracies, critical race theory and doctrines, and institutional practices based on it, racial discrimination, racial categorization, civil rights, academic freedom, cancel culture, censorship, and use of political litmus tests in the hiring of faculty and administrators and in student admissions.
With two exceptions, the excerpted items are from January 2020 – June 2023, when the Students for Fair Admissions lawsuits against Harvard and North Carolina were being heard and deliberated by the Supreme Court and getting intense public debate. Many items are by North Carolinians and/or about North Carolina public universities where there have been intense discussions of race preferences among trustees, administrators, legislators, professors, and students during this period. But all the articles should be of special interest to North Carolinians and others wanting a glimpse of the national context in which these issues have been recently debated.
[RELATED: Fair Admissions Model Legislation Aids the Battle Against Racial Preferences]
The two exceptions concern visits to North Carolina a quarter century ago by a legendary warrior from the West, University of California regent Ward Connerly. The first is an article about his December 1997 visit to North Carolina, where he gave a talk at the John Locke Foundation and another at UNC-Chapel Hill. The NC legislature had recently failed to pass an anti-preferences bill modeled on California’s Civil Rights Initiative, and UNC president Molly Broad had mandated a review of affirmative action policies throughout the UNC system.
The second exception is an article about Connerly’s June 2002 visit to Raleigh where he described the Racial Privacy Initiative that had just qualified to appear on the ballot in California in 2003 or 2004. This would have prevented California state and local governments and public institutions from requiring people to specify their race on government forms of any sort. In the end, it was not approved by voters, but it remains today very much on a national “backburner.”
This compilation is effectively a prequel to new discussions on how to bring all of education in the U.S. into conformity with newly clarified law and how to make progress on all manner of related issues. Even people new to the problems can quickly get up to speed with this one package of pre-decision literature. Its primary intended audience is the general public, not just the experts and activists already familiar with it. Groups of all sorts wishing to have productive and coherent discussions of the complex topics covered here might consider requesting their members first familiarize themselves with this compilation. That will provide a common information base and not be an onerous assignment. And individuals will often be stimulated to read many articles in their entirety.
Collectively the articles excerpted have a bias favoring the deracialization and depoliticization of universities, especially their central administrations and faculty senates, but also of K-12 school systems and society generally. But there are a few articles by administrators who favor the status quo.
Reconstructing policy statements and support systems for students, faculty, and staff without use of the deliberately ambiguous and much-abused labels of DEI inclusion will be necessary. These labels have no clear meaning in law or general discourse. They have disparate meanings when used by different people and organizations. In many political contexts, they serve as codes for divisive, unethical, and even illegal policies and actions favoring political censorship and discrimination based on race or sex. The jargon makes it difficult for the general public, in particular, to understand what is going on in colleges and universities as well as in K-12 public school systems. And it does so deliberately.
It is auspicious as these new Supreme Court decisions are more a call to arms than a victory. Opponents addicted to racial categorization schemes adopted from the days of slavery are strong and ready for battle. A complete victory over government-imposed racialism is only a distant possibility. While classical liberals have the support of the Supreme Court and most of the electorate, racialists and censors dominate the progressive leadership of most institutions in both the public and private sectors.
Accelerated progress on these issues started in the early 1990s. Under the leadership of Ward Connerly and Gail Heriot, we passed in 1996 the California Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI, Proposition 209). That did for California what the Supreme Court did for North Carolina and Harvard: it eliminated diversity as a legal pretext for racial discrimination. By 2012, eight additional states—but not North Carolina, though its legislature tried—had done the same. In 2020, the California state legislature put on the ballot an initiative (Proposition 16) that would have overturned the CCRI. That lost badly with only 43 percent of the vote, thanks to an expanded multiracial coalition, Californians for Equal Rights, headed up by Ward Connerly, Gail Heriot, and Wenyuan Wu. In 2023, the ever-race-obsessed California legislature tried again to water down the force of Proposition 209 and then failed. With a ‘blue’ governor, a ‘blue’ supermajority legislature, and a homogeneously blue educational establishment, attempting to enforce the original meaning and intent of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the U.S. Constitution, and the CCRI-modified California Constitution has been a never-ending battle in progressive California.
As a purple state, the different political dynamics of North Carolina will be interesting to follow. NC has the possibility of becoming a model for the rest of the U.S. There is a large gap between the NC legislature on the one hand and the central administrations and faculty senates of different NC university campuses on the other as regards the desirability of race and sex preferences in student admissions and faculty and staff hiring. However, the majority opinion of the entire faculty, unfiltered by senate leadership, is never considered or asked for. Perhaps there should be a confidential survey at each UNC campus of all faculty members as to whether they approve or disapprove of the recent Supreme Court decisions. If faculty senates decline to conduct the survey, boards of trustees might be willing to supervise such a process.
Such advisory polls would seem useful if genuine administration is interested in campus climate and representative shared governance. There is a resurgent civil rights movement across the country to reinforce the letter and spirit of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, wider formal adoption by universities of strong principles on academic freedom, and less top-down imposition of values and policy. Purple states like NC are well-positioned to play a positive role in national reform. In California, such faculty-wide polling couldn’t have been done without a struggle. Almost all university boards of trustees, central administrations, and faculty senates in our solidly blue state would oppose getting honest, uncensored faculty opinion. Universities often do surveys of campus climate. Such surveys, however, never ask any questions that might expose collective faculty opinion on controversial issues or actions to be very different from that of the central administration. It would be an intolerable threat to the latter’s power.
[RELATED: Shaun Harper Has a Plan to Save DEI. It Includes Eradicating Dissenters.]
The substance of the compilation is too diverse to characterize briefly, but here are some key 2020 – 2023 North Carolina events among those covered by the articles excerpted:
- February 2021: Recent Davidson College graduate Kenny Xu founded a new national but North Carolina-based civil rights organization, Color Us United.
- September 2021: Passage by the NC legislature of House Bill 324 under the leadership of North Carolina state Senator Phil Berger. This would not prohibit teaching about any topic but would prohibit indoctrination by teachers and professors. Though the legislation reflected classical liberal values, not a single Democratic legislator voted for it, and Democratic governor Roy Cooper vetoed it.
- December 2021: Christopher Clemens was appointed provost of UNC-Chapel Hill by the UNC Board of Trustees. As senior Associate Dean for Research and Innovation, he had been instrumental in creating an interdisciplinary Environment, Energy, and Ecology program, the UNC Program for Public Discourse, and the School of Civic Life and Leadership, among other accomplishments.
- January 2023: UNC-Chapel Hill trustees voted unanimously to establish a School of Civic Life and Leadership.
- February 2023: Both the UNC system and North Carolina State University decided they would no longer require an employee or applicant for academic admission or employment to affirmatively ascribe to or opine about beliefs, affiliations, ideals, or principles regarding matters of contemporary political debate or social action as a condition to admission, employment, or professional advancement.
- June 2023: Within 24 hours of the Supreme Court’s decisions, the initial reactions of politicians, administrators, and professors in North Carolina and elsewhere presaged the deluge of both praise and criticism that followed.
Many of the excerpted articles come from the work of scholars, journalists, and activists in various civil rights and educational reform NGOs. These would include the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, the College Fix, Californians for Equal Rights Foundation, Legal Insurrection, Color Us United, Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, National Association of Scholars, 1776 Unites, Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, American Civil Rights Project, Minding the Campus, the Heritage Foundation, and Center for Equal Opportunity.
Black voices abound, some as contributions made independently, many others as participants in conferences such as those of 1776 Unites and the Old Parkland Conference (American Enterprise Institute) or as editors of and authors in the Journal of Free Black Thought. But many blacks will find just as edifying the presentations in recent white-dominated gatherings such as the Stanford Academic Freedom Conference. That seems an excellent sign.
This introduction and the bibliography, consisting of 63 pages of excerpts, are both given in a PDF here.
Image of South View of the North Carolina State Capitol — Raleigh (NC) by Ron Cogswell on Flickr
