Hans Bader is a former senior attorney at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
School systems and colleges now routinely subject students and staff to racist scapegoating under the guise of promoting “diversity” or “anti-racism.” Radio broadcaster Rob Schilling reports on one example in Virginia: the Albermarle County Public Schools’ hiring of diversity-trainer Glenn Singleton. Singleton’s firm got paid a whopping $15,000 just to give a one-hour seminar. Singleton […]
Read MoreAt the University of San Diego, conservative law professor Tom Smith is being investigated for criticizing “Chinese” propaganda, based on the false premise that this constituted racial harassment of Asian-American students. If Professor Smith can be disciplined for criticizing China’s government, then I could have been disciplined as a student for criticizing Russia’s communist government […]
Read MoreA law professor at Georgetown University has been fired for pointing out that black students got lower grades in her classes. This was not due to racism. Black students get lower grades at selective colleges because they are admitted with lower grades and test scores than their non-black classmates, due to racial preferences in admissions […]
Read MoreThree professors have been wrongly suspended over Halloween costumes they wore over six years ago. One of them is being investigated for having dressed as a Confederate general. As the College Fix notes: Three University of South Alabama professors have been placed on administrative leave over Halloween costumes they wore and posed with at an […]
Read MoreGeorge Mason University in Virginia plans to illegally give minorities a racial preference, until its mostly white faculty has the same racial balance as its more heavily non-white student body, which is more ethnically diverse than the average college. Under GMU’s draft “ARIE Task Force Recommendations,” GMU will “recruit, hire, and retain faculty” and “staff […]
Read MoreWhy are progressives so angry at the police, to the point where a significant minority of them want to abolish the police? Because they vastly overstate the number of police shootings of unarmed black people, often by a factor of 40 or more—exaggerating police killings by around 4,000 percent. That leads some of them to […]
Read MoreAmerica has moved to the left so rapidly that Europeans are now expressing alarm about it. As journalist Glenn Greenwald notes, “Obama-endorsed French President Emmanuel Macron has joined numerous French intellectuals & journalists in warning that ‘out-of-control woke leftism of US campuses and its attendant cancel culture’ poses a grave threat due to the social […]
Read MoreI am a lawyer with a “Juris Doctor” degree from Harvard Law School. But calling myself “Doctor” would be misleading, because I don’t practice medicine. Indeed, it would be insufferably pompous. As law professor Eugene Volokh notes, lawyers don’t call themselves “doctor,” even though the word “doctor” is in their degree. Jill Biden has an […]
Read MoreThe Virginia attorney general’s office has ruled that the Loudoun County school system committed illegal racial discrimination by admitting fairly few black and Hispanic students to its selective schools, the Academies of Loudoun. For reasons that have nothing to do with racism, the Academies of Loudoun are much more heavily Asian than the Loudoun County […]
Read MoreDo you like being able to criticize progressive policies about race or gender, such as affirmative action? That freedom may soon disappear in workplaces, schools, and rental housing, if legislation backed by Democrats becomes law. A bill called the BE HEARD in the Workplace Act would redefine speech that previously was considered perfectly legal as […]
Read MoreThe Loudoun County Public Schools are planning to impose illegal racial preferences in student discipline, and have already made changes to school admission policies that are being challenged in court. They also plan to restrict teachers’ out-of-school speech, by punishing them for speech that disagrees with school policies, and by punishing teachers who fail to […]
Read MoreThe federal Education Department is investigating the University of Pittsburgh for free-speech violations and false statements, after the University took action against Professor Norman Wang for publishing an academic paper critical of race-based affirmative action. The University removed Wang as Program Director at its medical center solely due to his paper. The Education Department is […]
Read MoreA faculty coalition at Cornell University is calling for race-based hiring and promotions. What it is demanding violates two laws against racial discrimination, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and 42 U.S.C. 1981. That’s because Cornell has no justifiable rationale for using race in employment decisions at all, much less to the extent that […]
Read MoreThis week, the Virginia Board of Education will meet to discuss a report that may promote destructive racial ideologies — the August 2020 “Report from the Governor’s African American History Education Commission.” James Sherlock laments “the fiercely negative approach to the teaching of African American history offered by the Governor’s Commission.” He says says its […]
Read MoreAs lawyers like Barack Obama have noted, law school is already a year too long, with lots of nonessential classes. As a result, law students often graduate with over $150,000 in student-loan debt. Yet law students may soon be required to take more unnecessary classes. 150 law school deans have asked the American Bar Association […]
Read MoreAn Illinois high school teacher was fired on July 16 for a Facebook post rejecting the idea of “white privilege.” That violated the First Amendment, even if some people viewed her Facebook post as racially inflammatory. Speech doesn’t become punishable just because it offends members of minority groups. For example, in Thompson v. Board of Education of Chicago (1989), […]
Read MoreThe University of Pittsburgh has removed a program director at its medical center because he published a scholarly, peer-reviewed white paper discussing the pitfalls of affirmative action for black and Hispanic students. This violated the First Amendment, which protects even harsh criticism of affirmative action. The white paper was gentle in its criticism of racial preferences, merely […]
Read MoreJoe Biden released his “racial equity plan” on Tuesday. Some of it deals with racial issues, like a major expansion of affirmative action and lots of race-related government spending. But it also contains radical changes to America’s employment laws that have little to do with race. Under his plan, even the tiniest employers with only […]
Read MoreAs part of a new “anti-racism” push, George Mason University plans to discriminate based on race in favor of faculty of color. On July 23, Dr. Gregory Washington, the president of GMU, announced that “We will develop specific mechanisms in the promotion and tenure process that recognize the invisible and uncredited emotional labor that people of color […]
Read MoreAcademic freedom is under assault. Faculty are being told that their research and courses must promote a particular ideology: that racial disparities are due to racism, rather than other causes, such as the voluntary choices made by individuals. The Supreme Court has said that racial disparities are not presumptively due to racism, because reality shows […]
Read MoreProgressive policies cause the racial achievement gaps that progressives spend so much time lamenting. That’s the conclusion of Minnesota lawyer and think-tank president John Hinderaker, based on recent educational research. He cites a report from Brightbeam, “The Secret Shame: How America’s Most Progressive Cities Betray Their Commitment to Educational Opportunity For All.” The report is authored by Chris […]
Read MoreIf you are a progressive professor, your university will let you keep teaching, even if you say things that reflect extreme hostility to members of a particular race and gender. You can say we should “kill and castrate all white men, and feed their corpses to pigs,” call for the death of Republican senators and engage in full-blown […]
Read MoreTo get the best possible grade, students may need to pander to their professors’ left-wing ideology. Professors are much more likely to be progressives than they are to be moderate or conservative. Law professors are no exception. Progressive professors view progressive views as a sign of intelligence, and conservatism as a sign of stupidity. For example, Prof. Robert Brandon, head of Duke […]
Read MoreInside Higher Ed reports that “It’s OK to Be White” posters have appeared on more campuses: The posters, which also appeared a year ago at this time, are put up without permission [from college officials]. Posters have been seen this year at Christopher Newport University, East Tennessee State University, Oklahoma City University’s law school, Susquehanna University, and Western Connecticut State University. […]
Read MorePeople’s vocabularies are shrinking at a time when more and more people have college degrees. As Zach Goldberg notes, people’s mastery of hard words has been falling for well over 20 years, and their mastery of easier words has been falling for over 15 years. Meanwhile, a higher proportion of Americans have college degrees than […]
Read MoreTwo students wore blackface at the University of Tennessee in a Snapchat image with a racist caption. The University is responding by putting tens of thousands of students, faculty, and staff through sensitivity training. It may even require the 186,000 minors participating in the state’s 4-H program to attend sensitivity training. It will also require students […]
Read MoreIn a pointless act of censorship, CNN removed the episodes of the TV show “Parts Unknown” that featured actress Asia Argento. It did so because it learned that she had settled an unrelated lawsuit against her by actor Jimmy Bennett, who claimed she had sex with him when he was 17. This news had no […]
Read MoreProgressive journalists have a message for you: Free expression is for them, not for you — and not for conservative bloggers and academics. Left-leaning journalists like Margaret Carlson are angry that the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled in favor of a conservative professor whose academic freedom rights were violated by Marquette University. It effectively fired him for a blog post that […]
Read MoreBetsy DeVos, who was nominated to be the Education Secretary, has been attacked because she and her husband made donations to a civil-liberties group, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. FIRE is “a nonpartisan organization that defends free speech, religious liberty, and due process on college campuses.” The DeVos family donations drew criticism from […]
Read MorePolitically-correct college administrators in Madison, Wisconsin asked the police to investigate speech mocking campus Clinton supporters. The police reportedly did so, even though that could lead to a violation of the First Amendment. This occurred at Edgewood College. Reason Magazine reports that an investigation at Edgewood has begun over a “Suck it up, pussies” Post-it note […]
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