John Rosenberg blogs at Discriminations.
By John S. Rosenberg In my first year of graduate school at Yale, the debate over admitting women to the college was still raging. A joke (or maybe it wasn’t) at that time was that the Old Yalies were perfectly willing for the college to go co-ed — so long as no male who would […]
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Today the Supreme Court hears arguments in round two of Fisher v. Texas. Abigail Fisher, you will recall, claimed (and still claims) that the University of Texas’s admission preferences for blacks and Hispanics amounted to racial discrimination against her because she is white. In round one the Supremes almost agreed but instead vacated and remanded […]
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Most readers of the higher education press likely believe that women are underrepresented in STEM field because of sexist stereotypes, “unwelcoming” attitudes and practices, and either implicit or outright bias. But the work of two Cornell psychologists, Stephen Ceci and Wendy Williams, co-directors of the Cornell Institute for Women in Science, has upset this apple […]
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The Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights has dismissed the longstanding discrimination complaints of Asian Americans, giving Ivy League and other institutions a green light to continue chromatically contouring the results of their “holistic” admissions processes so that applicants who are black or brown or red consistently are admitted with lower academic scores than […]
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Einstein, as everyone knows, famously defined insanity as doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results. Science is the mirror image of insanity (which is not to say there are no mad scientists). It expects — indeed, requires — the same results when scientists do the same experiments or calculations over and over. Thus, […]
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Readers of the higher education press and literature may be forgiven for supposing that there is more research on why there are not more women in STEM fields than there is actual research in the STEM fields themselves. The latest addition to this growing pile of studies appeared a few months ago in Science, and […]
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If there were a Heisman Trophy for the most articulate angry black undergraduate, Sy Stokes, a recent UCLA graduate, would surely have won. Subject of a fawning, sprawling 3200-word profile by Eric Hoover in the Chronicle of Higher Education (“A Young Man of Words” — access may require subscription), Stokes made a name for himself […]
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On June 2 a group of 55 scholars released an Open Letter criticizing the College Board’s newly revised “Course and Exam Description, Including the Curriculum Framework” for Advanced Placement in United States History. On June 3 Daniel Henninger began his Wall Street Journalcolumn by asking, “Would a second Clinton presidency continue and expand Barack Obama’s […]
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Most reports, studies, proposals, etc., calling for more “diversity” — whether of faculties, students, coaches, whatever — either fail to provide any justification for the discrimination necessary to increase it or fall flat, sometimes fatuously, when they do attempt to provide a justification. In reviewing a typical one, for example, MIT’s Report on The Initiative […]
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For those searching frantically for discrimination on campus, the newest culprits are “microaggressions,” described by Heather Mac Donald in “The Microaggression Farce” as affronts or insults minorities find racist but are so small they are “invisible to the naked eye.” Now, according to a May 5 article at Inside Higher Ed, “more than half of […]
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After rejecting several previous proposals over the past several years, the UCLA faculty has finally succumbed to politically correct pressure from above (Eugene Block, the Chancellor, and other administrators) and below (“progressive” students) and voted to impose a four-unit “diversity” course requirement on all undergraduates. Ironically, the felt necessity for this new course requirement reveals […]
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Higher education and its comfortable inhabitants on campus have long been hotbeds of support for Obama and Obamacare. Now, along with business and labor, i.e., the other inhabitants of what passes for the real world, they are about to become victims of one of its high “Cadillac” tax on generous health plans. In 2009 President […]
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Thomas Bender, NYU professor of history and the humanities, laments that historians have “lost their public.” Economics, he notes, “has an audience in corporate and government circles; sociology and psychology have important roles in the social services. But historians generally have not had a similar targeted audience, except in schools. They have aspired to reach […]
Read MoreLoaded questions — “Have you stopped beating your wife?” — are usually objectionable, but in the case of new rules the University of Virginia just adopted in response to a fraudulent article in Rolling Stone describing a gang rape that did not happen on a night the accused fraternity did not have a party, it […]
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Inside Higher Ed has yet another sob story about yet another report — this one from Harvard’s Voices of Diversity project — lamenting that “[w]omen and students of color continue to encounter psychologically damaging racism and sexism on college campuses, creating a climate where students struggle to graduate and are unsure who to turn to […]
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Inside Higher Edreports on yet another hand wringing study of the difficulty of “diversifying” (that is, employing more women and certain minorities) in academic STEM fields. This time, however, the obstacle or barrier is at the end, not the beginning, of the pipeline: women and minorities themselves choose to abandon STEM careers in academic research […]
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Has Stanford Law stopped discriminating? I realize this is a loaded question, but it is inescapably prompted by research, published in the Journal of Legal Studies, that suggests “ways to close the gender gap in law schools.” Stanford law professors Mark Kelman and Daniel Ho examined 15,689 grades assigned by 91 instructors to 1,897 Stanford […]
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As part of its ongoing series on “Inequity In Silicon Valley,” USA TODAY published a long and questionable article Monday, “How To Close The Tech Diversity Gap,” reporting on a conference at the Stanford Law School the paper co-sponsored with Stanford last week. The Rev. Jesse Jackson was much in evidence, both in spirit and […]
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Doubling down on its ever expanding commitment to “diversity,” the University of Virginia Board of Visitors has just created a new standing “Committee on Diversity and Inclusion.” The new committee’s first meeting, held on September 12, considered the results of a study on the wages of female faculty, The study, by Economics Professor Sarah Turner, […]
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The University of Virginia is boasting again about how well it does by its black students. This is an annual event and some of the boasting has merit. As the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education pointed out last June, U.Va. “consistently posts the highest black student graduation rate of any state-operated university in the […]
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There’s nothing wrong with the first sentence of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s new report, “Affirmative Action and Human Capital Development,” which defines affirmative action as “the practice of granting preferential treatment to under-represented (UR) demographic groups,” but it’s down hill from there. The descent begins in the second sentence, which states that “It […]
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When my daughter Jessie was applying to graduate school, I asked one of my tennis buddies with a PhD from Caltech whether he thought Caltech would give Jessie any preference since there are so few women in physics. He replied cautiously that his impression was that Caltech had remained pretty steadfastly meritocratic, so she was […]
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For anyone still in doubt, a deeply statistical analysis by the National Bureau of Economic Research— complete with “Epanechinikov kernels” and “Silverman bandwidths” — of the effect of banning racial preferences in admission to the the UC Berkeley (Boalt Hall) and UCLA law schools demonstrates that eliminating racial preference reduces the numbers of previously preferred […]
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Most of the sturm and drang about discrimination for the past week or two has involved bitter disputes over recent Supreme Court decisions (Hobby Lobby and Wheaton College) that spared a few Christians from being thrown into the lion’s den of Obamacare’s contraceptive mandate. Now comes a rude reminder that the “Diversity” Vampire is still […]
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As everyone knows by now, the Supreme Court has just held in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (discussed here) that requiring the owners of a closely held family business to provide employees abortifacients that violated their sincerely held religious beliefs was barred by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (passed virtually unanimously by a Democrat-controlled Congress and […]
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In March 2007 Barack Obama bragged, as he has on other occasions, that “I was a constitutional law professor, which means unlike the current president I actually respect the Constitution.” Of course, many much more prominent and prolific Obama-supporting law professors (easy, since Obama published nothing on the subject) do not “respect the Constitution” — […]
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The politically correct speech enforcers at the Patent and Trademark office have just voted, for the second time, to cancel several Washington Redskins trademarks that contain the term “Redskins” because Section 2(a) of the Lanham Act “prohibits registration of marks that may disparage persons or bring them into contempt or disrepute.” (The first such decision, […]
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There he goes again, bypassing the Constitution’s pesky requirement that laws must be passed by Congress, not promulgated by executive decree. The Washington Post has just reported that President Obama will soon sign an executive order implementing all or most (the text is not yet available) of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), prohibiting discrimination by federal contractors based on […]
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Liberalism and the left have become virtually indistinguishable (as Fred Siegel’s impressive Revolt Against The Masses persuasively documents), becoming more intolerant and hence more intolerable. An exemplary recent example is the recent attack orchestrated by GetEqual, a Berkeley-based militant gay rights group, against University of Virginia law professor Douglas Laycock. Laycock, ubiquitously described, as here, as “husband of UVA President Teresa Sullivan [and] […]
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Tim Groseclose’s new book, Cheating: An Insider’s Report on the Use of Race in Admissions at UCLA, is a masterful expose of the lying and deception UCLA officials employ to evade Prop. 209’s prohibition of racial preferences in admissions. In his otherwise positive review, Russell Nieli expresses disappointment that Groseclose’s criticism of UCLA’s continuing and […]
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