John Rosenberg blogs at Discriminations.
Inside Higher Ed reports this morning on the Success for ‘Holistic’ Med School Admissions at Boston University: Boston University has demonstrated the success of “holistic” admissions for medical school, according an analysis published in The New England Journal of Medicine. Under such admissions, grades and test scores aren’t accorded the same dominant role they have […]
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The Supreme Court decided last week to review the Sixth Circuit’s decision in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, whose majority opinion (joined by all 8 Democratic appointees, opposed by all 7 Republican appointees) held that the 14th Amendment bars the people of Michigan from amending their state constitution to prohibit preferential treatment based […]
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In December, after extended controversy and protest, Michigan passed a right-to- work-law allowing employees to opt out of mandatory union membership and dues. The law goes into effect March 27, leaving all earlier contracts unaffected. Rushing to beat that deadline, Wayne State University has signed a new eight-year contract with its faculty union, and the […]
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In the Sunday New York Times Opinion Section Dan Slater asks, “Does Affirmative Action Do What It Should?” However, his over-2000 word piece provides no semblance of an answer because he misrepresents affirmative action. “Affirmative action policies attempt to compensate for the country’s brutal history of racial discrimination by giving some minority applicants a leg […]
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Chief Justice Roberts, with the four liberal justices in tow, upheld Obamacare only because it was (or could be construed as) a tax, not a penalty. Try telling that to the University of Virginia or the editors of the Charlottesville Daily Progress, whose lead article March 14, under the big, bold headline “‘Obamacare’ to swallow […]
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A new study of what high school achievement tests predict about the performance of California high school graduates in their first year at in-state community colleges has found “disturbing” achievement gaps. The study measured students’ performance on the California Standards Test as high school juniors against their first year community college performance in four areas: […]
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By John S. Rosenberg This may be a first: the president of a major research university has just been formally censured by his faculty — a no confidence vote may be coming next month — because of an opinion about a historical event (and a conventional, mainstream opinion at that) he expressed in a university […]
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Standardized tests are often about as popular as the messenger murdered for bringing bad news — and if it were up to their critics, would meet the same fate. Their “disparate impact” on minorities (most recently discussed here) provides one of the standard justifications for continuing affirmative action. Now their use seems to be seeping […]
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Most of the controversy over affirmative action in higher education concerns undergraduate admissions, but the American Educational Research Association has just published what it calls “important findings on the impact of banning affirmative action” in six fields of graduate study — natural sciences, engineering, social sciences, business, education, and humanities – in four states that […]
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Troy Duster, a past president of the American Sociological Association and a professor at the University of California at Berkeley’s Warren Institute for Law and Social Policy, has a long Chronicle of Higher Education article that is usefully if unwittingly revealing and instructive because it so perfectly reflects both the profound misunderstanding of their critics […]
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Just when you thought it safe to read about higher education without encountering more toxic fallout from the University of Virginia Board of Visitors’ firing and forced rehiring of President Teresa Sullivan last June, there is now more such fallout. In early December, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC), dissatisfied […]
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The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that a faculty grievance committee at the University of Southern California has called for the reconsideration of a recent decision to deny tenure to Mai’a K. Davis Cross, an assistant professor of international relations whom the Chronicle states “is of Native Hawaiian and Asian ancestry.” She claims her denial […]
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Adolph Reed, who professes political science at Penn, has a snarky OpEd in the New York Times today, “The Puzzle of Black Republicans.” Professor Reed is puzzled why any blacks would vote for Republicans, and why anyone thinks it’s newsworthy that a “token” black has just been appointed to the Senate from South Carolina, “the […]
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Inside Higher Ed reports on a new study that analyzes what its abstract calls “gender bias” in the top ranks of STEM fields. It found that one explanation — that women publish less — is true but suggests “that women may be publishing less than men because departments are not providing them with the same resources.” The study found […]
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A new report from the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education, Black Male Student-Athletes and Racial Inequities in NCAA Division I College Sports, points with horror at the “racial inequities” in big-time college sports, finding it “shocking” and “astonishing” that college leaders, the NCAA, and the public at large have “accepted as normal the […]
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Is the Fourteenth Amendment inferior to the First? If states are generally prohibited from discriminating on the basis of political identity, why should they be allowed to discriminate on the basis of racial identity? Consider Teresa Wagner’s much-discussed lawsuit against the University of Iowa College of Law for not hiring her due to her political […]
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Imagine a hypothetical gourmet grocery store chain — let’s call it Wholly Wholesome Foods — that serves haute cuisine specialties at sushi/deli/lunch counters only in its stores located in upscale neighborhoods. Now imagine the long zealous arm of federal, state, and local enforcers accusing WhoWhoFoo of discriminating against inner city residents and forcing it to […]
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On November 6 the voters of Oklahoma, following in the footsteps of voters in California (1996), Washington (1998), Michigan (2006), Nebraska (2008), and Arizona (2010), passed a constitutional amendment that prohibits the state from offering “preferred treatment” or engaging in discrimination based on race, color, gender, or ethnicity. On November 15 eight of the fifteen […]
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Advocates of affirmative action never seem to realize that abandoning the “without regard” principle of colorblind equality — i.e., legitimizing the distribution of benefits and burdens based on race — can result in unfavorable, discriminatory treatment of their favored minorities, even when that harsh lesson is staring them in the face as it is now […]
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“Mend it, don’t end it” was the famous advice on affirmative action from Bill Clinton, who did neither. There are, of course, other useful slogans, such as “Muddle it,” which the Supreme Court essentially did in the 2003 Gratz and Grutter cases. The Court held that the University of Michigan could not give a fixed […]
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Perhaps anticipating a defeat for affirmative action in the Fisher v. University of Texas case about to be argued before the Supreme Court, Columbia University political philosophy professor and former Dean of the College Michele Moody-Adams has just suggested moving away from a fixation on affirmative action and “Toward Real Equality in Higher Education.” Whatever […]
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Both Inside Higher Ed and the Chronicle of Higher Education have articles this morning about a new survey of Economics PhDs that finds a dramatic gender gap on policy questions. Among the findings, women economists are: 20% more likely than men to disagree with the notion that the United States has too much government regulation; […]
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As part of its series on higher ed issues in the 2012 campaign, the Chronicle of Higher Education has a long opinion piece in the form of a news article accusing Republicans of hypocrisy. In “Self-Sufficient, With a Hand From the Government,” author Scott Carlson claims to find “a striking dissonance” between the moving “pull-oneself-up-by-the-bootstraps […]
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Browsing through the collection of over 70 pro-“diversity” amicus briefs submitted on behalf of the University of Texas in the Fisher case, I am reminded, as I often am, of how eerily the current defense of “taking race into account,” i.e., preferential treatment based on race, resembles the old Southern arguments in defense of segregation. […]
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In explaining why the American Jewish Committee had (with his help) supported Alan Bakke’s lawsuit against the University of California but also supported the University of Michigan’s racial preferences in Gratz and Grutter, Alan Dershowitz wrote that We feared that our hard-earned right to be admitted on the merits would be taken away. The WASP […]
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The University of Texas has filed its main brief in Fisher v. University of Texas, and it’s a doozy. It argues, among other oddities, that the continuing “underrepresentation” of blacks and Hispanics requires the continued use of racial preferences to increase their numbers, but that the reason for increasing their numbers has nothing to do […]
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Columbia is not the only elite university promoting exclusionary hiring in a big way. The University of Pennsylvania has just announced that it will spend $100 million over the next five years “on hiring and retaining more diverse faculty members.” George Leef asks a very good question: “Why does it cost so much money to simply screen […]
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UCLA’s Proyecto Derechos Civiles — also known as the Civil Rights Project — has just published a useful new study suggesting the extent of racial discrimination in graduate school admissions. It examined minority graduate enrollments in four states with bans on racial preferences — California, Florida, Washington, and Texas (where the ban is no longer […]
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Under the headline “Diversity’s Evidences.” Len Niehoff’, described as a “professor from practice” at the University of Michigan law school, offered an almost humorously pathetic defense of “diversity on Inside Higher Ed today. He served on the legal team that defended Michigan in Grutter, which he claims the Court got “exactly right,” and his essay […]
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Now that the University of Virginia Board of Visitors has unanimously re-instated Teresa Sullivan as president, it will be important to put the controversy in the past as quickly as possible, to repair the frayed relations between supporters and opponents of the formerly fired president and between the Board and the faculty, which demanded her […]
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