John Rosenberg blogs at Discriminations.
Finally some defenses of the beleaguered University of Virginia Board of Visitors are beginning to appear. An editorial in the Washington Post half-heartedly and with notable lack of enthusiasm called for Teresa Sullivan’s reinstatement, but the next day it ran an OpEd piece by Anne Neal, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, […]
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Based on “new findings involving behavioral genetics,” reports the Chronicle of Higher Education, a growing clump of contemporary social scientists agrees with Gilbert and Sullivan that both liberals and conservatives (but especially conservatives) are the product of nature, although they seem to find nature’s […]
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Anyone who doubts that affirmative action stigmatizes those who receive it should read — in fact, be required to read — “Not Just a Diversity Number” at Inside Higher Ed. The author is identified only as “an assistant professor at a liberal arts college,” and the fact that Prof. Anonymous is afraid to sign his […]
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Listen closely and you can hear the sound of “diversity” crumbling, this week mixed with laughter over the news that the City University of New York has created two more official diversity groups–“white/Jewish” and “Italian-Americans.” Critics of the new Jewish category claim that “the creation of a label for Jewish professors could be used to […]
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Those of us who were disappointed when a divided Supreme Court upheld the distribution of burdens and benefits based on race in Grutter are hopeful that decision might be overturned — or that at least its most deleterious effects might be reined in — when the Court revisits affirmative action next fall in Fisher v. […]
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In an engaging but ultimately unpersuasive essay on Minding The Campus (“Affirmative Action, the Bishops and Women’s Colleges”), Jonathan B. Imber, a sociologist at Wellesley College, argues that the dispensation given to private women’s colleges to discriminate against men provides a model that would allow Catholic institutions to protect their religious values from public encroachment […]
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The Boston Globe has a long article revealing in excruciating detail the extent of Harvard’s publicizing of Elizabeth Warren’s self-identified Cherokeness, as well as her lame claim that she was oblivious to the use and usefulness of her alleged ethnicity to her employer. The article reveals one delicious new item, namely that “[t]he administrator responsible […]
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On May 18, both the Chronicle of Higher Education (here) and Inside Higher Ed (here) discussed a new report from the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education arguing that student debt has a disparate impact on Latinos.
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The recent flap over Elizabeth Warren’s claimed Cherokeeness has both raised and obscured a question at the core of debates over affirmative action: just who should receive the preferential treatment it bestows? The standard answer to that question preferred by those who support the current regime of racial preference is “underrepresented minority,” or URM, a […]
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Over at the Chronicle of Higher Education, which used to be the pre-eminent publication covering higher education, the inmates are now running the institution. Editor Liz McMillen’s disgraceful capitulation to the mob demanding the head of Chronicle blogger Naomi Schaefer Riley for having the temerity to criticize the field of black studies ironically demonstrates the […]
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Now that the world of higher education’s twitter (or is that now tweeter?) over Elizabeth Warren’s keen sense of her own Cherokee-ness is dying down, the two leading monitors of academic fads have each recently found and amplified new interest in black studies. The Chronicle of Higher Education has recently published two pieces glorifying the […]
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From what has been revealed so far, it appears that Elizabeth Warren, Harvard law professor and likely Democratic candidate against Sen. Scott Brown in Massachusetts, gave herself status as a Native American in the past, which led Harvard and a leading legal directory to identify her as such, but recently she has claimed that she […]
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Get ready for a brand new defense of affirmative action that you’ve never heard before: preferences are necessary to assure selection by merit. How can that be? Simple. Just rework Claude Steele’s theory of stereotype threat–that minorities do less well on tests than their abilities warrant out of fear that their performance will confirm negative […]
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Inside Higher Ed reports this morning that the University of Texas has hired a big Los Angeles-based law firm, Latham and Watkins, to defend its race-based admission policy before the Supreme Court in Fisher v. University of Texas, which the Supreme Court will hear next fall. “The law firm, with extensive Supreme Court expertise, will […]
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“Diversity,” as everyone surely knows by now, is the sole remaining justification for racial preference in higher education allowed by the Supreme Court. Defenders seem to regard it as even more essential to a good education than books in the library or professors behind the podium. But a funny thing has been happening on the […]
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Inside Higher Ed reports this morning (April 9) about a new study of “holistic” admissions at selective institutions by Rachel Rubin, a doctoral student at the Harvard School of Education, that will be presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association later this week. Her study confirms, albeit reluctantly, what you already […]
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The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (I am tempted to say even the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals) has once again recognized that treating people without regard to race does not violate the Fourteenth Amendment. In an opinion released April 2, a three-judge panel reaffirmed in no uncertain terms a 1997 Ninth Circuit decision holding […]
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“Top civil rights lawyer John Payton dies at 65; Obama calls him ‘champion of equality,’” the Washington Post reported a few days ago. Although Payton, 65, had been a prominent Washington lawyer and, after 2008, director-counsel and president of the NAACP Legal Defense & Education Fund, he is probably best known for arguing a case […]
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“Meet the new boss,” the Chronicle of Higher Education begins its article today (March 12) on the American Council of Education’s latest survey on “The American College President 2012,” and continues: “Same as the old boss.” By “same,” of course, the Chronicle didn’t mean that most college presidents share common religious, political, or cultural views, […]
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Inside Higher Ed reports this morning — surprise! — that “®oughly two-thirds of public and private college presidents say they plan to vote for President Obama in November.” Only two-thirds? Actually, that is a surprise. I wonder how many of them are in states that have had to cut or reduce spending on higher education […]
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Pressure has been building for President Obama to sign an executive order prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression by federal contractors, a move that might make the recent controversy over requiring religious institutions to offer contraception services look mild by comparison. Metro Weekly recently reported on a strategy session in […]
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As you probably know by now, the Supreme Court has agreed to hear Fisher v. Texas, depending on your point of view a promising or threatening challenge to affirmative action. Major and minor media, blogs, whatever, are all filled with cries of hope or wails of fear that the racial preferences sanctified in Grutter will […]
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Watch this space. I will be posting something shortly (but not short) on a proposed presidential executive order that would impose by White House fiat the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (discussed here and here), which serial Congresses have refused to pass.
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At the request of the unidentified Asian-American student who filed discrimination complaints against Harvard and Princeton, the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights has ended its investigation.
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Consider the following two cases: • Crystal Smith, VP for Human Resources at a small historically black state college in the deep South, was fired for her published letter in the local newspaper praising affirmative action and condemning Ward Connerly as a bigoted Uncle Tom because of his opposition to race preferences. In dismissing her […]
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Most people believe that “in perpetuity” means forever, or at least until hell freezes over. But not the University of California at Los Angeles, which is now proceeding to sell a Japanese garden that it had accepted as a gift after promising to keep and maintain it “in perpetuity.” How, you may well ask, can they […]
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On February 2 Daniel Golden, former Wall Street Journal reporter and author of a highly regarded book on college admissions, reported in Bloomberg’s Business Week that Harvard and Princeton are being investigated by the Dept. of Education’s Office for Civil Rights for discrimination against Asians. It’s not the first time. In fact, for the past […]
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When Justice John Paul Stevens retired from the Supreme Court in 2010 ABC News noted that over the course of his 34 years on the Court he “became a hero to liberals[,] voting to … uphold affirmative action” and other liberal causes. Now he has written an autobiography, Five Chiefs: A Supreme Court Memoir, ruminating […]
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Both Inside Higher Ed and the Chronicle of Higher Education have just reported that the U.S. State Department has teamed up with 36 American women’s colleges to launch a program that discriminates against Arab men and U.S. co-ed institutions.
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Richard Kahlenberg of the Century Foundation is well known for his relentless, articulate, well-researched arguments that affirmative action should be based on class, not race. My reaction to these arguments is usually rather tepid. I find Kahlenberg’s arguments compelling only insofar as he also criticizes race-based preferences, and his criticism of them usually doesn’t go very […]
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