Roger Clegg is the President and General Counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity.
The Supreme Court today upheld the University of Texas’s use of racial preferences in student admissions. The vote was 4-3, with Justice Kennedy writing the majority opinion, joined by Justices Breyer, Ginsburg, and Sotomayor (Justice Kagan was recused). Justice Alito write a powerful, 51-page dissent, which he read from the bench. Needless to say, for […]
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By Roger Clegg Kudos to Peter Wood for encouraging the presidential candidates to opine – and opine wisely – on higher education issues in his article, “What Candidates Can Do for Higher Education Now.” With regard to his Item #3 (“End higher education’s destructive focus on race”), I’d like to point out two specific proposals […]
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There have been two major developments in the past week in the fight against racial and ethnic preferences in university admissions. First, last week, in Fisher v. University of Texas, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit denied further review of a panel decision that had rejected the challenge to that school’s use […]
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I’d like to add this to Peter Augustine Lawler’s legislative agenda: As long as university officials take race and ethnicity into account in admissions decisions, a bill requiring publication of the use of such preferences is necessary. Such a bill would require universities that receive federal funding to report annually in detail on whether and […]
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The Federalist Society last Saturday sponsored a symposium at Yale Law School that discussed “Achieving Intellectual Diversity” on law school faculties. On one of the panels, I said that as a student at Yale law 1977-1981 (with a year off to work for the Republican National Committee) it was a good time to be in […]
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By way of background for you outside-the-beltway rubes, the Washington Post’s weekly “Style Invitational” is a contest in which readers compete to submit the funniest entry. This week the winners were announced for the funniest (made up) course description from a college catalogue. First-place was awarded to: “PSYC 207: Welcome to Your College Nightmare. Participants […]
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The Center for Individual Rights has filed a lawsuit in Connecticut on behalf of Pamela Swanigan, a graduate student in English at the University of Connecticut. The suit alleges that Ms. Swanigan was not allowed to compete for a highly prestigious, merit-based scholarship despite being the top applicant the year she applied to UConn. Instead she was […]
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Justice Scalia began his concurring opinion in Schuette v. BAMN last week by writing that, in this case, “we confront a frighteningly bizarre question: Does the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment forbid what its text plainly requires?” And he’s right that the Fourteenth Amendment and the Michigan ballot initiative at issue in Schuette […]
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A Chronicle of Higher Education article this week was headlined “Minority Male Students Face Challenge to Achieve at Community Colleges,” and it discussed various successes and failures in that eponymous arena. Particularly intriguing was this passage: And instead of offering small, “boutique” programs for minority students that attract just a few dozen students, [one […]
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The Washington Post notes today that though President Obama’s commencement address at Morehouse College received a “rousing response” from the audience, some of his African-American supporters are less than pleased. Amazingly, they argue that the President has devoted too much time to discussions of black accountability and responsibility. They also suggest that Jesse Jackson has […]
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As the Supreme Court prepares its opinion in Fisher v. University of Texas (in which that school’s use of racial and ethnic admissions preferences is challenged), and as our bien pensants continue as always to agonize about the state of race relations in the United States (which are actually quite good, by the way), a […]
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The New York Times today has a front-page story headlined – brace yourself – “In California, Early Push for College Diversity.” But wait! The take-away from this story is that the sky did not fall when racial preferences in university admissions were abolished in California. Not only did skin-color diversity “rebound” but – more importantly […]
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Here’s an instructive exercise: The next time you read an article about “diversity” (see, e.g., the interview with the University of Wisconsin’s diversity honcho in Inside Higher Ed today), mentally substitute the letters “BS” for “diversity” every time the latter appears. It’s amazing how much more accurate and understandable the article becomes! (It’s even better […]
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I accepted some warm invitations from the Federalist Society chapters at law schools in the chilly Midwest and spoke last week at Indiana University, Notre Dame, and the University of Michigan about Fisher v. University of Texas, the case before the Supreme Court challenging the use of racial preferences in university admissions. Here’s an edited […]
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Yesterday the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit held that Michigan’s Proposal 2 violates the U.S. Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause. Proposal 2 was a ballot initiative that amended the state constitution to provide that state and local government agencies (including public universities) in Michigan “shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment […]
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Just a few lawyerly thoughts to add to KC Johnson’s excellent post yesterday on Columbia University setting aside $30 million to hire female and minority faculty. It was clear enough all along that Columbia’s hiring would be racially discriminatory, if not racially exclusive; and, as Professor Johnson points out, even the pretext that sometimes a (politically […]
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A news story here has garnered some attention; it’s about how “Black students at Duke University are angry over a university research paper that found African-American undergraduates at the school are disproportionally more likely to switch from tough majors to easier ones.” There’s not much in it that denies the truth of the paper’s conclusion, […]
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I thank KC Johnson for his thoughtful post below. Here is a link to the studies we released on the severe and unjustified admission preferences at the University of Wisconsin, Madison,and to the press release that summarized them and announced the press conference: http://www.ceousa.org/content/view/929/119/. Since I was there, I thought I would also add a […]
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There’s good news out of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit: On Friday, the full court agreed to rehear a now infamous decision in which a three-judge panel had earlier struck down the state of Michigan’s Proposal 2. Proposal 2, in turn, is a ban on government discrimination and preference on the basis of […]
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Elmhurst College, in what is apparently a first, will ask this question on its admissions application: “Would you consider yourself a member of the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered) community?” Answering the question will be optional; applicants may chose “yes” or “no” or “prefer not to answer.” Those answering yes to the LGBT question will […]
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The New York Times had a fairly long online colloquy over the weekend on a very short study titled “Whites See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game That They Are Now Losing.” Prepared by Michael I. Norton of Harvard Business School and Samuel R. Sommers of Tuft University’s Department of Psychology, the study appeared in Perspectives on Psychological Science. It […]
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This week Arizonans overwhelmingly enacted the Arizona Civil Rights Initiative, which bans state and local discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, and sex in contracting, employment, and education – including racial preferences in university admissions. Opponents of such initiatives frequently claim that they are a solution in search of a problem, that the presence […]
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An Inside Higher Ed article yesterday by English professor Satya P. Mohanty of Cornell on “Diversity’s Next Challenges” constructs an elaborate house of cards but then inadvertently knocks the whole thing down. The piece features, in particular, an argument suggesting that “stereotype threat”—the claim that fear of being judged by a stereotype can cause minorities […]
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According to a short news item in Inside Higher Ed today, “The American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Association of American Universities have issued a new handbook with detailed legal resources to help colleges recruit and retain faculty members and students in science fields. The handbook notes legal challenges to some forms […]
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The Obama administration has weighed in on behalf of the University of Texas’s use of racial and ethnic preferences in its undergraduate admissions, filing an amicus brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, as reported here. This is unfortunate if not surprising, but the scope of the brief is noteworthy in […]
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Two law-school professors, Vikram David Amar and Kevin R. Johnson, recently published a piece in FindLaw.com on “Why U.S. News and World Report Should Include a Diversity Index in its Ranking of Law Schools.” Early on, the piece notes a research finding that, by including in its law-school index the LSAT scores and undergraduate GPAs […]
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Last December, I wrote in these pages about allegations of racial discrimination in tenure denial at Emerson College, which had prompted the school to set up a three-person commission charged with reviewing those allegations. The panel’s report has just been released, and the good news is that the panelists “noticed no overtly racist or prejudiced […]
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10. Justice O’Connor now suggests that the social-science evidence on which it was based is shaky. 9. The social-science evidence on which it was based is getting shakier, as more and more disinterested research is done. 8. There should not be a social-science exception to the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause anyhow. 7. In a variety […]
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A Chicago study on “Assessing the Impact of Eliminating Affirmative Action in Higher Education” comes to this conclusion: black and Hispanic representation at all 4-year colleges is predicted to decline modestly—by 2%—if race-neutral college admissions policies are mandated nationwide. However, race-neutral admissions are predicted to decrease minority representation at the most selective 4-year institutions by […]
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Should universities weigh race and ethnicity in deciding whom to hire for their science departments? The American Association for the Advancement of Science thinks so, according to a recent National Journal article. “Science and engineering should look like the rest of the population,” says AAAS’s Daryl Chubin, and if hiring decisions don’t yield the right […]
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