Wenyuan Wu is Executive Director of the Californians for Equal Rights Foundation. Twitter: @wu_wenyuan
“Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.”—Thomas Paine Race peddlers are at the scheme of reparations again. This time, they are playing the game in higher education, hoping to get progressive government agencies to legislate racial preferences in college admissions. Will they succeed? California […]
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Having witnessed profound political changes under America’s first “Common Man” president – Andrew Jackson, Alexis de Tocqueville issued stern warnings against the “tyranny of the majority” in his otherwise glowing account of American Democracy: If liberty is ever lost in America, it will be necessary to lay the blame on the omnipotence of the majority […]
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“What kind of a friend could pull a knife When it’s him or you and his kids need shoes? What kind of friend would do you in When the bomb goes off and the shelter’s his? … What kind of friend would tell you lies To spare you from the bitter truth? And what kind […]
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“The reason that university politics is so vicious is because stakes are so small,” former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger once restated Sayre’s law in this famous quip on competition in academia. That was the 1970s when scholarly debates about communism and Marxism had little influence on government policies at the height of the Cold […]
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“The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule it. Power is what all messiahs really seek: not the chance to serve. ” – H.L. Mencken, Minority Report You don’t have to agree with all Mencken’s views to appreciate the poignant message of power hunger corrupting good intentions […]
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Depending on which side of the political aisle you choose, “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” better known as DEI, stands for very different things. For the far-left, who have largely coopted and infected their less radical comrades, it is something inherently good and imbued in America’s DNA. In response to increasing demands for dialing down DEI […]
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“We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter.” – Denis Didero The French philosopher could not have foreseen the delicate state of today’s young minds, who are culturally conditioned, coddled, and deceived to reject the truth when he wrote those sobering words […]
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The fringe lens of critical pedagogy has swallowed today’s academia. Facts are deconstructed, logical reasoning is contorted, historical narratives are rewritten, and causality takes a back seat to the post-modernist project of affirming feelings and identities. Increasingly, words lose meaning and become weaponized for the sake of ideological conformity. Cue the perennial abuse of “white […]
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History shows that lofty ideals predicated upon political utopianism and social egalitarianism often generate feel-good, do-bad policies that lead to disastrous outcomes. As Thomas Sowell has sharply observed, “[i]f there is anything worse than unfairness, it is make-believe fairness.” The exhaustion of the #MeToo movement provides a case in point for the unintended consequences and […]
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Once again, the Washington Post misses the mark when it associates “zombie” CVS of Washington, D.C., or America’s shoplifting pandemic with the decline of liberal democracy. Ironically, torchbearers of modern-day progressivism are willfully oblivious to the fact that their illiberal ideology, not liberal democracy itself, is at the root of many societal problems, including urban […]
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Educational inequities, racial wealth gaps, health disparities, environmental racism … America’s race peddlers have invaded every aspect of our public life with their ongoing schemes of injecting race into various government programs, education policies, health initiatives, and so on. Alas, the never-ending race grift has descended on government housing policies. Since 2023, the San Diego […]
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The New York Times recently unveiled a fascinating shift in the landscape of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) programs. Instead of the overt focus on race and gender representation, a new trend of rebranding is emerging. Now, we see the rise of more innocuous-sounding initiatives like “culture surveys” and “performance training.” While opponents should rightfully […]
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These days, politicians and political pundits of a particular orientation like to fancy themselves as the spokesmen of science and reason. Often, rudimentary data points on disparities in a number of socioeconomic and political outcomes based on aggregate group labels are upheld as the unquestionable science that proves systemic inequities of some sort, which then […]
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Noah Webster, known as the Father of American Scholarship and Education, wrote in 1788: It is an object of vast magnitude that systems of education should be adopted and pursued which may not only diffuse a knowledge of the sciences but may implant in the minds of the American youth the principles of virtue and […]
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When the U.S. Supreme Court issued the landmark ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College, bundled with the University of North Carolina (UNC), the higher education status quo latched on to one particular sentence in the conclusion: [N]othing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicants’ discussion of […]
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When the French-Spanish singer and songwriter Manu Chao released the song “Politik Kills” as the third single from his 2007 album La Radiolina, the artist was taking a jab at global capitalism, neoliberalism, and political conservativism of the West. He sings: That’s what my friend is an evidence Politik is violence; What my friend it’s […]
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While the cabal of far-left ideologues and interest groups complain that America’s zealous pursuit of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) is not far-reaching or radical enough, a coalition of oppositional forces are pushing back against this dominant narrative. Public interest law firms, advocates, scholars, and activists are increasingly utilizing litigation to challenge the incorporation of […]
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On August 14, 2023, the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights (OCR) and the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division (CRD) jointly released guidance titled “Questions and Answers Regarding the Supreme Court’s Decision in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. Harvard College and University of North Carolina.” Designed to help colleges and […]
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On July 12, after giving the public less than ten days to submit written comments, the California State Board of Education (SBE) voted to adopt the 2023 Mathematics Framework for California Public Schools, which will guide math instruction in the state’s nearly 1,000 public K–12 school districts. The controversial framework has received and continues to […]
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California is a peculiar case of counteracting, yet converging forces regarding affirmative action. In 1996, it was the first state to codify a statewide constitutional ban on preferential treatment on the basis of race, color, sex, ethnicity, or national origin via the passage of Proposition 209. Over the last two decades, big players in the […]
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Last Thursday, June 29, the U.S. Supreme Court released its ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College, which it bundled with the University of North Carolina (UNC) case, putting an end to race-based affirmative action in college admissions. Framing the decision as one that embraces “the transcendent aims of the Equal Protection Clause,” […]
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“There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs; you try to get the best trade-off you can get, that’s all you can hope for.” – Thomas Sowell Many academic observers have high hopes that the expected Supreme Court rulings in the Harvard and University of North Carolina cases will settle the race question in college […]
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On May 6, 2023, the California Reparations Task Force met at Northeastern University Oakland for a final discussion and vote on its full reparations report. Consisting of 40 chapters and a 104-page executive summary, the report offers sweeping policy recommendations on restitution, compensation, rehabilitation, and other forms of reparations. According to the taskforce, California, which […]
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In an effort to justify students’ protest against Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan’s invited speech, Stanford Law School Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Tirien Steinbach says that she supports free speech—but she also criticized the judge for harming “people of color.” After the chaotic event, in which about 100 Stanford students heckled Judge Duncan […]
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On Monday, academic workers at Rutgers University, including part-time faculty and graduate assistants, returned to their positions, effectively ending the university’s first-ever labor stoppage since its founding in 1766. After the university reached a framework agreement promising comprehensive pay raises, over 67,000 Rutgers students are now able to resume classes after a week of disruptions […]
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On March 9, 2023, the Arkansas State Senate—controlled by a 29-to-6 Republican majority—narrowly passed a legislative ban on race-based affirmative action: Senate Bill 71 (SB 71). If signed into law, SB 71 would make the Natural State the tenth U.S. state to prohibit racial preferences in public programs. However, when the bill made its way […]
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Since the University of Chicago pioneered the test-optional movement in 2018 by dropping the SAT and the ACT from its undergraduate admissions requirements—ostensibly to “level the playing field”—1,843 accredited four-year colleges in the U.S. have made standardized tests optional, and 84 have gone completely “test-blind.” Diminishing or eliminating the role of admissions tests seems to […]
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“The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.” – Abraham Lincoln By the time an American kid graduates from high school, to what extent has he been exposed to left-wing racial and gender ideology? Furthermore, how does this leftward indoctrination affect the student’s political views […]
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In recent years, American higher education has popularized the idea that students do better academically when taught by professors from the same racial or ethnic group. It is hard to imagine that such a theory of “racial pairing” has risen from a testable (and refutable) hypothesis in the 1990s to an industry standard adopted by […]
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A new book documents authentic stories of fighting political indoctrination and standing up for America. In the last two years, progressives have responded to parents and citizens protesting critical race theory (CRT), a hot-button issue of the American cultural war, with dishonesty and gaslighting. On the one hand, they argue that CRT’s prevalence in American […]
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