Wenyuan Wu is Executive Director of the Californians for Equal Rights Foundation. Twitter: @wu_wenyuan
When a 33-year-old Thomas Jefferson defined America as a land that promises “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” as inalienable rights, he laid out the vision for the American Dream. But as time went on, and as the tiny, fragile nation exploded into a world powerhouse, these grandiose promises were frequently blunted by tyrannical […]
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What went wrong with American education? Why are preschoolers and kindergarteners being taught that they were born to combat racism and embrace transgender rights? How come concerned parents who oppose blatant indoctrination are now the bad guys? Any keen observer of contemporary education policy would point out the role played by schools of education in […]
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As Florida’s midterm victories by conservative candidates are celebrated across the country as a blueprint for the counter-woke movement, U.S. District Judge Mark E. Walker rebuffed the trend. After issuing a preliminary injunction order in August against the employment provisions in the Individual Freedom Act (IFA), also known as the Stop Wrongs against Our Kids […]
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On November 2, President Biden addressed the nation regarding the 2022 midterm elections with a sense of urgency, claiming that “our democracy is under threat” due to “political violence” planned by “extreme MAGA Republicans.” On November 3, the president traveled to San Diego County, where he spoke at a campaign rally for incumbent Congressman Mike […]
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In her majority opinion in the 2003 Supreme Court case Grutter v. Bollinger, in which the court decided on the narrow tailoring of race considerations in admissions, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor argued against perpetual race-based affirmative action: We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to […]
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Last month, the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) hosted a Black, Latinx and Native American Family Orientation. After facing allegations of racial segregation from Christopher Rufo and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), UCSD’s Office of the Chancellor promised that “[a]ll students and their families are welcome to attend, subject to space […]
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Whenever the associate vice president for faculty and staff diversity at San Diego State University (SDSU) sends an email from work, her signature identifies the school as “a proud Hispanic Serving Institution, located in the territory of the Kumeyaay nations.” This kind of statement, not uncommon in contemporary academia, is a comical demonstration of our […]
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Donna Shalala, the former president of my alma mater—the University of Miami (UM)—who also held a professorship in my Department of International Studies during her UM tenure, once defended academic freedom: You can’t have a university without having free speech, even though at times it makes us terribly uncomfortable. If students are not going to […]
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Last Thursday, Chief U.S. District Judge Mark E. Walker from the North District of Florida issued a preliminary injunction halting enforcement of the employment provisions in Florida’s newly codified Individual Freedom Act (IFA). On the same day, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) submitted a lawsuit challenging the IFA, also known as the Stop the […]
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Last week, both Harvard and the University of North Carolina (UNC) filed their response briefs with the United States Supreme Court (SCOTUS), which is now considering two lawsuits against the institutions’ admissions processes by Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA). In the responses, the defendants categorically deny claims of racial discrimination in undergraduate admissions, pledge their […]
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The Civics Secures Democracy Act (CSDA), a bill that was reintroduced in the U.S. Senate last month under the auspices of bipartisanship, represents a federal legislative push to expand and upgrade K-12 civic and history education through a sum of $6 billion in competitive grants over a six-year period. The proposed federal funding bonanza includes: […]
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Between March 4 and March 6, 2022, the California Teachers Association (CTA), California’s largest teachers union with a membership of 325,000 educators, hosted a convention titled “2022 Equity & Human Rights Conference” in Los Angeles. With an aim to “provide all CTA members with a greater understanding of the issues of diversity, equity and social […]
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California’s New Reparations Report Defies Gravity On June 1, 2022, the California Reparations Task Force, established by the passage of AB 3121 in 2020, released an interim report detailing generational harms of slavery and post-slavery government policies and practices on black Americans. The 492-page report makes sweeping policy recommendations such as zero-interest home loans, free […]
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To what extent can a selective educational institution advantage certain racial groups in admissions decisions without discriminating against other groups simultaneously? How can said institutions balance external demands for fairness and group representation with their core mission to educate students sufficiently? How much influence should an institution itself wield, compared with other stakeholders (including the […]
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The idea of merit has been thoroughly scrutinized in both the ivory tower and the public square. Harvard professor Michael Sandel presents a philosophical case against meritocracy in his best-selling book The Tyranny of Merit (2020), arguing that “the talent game generates hubris among the winners… and creates humiliation and resentment among the losers.” Sandel’s […]
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Recently, a San Diego school district superintendent attempted to explain the overall good educational performance of Asian students by highlighting these students’ alleged rich immigrant backgrounds. She said: “people who’re able to make the journey to America are wealthy.” Once her bigoted comments were exposed, the superintendent first apologized and then doubled down and advocated […]
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What does it take for a fringe dogma that preys on frail human divisions and obsesses with power struggles to be promoted en masse and generally accepted in a country where political liberalism had been the norm? The radical reshaping of contemporary American minds towards an unnatural preoccupation with cultural relativism and identity tribalism began […]
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On March 21, 2021, the Governing Board at the California Community Colleges (CCC), the state-wide public higher education entity in charge of 116 community colleges, held a public meeting to discuss a regulatory proposal on diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA). The proposal would amend the California Code of Regulations to establish a set of […]
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In recent years, many higher education institutions have abandoned standardized testing in their admissions processes or made these tests optional, arguing that SAT or ACT scores do not reliably project student performance and that these tests have built-in biases against underrepresented minorities (URMs). As of February 9, 2022, over 1,820 accredited U.S. colleges and universities […]
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At California State University San Marcos (CSUSM), the Craven Taskforce is busy at work to cleanse the university of its connections to the late Senator William A. Craven, who helped found the school in 1978. The renaming taskforce consists of 23 members drawn from the faculty, the student body, and the larger community, who are […]
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One man’s fight for justice after critiquing BLM If you work for a well-established American institution, be it a Fortune 500 company or a prestigious research foundation, are you constantly worried about being targeted for not endorsing political fads or prevailing cultural symbols? The often-dichotomous struggle between inconvenient truths and popular beliefs is nothing new. […]
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Anti-racist discrimination is not a victimless offense. A glaring skeleton in the closet of American education is its intentional and long-established discrimination against Asian Americans, both in college admissions and in access to quality K-12 education. In light of such endemic practices that should embarrass any classical liberal, a federal lawsuit filed by Coalition for […]
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Over the 2021 holiday season, Kaiser Permanente, the largest managed care organization in the United States, quietly conducted a mandatory training targeting its California employees in the name of “Providing Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate Services in California.” Filled with boilerplate progressive jargon including “unconscious bias,” “diversity and equity,” “racial disparities,” and “systemic barriers,” the training […]
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Thuy Thi Nguyen, our nation’s first Vietnamese-American college president and leader of California’s Foothill College, was recently ousted by the college’s Academic Senate in an unprecedented vote of no confidence. The Senate, which gives recommendations to the District Board of Trustees on academic and professional matters, accused Nguyen’s administration of prioritizing equity over educational competitiveness. […]
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The University of Georgia (UGA), “the birthplace of public education in America,” recently posted a tenured faculty cluster hiring notice for its Integrative Precision Agriculture program. The program, a cross-disciplinary undertaking between the Engineering and Agricultural & Environmental Sciences colleges, seeks tenured or tenure-track professors who have expertise in distributed sensing, systems modeling, AI-enabled decision […]
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At the height of globalization in the 1990s and early 2000s, many political economists—including Susan Strange, Philip G. Cerny, and Nita Rudra—argued that forces of economic and cultural neoliberalism were steadily eroding traditional nation-states and welfare societies. In developed countries, backlash against globalism often manifested as labor protectionism, trade barriers, and nationalism. Meanwhile, in developing […]
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Over 6,000 non-tenured University of California (UC) lecturers are threatening to go on strike again. This follows an October 12th collective bargaining offer from UC, which the lecturers criticize as insufficient to satisfy their demands for better pay and job security. Adjunct faculty from UC San Diego and UC Santa Cruz claim that the 4.3% […]
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“Antiracism” guru Dr. Ibram X. Kendi strikes again. In an emotionally taxing column published by The Atlantic, a melodramatic Kendi laments the alleged misappropriation and distortions of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at the hands of conservatives opposed to critical race theory (CRT). Kendi disparages “Reagan Republicans then and Trump Republicans today” as King’s “modern-day […]
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On a warm day in the early fall of 1966, a 17-year-old former high school student led a group of local Red Guards in a struggle session to publicly shame members of the “Five Black Categories (landlords, rich farmers, counter-revolutionaries, bad elements, and right-wingers)” in a small town near Shanghai. The teenager, who came from […]
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The North Carolina General Assembly is considering a new bill (Senate Bill 729) which seeks to outlaw racial discrimination and racial preferences in public affairs. The bill’s language is identical to similar proposals in California, Washington, Michigan, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Arizona, Colorado, and Idaho, which states: The State shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment […]
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