Wesleyan University’s affirmative action bake sale, staged by two students on October 26th, has generated more sputtering controversy than most, largely because one professor, Claire Potter, intemperately called the event racist. Late yesterday, Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, published a remarkable discussion of the controversy and the uses of the word […]
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According to a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, leaders of the American Philosophical Association and the American Anthropological Association are worried about cuts in their fields at Howard University because “such moves at the historically black institution would harm attempts to bring black scholars into their disciplines.” In a letter to Howard […]
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I first encountered Wesleyan professor Claire Potter at the tail end of the Duke lacrosse case. The self-described “tenured radical” published a post claiming that “the dancers” at the lacrosse team’s party “were, it is clear, physically . . . assaulted.” She produced no evidence for the assertion (perhaps because no evidence existed); indeed, even […]
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In “Rising Admissions Standards Have Kept Top Colleges Out of Many Minority Students’ Reach,” Peter Schmidt reports in the Chronicle of Higher Education on yet another study of blacks and Hispanics being “channelled” into less selective colleges. The most selective colleges have raised the bar for admission over decades in which more black and Hispanic […]
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In “A Supportive Nudge for Minority Graduate Students on the Path to a Ph.D.,” the Chronicle of Higher Education recently reported on the Compact for Faculty Diversity‘s annual Institute on Teaching and Mentoring. The Compact for Faculty Diversity has what its web site acknowledges is “a simple goal: to increase the number of minority students […]
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On August 30, I noted here that Title IX Has A Disparate Impact–for Black Women. The occasion for that piece was an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Narrowing the Gap, that fawningly reported the dramatic findings of a new book by Deborah Brake, a law professor at Temple, lamenting the lack of “diversity” […]
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If damaging evidence against affirmative action turns up in a pro-affirmative action book, the author often explains it away as misunderstood or exaggerated. This has happened once again, this time to a book that made no splash when it was published last October, but drew attention here at Minding the Campus in criticism that spread […]
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Russell K. Nieli’s recent article, “How Diversity Punishes Asians, Poor Whites and Lots of Others,” drew a lot of attention, including a mention in Ross Douthat’s New York Times column. Referring to the book, No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal, a 2009 study of elite college admissions, Nieli wrote that the authors, Thomas J. Espenshade […]
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The controversy at Harvard Law School over last month’s email about racial intelligence seems to have died down. The basic facts of the case are these: a Harvard law student who is an editor of the Harvard Law Review sent an email to two friends as a follow-up to an earlier conversation. In it she […]
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The Obama Department of Justice is keen to support those who seek to expand racial preferences. The latest case is Fisher v. University of Texas, in which two young white women, Abigail Fisher and Rachel Michalewicz, argue that the University’s diversity policy-one of the more aggressive in the nation– violates their right to equal protection. […]
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On Monday the Supreme Court heard arguments in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, a case that pitted the right to free association against the principle of non-discrimination. Hastings College of Law in San Francisco, part of the University of California system, has a policy stating that recognized student organizations “shall not discriminate unlawfully on the […]
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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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People who have followed the effort to put initiatives on state ballots eliminating racial preferences from college admissions might remember this advertisement from 2008, which set Ward Connerly in Klan regalia. Two years before, a group called Think Progress posted a video on its web page under the headline “Leader of Michigan Initiative To End […]
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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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Yesterday, our own John McWhorter participated in a debate on Affirmative Action hosted by the Miller Center. Other participants included Julian Bond and Lee Bollinger. You can watch it here.
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The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) took its customary bystander role in the Ward Churchill case, as it regularly does when academic integrity is the issue and the evidence of malfeasance is obvious. But among the many mealy-mouthed statements by AAUP president Cary Nelson, one was surely true: “Colorado knew what it was getting […]
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Students applying for college admission now face a new reality—the SAT is increasingly optional at our colleges and universities. The test-optional movement, pioneered by FairTest, a political advocacy group supported by George Soros and the Woods Fund—now list 815 schools that do not require SAT scores. That number may seem impressive, but it includes institutions […]
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“Colorado First State Not To Reject Affirmative Action”
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The Chronicle of Higher Education reports (no subscription required). They provide an additional list of state referenda related to higher education. Several reveal a surprising new direction for education-financing: lotteries and taxes from casino gambling. That’s one way to do it, I guess.
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Nebraska voters have approved a ballot initiative banning affirmative action, and Coloradans may do the same. As of 7:40 AM, CNN has the ban ahead 983,546 to 970,067, with 87% of precincts reporting). There’s victory for Ward Connerly, and hopefully soon two.
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If you like “whodunit” books and “perfect crime” plots, I heartily recommend the Tim Groseclose experience of trying to obtain the data to evaluate the “holistic” admissions process of the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). Groseclose is the political science professor who blew the whistle on what he considers to be UCLA’s violation […]
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Tim Groseclose, a Political Science Professor at UCLA, has resigned from its Committee on Undergraduate Admissions and Relations with Schools, stating that “a growing body of evidence strongly suggests that UCLA is cheating on admissions” – of course, in order to circumvent the state ban on the use of race as a factor in admissions. […]
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How do you thwart an anti-affirmative action ballot measure likely to be overwhelmingly approved by state voters? Let me count the ways in which racial-preference boosters (typically college administrators, liberal state officials, and ethnic advocacy groups) have thwarted or tried to thwart anti affirmative action activist Ward Connerly’s hopes for a “Super Tuesday” this November […]
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Book Review: Ending Racial Preferences: The Michigan Story by Carol M. Allen (Lexington Books, 2008, 422 pp.) I like this book, but fairness to the prospective reader requires disclosure of three facts: (a) it is an odd book, (b) I am an odd reader, and (c) it costs ninety dollars, for Pete’s sake. The last […]
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The ABA is very big on diversity. To satisfy its standards, nearly all law schools must seriously relax their admissions standards for minority students. But how many of so-called beneficiaries of affirmative action are graduating and passing the bar? And how many are winding up with nothing to show for their trouble but students loans? […]
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Several years ago a Korean-American student in one of my politics classes at Princeton described the reaction of his Asian classmates in the California private school he attended when the college acceptance and rejection letters arrived in the mail the spring of their senior year. A female Black student, he explained, had applied to more […]
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The University of Texas has been sued once again over racial preferences in its admissions policy – by an 18-year-old high school senior in Sugar Land near Houston who ranks in the top 12 percent of her class but says she was turned down by the university’s prestigious Austin campus in favor of less academically […]
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By Gail Heriot (Ms. Heriot is a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. This piece is adapted from Ms. Heriot’s Commissioner Statement for the Civil Rights Report on Affirmative Action at American Law Schools released last fall.) I have no doubt that those who originally conceived of race-based admissions policies – nearly forty […]
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The Harvard Crimson offers an unsurprisingly elliptical response to a new study “Admissions and Public Higher Education in California, Texas, and Florida: The Post-Affirmative Action Era” appearing in InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies. The study focuses on the enrollment patterns of school systems that eliminated affirmative action – and found significant increases […]
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