“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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Back in September the College Republicans at the University of California, Berkeley, garnered a good deal of attention (including here and here) by sponsoring an anti-affirmative action bake sale. Part of their purpose was to call attention to legislation, SB 185, then waiting for Gov. Brown’s signature, that in clear violation of the state constitution’s prohibition […]
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When last we heard from Wisconsin, Roger Clegg, the mild-mannered, scholarly president and general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity, had provoked a riot of pro-racial preference liberals there by visiting the state to discuss CEO’s studies demonstrating massive racial discrimination by the University of Wisconsin. He must have put something in the water (or beer) […]
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The following job notice was posted August 4: The University of California, Berkeley invites applications for a position as an Assistant Professor (tenure-track) in any of the following three areas: (1) Diversity and Identity; (2) Legal or Philosophical Frameworks for Diverse Democracies; and (3) Diversity, Civil Society and Political Action, or some combination thereof. The anticipated […]
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Writing here over a year ago in The Misguided Push for STEM Diversity, I noted that “Sometimes it seems as though the most heavily researched, richly funded area of American science today involves studies of why there aren’t more women in STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) and efforts to induce, recruit, and retain […]
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Another day, another bunch of dollars thrown at studies lamenting “the gender gap in science and technology fields.” The most recent comes from the U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Women in STEM: A Gender Gap to Innovation. From its Executive Summary: Our science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) workforce is crucial to America’s innovative capacity and […]
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I recently posted an essay here about a racial hoax at the University of Virginia Law School that quickly became an issue implicating the University’s honor code. Briefly, Johnathan Perkins was an attractive third year UVa law student from what could be described as a civil rights family inasmuch as both his father and grandfather wrote […]
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What you may have heard coming out of Nashville recently is not the twang of country music but the shrill trill of academic controversy provoked by the decision of historically black Tennessee State University to eliminate two programs from opposite ends of the curriculum, physics and Africana studies. According to Inside Higher Ed, Administrators said the reorganization […]
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The Center for Diversity in Engineering at the University of Virginia is sponsoring a “Discover the joy of engineering” summer camp, but boys need not apply. Program Description Enjoy Engineering is a camp designed to help girls discover the joy of engineering. It will provide hands-on activities, lab tours, and creative engineering design projects in a […]
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The University of Virginia Law School held its commencement on May 22, and not a moment too soon. “Not since Teddy Kennedy was speeding through town and picking up reckless driving tickets in the late 1950s,” The Hook, a Charlottesville weekly, reported, “has UVA Law School seen so much scandal.” Since those scandals involved race […]
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Ron Howell (Yale, ’70), a journalism professor at Brooklyn College, writesin the current issue of the Yale alumni magazine that over the years I have from time to time floated the idea that some racist scientist had slipped poison into our milk, after our births or while we were at Yale. Others, not easily inclined […]
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Inside Higher Ed reports that a workshop at the University of Washington is attempting to reduce the number of women who work in STEM fields in industry. Neither the IHE article nor the organizers of the workshop put it quite that way, of course, but that nevertheless is clearly the workshop’s purpose. “The organizers of the On-Ramps […]
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Forty years after co-education came to Princeton, the campus has been in a tizzy because, Inside Higher Ed reported a few days ago, “female undergrads tend to eschew high-profile executive positions at the most prestigious student organizations in favor of less glamorous — but often equally labor-intensive — leadership roles.” In the decades after Princeton went co-ed in 1969, women regularly rose […]
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At about the same time as the release of MIT’s new study on the status of its women, which I discussed recently here, two more studies appeared on the anemic underrepresentation on higher education faculties of another marginalized group, political conservatives. Both studies, by Neil Gross, Ethan Fosse, and Jeremy Freese, conclude that “self-selection,” not […]
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The latest MIT report on the status of its faculty women– earlier ones appeared in 1999 and 2002–finds impressive progress and “an overwhelmingly positive view of MIT,” but the key word in the seemingly endless stream of reports on women in STEM fields, “marginalization,” inevitably pops up as well, this time in reaction to “the […]
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Are you a female STEM student (or wannabe STEM student) suffering from a stereotype infection? Then, according to new research recently described in Inside Higher Ed (“Inoculation Against Stereotype”), you should take a course from a female instructor to inoculate yourself. The research, based on a study at U Mass Amherst by Nilanjana Dasgupta, associate professor of […]
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Stigmatism, n. A variant of astigmatism, particularly virulent in academia, in which visual impairment derives not from an irregularly curved cornea but from ideologically distorted vision that in many cases prevents its victims from perceiving the stigma from which they suffer and in others prevents them from recognizing the source of the stigma they do […]
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It is not really news to most of us that the most avid and outspoken devotees of “diversity” often live and work in the most politically and ideologically un-diverse pockets of America, academic communities, but that must have been news to editors at the New York Times since they found reporter John Tierney’s surprisingly intelligent […]
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Supporters of Title IX such as the National Coalition for Women and Girls In Sports regularly claim that “loss of male collegiate athletic participation opportunities is a myth.” Tell that to the University of Delaware, which announced in January: that it is downgrading its men’s cross country and outdoor track and field teams from varsity […]
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