Affirmative action
November 28, 2019 — Scott Johnson
In a surprise Thanksgiving visit, President Trump flew to Afghanistan to visit the troops at Bagram Air Field. It is his first visit to the Afghanistan theater. The president left Mar-a-Lago and flew overnight to be with the troops. In Afghanistan he has announced that the United States has resumed talks with the Taliban and that the talks are focused on a possible ceasefire. This is from the CBS News
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November 11, 2019 — Steven Hayward
Move over Cook County, Illinois, and make room for King County in Washington state, where Seattle’s ongoing bid to rival San Francisco in the crazy department is only exceeded by its dubious record in ballot counting after close elections. Last week I noted that the attempt to reimpose affirmative action in Washington state had failed at the ballot box, but then the “late vote” started coming in from King County.
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October 1, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
Scott has already written about the decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which upholds excluding many Asian-American applicants to Harvard who, by all objective criteria should be admitted, on the theory that they fit the stereotype of being, in effect, too serious. Harvard doesn’t really think the Asian-American applicants are too serious. It just needs an excuse for keeping a lid on the number of Asian-Americans at Harvard
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October 1, 2019 — Scott Johnson
Federal district court judge Allison Burroughs has upheld Harvard’s racially discriminatory admissions policy in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (embedded below). Long story short: Harvard’s discrimination is all in a good cause. Asian-Americans are only incidental victims and they aren’t treated any more poorly in the process than white students. Harvard doesn’t mean anything invidious by it. The AP story on the ruling is here. Stuart Taylor, Jr.’s 2018
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April 22, 2019 — John Hinderaker
Race discrimination is popular with our nation’s elites, much as it was in the 1840s, say, or the 1930s. So it isn’t surprising that it has fallen to the populist Trump administration to oppose such discrimination in principle. The Wall Street Journal broke this story last week, but this link goes to an NPR article: Texas Tech University’s medical school has agreed to end its consideration of race in selecting
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December 24, 2018 — John Hinderaker
Via Steve Sailer, the Washington Post maps the minefield that high school students navigate as they describe their racial backgrounds: Sabria Kazmi’s background defies easy classification. She has grandparents from Tennessee, Iraq and two countries in South Asia. So when the 18-year-old filled out her college application, she puzzled over what boxes to check. The task is all the more sensitive this year amid the mounting debate over the role
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October 14, 2018 — Scott Johnson
Stuart Taylor Jr. is coauthor with Richard Sander of the indispensable 2012 book Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students Its Intended to Help, and Why Universities Wont Admit It. I drew on it for my 2013 Federalist Society talk “Bias in the air.” Writing in the Claremont Review of Books, Thomas Sowell commented: “Sander and Taylor have written an outstanding book that deserves to be read and pondered in many
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July 4, 2018 — Scott Johnson
The Department of Education has posted the rescission of Obama era federal regulatory guidance documents encouraging educational institutions to discriminate on the basis of race under cover of the “diversity” and “affirmative action” shibboleths. We previewed the rescission yesterday here. The Department of Education has now posted it here. It comes in the form of a “Dear Colleague” letter signed by senior officers of the Department of Education and the
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July 3, 2018 — Scott Johnson
Word comes today via Michelle Hackman’s Wall Street Journal story that the Trump administration is planning to rescind “a set of Obama-era policies that encourage the use of race in college admissions to promote diverse educational settings[.]” Hackman tacfully couches her report in the euphemisms that enshroud the practice of racial discrimination in the name of “affirmative action.” Hackman does not link to either of the two Obama administration guidance
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June 30, 2018 — Scott Johnson
The principle of equal treatment without regard to race is one that is close to my heart. Accordingly, one of my favorite books on a legal subject is Andrew Kull’s The Color-Blind Constitution. The book is full of surprises. For example, Kull devotes two chapters to the separate but equal doctrine approved by the Supreme Court in the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson. The case represents the bygone era
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April 8, 2018 — Scott Johnson
I mentioned the then forthcoming appearance of Professor Richard Sander to speak at Middlebury College in “Darkeness at Penn, take 2” (discussing the Amy Wax affair). Sander is professor of law at the UCLA School of Law. He became interested in the subject of “affirmative action” when he joined the UCLA faculty. Professor Sander is the coauthor (with Stuart Taylor, Jr.) of Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended
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February 3, 2018 — Steven Hayward
The following paper uploaded to the Social Science Research Network a few days ago caught the eye of Charles Murray. You’ll see why toward the end of the abstract: The Effects of Affirmative Action Bans on Low-Income College Access and Upward Mobility Sungoh Kwan, University of Connecticut Abstract In recent years, many states in the U.S. have banned race-based affirmative action in college admissions. Public universities in these states have
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January 29, 2018 — Steven Hayward
National Review‘s Jim Geraghty offered an interesting observation the other day about the actual motivations behind the push for “diversity: in the media: Back in my journalism pollywog days, I recall going to some gathering at the National Press Club where the Washington offices of most of the big news organizations were represented. They went around the room and introduced all of the bigwigs, and I noticed a clear pattern. The
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November 12, 2017 — Paul Mirengoff
In a post called “The Prophet of Affirmative Action,” John cited and quoted extensively from a letter written in 1969 by California appellate judge Macklin Fleming, a Yale Law graduate, to the dean of Yale Law School. The letter questions the wisdom of the new quota system in terms that, as John says, are remarkably prescient. I want to give credit to another, even earlier, prophet of affirmative action —
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November 11, 2017 — John Hinderaker
In the late 1960s, Yale Law School adopted a quota system for African-American applicants. Putting aside its normal criteria for admission, Yale decided that future law school classes would be 10% black, regardless of qualifications. Other law schools and academic institutions did the same thing at around the same time. On June 9, 1969, California appellate judge Macklin Fleming, a Yale Law graduate, wrote a letter to Dean Louis Pollak
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May 31, 2017 — Steven Hayward
We noted here a few weeks ago the ruckus over the Rhodes College feminist philosopher Rebecca Tuvel, who foolishly thought that the same logic that applied to gender identity (namely that you pick your own) should apply equally to racial identity. Why not? We’re sometimes told from the identity politics left that race is a social construct, too, except when we’re told it isn’t. Left unexplored was exactly why Tuvel’s
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March 30, 2017 — Scott Johnson
The principle of equal treatment without regard to race is one that is close to my heart. Accordingly, one of my favorite books on a legal subject is Andrew Kull’s The Color-Blind Constitution. (I learned of the book at the time of its publication through Judge Alex Kosinski’s 1993 New Republic review/essay.) It is a book that is by turns inspiring and maddening. I recommend it without reservation to readers
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