Affirmative action
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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September 8, 2016 — John Hinderaker
Last Friday, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported on a decision by General Mills, one of the nation’s largest advertisers, to impose race and gender quotas on the advertising agencies it uses: The Golden Valley-based foodmaker wants the creative departments in agencies bidding for its business to be staffed at least half by women and 20 percent by people of color. *** In revealing its standard, General Mills executives said they
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June 23, 2016 — Scott Johnson
In an opinion issued this morning, Justice Kennedy joined the Supreme Court’s four liberals to uphold the University of Texas’s “affirmative action” program in the Fisher case. This is the case’s second trip to the Court. It won’t be coming back. The Court’s opinion today is posted here. The Court’s 2013 opinion in Fisher I (as the Court refers to it) is posted here. I think today’s result is disappointing,
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February 18, 2016 — John Hinderaker
Today Center of the American Experiment, the think tank of which I am president, put on a lunch forum in downtown Minneapolis featuring Jason Riley of the Manhattan Institute and the Wall Street Journal. Jason talked about his blockbuster book, Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed. We interviewed Jason last night on the Power Line Show. If you haven’t listened to that interview,
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December 17, 2015 — Paul Mirengoff
I had missed this story, but catching up with NR’s Bench Memos today I learned from Carrie Severino that Donald Trump joined in the criticism of Justice Scalia’s pertinent questioning during oral argument in the Fisher case. Readers probably recall that Scalia raised the problem of the “mismatch” that arises when blacks students receive preferential admission to college and must then compete with students who have significantly better credentials. Scalia
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December 13, 2015 — Paul Mirengoff
Scott’s six notes on “mismatch” add a much needed clarity to the discussion of race-based preferential admissions to college. I want to add seven notes on the concept of diversity, which Scott discussed. Note 1: The ideology of diversity is, as Scott says, relatively new. The concept of diversity, however, has been around for quite a while. Decades ago, it was common for elite eastern colleges to strive for geographic
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