Affirmative action
May 2, 2022 — Steven Hayward
In other survey news, a brand new Pew Research Center survey finds that the public opposes race-based college admissions by a whopping 74 percent. Here’s the general breakdown of factors the public believe should guide admission: Pew, controlled for decades now by liberals despite—or rather against—the wishes of the very conservative J. Howard Pew who set up the Pew foundation, does its best to fog up the massive public opposition
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April 25, 2022 — Steven Hayward
Our go-to thinker on civil rights issues, University of San Diego law professor Gail Heriot, is out with a new paper (with co-author Carissa Mulder) on “The Sausage Factory” of college admissions. Here is the abstract: The Supreme Court assumes that race-preferential admissions policies are the result of a careful academic judgment by colleges and universities that racial diversity has pedagogical benefits for students generally. But evidence shows that the
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January 28, 2022 — John Hinderaker
Paul has argued here and here that Senate Republicans should feel free to oppose Joe Biden’s nominee to replace Stephen Breyer on the merits, in part because most voters don’t like the idea of a “set aside” Supreme Court seat that is available only to, in this case, black women. This poll, reported today by Rasmussen Reports, supports that conclusion: [O]nly 26% of voters think it’s a good idea to
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January 28, 2022 — Steven Hayward
“The Underhandedness of Affirmative Action” is the title of Harvey Mansfield’s prescient article in National Review way back in 1984 (unfortunately not available online easily that I can find). A key sample: To understand the threat [that affirmative action poses to constitutional government], let us return to the necessity that affirmative action conceal the help it renders its beneficiaries. As a policy, it cannot claim success, because to announce an
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October 30, 2021 — John Hinderaker
A central tenet of Critical Race Theory is that America’s institutions are “systemically” rigged to favor white people. POCs just can’t catch up, no matter what they do. Of course, if that were true it would be hard to explain why whites rank only 17th in median income, trailing such allegedly oppressed groups as Lebanese, Iranian, Pakistani, Syrian, Ghanian and Nigerian Americans, as well, of course, as Indian-Americans, whose median
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August 5, 2021 — John Hinderaker
Classical music is under attack by the “woke” because the overwhelming majority of classical musicians are either Asian or white. Heather Mac Donald tells the depressing story. Her whole article is worth reading, but for now I want to focus on this: in recent history, orchestra auditions have generally been “blind,” i.e., the performer is behind a screen so that the judges are not influenced by his or her gender,
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May 28, 2021 — Steven Hayward
While we await word as to whether the Supreme Court will take up appeal of the case of Harvard’s blatant discrimination against Asians, we note the publication this week of A Dubious Expediency: How Race Preferences Damage Higher Education, a fine essay collection edited by Gail Heriot and Maimon Schwarzchild of the University of San Diego, and published by our friends at Encounter Books. The title of the book—”a dubious
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May 17, 2021 — Steven Hayward
In recent weeks we’ve seen the announcement that certain Virginia public school districts (and others elsewhere in the country) will discontinue advanced math classes, because “equity,” and the University of California will permanently discontinue using the SAT for admission purposes. If you want to know why the left is doing this, have a close look at this chart: If there’s one thing the left can’t abide at the moment, it
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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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