Racial Preferences
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 25, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
We are writing with unfortunate frequency about the spread of the racial spoils system in the U.S. That system first took hold in college admissions policies. The Supreme Court could have stopped it in its tracks, but declined early on to do so. Since then, it has continued to tolerate blatant racial discrimination against Whites and Asian-Americans. Now, the Supreme Court has the opportunity to address the problem it helped
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May 24, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
The dishing out of benefits based on skin color is becoming a huge issue in America. A practice that once seemed mostly confined to admission to college now extends as far as access to interviews with the mayor of Chicago. And, most significantly, it extends to the receipt of dollars from the federal government. Blacks say they are tired of being taken for granted by Democrat politicians. So Democrats are
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May 22, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
There are enough destructive and unlawful woke policies going forward these days to keep dozens, if not hundreds, of public interest law firms working full time. I’m happy to report on two recent court successes (for now) in cases challenging such policies. In Texas, U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor has issued a temporary restraining order sought by a restaurant owner against the Biden Small Business Administration. The owner challenged the
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May 18, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
In a move that will favor Black applicants for admission, the University of California has agreed to no longer consider SAT or ACT scores when making admissions and scholarship decisions. Most colleges and universities are confident they can discriminate against White and Asian applicants without ditching these tests. They believe they can, in effect, award free points (hundreds of them in the case of the SAT) to Black applicants to
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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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May 10, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
Rhodes Scholarships have been awarded based, in part, on race for at least 50 years. A friend from high school, and one of the smartest people I’ve ever known, was up for the prize in 1971. In the late stage of the process, he was in a room with other candidates from his region. When a tall African-American, an athlete whom I also knew, entered, a buzz went through the
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April 30, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
Tim Scott’s powerful response to Joe Biden’s address to Congress has forced both Biden and Kamala Harris to reject a core belief of the BLM movement and the American left. Both the president and the vice president have now stated that the American people are not racist. Biden said this: No, I don’t think the American people are racist, but I think after 400 years, African-Americans have been left in
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April 27, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
In March, I wrote about the demand by Coca-Cola’s then-general counsel that law firms representing the company engage in racial discrimination. In a letter to these firms, Coke demanded, among other things, that on Coca-Cola matters they “commit that at least 30% of each of billed associate and partner time will be from diverse attorneys, and of such amounts at least half will be from Black attorneys.” I argued that,
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April 17, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
The Brearley School is a private all-girls school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It costs $54,000 a year to attend and, according to Bari Weiss, prospective families apparently have to take an “anti-racism pledge” to be considered for admission. Brearley’s supposed commitment to anti-racism does not prevent it from discriminating on the basis of race in admissions and hiring. Nor does it stop the school from indoctrinating its
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April 11, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
Tech Gate USA has compiled a partial breakdown, by race, of the students offered admission by six of the eight Ivy League schools (all Ivies except Yale and Columbia). The breakdown is only partial because, with the exception of Harvard, the data released by the schools differentiate only between Whites and “persons of color” — an interesting fact, in itself. The Tech Gate numbers purport to encompass all accepted applicants,
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April 10, 2021 — Steven Hayward
Liberals have long believed that economics is a zero-sum process (think back to Lester Thurow’s old book, The Zero-Sum Society): people only get rich by taking from the poor. You see this in liberals’ long-used rhetoric about how income tax cuts, which allow people to keep more of what they earn, are described as “redistributing” wealth. The idea of positive wealth creation seems beyond the grasp of most liberals. Now
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April 9, 2021 — John Hinderaker
We live in a world in which race discrimination is ubiquitous. Universities, government agencies and all major employers systematically discriminate in favor of some races, and against others, under the banner of “affirmative action.” This has been going on for 50 years. And yet, the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection has been applied to ban race discrimination by public entities in a number of contexts. Similarly, the Civil Rights
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April 8, 2021 — John Hinderaker
From the TaxProf comes the news that a number of states are lowering, or considering lowering, the scores needed to pass the bar exam. Why? So that more minorities will become lawyers: Several states say they could make their bar exams easier to pass as a way to address racial diversity problems and access-to-justice issues entrenched in the legal profession. Their statements coincide with the first data from California, which
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April 8, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
Last night, I wrote that slightly less than 9 percent of those admitted to Princeton’s class of 2025 are white male Americans. However, a closer reading of Princeton’s announcement indicates that the actual percentage is slightly less than 14 percent. I based the 9 percent figure on the residual, after eliminating the 14 percent of admittees who are international students and the 68 percent who are “persons of color” from
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April 8, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
Last night, I reported that white Americans make up only 18 percent of those offered admission to Princeton’s class of 2025, and that males make up less than 9 percent of that group. As I noted here, however, the actual numbers appear to be 28 percent and 14 percent, respectively — still shockingly low and suggestive of race discrimination, in my opinion. I haven’t seen the numbers for other Ivy
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April 7, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
Princeton has offered admission to its class of 2025 to 1,498 applicants. According to numbers provided by the University, around fourteen percent of them are white American males. 14 percent of the admitted applicants identify as international students. 68 percent of the admitted applicants from the U.S. identify as “persons of color.” 52 percent are female. 48 percent are male. Putting these numbers together, we see that only around 28
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