Discreditable Accreditors | Center for Equal Opportunity

Professor Gail Heriot, who moonlights as a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, had an excellent Wall Street Journal op-ed last week that made two important points. The first is that the “mismatch” that results from racial preferences in university admissions is an important factor in the relative dearth of African American graduates in the STEM disciplines. The second is that, while some of the pressure to use these preferences is self-imposed, a lot of it is not — and, in particular, much of it comes from accrediting agencies.

She calls on Sen. Lamar Alexander and Reps. John Kline and Virginia Foxx — “congressional Republican leaders involved in the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act this fall” — to step up to the plate and “prohibit[] accreditors from wading into student-body diversity issues.” She notes that Sen. Alexander knows about this problem and, indeed, helped resist the politically correct accreditors when he was Secretary of Education.

Those interested in more information about what Congress should do can read Professor Heriot’s additional words of wisdom here and here. I should note that the Center for Equal Opportunity works frequently with Professor Heriot, and has been supportive of her efforts here in particular.

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Interview with Clifton R. Wharton, Jr. — Among other accomplishments, Mr. Wharton was the president of Michigan State University and chancellor of the 64-campus State University of New York, and he’s just published his autobiography. In this interview with Inside Higher Ed last week, I liked this exchange (not only did it implicitly reject the need for racial preferences, but it was honest in acknowledging that “affirmative action” is in conflict with “intellectual merit”):

Q: At Michigan State, you created a commission to study the composition of the student body. As you look at higher education today, affirmative action is under legal attack. Can higher education achieve diversity without affirmative action?

A: My personal experience has ranged from attending higher education when there was no such thing as affirmative action — at Harvard my class in the 1940s had only four blacks, who were admitted on intellectual merit, not affirmative action — to the University of Chicago, where I was the first black to receive their economics degree. At MSU in the 1970s, I created a commission on admission which recommended a then radical program rooted in the need to provide enhanced activities that improved the ability of economically disadvantaged students — black and white — to succeed. We did not have any numeric diversity admission goals or affirmative action quotas. The result was that when fully operative, the graduation rates for economically disadvantaged minority and white students were the same as their classmates. And the numbers of such students increased steadily.

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You Can’t Beat Quotas! — The Wall Street Journal published a series of pieces recently on corporate gender diversity. The first sentence in one of them typifies all of them: “Top executives understand that gender diversity is both an ethical and a business imperative.” Why? No explanation in the piece is given. Now, nondiscrimination may be an ethical and business imperative, but that’s quite different.

There’s also lots of discussion about how setting “targets” for female hiring and promotions — and then rewarding or punishing those who succeed or fail in hitting those targets, respectively — is a great technique. My posted comment: “Yes, I bet that nothing succeeds in getting your numbers right like having the boss set a quota. But quotas inevitably lead to discrimination, and discrimination is unfair, divisive, inefficient — and illegal. More here.”

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Smiling at “Disparate Impact” — As CEO supporters know, we’re no fans of the “disparate impact” approach to civil-rights enforcement, but this recent victory for some municipal firefighter plaintiffs nonetheless makes us smile.

Not because some of the plaintiffs were white: There’s no reason why whites can’t make disparate-impact claims, and of course there would be serious constitutional problems were civil-rights statutes interpreted otherwise (literally a denial of equal protection of the laws). But what’s funnier is the (affirmed) “finding that Akron’s promotional process adversely impacted African–American Lieutenant candidates and Caucasian Captain candidates.”

This just goes to show that everything has a disparate impact on someone. And that, of course, is one of the many reasons why this approach to civil-rights enforcement is ridiculous.

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EEOC and Criminal Background Checks — And speaking of “disparate impact,”I wrote earlier this year about a big loss that the Obama administration’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission suffered when it claimed that a company’s use of criminal background checks had an illegal “disparate impact” on the basis of race and sex. Here’s an update: The EEOC has now been socked with nearly a million dollars in attorney fees.

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Finally, the Palm Beach Post recently published (with the title “Not every felon should regain the right to vote”) my response to an editorial it had run that endorsed felon reenfranchisement. Here’s what I wrote:

In reference to the Monday editorial, “Fight to restore ex-felons’ voting rights must not be abandoned”: If you aren’t willing to follow the law yourself, then you can’t demand a role in making the law for everyone else — which is what you do when you vote.

The right to vote can be restored to felons, but it should be done carefully, on a case-by-case basis, after a person has shown that he or she has really turned over a new leaf — not automatically, on the day someone walks out of prison. After all, the unfortunate truth is that many people who walk out of prison will be walking back in.

We don’t let everyone vote. That’s because we have certain objective, minimum requirements of responsibility, trustworthiness and commitment to our laws that we require of people — before entrusting them with a role in the solemn enterprise of self-government. So we deny the right to vote to children, noncitizens, the mentally incompetent — and people who have committed serious crimes against their fellow citizens.

Once a person has shown he has turned over a new leaf by going some period of time without committing a new crime, he could be re-enfranchised at a congratulatory ceremony, rather like a naturalization ceremony for new citizens. But it has to be earned if it is to mean anything.

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