The New York Times Slams Racial Preferences | Center for Equal Opportunity

Not on purpose, of course, but bear with me.

Last week there was a long, front-page story in the New York Times, showcasing the success that the University of Michigan has had in achieving student-body “diversity” without the use of racial admission preferences. On the article, three observations.

First, the obvious point is that this is bad news for the University of Texas in the Fisher case, since it shows that such preferences are not “narrowly tailored” to the achievement of student-body diversity. (Whether schools ought to be trying to achieve student bodies of a predetermined racial and ethnic mix at all is an even better question.)

Second, as has happened in the past, Lee Bollinger’s mask has slipped. He admits in the article that the reason for the use of admission preferences is not the purported “educational benefits” of a diverse student body, but really “to overcome two centuries of legacies of discrimination and active disempowerment and wealth transfer.” That may warm Ta-Nehisi Coates’s heart, but this purported justification is one the Supreme Court has rejected and, therefore, schools are no longer supposed to be using in litigation. This is of some note since Mr. Bollinger — “who was Michigan’s president during the Supreme Court cases [challenging preferences there in 2003] and now leads Columbia University” — has long been the face of university affirmative action.

Third, it’s chilling that one way the University of Michigan decided to increase its diversity was by admitting nobody off its waiting list and thus shrinking its enrollment, since the list had too many well-off white and Asian American students on it. Think about that: People are refused admission, not just because it was preferable to admit someone of a different color (as bad as that is), but because the school wanted to increase the percentage of some colors of students by denying admission to students of other colors. Keep this in mind the next time you’re told that politically correct discrimination is more acceptable than old-fashioned discrimination because the latter was not “inclusive” and the former is.

Clubbing White Guys: The corporate head of Sam’s Club brags in this video about how she demands not only that her own managers get their racial/ethnic/gender numbers right, but that her suppliers do so as well. The resulting discrimination is, of course, flatly at odds with the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which says that employment decisions are supposed to be made without regard to skin color, national origin, and sex. Who does she think she is, anyway — a university?

Bragging about Lawbreaking: The provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at Rochester Institute of Technology bragged last week in Inside Higher Ed about how his institution violates Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. I hope someone sues RIT, or at least that RIT’s general counsel takes a look at this, in light of Title VII, which (as just noted) makes it illegal to weigh race, ethnicity, and sex in hiring and promotion decisions, and to sort applicants on that basis.

This is therefore illegal: “Or if you have an opening for a dean position and are going through a search process, you might consider asking a qualified woman to step in as interim — something I’ve done on two occasions at RIT.” Clearly the suggestion is that you look for a woman to appoint, not just that you be willing to appoint one if she is the best qualified. It is likewise illegal to tell a hiring committee that it has to meet a racial/gender quota in sorting applicants into a finalist selection pool, as the author also recommends.

Finally, there’s this: “In other words, if you have to choose between two equally qualified candidates, choose the one who brings diversity to your college or university.” In the first place, and as a practical matter, “diversity” policies inevitably result in people getting hired who are not just marginally less qualified but substantially less qualified. Moreover, how often can it be said that there is no difference between two competing candidates? This is just an excuse for discrimination. But, in the rare instance where there is a tie, then the decisionmaker should flip a coin. Would anyone dispute that a policy of tie-goes-to-the-white-male would be discriminatory?

More on the illegality of this sort of thing here.

Omnibus Bad-Wish List: It has a lot of competition, of course, but a case can be made that, pound-for-pound, the worst bureaucracy in the Obama administration is the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. Here’s hoping, therefore, that this fact is reflected in the funding that it gets — or, more precisely, doesn’t get — in Congress’s omnibus spending bill. More here and here.

P.S. I don’t know if this can be done at this point or not, but Congress could also specify particular areas in which appropriated money cannot be spent — e.g., no funds shall be used to argue that “microaggressions” or bathrooms-for-actual-boys-only-and-bathrooms-for-actual-girls-only or whatever violate federal civil-rights laws.

Yesterday’s Giants, Today’s Dwarves: A couple of thoughts regarding campus demands to rename buildings, statues, and the like commemorating individuals whose views on minorities and women have not stood well the test of time. First, since none of us is without sin, requiring sinlessness for commemoration means no one will be commemorated — yet even those of us who are terrible sinners in one area might be visionaries in another. So a Woodrow Wilson Civil Rights Center might be a bad idea, but not a Woodrow Wilson Center for Loopy Progressivism. Second, the Left seems happy to name things after people who are actually convicted criminals, so long as the person is their convicted criminal: Consider the recent proposals to honor former D.C. mayor Marion Barry. One suspects, alas, that denigrating the Nation’s (and the West’s) founders – and thus the Nation (and the West) itself – is part of the long-term game here.

It has also struck me that the following analogy might be apt. Suppose that an ante bellum Southerner criticized Yankees for having bad manners. He might well have been right. But, in hindsight, we would all agree that, bad manners or not, the Yankees were right about slavery, and to focus on bad manners at a time when that abhorrent institution was alive and well showed, to put it charitably, a lack of perspective. In 2016, for the Left to be focused on renaming buildings and removing statues — when 71 percent of African Americans are being born out of wedlock, and that is the real obstacle to black progress — shows a similar lack of perspective.

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