Use English, not quotas | Center for Equal Opportunity

Center for Equal Opportunity board member Rosalie Pedalino Porter recently testified before Congress in favor of legislation to make English the nation’s official language. It earned her a mention in a New York Times editorial, and if the reference was not exactly to praise her, well, consider the source. Great job, Dr. Porter!

Meanwhile, the New York Post was running my op-ed, criticizing Columbia University’s decision to earmark some faculty hiring money — a lot of faculty hiring money — on the basis of race, ethnicity, and sex. Here is an excerpted version:

Columbia University President Lee Bollinger has announced “a $30 million commitment to the recruitment and support of outstanding female and underrepresented minority scholars.” What’s more, the money comes “with an insistence on accountability and achieving measurable movement toward our goals.”

Can you say, “quotas”?

Bollinger is no stranger to politically correct discrimination. As president of the University of Michigan, he aggressively defended his school’s use of racial preferences in admissions, winning one case (Grutter v. Bollinger, involving the law school) and losing another (Gratz v. Bollinger, involving undergrad admissions) before the Supreme Court in 2003.

Bollinger is apparently relying on the high court’s 2003 rulings that universities can discriminate — to a limited degree — on the basis of race and ethnicity in student admissions. But he’s wrong to assume that it must also be OK for universities to weigh race and ethnicity (and sex) in the same “diversity”-driven way when hiring faculty.

Sorry: The Grutter decision said nothing about Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which covers employment and which has different language and jurisprudence than Title VI, which applies to student admissions. The federal courts have never recognized a “diversity” exception to Title VII, and are unlikely to. (In fact, when the Supreme Court was about to decide that issue in the late 1990s, the civil-rights establishment hastily raised enough money to settle the case.)

Sometimes school officials assert that their affirmative-discrimination efforts are justified because minority or female students need “role models” (as if we’re not allowed to admire people who have a different skin color than we do). Yet the high court rejected this argument more than 25 years ago, in Wygant v. Jackson Board of Education.
Bollinger may argue that setting aside $30 million to hire female and underrepresented minority scholars isn’t necessarily discrimination, since there is other money for hiring white males. Really — separate but equal?
So Columbia is breaking the law. Of course, it’s also morally wrong: This is discrimination based on skin color, gender and/or what country someone’s ancestors came from. That ought to be simply unacceptable in America in 2012.

Note, too, that Columbia’s new initiative is quite explicit in promising to discriminate against some racial and ethnic minorities. The phrase “underrepresented minority” was coined to cover the fact that it’s not just whites who need to be discriminated against, but “overrepresented minorities” as well (typically Asians, including Arab-Americans).

Here’s the last, most obvious point: If Columbia weighs race, ethnicity and sex in hiring and recruiting, then it won’t be hiring and recruiting simply the best qualified people. The research won’t be as good, the teaching won’t be as good — and the university won’t be as good.

* * *

But Columbia is not alone. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that many business schools are putting a thumb on the scales to hire more female deans, and some companies are worse.

For example, take a look at this interview with Walmart’s “global chief diversity officer,” Sharon Orlopp. In it, she describes her successes in hiring and promoting more women and people from “traditionally underrepresented groups” — using “diversity metrics,” a “diversity-goals program,” “quantitative measurements, probably around representation, retention, promotion, etc.,” and scrutiny of “applicant versus pool placements,” and with some thought now being given to adding a “carrot” to the current “stick” in order to make sure the line is toed. Again, can you say “quota”?

Is hiring and promoting with an eye on race, ethnicity, and sex required by law? No — again, it’s illegal. Does this discrimination make them popular? No, not with most Americans it doesn’t. Well, then, is it “good for business,” as we’re sometimes told? No, it’s not that either: Ms. Orlopp admits, “We haven’t been able to trace an effect [on sales in stores] . . . We currently don’t have any tracking mechanisms that say because we’re more diverse it’s driven sales up.”

The fact is that there is no legal, logical, empirical, or moral justification for it, as I explained some years ago in this testimony before the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

There are no good reasons for these policies, then, but there are some bad ones: pressure from the federal government, fear of “disparate impact” lawsuits, fear that Al Sharpton will say nasty things about you, etc. And so the corporations cave.

They hire a “global chief diversity officer,” who will defend these programs as if her job depended on it, because of course it does.

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