The New SAT “Adversity Score”

Roger CleggEducation

Lots of recent news stories tell us that the College Board is adding an “adversity score”— looking at crime, poverty, and other demographic data from students’ neighborhoods and high schools — to the SAT scores it reports to universities for their applicants. This has attracted much attention and comment, so allow a poor but somewhat honest lawyer to put in his two cents’ worth. The principal point I’ll make is that, as a legal matter, this is of limited interest. In admitting students, schools are free to take into account pretty much whatever they like, with the notable exception of race …

Fighting racial preferences in print, online, and over the air

Roger CleggRacial Preferences

The New York Times recently asked me to participate in a debate in its publication Upfront (“The News Magazine for Teens”), on the question, “Should Affirmative Action Be Eliminated?”  I was happy to do so, and focused on the area I thought most likely to grab teens’ attention, namely college admissions.  Here’s what I wrote: Affirmative action is a system that treats school or job applicants differently based on race or ethnicity. That’s called discrimination, and the costs of this kind of discrimination are much higher than any potential benefit. The unfairness of this system is particularly evident in college admissions. …

Try, Try Again with the Supreme Court

Roger CleggDisparate Impact

For many years, the Center for Equal Opportunity tried to get the Supreme Court to rule that there is no “disparate impact” cause of action under the Fair Housing Act.  Thus, for example, if the landlord of an apartment building decided to favor potential tenants who did not have a record of violent crime — and this policy ignored race by its terms, in its intent, and in its application — then he could not be held liable for racial discrimination just because the policy had a statistically disproportionate effect on this racial group versus that racial group.   Alas, …

Congratulations to Texas Tech!

Roger CleggEducation

As a result of a complaint that the Center for Equal Opportunity filed in 2004 (!) against Texas Tech, the medical school there recently signed a Resolution Agreement (RA) with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, ending its use of racial preferences in admissions.  As of March 1, “an applicant’s race and/or national origin are no longer to be considered.” Kudos to Texas Tech: This is even more impressive than its run to the Final Four in the NCAA’s annual basketball championship! Our complaint was filed when, after the Supreme Court had issued its 2003 decisions narrowly …

Are We Winning or Losing?

Roger CleggUncategorized

Like most people, I have good days and bad days on my job.  Sometimes you feel like you’re getting ahead, and some days not so much. At the Center for Equal Opportunity, getting ahead means stopping the powers that be from using race-based decision-making — that is, from treating Americans differently on the basis of skin color and what country their ancestors they came from.  That means saying no to old-fashioned, politically incorrect discrimination, of course, but also to today’s more fashionable and politically correct discrimination:  affirmative action and the use of the “disparate impact” approach to civil-rights enforcement.  And …

The College Admissions Scandal and Racial Preferences

Roger CleggEducation

The Left is trying hard to let no scandal go to waste by asserting that last week’s college-admission indictments prove that we need to continue racial preferences. White people cheat and bribe to get in, you see, so we have to this counterbalance to give nonwhites a boost. Of course this is silly. It requires, for starters, that we equate being white with being wealthy and corrupt. But the overwhelming majority of whites are neither, needless to say, and one suspects that most of the students who were cheated out of a slot here were themselves white. Conversely, it is …

Americans Overwhelmingly Reject Racial Preferences in Admissions

Roger CleggRacial Preferences

My colleague Terry Eastland wrote about this last week, but in case you missed it: Accordingly to a new Pew Research Center survey, 73 percent of Americans believe that race and ethnicity should play no role in university admissions. All racial and ethnic groups reject this discrimination: 78 percent of whites, 62 percent of blacks, 65 percent of Hispanics, and 59 percent of Asian Americans. This result is no outlier, by the way, and is line with other surveys over the years. *** And for the same reason — which can be summed up as E Pluribus Unum — reparations …

We Need More Black Drug Dealers, Part II

Roger CleggCulture & Society

The Huffington Post last week had an article headlined, “Ocasio-Cortez Slams the ‘Racial Injustice’ of the Cannabis Business As White Men Profit,” reporting that the “New York congresswoman suggests ‘affirmative-action licensing’ to mitigate the ‘racial wealth gap’ in areas that paid the price of the war on drugs.”  She’s offended by the fact that too many white men are making money on legalized pot, and suggests that maybe licenses should be distributed so as to favor nonwhites, to make up for the fact that so many of them were arrested in the past for dealing drugs illegally. I’m not happy …

Pocahontas or Pioneer?

Roger CleggEducation

Here’s an interesting case: A medical school has been sued for racial discrimination because an admissions officer there advised a (white) applicant that her chances of admission would be better if she took a DNA test and could point to some African American or Native American blood. Now, surely, this has to be filed in the category of “appalling but not surprising.” That is, under the lamentable current state of the law, schools can weigh race and ethnicity in admissions, and this helps you if you belong to some groups and hurts you if you belong to other groups, so …

Happy Talk

Roger CleggDisparate Impact

Let me elaborate a bit on the important development, regarding the Trump administration and the dubious “disparate impact” approach to civil-right enforcement, that I discussed in an earlier email this month. Not only has the Trump administration done the right thing in rescinding the Obama-era guidance aggressively taking the “disparate impact” approach with respect to school discipline, but the Washington Post reports that this action reflects a larger skepticism in the administration about the approach throughout executive-branch agencies. Good. As conservatives have long argued, this approach to civil-rights enforcement is bad law and bad policy for any number of reasons. …