Education

For now, at least. A federal trial judge has ruled that, while race is considered by Harvard in determining who gets in and who doesn’t (“the use of race in and of itself is admitted”), and while the plaintiff group has standing in this case to challenge the resulting discrimination against Asian Americans (in line with an earlier ruling), nonetheless Harvard is not breaking the law. The outcome was not surprising, and the judge’s 130-page opinion is unlikely to change many minds or alter the expected trajectory of the case to the Supreme Court. The judge found, “Race is only …

The Assault on American Excellence In 1978, when the Supreme Court upheld race-based admissions in the Bakke case, there was just one Justice who said that the attainment of a diverse student body was a compelling state interest. Today “diversity” is no longer so obscure. Indeed, it is “the most powerful word in higher education today,” says Anthony Kronman. Kronman is a Yale Law professor and former dean of the Yale Law school. His politics are liberal yet he has not been fooled by the diversity cult. The Assault on American Excellence is his new book, which he previewed in …

Inside Higher Education The Supreme Court’s leading race-based admissions case remains Grutter v. Bollinger, which was decided in 2003. In the course of upholding the use of race in the admissions policy at the Michigan Law School, the Supreme Court, with Justice O’Connor writing for a majority of five, decided that diversity can be a compelling interest the pursuit of which can justify the narrowly tailored use of race in selecting applicants. O’Connor said the policy has “the potential to enrich everyone’s education.” Which can be done by enrolling a “critical mass” of underrepresented minority students, thus ensuring their ability …

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 …

The Office for Civil Rights Investigates   The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights has dismissed a complaint by the Center for Equal Opportunity alleging that Texas Tech University unlawfully used race and ethnicity as a factor in its undergraduate admissions programs, starting with the entering freshman class of 2005 — but wait! Yes, the complaint was “dismissed” in the legal sense, but not until OCR had made sure that race was no longer a consideration in the University’s admissions programs. CEO has long argued for race-neutral admissions, at Texas Tech as well as at other institutions of higher education, …

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 …

Here at the Center for Equal Opportunity we followed as we usually do this year’s March Madness, which meant keeping up with Texas Tech’s excellent basketball team, which battled into the Final Four and then into Overtime in the championship game before losing to Virginia. Texas Tech also won our attention for its worthy decision to end the use of race in admissions, a position we had urged the university to take some years ago, and which the Trump administration has pressed through the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights. Even Justice O’Connor has been sympathetic to ending affirmative action …

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 …

Some thoughts & observations The  Grutter case decided in 2003 is best (though infamously) known for holding that the attainment of a racially diverse student body is “a compelling government interest.” Otherwise, the admissions preferences under challenge in Grutter could not have been justified. These issues are back in the federal courts, and may well rise to the Supreme Court by 2020-21. There is yet more to observe about Grutter—in particular a sentence early in the Court’s opinion in the case by Justice O’Connor: “As part of its goal of ‘assembling a class that is both exceptionally academically qualified and …