Education

As we await the Supreme Court’s decision in Fisher v. University of Texas–Austin, challenging the school’s use of preferences for African Americans and Latinos in admissions, I was thinking about what I would like to hear Donald Trump say when asked about the opinion (I know what Hillary Clinton will say).  Normally, I would hope that the Republican nominee, at least, would be supportive of the expected Court decision rejecting or at least limiting such preferences, but it’s more complicated with Mr. Trump.  The trouble is that, if he said the right thing, then the response of the Left, the …

Linda Greenhouse recently had a meandering New York Times column about Fisher v. University of Texas – in which  the Supreme Court is considering a challenge to racial and ethnic preferences in student admissions –  in which she unhappily concedes that the “diversity” rationale is the only way that universities can legally justify their use of such preferences. And she poses the core question that follows this way: “If diversity is the only acceptable rationale for taking account of race, as the court insists, then what is the rationale for diversity?” Luckily (or unluckily) for her, I answered this question …

Each campus protest is different, and the demands in each are different, too. Some are illegal (racial quotas for faculty hiring), some are themselves otherwise racist and divisive (demands of acknowledgment of “white privilege”), some might even be worth considering (though even a reasonable demand should not be considered if violently or otherwise illegally made). But here’s an easy one from Dartmouth: If protestors assault other students and deliberately keep them from studying — the only thing students are really supposed to have to do at a university — then the president should call in the police, and the thugs …

An op-ed in the Washington Post recently calls on K–12 schools to improve their racial and ethnic mixes in order to close academic achievement gaps — most specifically, that is, to help black students learn better by making sure they go to schools with plenty of white students in them. It’s a fine op-ed, except for just a few problems:  The terms “integration” and “segregation” are not defined, which is a problem since they are typically misdefined by liberals, as a matter of both law and policy. There is no discussion of where the racial achievement gaps might come from, which is …

I recently participated, at ScotusBlog’s kind invitation, in its symposium on the Fisher II case, and you can read my contribution to it here.  There were no surprises in the arguments made in favor of the University of Texas’s racial discrimination in student admissions, but I did want to address briefly one particularly outrageous claim, since I’ve seen it made elsewhere.  The argument was (and variations on it have been) made that, if you oppose universities’ giving a preference on the basis of race or ethnicity, it follows that “if an applicant wrote an admissions essay about volunteering for an …

Last week I testified before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights at their two-day event on minority access to higher education.  The Commission, which is now dominated 6-2 by liberals, deserves credit for inviting me, since I certainly did not tell the Commissioners what most of them wanted to hear.  Below is a summary of my statement; I’ve deleted the numerous legal and social-science citations, but you can read the full statement here. Introduction.  Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, for the opportunity to testify today. My name is Roger Clegg, and I am president and general counsel of the …

Earlier this year, the lawyers for Abigail Fisher asked the Supreme Court to grant review — again — of her lawsuit challenging the University of Texas’s use of racial and ethnic preferences in its admissions. The Court will consider whether to grant Fisher’s request at its conference on Thursday this week (May 21 — though I caution that sometimes the Court doesn’t decide immediately on what it will do).  The Center for Equal Opportunity has joined and helped write a brief filed by Pacific Legal Foundation that highlights CEO’s work in this area and that urges the Court to grant …

This week the Center for Equal Opportunity joined in the filing of the friend-of-the-court brief it helped write in Fisher v. University of Texas.  In this brief, we ask the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit to reconsider what we believe to be an erroneous decision by a three-judge panel last month, upholding the University’s use of racial and ethnic admission preferences.  As our supporters know, this is a case in which the Center for Equal Opportunity has been deeply involved from the beginning.  I thought that we would devote most of my email this week to …