Education

Some documents recently uncovered at Princeton show that, when awarding a preference on the basis of race or ethnicity, the admissions office wants to make sure that the student being considered has a strong “cultural flavor.” That is, for example, you can’t just be Hispanic, you have to act Hispanic, whatever that means for the admissions office. Offensive, of course, but unsurprising. After all, the “diversity” rationale for such racial and ethnic discrimination is premised on such stereotyping. That is, there are supposed to be “educational benefits” to exposing students to people with different backgrounds and perspectives; if the recipient …

A new book by Rebecca Zwick, Who Gets In?, has some interesting data on, among other things, the effect of racial preferences on university admissions.  According to the discussion this week in Inside Higher Ed: What she found is that an admissions system based solely on grades and test scores would result in significant increases in Asian [and white] enrollments and declines in enrollments of underrepresented minority [i.e., black and Latino, and sometimes American Indian] students. … Model for Impact of Different Admissions Models at Colleges That Admit Less Than 10% of Applicants Race/Ethnicity Current If Decisions Based Only on …

Ashley Thorne, executive director of the National Association of Scholars, recently posted an essay on Minding the Campus (“Dismissing the Reality of Affirmative Action”) that was both kind and accurate regarding the word of the Center for Equal Opportunity. The Gallup Organization and Inside Higher Ed co-hosted a conference in Washington on September 15, “Not out of the Woods:  Colleges, Diversity and Affirmative Action after a Year of Protest and Court Battles.”  Most of those in attendance were university officials of one kind or another.  Ms. Thorne, who attended the whole conference (I did not), said those officials were determined …

The Pope Center for Higher Education Policy asked me to write about my recent appearance at a conference in Washington, D.C., at which I warned college officials that the Center for Equal Opportunity was watching their use of racial and ethnic preferences in admissions.  Here’s the essay that I sent the Pope Center and that it published (there’s also a link here): The Gallup Organization and Inside Higher Ed co-hosted a conference in Washington on September 15. They called it “Not Out of the Woods: Colleges, Diversity and Affirmative Action after a Year of Protest and Court Battles.” Most of …

A couple of months ago, the Supreme Court handed down its disappointing decision in Fisher v. University of Texas, and race and higher education continue to be in the news.  This past week has seen controversy over student housing ads expressing a preference of “people of color” and separate student sections in courses for minority students, and there’s been a call this week for “diversity” to be graded in school rankings by U.S. News & World Report — all bad ideas, in my humble opinion, and each showing in its own way why politically correct racial discrimination should not be …

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 …