Category Archive

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 …