Affirmative Discrimination in Elite College Admissions

Terry EastlandEducation

It’s against Asian American applicants Last week’s news brought the story that New York City mayor Bill de Blasio wants to scrap admissions policies for three public high schools in the city that are among the best in the country. Apparently, too many Asian Americans get in while too few blacks and Latinos do. De Blasio speaks favorably about new policies based on “new definitions of merit.” Let’s hope that the mayor recovers his wits before he imposes a cap or ceiling on the number of Asian Americans the schools accept. Our research fellow Althea Nagai discusses below in a …

The Mismatch Game

Terry EastlandRacial Preferences

It’s been 13 years since I wrote the article below (for The Weekly Standard) on Richard Sander’s intensive study of affirmative action in American law schools. Sander, a lawyer and economist, found “a system of racial preferences that, in one realm after another, produces more harms than benefits for its putative beneficiaries.” Sander became one of the most compelling critics of affirmative action, the co-author with Stuart Taylor of Mismatch. Read my article as an introduction to the mismatch school of thought. Pick up the book for the full treatment of the topic.   Affirmative action emerged in the 1960s …

Google in the Dock

Terry EastlandEmployment

When diversity morphs into discrimination. A Google engineer objecting to racial preferences in employment got my attention when he was fired earlier this year. In telling Arne Wilberg’s story, published last month in The Weekly Standard, I was struck by the extent to which Google managers thought they could actually use hiring initiatives that categorically excluded from consideration job candidates of a certain race or sex. You’d think that at least one of those managers would have recalled Martin Luther King’s dream “that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged …

The Nitty Gritty of Diversity

Terry EastlandEducation

How many minority students = a critical mass? That’s a good exam question, but not one that advocates of race preferences in admissions have been able to answer, as I explained below in this article for The Weekly Standard. In 2003 Justice O’Connor said that schools may seek to enroll a “critical mass” of minority students. But she didn’t say what that term required, nor has any other Justice since then. Justice Scalia, ever the great wordsmith, used a dissenting opinion to refer to critical mass as “the mystical critical mass” and “the fabled critical mass.” Good adjectives for a …

The Parable of the Lifeguard

Roger CleggRacial Preferences

There’s an interesting new paper discussed here by Mark Perry at the American Enterprise Institute about an international phenomenon called the “educational-gender-equality paradox — the greater the degree of gender equality among 67 countries studied . . . the lower the female share of STEM college graduates.”  As The Atlantic puts it, “In countries that empower women, they are less likely to choose math and science professions.” It’s about choice, then, not discrimination. I don’t expect this to diminish the incessant politically correct demands for no gender imbalances in the STEM professions (or anywhere else, for that matter), and that if we have to …

Another Reason to End Preferences

Terry EastlandRacial Preferences

Affirmative action also hurts the ‘beneficiaries.’ Mismatch came out more than five years ago, and I wrote a review of it for The Weekly Standard, which is published below. It explains “mismatch” and shows that if racial preferences have mostly harmful effects for those whom they are meant to help, then “the fundamental legal premise for permitting this type of racial classification is gone.” Neither Rick Sander nor Stuart Taylor, the co-authors, are conservatives. They have been, you could say, mugged by a reality they have carefully studied. Or as they put it, “It is this growing body of evidence that …

Waiting for the ‘Termination Point’

Terry EastlandEducation

Is the end in sight for race-conscious college admissions? I wrote this piece three years ago for The Weekly Standard. It was basically a “backgrounder” on what were then new challenges to admissions preferences–one brought against Harvard and the other against the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. There has been some “discovery” in the cases, and seven months ago the Justice Department confirmed that it is considering whether it might enter the Harvard case. We hope that the department decides to get involved—and that it will argue for non-discrimination in admissions. In Grutter v. Bollinger, decided in 2003, Justice Sandra Day …

The Battle of Ann Arbor

Terry EastlandRacial Preferences

A philosophy professor’s belief in colorblind law led him to oppose the university’s use of affirmative action in admissions decisions. The Supreme Court has decided four cases involving affirmative action in admissions, two of which were the 2003 controversies from state schools in Michigan, Gratz and Grutter. Treated to an amicus brief in the cases by the Center for Equal Opportunity, the Court divided on the merits, leaving resolution on the issue for a later case, perhaps the one now arising from Harvard. In 2015 University of Michigan philosophy professor Carl Cohen wrote the compelling account of Gratz and Grutter …

The Justice Department Is Rethinking Affirmative Action—That’s a Good Thing

Terry EastlandRacial Preferences

A complaint against Harvard’s use of race in admissions may result in an end to this discriminatory practice. I wrote the article below for the Weekly Standard back August, when the story first came out. Here at CEO we’ve been following the complaint. It’s taken longer than we thought it would for the Justice Department to decide whether to enter the case as a friend of the court or to file its own complaint or—the wrong course in my view—to do nothing. Yet in recent weeks issues over the government’s access to Harvard’s admissions records have been resolved. So there’s reason …

Does MLB’s New Diversity Fellowship Violate Civil Rights Law?

Terry EastlandEmployment

The job description explicitly says only women and applicants of color will be considered. Baseball is my sport, and kudos to the Houston Astros for winning the World Series—its first ever. But discrimination on the basis of race and sex remains wrong and illegal, and as I wrote in this piece, first published in The Weekly Standard, Major League Baseball needs to ask whether it really wants to deny jobs in its business operations to people who lack the “right” skin color or sex. Of all the professional sports, Major League baseball has the broadest range of players from diverse …