Category Archive

This week I thought I’d share with you an exchange of emails that is typical of one part of the day-to-day work that the Center for Equal Opportunity does.  This exchange started when one of our routine news.google.com searches — conducted several times a day, every day — hit an article about a school district’s “equity plan.”  Since the plan seemed clearly to embrace hiring with an eye on race, ethnicity, and sex, this in turn prompted us to send one of our frequent emails to a local government official (here, the school superintendent), pointing out that there are laws …

There was a front-page story in the Washington Post last week, headlined “Black enrollment dwindles at major Florida colleges.”  The article takes Jeb Bush to task for his claim that, as governor, he was able to abolish racial preferences in public university admissions in that state and still have a system “where there were more African American and Hispanic kinds attending” than before the preferences were ended.  Bush replaced the racial preferences with a guarantee that the top 20 percent of each graduating high-school class could go to a state university, and added other measures like more college preparatory courses …

Two good items of note this week so far, and one bad.  National Review Online (for which I am a contributing editor) has an excellent article on smashing the bamboo curtain — that is, ending anti-Asian American discrimination in university admissions — here.  It includes an amusing discussion of how “Vijay Chokal-Ingam, an Indian American who happens to be the brother of Fox comedy star Mindy Kaling, revealed that he won acceptance to medical school by claiming to be black. Frustrated at being rejected by medical schools in part because of mediocre test scores and a 3.1 grade point average, …

Last week, National Review Onlineposted my column on “Affirmative Discrimination in Higher Education:  Notes on the Continuing Struggle.” Here it is: Racial and ethnic admission preferences will probably have to be pried from the cold, dead fingers of university officials, but the pressure to end this affirmative discrimination continues. For starters, such preferences are unpopular with most Americans, and most Americans have a dog in this fight. I’ll cite just two recent polls, from somewhat surprising sources. A survey conducted last April by MTV of “millennials” aged 14 to 24 found that 90 percent “believed that everyone should be treated …

This recent Wall Street Journal article, “The Trouble with Diversity Initiatives,” covers a new study that identifies problems with using affirmative action in corporate hiring and promotion.  The article notes that, according to the study, companies “looking to diversify their employee ranks should brace for a potential backlash.” Rachel Feintzeig reports:  A meta-analysis from researchers at New York University, University of Michigan and George Mason University traces the roots of stigma that can erupt in organizations that implement affirmative action policies to attract women and racial minorities. The study dug into 45 previous pieces of research to identify the mechanisms that …

Last week, the New York Times’s Linda Greenhouse predictably praised the recent court of appeals decision upholding the University of Texas’s use of racial and ethnic preferences in admissions.  The Washington Post has now followed suit.  But as I noted in response to both:  “The court’s analytical framework is obviously wrong: The purported educational benefits of adding racial preferences … were not demonstrated, and there was no discussion at all of the costs of such discrimination. The alleged benefits are dubious and trivial, while the costs are many, heavy, and undeniable. To give just one example of the latter: Despite …

Last Saturday was the 60th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, and that prompted many on the Left to claim that any celebration should be tempered by a recognition that “segregation” and/or “resegregation” continues.  Below is an op-ed I wrote for USA Today that explains why these claims are specious.  Center for Equal Opportunity board member Abigail Thernstrom and her husband Stephan likewise set the record straight in their excellent Wall Street Journal op-ed here. On May 17, we will celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education. And that is …

Our friends at the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy recently asked me to write for them on the latest developments in the fight to end racial and ethnic preferences in university admissions.  Here’s what I said: Racial preferences have never been popular among most Americans, and in fact they are becoming less and less popular.   One reason is the simple passage of time. Many people felt viscerally that some sort of affirmative action made sense 50 or 60 years ago, when Jim Crow had been the law until quite recently and the beneficiaries of preferences would be individuals …