Category Archive

“An Update on the Mess at Bowdoin” is the all-too-accurate title of this piece by KC Johnson at Minding the Campus. Professor Johnson summarizes the proceedings at an event this month, held by the Maine Heritage Policy Center and National Association of Scholars, that builds on NAS’s comprehensive study of political correctness at Bowdoin College; this month the focus was on what Bowdoin proudly calls its efforts to ensure that students there are taught to be proper “global citizens.”  Speakers included Peter Wood, John Fonte, Michael Poliakoff, Susan Shell, and Herb London. Here’s Peter Wood’s graceful essay on the conference.  Center for Equal Opportunity …

The Senate Judiciary Committee has voted 10-8 along party lines to send to the Senate floor the nomination of Debo Adegbile to head the Justice Department’s civil-rights division. As I noted earlier, the Obama administration certainly had its work cut out for it when it tried to find someone farther to the left than Thomas Perez to head the Justice Department’s civil-rights division, but it appears to have succeeded. Among his other accomplishments, Mr. Adegbile went out of his way to play a role in defending cop killer Mumia Abu-Jamal, an international cause célèbre on the left, prompting the Fraternal Order …

There was mercifully little in last week’s State of the Union speech related to civil-rights issues. It was too bad that the president said, “And I’m reaching out to some of America’s leading foundations and corporations on a new initiative to help more young men of color facing especially tough odds stay on track and reach their full potential”; after all, why should efforts for those “facing especially tough odds” be limited to those of a particular color, or sex for that matter? The underlying problem facing, disproportionately, “young men of color” is that they are brought up by unmarried women, so …

For the Dr. Martin Luther King Day weekend, Hans von Spakovsky and I wrote the following column for National Review Online: Americans overwhelmingly agree that discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, or gender is wrong — whether it is the politically correct version that discriminates against whites, and often Asians (particularly in college admissions), by giving preferences to other racial or ethnic groups like blacks and Hispanics, or the old-fashioned, politically incorrect version that discriminates against African Americans and other ethnic minorities, which the civil-rights movement fought in the 1960s. Americans today still want to “live in a nation …

The Obama administration certainly had its work cut out for it when it tried to find someone further to the left than Thomas Perez to head the Justice Department’s civil-rights division, but it appears to have succeeded. Among his other accomplishments, Debo Adegbile went out of his way to play a role in defending cop killer Mumia Abu-Jamal, an international cause célèbre on the left, prompting the Fraternal Order of Police, among other groups, to oppose his nomination. Read all about this and Mr. Adegbile’s other left-wing causes here. *          *          * In a recent speech President Obama declared that economic inequality …

In case you didn’t see it, I coauthored a column in USA Today last week, and I think you’ll enjoy it: News that the U.S. Department of Justice invoked a 42-year-old desegregation decree in an attempt to thwart a Louisiana school voucher program raises an important question: Are desegregation orders really still in effect more than a half-century after Brown v. Board of Education? The answer is yes. But for the most part, the orders might as well not be. They are generally not actively or adequately reviewed and supervised by the judges. They remain in place doing little until …

The Center for Equal Opportunity’s board of directors met last week and voted unanimously in favor of John J. Miller joining the board. John is director of the Dow Journalism Program at Hillsdale College in Michigan. He writes for National Review, the Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. He is also the author of several books, including The First Assassin, a historical thriller set during the Civil War, and The Big Scrum: How Teddy Roosevelt Saved Football.   And I should mention that, when I first came to CEO in 1997, John was already here, and I had the pleasure …

Earlier this month, the Obama administration filed a brief with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit urging it to rule in favor of the University of Texas’s use of racial and ethnic preferences in admissions. This is the Fisher v. University of Texas case that the Supreme Court decided last summer and sent back to the Fifth Circuit, telling it that it had been too deferential — not strict enough — in the scrutiny it had given the school’s use of preferences. It’s the administration’s third brief on behalf of the school’s practice of discrimination, following earlier filings in the …

A New York Times headline Thursday declared: “Texas’ Stringent Voter ID Law Makes a Dent at the Polls.” A careful reading of the article will leave many readers scratching their heads about that title. The article begins by noting that three prominent Texans — state judge Sandra Watts, state senator Wendy Davis, and state attorney general Greg Abbott — all had photo IDs that did not quite match their names on official voter rolls, and so all had to sign affidavits before they could vote. But . . . they all could and did vote. Jim Wright — another Texan, whom the Times helpfully …