Category Archive

I’d like to devote my email this week to reviewing the outcome of three complaints — filed against three different educational entities by the Center for Equal Opportunity with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) — that have been successfully resolved for us during the Trump administration.  Together they cover the waterfront of much politically correct race-based decisionmaking in higher education.  We hope they will encourage others to file similar complaints with OCR. Texas Tech Medical School:  “Diversity” Racial Preferences in Admissions Rejected As a result of a complaint that the Center for Equal Opportunity filed in 2004 (!) against Texas Tech, the medical school there last year …

Democrats in Virginia last November gained control of both houses in the state legislature, and elections have consequences. As conservative legal expert Hans Bader has been tirelessly explaining over the last few weeks, Democrats in the state legislature are systematically ruining the state’s business climate and incentivizing frivolous lawsuits, in addition to adopting bills that will release violent criminals from jail or reduce their sentences. The Heritage Foundation likewise sounded the alarm here, noting the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, discussing gun-control proposals, and criticizing the religious-liberty-threatening Virginia Values Act. And don’t expect Governor Ralph Northam to veto anything …

Kudos to the Trump administration, Washington University in St. Louis, and (of course!) the Center for Equal Opportunity. The occasion is the recent resolution reached regarding a complaint that CEO filed last June with the federal Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights about an illegally discriminatory program being run by the university. The program at issue granted various awards to WUSL students, but only if they were black. A poster advertising the program was sent by a member of the university community to us, and we filed a complaint with OCR. The resolution agreement makes this program — and …

What ails us? That is, what do Americans deeply disagree about, and what causes the sense we’ve lost our way? I think they’re related, and that they tie in with this week’s federal holiday. Let’s go through the standard list of our national concerns. It’s not about foreign policy. There’s still a general consensus, which I share, that a cautious interventionism abroad to protect our interests makes sense. I don’t think that President Trump’s decision to kill a terrorist general will be a generally unpopular one. Or look at it this way: If President Obama were still president and had …

According to the Reuters news service last week, “Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg would seek to standardize federal elections across the United States and prevent states from blocking felons from voting under a plan aimed at expanding access to elections rolled out on Friday.   …   Under the voting rights plan, Bloomberg would seek to create a non-partisan commission that would look to standardize federal elections, including forcing states to restore voting rights to felons and prohibit them from charging onerous fees to get those rights back.” But it would be unconstitutional for the federal government to require states to allow …

Virginia governor Ralph Northam was humiliated and almost forced to resign early last year when it came to light that he had, as a medical student, appeared in blackface in Michael Jackson impersonation contests.  The issue is not whether this really is a grievous sin; the point is that, for most politicians these days and certainly any Democratic politician, such a revelation requires extreme contrition. And so Governor Northam will apparently spend the balance of his term embracing any race-based, politically correct initiative he can think of.  And he’ll do so even if the proposal is actually antiblack, so long …

In the Japanese Relocation Cases during Word War II, Chief Justice Stone observed, “Distinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry are by their very nature odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality.” That remains one of the best statements of colorblind law ever. Stone went on to address its reach (application) during the war: “The adoption by government, in the crisis of war and of threatened invasion, of measures for the public safety, based upon the recognition of facts and circumstances which indicate that a group of one national extraction may menace …

Less than a year from now, Americans will be choosing a new president.  From my perspective at the Center for Equal Opportunity, the Democratic candidates are so far uniformly appalling, each trying to outrace the other to the Left — supporting reparations and busing, condemning the criminal justice system as racist, you name it. And Donald Trump and his administration — how’s that record after nearly three years?  Well, it’s a mixed bag.  As a lawyer and CEO’s general counsel, my focus is on the extent to which the legality of race-based decision-making is being supported or opposed.  Racial preferences …

A Conversation with Althea Nagai Althea Nagai, Ph.D., is our research fellow at CEO and the author of our studies of preferences in admissions in higher education, the most recent one of which examines their use at five public universities in Virginia. The other day I caught up with her in the hope of learning more about how she thinks about these matters. I was not disappointed, and trust that you will not be either. Here is my conversation with her, which treats issues in the news, including Harvard’s use of race in admissions, the consistently discriminatory fate of Asian …