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 …

Last week President Trump created some controversy — so what else is new? — with his off-the-cuff remarks.  This time it had to do with his criticism of Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) for their criticism of Israel.  “Where has the Democratic Party gone?  Where have they gone, where they’re defending these two people over the state of Israel?  And I think any Jewish people that vote for a Democrat, I think it shows either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty.” Now, the controversy centered on the term “disloyalty,” and whether it implied that …

Law professor Eugene Volokh asks the useful question: “When does the U.S. Constitution allow government officials to discriminate based on race?” Courts have said that “governmental racial classifications”—policies that sort people into racial categories—are presumptively impermissible, yet acceptable if the government makes a strong justification for them. “The legal rule is . . . the strict scrutiny test,” says Volokh. Accordingly, to be deemed constitutional, a race-based policy must be “narrowly tailored” to achieve a “compelling government interest.”  There is, of course, some pertinent history. Law professor Stephen A. Siegel says that by 1940 narrow tailoring had become “the oldest …

The Trump administration is to be commended for the new regulations that the Department of Housing and Urban Development is proposing for enforcement of the Fair Housing Act, aimed at changing the disparate-impact approach used in the Obama administration. This is the approach whereby a defendant can be held liable for housing discrimination when it has a policy that is nondiscriminatory on its face, is evenhandedly applied, and was adopted with no discriminatory intent — but which leads to politically incorrect statistical imbalances. So, for example, if a landlord would prefer not to rent to individuals with a history of …