Achieving, or Not, Critical Mass

Terry EastlandEducation

Inside Higher Education The Supreme Court’s leading race-based admissions case remains Grutter v. Bollinger, which was decided in 2003. In the course of upholding the use of race in the admissions policy at the Michigan Law School, the Supreme Court, with Justice O’Connor writing for a majority of five, decided that diversity can be a compelling interest the pursuit of which can justify the narrowly tailored use of race in selecting applicants. O’Connor said the policy has “the potential to enrich everyone’s education.” Which can be done by enrolling a “critical mass” of underrepresented minority students, thus ensuring their ability …

Dr. Althea Nagai

CEO StaffMeet the Staff

Senior Research Fellow In D.C. area for over 20 years, Althea Nagai, Ph.D., is a research fellow at the Center for Equal Opportunity. She has conducted numerous statistical analyses on racial and ethnic preferences in higher education, including racial and ethnic preferences in undergraduate education at five public universities in Virginia, the University of Michigan, two Arizona universities, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, two Ohio universities, and various law and medical schools. In addition, she has written two essays for CEO focusing on Asian Americans, “Too Many Asian Americans,” and “Harvard Investigates Harvard.” She has also has done work on other …

Stuart Taylor, Jr.

CEO StaffMeet the Staff

Of Counsel and Senior Fellow Stuart Taylor, Jr. is an author and freelance journalist focusing on legal and policy issues including unfairness and excessive punishment in the criminal justice system.  He has coauthored three critically acclaimed books and has written since 1980 for leading publications includingThe New York Times, American Lawyer Media, National Journal, Newsweek, RealClearPolitics, and many other newspapers and magazines. He has been interviewed on all major broadcast networks and has won numerous journalism honors. In 2017, KC Johnson and Taylor wrote The Campus Rape Frenzy: The Attack on Due Process at America’s Universities. In 2012, Richard Sander and Taylor wrote Mismatch: How …

Stevens in Memory

Terry EastlandUncategorized

The Justice’s Best Work At the top of my (short) list of “Stevens in Memory” is John Paul Stevens’s separate opinion in the Bakke case, decided in 1978. You’ll recall Allan Bakke, especially if you repair even just occasionally to this site. Bakke was the aspiring medical student who despite strong academic credentials was rejected by the Medical School at the University of California at Davis. Bakke, who is white, sued, alleging racial discrimination inasmuch as the school gave him less of an opportunity than it did minority students to compete for a seat. As I saw the case then …

Keeping skin color and sex out of government contracting

Roger CleggRacial Preferences

Last month, the Center for Equal Opportunity weighed in with Nassau County in New York regarding the issue of preferences based on race, ethnicity, and sex in its contracting.  Here’s what we said (and this is typical of what we have said to many state and local jurisdictions over the years): June 22, 2019 To:                   Laura Curran Nassau County Executive From:               Roger Clegg General Counsel, Center for Equal Opportunity Re:                   Proposed disparity study For the legal and policy reasons stated in the attached redacted memorandum, which we sent to another jurisdiction, we urge that the County reconsider whether to …

Discrimination by Government: A History in Brief

Terry EastlandRacial Preferences

Does the Constitution permit government officials to discriminate on the basis of race? Courts first reviewed the question more than 100 years ago, and it has been at the heart of the racial admissions cases. The answer is yes, but— meaning the Constitution allows discrimination by government but only on rare occasions. The courts have said that classifying by race—that is, sorting people by race—is “presumptively impermissible.” The courts have also made clear that racial classifications are subject to “strict scrutiny,” the most stringent standard of constitutional review. To satisfy strict scrutiny, a racial classification must be “narrowly tailored” to …

Biden and Busing

Roger CleggUncategorized

It’s hard to know how to weigh in on the Biden-and-busing controversy, since the definition of “busing” is itself uncertain; since it’s hard to tell what Joe Biden means to say now, let alone what he meant to say decades ago; and since the criticism of him by his political opponents is so likely to be deceptive as well. But these thoughts: 1) It is unconstitutional and bad policy to assign students to public schools on the basis of their skin color. 2) This means that Jim Crow segregation was unconstitutional and bad policy; it also means that racial balancing …

Reparations and Other Silliness

Roger CleggGovernment Activity

Last week there were House hearings on reparations, the first since I testified against them in 2007.  In an earlier email, I had included the main text of my testimony, and this week I’m sending an imagined dialogue — which I included with that testimony at the time and which was published in the Federalist Society’s Engage magazine — between a proponent and an opponent of this (silly) idea.  In sum, reparations would be unfair, unworkable, inevitably unending and expanding, divisive (encouraging a victim mentality among blacks and resentment among everyone else), and of course unconstitutional.  But aside from those …

Lying About Race

Terry EastlandUncategorized

By now you’ve probably read about the “college admissions scandal,” the dubious work of a man named William Singer, a college counselor who helped students from wealthy students get into elite schools by cheating on tests and using false athletic credentials. Now the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, has added to it in an article reporting that Singer also “advised some families to falsely claim students were racial minorities.” Singer let families know that their applicant sons and daughters might be at a “competitive disadvantage” if they didn’t opt for misrepresentation as minorities. He wound up pleading guilty to …

Sex and the Supreme Court

Roger CleggUncategorized

The Supreme Court recently agreed to review cases presenting the questions whether sexual orientation and transgender status are “sex” within the meaning of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act — that is, whether the prohibition in federal employment law against discrimination on the basis of sex includes bans on sexual-orientation and transgender-status discrimination. The answer, of course, is no:  When Congress wrote in 1964 that employers may not discriminate on the basis of sex, they meant — those words meant — that employers could not treat men and women differently, and nobody would have thought that the word …