DOJ Investigating Harvard’s Racial Preferences

Roger CleggEducation

Over the summer, it was reported that the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division was taking steps to investigate Harvard University’s use of racial preferences in admissions, especially insofar as they discriminate against Asian-American applicants. You may recall that the Center for Equal Opportunity was mentioned prominently as encouraging the investigation (see the statement we issued here) when the story was first reported in the New York Times.  Well, news stories are now confirming that this investigation is, indeed, under way. Good. As I explain here, such an investigation is entirely appropriate. What’s more, such discrimination should be stopped …

How the Trump Justice Department is Defending Free Speech

Terry EastlandUncategorized

Attorney General Jeff Sessions wants college campuses to become what many of them once were—places of “robust debate.” That is a worthy project, and I wrote about it this week in The Weekly Standard. By the way, I recently joined the Center for Equal Opportunity as a senior fellow. “The American university was once the center of academic freedom,” said Attorney General Jeff Sessions in his speech at the Georgetown Law Center this week. It was “a place of robust debate, a forum for the competition of ideas.” But over the years it has become “an echo chamber of political …

Why Racial Preferences Remain Wrongheaded

Roger CleggRacial Preferences

Last week, Inside Higher Ed published my essay on racial preferences, which you can read here: Why Racial Preferences Remain Wrongheaded Those who defend them should consider whether they’d require them indefinitely and whether such a requirement is consistent with good race relations in the country America is becoming, argues Roger Clegg. Last month, The New York Times reported that the U.S. Justice Department was preparing to begin “investigating and suing universities over affirmative action admissions policies deemed to discriminate against white applicants.” It turned out that what the Justice Department was really up to was investigating admissions discrimination against …

Two Down, One to Go

Roger CleggUncategorized

Last week the Federalist Society’s Regulatory Transparency Project released this paper prepared by its “Race & Sex Working Group” (love that name, and I’m proud to be a member of it). The paper critiques three areas of Obama administration overreach by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights: transgender bathroom and locker room access under Title IX; investigations by universities of sexual-assault and harassment claims, also under Title IX; and requirements that school-discipline policies not have a “disparate impact” on the basis of race, under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. To its credit, the Trump administration has …

Politicized external review panels as unguided “diversity” missiles: California university administrators remain ultra-slow learners

Stuart H. HurlbertDocuments

By Stuart H. Hurlbert Professor of Biology Emeritus, San Diego State University, San Diego CA, Contact: hurlbert@mail.sdsu.edu Distinctions by race are so evil, so arbitrary and insidious that a state bound to defend the equal protection of the laws must not allow them in any public sphere. – Thurgood MarshallLead Attorney in Brown vs. Board of Education, Supreme Court of the United States, 1954 [It] is neither race nor racism that bedevils American society, but rather that racial classification enjoys a privileged status in social studies. American society is being tied in painful knots by virtue of legislative, social scientific, …

CEO welcomes new Senior Fellow Terry Eastland

CEO StaffPress Releases

     PRESS RELEASE FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Tuesday September 5, 2017  CONTACT:    Roger Clegg (703) 442-0066 CEO welcomes new Senior Fellow Terry Eastland  (Falls Church, VA) The Center for Equal Opportunity today welcomed aboard Terry Eastland as a Senior Fellow. Eastland is an accomplished journalist who was editor of The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, Va., before working in the Reagan administration as a speechwriter for Attorney General William French Smith and as director of public affairs for Attorney General Edwin Meese. Eastland was later a resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and the editor of Forbes MediaCritic. In 2001, …

Pretty Good End to a Really Bad Case

Roger CleggDisparate Impact

The Ninth Circuit issued a favorable opinion this summer in Hardie v. NCAA, a case raising the important question of whether “disparate impact” liability is cognizable under Title II of the Civil Rights Act. The Ninth Circuit didn’t answer the broad question of whether Title II ever recognizes such claims. It held instead that NCAA’s ban on felon-coaches in its high school tournaments didn’t amount to a disparate impact violation, even if Title II might under other circumstances encompass such claims. In a cogent concurring opinion, Judge Faber noted that although NCAA did not argue the issue on appeal, “amici Pacific …

More on Charlottesville, and a Bad Speech by Tillerson

Roger CleggUncategorized

Following my email from last week, here are some additional thoughts on Charlottesville: First, liberals should condemn lawless and violent behavior by those on the Left, and conservatives should condemn lawless and violent behavior by those on the Right. There is a temptation when this is done on both sides to temper that criticism by adding a “But . . . ” — that is, to say, “Of course, it is wrong to kill the police, but we must recognize that black lives do matter,” etc., or “Of course, it is wrong to ram a car into a protestor, but many protestors on the …

E Pluribus Unum

Roger CleggUncategorized

If recent headlines over the last few weeks can tell us anything, it is that America needs to get serious, and quickly, about E pluribus unum. America has always been a multiracial and multiethnic country, and it is becoming dramatically more so. For a society like ours to work, our laws and institutions cannot treat Americans differently according to skin color and what country people’s ancestors came from. We cannot view ourselves and each other as something other than Americans first and foremost. Of course, America has had a sad history of ignoring this principle, and whenever it has, it …

CEO in the News – 2017/2018

CEO StaffCEO in the News

ROGER CLEGG, THE FEDERAL COMMISSION ON SCHOOL SAFETY ISSUED A REPORT THAT RECOMMENDED RESCINDING OBAMA-ERA GUIDANCE.. PT1 WJIM – 12/26/18 Common sense prevails at last on school discipline College Fix – 12/22/18 Trump officials cancel Obama-era policy on school discipline ABC4.com – 12/21/18 2018 Higher Education Highlights Diverse – 12/20/18 CHAVEZ: Congress Could Fix Immigration — If Trump Plays Ball Daily Caller- 12/12/18 Push to end disenfranchisement for N.J. inmates moving ahead WhyY- 11/26/18 RACIAL DISCRIMINATION, HARVARD STYLE PowerLine – 11/19/18 Who deserves the right to vote? Washington Post – 11/15/18 Two Conversations on a Great Divide: Interviews with Gary …