Silliness at the White House Science Fair

Roger CleggUncategorized

The White House had its annual science fair last week, but every week is political correctness week at the White House, so the president warned that we must work through some of the structural biases that exist in science.  Some of them — a lot of them are unconscious.  But the fact is, is that we’ve got to get more of our young women and minorities into science and technology, engineering and math, and computer science.  I’ve been really pleased to see the number of young women who have gotten more and more involved in our science fairs over the …

Obama Disavows Diversity Hiring (Sort Of)

Roger CleggRacial Preferences

President Obama spoke at the University of Chicago law school last week about his nomination of Merrick Garland — a white male (tsk, tsk) — to the Supreme Court.  At one point, he was asked about “diversity” in this context, and the answer he gave is interesting (search for the word “diversity” to find the relevant question and answer).  The president professed not to make judicial appointment decisions on the basis of race, ethnicity, or sex, instead insisting only on a process that ensures that all the best candidates are identified and looked at.  He said the same thing for …

Some Funny Anti-PC Items

Roger CleggUncategorized

The Washington Post Magazine’s end-page is always a column by humorist Gene Weingarten, who’s very funny but extremely liberal.  His column this week, however, makes fun of Bowdoin College’s political correctness, which I recently wrote about, in the sombrero scandal.  Mr. Weingarten’s column is styled a plea for forgiveness and addressed to the Bowdoin student government; he wants forgiveness for his daughter having dressed up as an Indian (complete with feather, horrors!) many years ago. It’s very funny, and if even a big liberal like Gene Weingarten agrees things have gotten out of hand, then maybe there’s hope. Another funny …

Maryland's Stadium was recently renamed.

Renaming Campus Buildings?

Roger CleggUncategorized

I wrote at little about his earlier, but I’d like to add a couple of other thoughts regarding campus demands to rename buildings, statues, and the like commemorating individuals whose views on minorities and women have not stood well the test of time.  First, as I noted before, since none of us is without sin, requiring sinlessness for commemoration means no one will be commemorated.  Yet even those who were terrible sinners in one area might be visionaries in another.  So a Woodrow Wilson Civil Rights Center might be a bad idea, but not a Woodrow Wilson Center for Loopy …

Disparate Impact and Criminal Justice

Roger CleggDisparate Impact

The Obama administration’s efforts to apply “disparate impact” theory to the criminal justice system continue.  In a “Dear Colleague” letter to state and local courts last week, the administration warned, “In court systems receiving federal funds, these practices [i.e., the enforcement of fines and fees] may also violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 42 U.S.C. § 2000d, when they unnecessarily impose disparate harm on the basis of race or national origin.” The trouble is that the enforcement of just about any criminal law is going to have a disproportionate impact on some racial or ethnic group …

Bowdoin’s Sombrero Scandal

Roger CleggRacial Preferences

The horror, the horror:  Sombreros were apparently distributed during a tequila party at Bowdoin College (see Weekly Standard item here).  Needless to say, the powers of political correctness at the college are in high dudgeon.  They are being accused of overreaction — but, really, how can one overreact to this sort of vicious cultural appropriation in what is supposed to be a civilized society in the 21st century?  Off with their hats, I mean heads! Trump and Affirmative Action – One addendum to this National Review Online post on the Michelle Fields matter:  The Breitbart reporter was asking Mr. Trump …

Dissing “Diversity”

Roger CleggRacial Preferences

It turns out that the corporate “celebration of diversity” is not only unfair, divisive, inefficient, illogical, immoral, and illegal — it doesn’t work very well by its own terms, according to the Harvard Business Review. So here’s a crazy idea: How about if companies announced that from now on people were going to be judged as individuals and that nobody would be given any preference or suffer any discrimination on the basis of skin color, national origin, or sex? They could make clear that this applied to men and women, minorities and non-minorities alike. Might that possibly be a good way to advance …

Let the Sunshine In

Roger CleggUncategorized

The Center for Equal Opportunity often makes common cause with the National Association of Scholars, an organization of conservative academics.  Recently the good folks there asked me to contribute a short piece to their publication, Academic Questions, which was weighing the pros and cons of federal and state freedom-of-information (FOIA) statutes.  Below is a slightly edited version of what is appearing in that journal. The principal use that the Center for Equal Opportunity has made of state FOIA requests is to get information from public universities about the way that race and ethnicity are weighed in student admissions.  That includes …

Roger Clegg debates the issue of Affirmative Action at the University of Texas.

Justice Scalia Cannot Be Replaced

Roger CleggUncategorized

It is impossible to overstate the love that conservative lawyers for over a generation have felt for Antonin Scalia.  When he was nominated by President Reagan to the Supreme Court in 1986, he and Robert Bork were not just the two people quickly left on the list being considered by administration officials at the Justice Department (a much younger yours truly was among them) — there was no third place on that list. As a justice, he transformed the importance given to constitutional and statutory texts, over not only over a judge’s selfish policy preferences but also over other nontextual sources …

Dan Rooney

The Washington Post Hides the Ball

Roger CleggRacial Preferences

The Washington Post had a long article recently headlined in the hard copy, “Why do poor boys become jobless men?” (the headline on the jump-page was “Study: Poverty especially harmful to job prospects of boys”).  It begins by noting that, while generally and historically men have been more likely to work than women, in some places now there is a “reverse gender gap” and it is men who are less likely to have jobs. And it goes on and on about poverty and race and geography and segregation, dropping a few tantalizing references to “unstable, high-poverty environments” and “family, schools and policy” …