Author: Hans Bader

Hans Bader is a senior attorney at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Coalition demands illegal racial discrimination at Cornell

September 19, 2020
By Hans Bader

A faculty coalition at Cornell University is calling for race-based hiring and promotions. What it is demanding violates two laws against racial discrimination, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and 42 U.S.C. 1981. That’s because Cornell has no justifiable rationale for using race in employment decisions at all, much less to the extent that […]

Will Virginia teach critical race theory to kindergartners?

September 14, 2020
By Hans Bader

This week, the Virginia Board of Education will meet to discuss a report that may promote destructive racial ideologies — the August 2020 “Report from the Governor’s African American History Education Commission.” James Sherlock laments “the fiercely negative approach to the teaching of African American history offered by the Governor’s Commission.” He says says its […]

150 Law School Deans Ask ABA to Mandate Anti-Racism Training

August 11, 2020
By Hans Bader

As lawyers like Barack Obama have noted, law school is already a year too long, with lots of nonessential classes. As a result, law students often graduate with over $150,000 in student-loan debt. Yet law students may soon be required to take more unnecessary classes. 150 law school deans have asked the American Bar Association […]

Teacher Unconstitutionally Fired for Facebook Post Rejecting Concept of ‘White Privilege’

August 7, 2020
By Hans Bader

An Illinois high school teacher was fired on July 16 for a Facebook post rejecting the idea of “white privilege.” That violated the First Amendment, even if some people viewed her Facebook post as racially inflammatory. Speech doesn’t become punishable just because it offends members of minority groups. For example, in Thompson v. Board of Education of Chicago (1989), […]

University Removes Director for Mild Criticism of Affirmative Action, Violating Free Speech

August 7, 2020
By Hans Bader

The University of Pittsburgh has removed a program director at its medical center because he published a scholarly, peer-reviewed white paper discussing the pitfalls of affirmative action for black and Hispanic students. This violated the First Amendment, which protects even harsh criticism of affirmative action. The white paper was gentle in its criticism of racial preferences, merely […]

Biden ‘Racial Equity Plan’ Would Enrich Wealthy Lawyers at Employers’ Expense

July 30, 2020
By Hans Bader

Joe Biden released his “racial equity plan” on Tuesday. Some of it deals with racial issues, like a major expansion of affirmative action and lots of race-related government spending. But it also contains radical changes to America’s employment laws that have little to do with race. Under his plan, even the tiniest employers with only […]

George Mason University May Discriminate Based on Race in Unconstitutional Ways

July 27, 2020
By Hans Bader

As part of a new “anti-racism” push, George Mason University plans to discriminate based on race in favor of faculty of color. On July 23, Dr. Gregory Washington, the president of GMU, announced that “We will develop specific mechanisms in the promotion and tenure process that recognize the invisible and uncredited emotional labor that people of color […]

Reality-Based Research on Racism Now Under Assault in Academia

July 23, 2020
By Hans Bader

Academic freedom is under assault. Faculty are being told that their research and courses must promote a particular ideology: that racial disparities are due to racism, rather than other causes, such as the voluntary choices made by individuals. The Supreme Court has said that racial disparities are not presumptively due to racism, because reality shows […]

The Real Reason for Racial Achievement Gaps

February 26, 2020
By Hans Bader

Progressive policies cause the racial achievement gaps that progressives spend so much time lamenting. That’s the conclusion of Minnesota lawyer and think-tank president John Hinderaker, based on recent educational research. He cites a report from Brightbeam, “The Secret Shame: How America’s Most Progressive Cities Betray Their Commitment to Educational Opportunity For All.” The report is authored by Chris […]

Double Standards on Free Speech

December 10, 2019
By Hans Bader

If you are a progressive professor, your university will let you keep teaching, even if you say things that reflect extreme hostility to members of a particular race and gender. You can say we should “kill and castrate all white men, and feed their corpses to pigs,” call for the death of Republican senators and engage in full-blown […]

How to Cope With Your Prof’s Left-wing Bias

December 6, 2019
By Hans Bader

To get the best possible grade, students may need to pander to their professors’ left-wing ideology. Professors are much more likely to be progressives than they are to be moderate or conservative. Law professors are no exception. Progressive professors view progressive views as a sign of intelligence, and conservatism as a sign of stupidity. For example, Prof. Robert Brandon, head of Duke […]

At Some Colleges, It’s OK to Be White Again

November 24, 2019
By Hans Bader

Inside Higher Ed reports that “It’s OK to Be White” posters have appeared on more campuses: The posters, which also appeared a year ago at this time, are put up without permission [from college officials]. Posters have been seen this year at Christopher Newport University, East Tennessee State University, Oklahoma City University’s law school, Susquehanna University, and Western Connecticut State University. […]

College Students Aren’t Even Learning New Words

May 27, 2019
By Hans Bader

People’s vocabularies are shrinking at a time when more and more people have college degrees. As Zach Goldberg notes, people’s mastery of hard words has been falling for well over 20 years, and their mastery of easier words has been falling for over 15 years. Meanwhile, a higher proportion of Americans have college degrees than […]

How Diversity Training Widens the Gulf Among the Races

April 11, 2019
By Hans Bader

Two students wore blackface at the University of Tennessee in a Snapchat image with a racist caption. The University is responding by putting tens of thousands of students, faculty, and staff through sensitivity training. It may even require the 186,000 minors participating in the state’s 4-H program to attend sensitivity training. It will also require students […]

Campus Censorship Is Leaching Into Business and the Arts

October 11, 2018
By Hans Bader

In a pointless act of censorship, CNN removed the episodes of the TV show “Parts Unknown” that featured actress Asia Argento. It did so because it learned that she had settled an unrelated lawsuit against her by actor Jimmy Bennett, who claimed she had sex with him when he was 17. This news had no […]

Liberal Journos Fume at Decision to Protect Academic Freedom

July 24, 2018
By Hans Bader

Progressive journalists have a message for you: Free expression is for them, not for you — and not for conservative bloggers and academics. Left-leaning journalists like Margaret Carlson are angry that the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled in favor of a conservative professor whose academic freedom rights were violated by Marquette University. It effectively fired him for a blog post that […]

DeVos Attacked for Civil Liberties Donations

January 25, 2017
By Hans Bader

Betsy DeVos, who was nominated to be the Education Secretary, has been attacked because she and her husband made donations to a civil-liberties group, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. FIRE is “a nonpartisan organization that defends free speech, religious liberty, and due process on college campuses.” The DeVos family donations drew criticism from […]

Pro-Trump Message Investigated as Hate Crime on This Campus

November 27, 2016
By Hans Bader

Politically-correct college administrators in Madison, Wisconsin asked the police to investigate speech mocking campus Clinton supporters. The police reportedly did so, even though that could lead to a violation of the First Amendment. This occurred at Edgewood College. Reason Magazine reports that an investigation at Edgewood has begun over a “Suck it up, pussies” Post-it note […]

What the Feds Have Done to Colleges and Schools

November 1, 2016
By Hans Bader

The Obama administration has repeatedly violated civil liberties on campus. The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has been the chief culprit, but the Department of Justice has played a role too. They have attacked free speech, demanding that school officials censor politically-incorrect speech. They have also pressured colleges to stack the deck against […]

The Feds Now Run a Bureaucracy That Regulates Sex

September 18, 2016
By Hans Bader

Writing in the California Law Review, Harvard Law School professors Jeannie Suk and Jacob Gersen note, “Today we have an elaborate and growing federal bureaucratic structure that in effect regulates sex.” This is largely the result of pressure from the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, where I used to work. It has told colleges […]

Obama Backs the Worst Colleges While Destroying For-Profit Schools

September 14, 2016
By Hans Bader

The federal government happily subsidizes inferior state colleges that graduate few if any of their students. That includes Chicago State University, which has a 12.8 percent six-year graduation rate. The Obama administration has rewritten federal student loan rules in a way that encourages colleges to raise tuition and effectively subsidizes the worst colleges the most. The Federal Reserve Bank of […]

Senators Reward OCR Abuses with Budget Hike Proposal

April 4, 2016
By Hans Bader

Twenty-two Senators have asked the Appropriations Committee to increase the budget of the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) by almost 30%. All of those Senators are Democrats except for Sen. Dean Heller of Nevada. OCR has pressured colleges and high schools to adopt unconstitutional speech codes. It also has pressured school districts to […]

The Systematic Eradication of Conservative Thought on Campus

November 2, 2015
By Hans Bader

Progressive faculty justify the absence of moderate and conservative voices on campus by saying that conservatives are stupid. As a result, moderate Republicans with Ivy League degrees and genius level IQs sometimes can’t find a job in academia. My former boss had a degree from the highest-ranked law school (Yale) and had published scholarly articles, but […]

Yik Yak—Latest Target of the Anti-Free-Speech Left

October 26, 2015
By Hans Bader

Last Wednesday, 72 left-wing groups, including the Feminist Majority Foundation, American Association of University Women, and Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, asked federal civil-rights officials to crack down on anonymous politically-incorrect speech on campus, which they claim violates federal civil-rights laws such as Title IX. They claim they are concerned about “harassment” on anonymous […]

The NY Times Reveals the Stupidity of ‘Yes Means Yes’

October 19, 2015
By Hans Bader

On October 15, The New York Times published a balanced news story that inadvertently revealed the stupidity of “Yes Means Yes” policies. Those policies redefine a great deal of consensual sex and touching as “sexual assault,” and effectively require college students to engage in “state-mandated dirty talk” during sexual encounters (as one supporter of “Yes Means Yes” policies gloated). That potentially violates the Constitution, and such policies have […]

Education Dept. Rules on Campus Rape Called Illegal

September 26, 2015
By Hans Bader

The College Fix published an interesting article, “Department of Education shredded for lawless overreach in Senate hearing.” It was about Congress getting annoyed with the Education Department for illegally imposing mandates on colleges and schools out of thin air, without even going through rulemaking or the notice and comment required by the Administrative Procedure Act […]

Education Department Rewards False Complaints of Abuse

September 15, 2015
By Hans Bader

The Education Department, where I used to work, is becoming more and more extreme in how it misinterprets and misapplies federal law. For example, the Education Department has thumbed its nose at federal court rulings by wrongly creating entitlements for people who make false discrimination and harassment complaints—even though such baseless complaints can make life […]

Federal Aid Drives up College Costs, Study Finds

July 13, 2015
By Hans Bader

The federal government is now admitting that its own financial aid is partly to blame for rising tuition, reports Blake Neff in The Daily Caller: A new report by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York has found that the massive investment in grants and student loans by the federal government is a major contributor […]

Another Illegal Rule from the Education Department

March 2, 2015
By Hans Bader

CEI Recently, I wrote about a report to the Senate by a task force of college presidents, on how the Education Department is illegally dumping an avalanche of new rules and regulations on America’s schools, without even complying with the Administrative Procedure Act’s notice-and-comment requirements. Yet another example of such mischief is the 2014 sexual […]

Obama Ed. Dept. Throws its Weight Around

February 26, 2015
By Hans Bader

CEI A task force of college presidents has chronicled massive regulatory overreaching by the U.S. Department of Education, which, on a daily basis, floods the nation’s schools with new, uncodified agency requirements that have never even been vetted through the formal rule-making process. “The Report of the Task Force on Federal Regulation of Higher Education: […]

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What Students Really Learn at University

Perhaps no one has written more about the plague of identity politics on America’s college campuses than MTC's contributor, Philip Carl Salzman. Salzman, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at McGill University, and a contributor to many public policy organizations, has now published some of his most powerful essays in an e-Book collection called Universities Today. Salzman writes, "Since the 1980s, universities have increasingly turned away from producing and disseminating knowledge and taken up as their objective neo-Marxist radical social reform, often labeled ‘social justice.’ Today, universities focus on political propaganda and activism and are increasingly like closed religious cults."

Attention Middle Easterners! You Don’t Have to Be White Anymore

So says Harvard University in a convoluted explanation of race, identity, culture and white privilege. According to Harvard, “Since 1944, Middle Eastern- and North African-Americans have been legally “white,” having to check the “white” box on demographic surveys like the U.S. census.” OMG—what a burden! Well, fear no more my Lebanese and Syrian friends, my pals from Iraq and Iran—you no longer have the burden of being white—you can be a MENA! A middle-eastern north African. What a joy to shed the mantle of white privilege once and for all. How wonderful to have such a joyous moniker of peace, achievement, cultural contribution, and tolerance to wrap around oneself.

If You're On Time, You're a White Supremacist

The National Conference on Race and Ethnicity in American Higher Education, or NCORE, will feature a “pre-conference” session led by an educational consultant who believes being on time is a form of “white supremacy.” The story appears in The College Fix. NCORE is a function of the University of Oklahoma’s Southwest Center for Human Relations Studies. This year, Heather Hackman of the Hackman Consulting Group will speak about “…Racism and Whiteness and Achieving Racial Justice.” Hackman is a former professor of multicultural education at St. Cloud University who, at 2016’s “White Privilege Conference,” informed attendees that “the racial narrative of White” includes “making sure you’re not tardy.” Individualism, honesty, discipline, and rigor were other factors.

Peggy Noonan on the Coming Fall of ‘Woke’ Progressives

"The past decade saw the rise of the woke progressives who dictate what words can be said and ideas held, thus poisoning and paralyzing American humor, drama, entertainment, culture and journalism. In the coming 10 years someone will effectively stand up to them. They are the most hated people in America, and their entire program is accusation: you are racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic; you are a bigot, a villain, a white male, a patriarchal misogynist, your day is over. They never have a second move. Bow to them, as most do, and they’ll accuse you even more of newly imagined sins. They claim to be vulnerable victims, and moral. Actually, they’re not." -- The Wall Street Journal, January 4 -5

Let's Ban the SAT and ACT!

That's what a coalition of civil rights lawyers wants to do in California in order to end discrimination based on merit for Latinos and African Americans. According to a report in The New Yorker, the only tests the lawyers would allow are Advanced Placement exams. The shell game of accepting test results, then distorting them to achieve a "racially balanced outcome," has been known for years at some of the most prestigious schools in the country. But two events have prompted this action in California: One is the ongoing challenge by Students for Fair Admissions vs. Harvard to level the playing field for Asian students, who score high on grades and tests. The other is the changing makeup of the Supreme Court, which has become more conservative in the last few years. Does anyone care that American students continue to decline in global matchups against other developed countries?

If You're White, You're Wrong

Following a growing trend in higher education, a Dartmouth professor called for mandatory white privilege courses. Dr. Emily Walton wrote an op-ed in USA Today calling for all students to take courses in white privilege and black history. She accuses white people of being afflicted with "white blindness" or a state in which racial privilege is invisible. She also claims the K-12 public schools perpetuate "white blindness" (read discrimination) by not mandating ethnic studies classes. To top it off, she equates the meritocratic system of hard work with white discrimination against minorities.

In response to "Wanna Teach? Submit a Killer 'Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion' Statement"

I am a long-retired public school teacher. Last fall, I submitted a letter to the editor of Education Week (unpublished), providing data on public education’s devotion to social justice issues.

To the editor:

A subscriber since the founding of Education Week in 1981, I’ve noticed a persistent theme: the “achievement gap.” In the 12-11 issue, for example, two commentaries were on that topic. Looking towards the next four decades, entertain a possibility: A fixation on performance “gaps” and on assigning blame may be unhealthy.

Evidence of fixation? At Edweek.org, I searched 24 terms associated with the achievement gap to gauge frequency. Assume 36 issues per year of Education Week over 38 years. That’s 1,368 issues. Divide “mentions” below by 1,368 for the average number of times one is likely to encounter a particular term in a random issue of Education Week:

“equity” – 7,334 mentions (5.9 times per issue)
“achievement gap” – 4,930
“discrimination” – 3,740
“desegregation” – 3,090
“social justice” – 3,020
“desegregate” – 3,063
“segregation” – 1,968
“segregate” – 1,498
“discriminate” – 1,396
“racism” – 1,380
“slavery” – 520
“racial discrimination” – 431
“racial bias” – 265
“mandatory busing” – 235
“Jim Crow” – 168
“implicit bias” – 166
“cultural competence” – 91
“forced busing” – 90
“white privilege” – 85
“institutional racism” – 76
“systemic racism” – 51
“busing for racial balance” – 51
“redlining” or “red-lining” – 38
“structural racism” – 27

Consider two changes-of-direction for the next 38 years:

1) America is among the least racist nations in the world. Endlessly beating itself up over racial disparities ill serves everyone.

2) Groups focus differently; people are individuals. All 64 starting NFL cornerbacks are Black and have been for 17 years. That gap alarms no one. Bringing some of that tolerance to educational performance may produce happier results than four more decades obsessing over gaps.
Individuals are key. Overlap among and variation within groups is enormous. While upholding meritocratic standards, why not incentivize individuals to move where they can, possibly “testing out” of graded systems. Adjusting compulsory attendance and child-labor laws might better accommodate enormous variation among individuals.

Tom Shuford, Lenoir, NC