Wenyuan Wu is Executive Director of the Californians for Equal Rights Foundation. Twitter: @wu_wenyuan
Last Thursday, Chief U.S. District Judge Mark E. Walker from the North District of Florida issued a preliminary injunction halting enforcement of the employment provisions in Florida’s newly codified Individual Freedom Act (IFA). On the same day, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) submitted a lawsuit challenging the IFA, also known as the Stop the […]
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Last week, both Harvard and the University of North Carolina (UNC) filed their response briefs with the United States Supreme Court (SCOTUS), which is now considering two lawsuits against the institutions’ admissions processes by Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA). In the responses, the defendants categorically deny claims of racial discrimination in undergraduate admissions, pledge their […]
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The Civics Secures Democracy Act (CSDA), a bill that was reintroduced in the U.S. Senate last month under the auspices of bipartisanship, represents a federal legislative push to expand and upgrade K-12 civic and history education through a sum of $6 billion in competitive grants over a six-year period. The proposed federal funding bonanza includes: […]
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Between March 4 and March 6, 2022, the California Teachers Association (CTA), California’s largest teachers union with a membership of 325,000 educators, hosted a convention titled “2022 Equity & Human Rights Conference” in Los Angeles. With an aim to “provide all CTA members with a greater understanding of the issues of diversity, equity and social […]
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California’s New Reparations Report Defies Gravity On June 1, 2022, the California Reparations Task Force, established by the passage of AB 3121 in 2020, released an interim report detailing generational harms of slavery and post-slavery government policies and practices on black Americans. The 492-page report makes sweeping policy recommendations such as zero-interest home loans, free […]
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To what extent can a selective educational institution advantage certain racial groups in admissions decisions without discriminating against other groups simultaneously? How can said institutions balance external demands for fairness and group representation with their core mission to educate students sufficiently? How much influence should an institution itself wield, compared with other stakeholders (including the […]
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The idea of merit has been thoroughly scrutinized in both the ivory tower and the public square. Harvard professor Michael Sandel presents a philosophical case against meritocracy in his best-selling book The Tyranny of Merit (2020), arguing that “the talent game generates hubris among the winners… and creates humiliation and resentment among the losers.” Sandel’s […]
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Recently, a San Diego school district superintendent attempted to explain the overall good educational performance of Asian students by highlighting these students’ alleged rich immigrant backgrounds. She said: “people who’re able to make the journey to America are wealthy.” Once her bigoted comments were exposed, the superintendent first apologized and then doubled down and advocated […]
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What does it take for a fringe dogma that preys on frail human divisions and obsesses with power struggles to be promoted en masse and generally accepted in a country where political liberalism had been the norm? The radical reshaping of contemporary American minds towards an unnatural preoccupation with cultural relativism and identity tribalism began […]
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On March 21, 2021, the Governing Board at the California Community Colleges (CCC), the state-wide public higher education entity in charge of 116 community colleges, held a public meeting to discuss a regulatory proposal on diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA). The proposal would amend the California Code of Regulations to establish a set of […]
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In recent years, many higher education institutions have abandoned standardized testing in their admissions processes or made these tests optional, arguing that SAT or ACT scores do not reliably project student performance and that these tests have built-in biases against underrepresented minorities (URMs). As of February 9, 2022, over 1,820 accredited U.S. colleges and universities […]
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At California State University San Marcos (CSUSM), the Craven Taskforce is busy at work to cleanse the university of its connections to the late Senator William A. Craven, who helped found the school in 1978. The renaming taskforce consists of 23 members drawn from the faculty, the student body, and the larger community, who are […]
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One man’s fight for justice after critiquing BLM If you work for a well-established American institution, be it a Fortune 500 company or a prestigious research foundation, are you constantly worried about being targeted for not endorsing political fads or prevailing cultural symbols? The often-dichotomous struggle between inconvenient truths and popular beliefs is nothing new. […]
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Anti-racist discrimination is not a victimless offense. A glaring skeleton in the closet of American education is its intentional and long-established discrimination against Asian Americans, both in college admissions and in access to quality K-12 education. In light of such endemic practices that should embarrass any classical liberal, a federal lawsuit filed by Coalition for […]
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Over the 2021 holiday season, Kaiser Permanente, the largest managed care organization in the United States, quietly conducted a mandatory training targeting its California employees in the name of “Providing Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate Services in California.” Filled with boilerplate progressive jargon including “unconscious bias,” “diversity and equity,” “racial disparities,” and “systemic barriers,” the training […]
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Thuy Thi Nguyen, our nation’s first Vietnamese-American college president and leader of California’s Foothill College, was recently ousted by the college’s Academic Senate in an unprecedented vote of no confidence. The Senate, which gives recommendations to the District Board of Trustees on academic and professional matters, accused Nguyen’s administration of prioritizing equity over educational competitiveness. […]
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The University of Georgia (UGA), “the birthplace of public education in America,” recently posted a tenured faculty cluster hiring notice for its Integrative Precision Agriculture program. The program, a cross-disciplinary undertaking between the Engineering and Agricultural & Environmental Sciences colleges, seeks tenured or tenure-track professors who have expertise in distributed sensing, systems modeling, AI-enabled decision […]
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At the height of globalization in the 1990s and early 2000s, many political economists—including Susan Strange, Philip G. Cerny, and Nita Rudra—argued that forces of economic and cultural neoliberalism were steadily eroding traditional nation-states and welfare societies. In developed countries, backlash against globalism often manifested as labor protectionism, trade barriers, and nationalism. Meanwhile, in developing […]
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Over 6,000 non-tenured University of California (UC) lecturers are threatening to go on strike again. This follows an October 12th collective bargaining offer from UC, which the lecturers criticize as insufficient to satisfy their demands for better pay and job security. Adjunct faculty from UC San Diego and UC Santa Cruz claim that the 4.3% […]
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“Antiracism” guru Dr. Ibram X. Kendi strikes again. In an emotionally taxing column published by The Atlantic, a melodramatic Kendi laments the alleged misappropriation and distortions of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at the hands of conservatives opposed to critical race theory (CRT). Kendi disparages “Reagan Republicans then and Trump Republicans today” as King’s “modern-day […]
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On a warm day in the early fall of 1966, a 17-year-old former high school student led a group of local Red Guards in a struggle session to publicly shame members of the “Five Black Categories (landlords, rich farmers, counter-revolutionaries, bad elements, and right-wingers)” in a small town near Shanghai. The teenager, who came from […]
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The North Carolina General Assembly is considering a new bill (Senate Bill 729) which seeks to outlaw racial discrimination and racial preferences in public affairs. The bill’s language is identical to similar proposals in California, Washington, Michigan, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Arizona, Colorado, and Idaho, which states: The State shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment […]
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The L.A. Times’ Attack on a Volunteer County Board of Education A few weeks ago, the Los Angeles Times editorial board published a scathing editorial criticizing the Orange County Board of Education (OCBE), two weeks after its special board meeting on ethnic studies and critical race theory (CRT). The editorial accused the OCBE and its […]
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On July 13, the Governing Board of California Community Colleges (CCC) voted to approve two new requirements—one adding ethnic studies as a graduation requirement for students seeking an associate’s degree and another mandating the incorporation of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and anti-racism in the schools’ employment procedures. Given that all existing collegiate-level ethnic studies […]
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I spent my early years believing in a euphonious lie that modern China was beautifully multicultural, with all its 56 ethnic groups living as one family in utter adoration of the motherland. This patriotic belief, consolidated through years of Marxist and Maoist training, was slightly shaken when I met my college best friend—a Yao minority who talks […]
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In August 1996, at the height of a 6-million-dollar campaign coalition to preserve race-based affirmative action over against Proposition 209, Dr. Shirley Weber spoke at the Million Man March statewide conference organized by Dr. Manulana Karenga for a revolutionary agenda of black empowerment. At the time, Dr. Weber was a member of the San Diego School Board […]
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