When last we heard from Wisconsin, Roger Clegg, the mild-mannered, scholarly president and general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity, had provoked a riot of pro-racial preference liberals there by visiting the state to discuss CEO’s studies demonstrating massive racial discrimination by the University of Wisconsin. He must have put something in the water (or beer) […]
Read More
Columnist Mike Adams has some fun today with the strange decision of his college, the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, to lump together two serious academic departments (because of a shortage of funding) while once again expanding the campus diversity bureaucracy (for which no funding shortage ever seems to appear). As Adams figures it, the university […]
Read More
Males are keenly aware that when they go to college they are entering a hostile environment. Freshman orientation alone has had a distinctively anti-male cast for years: heavy emphasis on date rape, stalking, unwanted sexual attention, and sexual harassment amount to an unmistakable message that males are patriarchal oppressors and potential sex criminals. The lesson […]
Read More
Stuart Taylor, my colleague from the lacrosse case, and UCLA Law School professor Richard Sander, have filed a brief urging the Supreme Court to hear Fisher v. University of Texas, the University of Texas racial preferences case. Hopefully the brief will achieve its purpose; it certainly presents a compelling indictment of the racial preferences structure […]
Read More
Say what you will about California’s enigmatic governor, Edmund G. “Jerry” Brown, but on major issues involving votes of the people, Brown is very reluctant to go against the will of the people, no matter what his personal views happen to be. In 1978, during his first term as governor, Brown opposed the highly popular […]
Read More
Some key questions are rarely asked about the success or failure of affirmative action programs on college campuses. Among them are: Does ignorance foster negative racial stereotyping? Does the greater opportunity for contact between people of diverse races and ethnicities brought about by “race-sensitive admissions” help prejudiced whites overcome their prejudice against blacks and other […]
Read More
In her thoughtful and intelligent critique of my case against Columbia University, Charlotte Allen agrees with my basic concern when she writes that what’s wrong at Columbia is “the university’s continued support of professors who have turned their classrooms into bully pulpits for preaching religious and ethnic hatred.” She disagrees, however, with whether OCR should […]
Read More
I disagree with Kenneth L. Marcus’s post here approving the Education Department’s pending investigation of Columbia University for allegedly “steering” a Jewish student at Barnard College away from a course taught by Joseph Massad. While I’m in sympathy with Marcus’s efforts to show up Massad for the unreconstructed ideologue and tiresome non-scholar that he is, […]
Read More
The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has just opened a new investigation into anti-Semitism at Columbia University. At this author’s urging, OCR is looking into whether a Jewish Barnard student was unlawfully “steered” away from a course taught by controversial Columbia Professor Joseph Massad. Massad has been accused of anti-Semitism before. This […]
Read More
Prompted by the NAS’ intriguing–and commendable–decision to use Bowdoin as a case study to explore the liberal arts experience, I took a look last week at the staffing decisions in Bowdoin’s history department. Three unusual patterns emerged: (1) a seemingly disproportionate emphasis on environmental and African history; (2) an inconsistent commitment to scholarship as a requirement […]
Read More
By now the “Cupcake War” in which the Berkeley College Republicans sold cupcakes with different prices for various ethnic/racial/gender groups is well known. Drawing less attention is why it produced the panicky overkill reaction, including strong condemnations from some university administrators. After all, the anti-affirmative action bake sale hardly threatens the diversity infrastructure and is […]
Read More
This week’s “Diversity in Academe” issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education contains an interview with the “first-person ever appointed to the position of vice president for diversity and equity at the University of Virginia,” a man named William B. Harvey. He has moved on to North Carolina A & T, where he serves as dean […]
Read More
The occasionally violent mob protests at the University of Wisconsin, and the role of a university administrator in egging on the disrupters, have barely raised a ripple in the mainstream press. But commentary here by Robert Weissberg, KC Johnson and Roger Clegg, has circulated widely on the Internet. Today Donald Downs, a professor at the […]
Read More
It has been over a week since the University of Wisconsin at Madison was torn by the debate over affirmative action on September 13. The conflict was precipitated by the presentation of a study conducted by the Center for Equal Opportunity, which alleges reverse discrimination in UW admissions policies. A lot has been written about […]
Read More
Most observers have framed the recent disruption by backers of racial and ethnic preferences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as a free-speech conflict. Free speech is clearly involved but lying below the surface are three issues that warrant close attention, specifically how Wisconsin once handled “inclusion;” how the protest reflects the transformation of the idea […]
Read More
I thank KC Johnson for his thoughtful post below. Here is a link to the studies we released on the severe and unjustified admission preferences at the University of Wisconsin, Madison,and to the press release that summarized them and announced the press conference: http://www.ceousa.org/content/view/929/119/. Since I was there, I thought I would also add a […]
Read More
The Center for Equal Opportunity’s Roger Clegg convened a press conference in Madison, Wisconsin. The gathering intended to discuss findings from the CEO’s disturbing study of how the University of Wisconsin has misused and abused the school’s racial preferences admissions scheme. Using internal data obtained, in part, through a lawsuit against the university, the study […]
Read More
The following job notice was posted August 4: The University of California, Berkeley invites applications for a position as an Assistant Professor (tenure-track) in any of the following three areas: (1) Diversity and Identity; (2) Legal or Philosophical Frameworks for Diverse Democracies; and (3) Diversity, Civil Society and Political Action, or some combination thereof. The anticipated […]
Read More
Writing here over a year ago in The Misguided Push for STEM Diversity, I noted that “Sometimes it seems as though the most heavily researched, richly funded area of American science today involves studies of why there aren’t more women in STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) and efforts to induce, recruit, and retain […]
Read More
Even the most jaded observer of the contemporary academy can sometimes be stunned. Consider, for instance, an article last week in the New York Times, detailing faculty unrest toward Columbia president Lee Bollinger, on grounds that Bollinger is . . . insufficiently committed to diversity. Bollinger, of course, presided over the University of Michigan’s aggressive (and […]
Read More
Elmhurst College, in what is apparently a first, will ask this question on its admissions application: “Would you consider yourself a member of the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered) community?” Answering the question will be optional; applicants may chose “yes” or “no” or “prefer not to answer.” Those answering yes to the LGBT question will […]
Read More
Of the criticisms directed toward the contemporary academy, the charge of “indoctrination” strikes me as the most overhyped. The phenomenon certainly occurs; the most obvious recent example came in the “dispositions” controversy, when education students around the country could choose between agreeing with their professors’ political opinions and finding another career path. But it’s relatively […]
Read More
By Jonathan B. Imber Until 1969, on the campus where I teach, all students were required to take two semester s of Bible, which made the Department of Religion a central force in the life of the institution. When I arrived twelve years later, with no Bible requirement any longer in place, the only remnant […]
Read More
I recently posted an essay here about a racial hoax at the University of Virginia Law School that quickly became an issue implicating the University’s honor code. Briefly, Johnathan Perkins was an attractive third year UVa law student from what could be described as a civil rights family inasmuch as both his father and grandfather wrote […]
Read More
Reprinted from City Journal. California’s budget crisis has reduced the University of California to near-penury, claim its spokesmen. “Our campuses and the UC Office of the President already have cut to the bone,” the university system’s vice president for budget and capital resources warned earlier this month, in advance of this week’s meeting of the university’s […]
Read More
A divided three-judge panel from the 6th Circuit has issued a remarkable decision striking down the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, which prohibited state institutions from contracting.” In 2006, Michigan voters had approved the measure, by a 16-point margin. Voters in other blue states, such as California and Washington, have endorsed similar measures. Judges Guy Cole and […]
Read More
The Center for Diversity in Engineering at the University of Virginia is sponsoring a “Discover the joy of engineering” summer camp, but boys need not apply. Program Description Enjoy Engineering is a camp designed to help girls discover the joy of engineering. It will provide hands-on activities, lab tours, and creative engineering design projects in a […]
Read More
The University of Virginia Law School held its commencement on May 22, and not a moment too soon. “Not since Teddy Kennedy was speeding through town and picking up reckless driving tickets in the late 1950s,” The Hook, a Charlottesville weekly, reported, “has UVA Law School seen so much scandal.” Since those scandals involved race […]
Read More
The New York Times had a fairly long online colloquy over the weekend on a very short study titled “Whites See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game That They Are Now Losing.” Prepared by Michael I. Norton of Harvard Business School and Samuel R. Sommers of Tuft University’s Department of Psychology, the study appeared in Perspectives on Psychological Science. It […]
Read More
Ron Howell (Yale, ’70), a journalism professor at Brooklyn College, writesin the current issue of the Yale alumni magazine that over the years I have from time to time floated the idea that some racist scientist had slipped poison into our milk, after our births or while we were at Yale. Others, not easily inclined […]
Read More