By Ward Connerly More than thirteen years ago the people of California voted to end discrimination and “preferential treatment” on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity and national origin, in the public arenas of contracting, education and employment. The margin of the vote on the ballot initiative (Proposition 209) that enshrined the principle of […]
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When college presidents and academic administrators pay their usual obeisance to “diversity” you know they are talking first and foremost about race. More specifically, they are talking about blacks. A diverse college campus is understood as one that has a student body that–at a minimum–is 5 to 7 percent black (i.e., equivalent to roughly half […]
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An Inside Higher Ed article yesterday by English professor Satya P. Mohanty of Cornell on “Diversity’s Next Challenges” constructs an elaborate house of cards but then inadvertently knocks the whole thing down. The piece features, in particular, an argument suggesting that “stereotype threat”—the claim that fear of being judged by a stereotype can cause minorities […]
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Ohio governor Ted Strickland believes America’s public systems of higher education “strengthen our people” and “provide ideas that our [nation] needs to grow.” I agree that they should do this. After serving as a trustee of The Ohio State University at Mansfield for the past nine years though, I have begun to wonder whether, in […]
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The College Board has issued another of its reports on student loan debt, focusing this time on the 17 percent of students who graduate from four-year colleges with “high debt levels”—that is, more than $30,500 worth of education loans. The average debt load for those high -borrowing students, one out every six graduates with bachelor’s […]
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One of the most popular assessment tools in higher education is the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), a questionnaire administered each year to some 300,000 first-year and senior students at diverse institutions across the country. It has items on how many books students read, how many papers they write, how often they meet with […]
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The Obama Department of Justice is keen to support those who seek to expand racial preferences. The latest case is Fisher v. University of Texas, in which two young white women, Abigail Fisher and Rachel Michalewicz, argue that the University’s diversity policy-one of the more aggressive in the nation– violates their right to equal protection. […]
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Although my years of service on the University of California (UC) Board of Regents were the most tumultuous years of my life, my pride in the Board and the university that it serves has, until now, never wavered. But, a recent meeting and action by the Board has caused that feeling of pride to diminish. […]
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During a conversation at an academic conference, a professor from an Ivy League school refers to two female graduate students as “black bitches.” After the students report the incident, the professor apologizes — but it takes another two months, and vociferous protests from the campus black community, for the university officials to acknowledge the issue […]
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On Monday the Supreme Court heard arguments in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, a case that pitted the right to free association against the principle of non-discrimination. Hastings College of Law in San Francisco, part of the University of California system, has a policy stating that recognized student organizations “shall not discriminate unlawfully on the […]
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Earlier this month the United States Commission on Civil Rights issued a series of recommendations on Title IX enforcement. Chief among their analysis was the idea that the Model Survey promoted by the Bush Administration “currently provides the best method available” for measuring student interest, which has been a method of Title IX compliance since […]
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At a time when every major bill coming out of Congress seems to push 2,000-plus pages, it is easy to forget that arguably the most sweeping and controversial piece of higher education policy in history, Title IX, was a mere 36 words in the Higher Education Amendments Act of 1972. Some laws, it turns out, […]
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Growing Anti-Semitism On The Campus The sad evidence that American campuses have been the site of rising anti-Semitism is truly an alarming phenomenon. Anti-Semitism has come from various sources: African-American student organizations; the Muslim Student Association at various colleges and universities, and the widespread movement on behalf of disinvestment in Israel, whose sponsors regularly compares […]
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People who have followed the effort to put initiatives on state ballots eliminating racial preferences from college admissions might remember this advertisement from 2008, which set Ward Connerly in Klan regalia. Two years before, a group called Think Progress posted a video on its web page under the headline “Leader of Michigan Initiative To End […]
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Last December, I wrote in these pages about allegations of racial discrimination in tenure denial at Emerson College, which had prompted the school to set up a three-person commission charged with reviewing those allegations. The panel’s report has just been released, and the good news is that the panelists “noticed no overtly racist or prejudiced […]
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A Chicago study on “Assessing the Impact of Eliminating Affirmative Action in Higher Education” comes to this conclusion: black and Hispanic representation at all 4-year colleges is predicted to decline modestly—by 2%—if race-neutral college admissions policies are mandated nationwide. However, race-neutral admissions are predicted to decrease minority representation at the most selective 4-year institutions by […]
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Should universities weigh race and ethnicity in deciding whom to hire for their science departments? The American Association for the Advancement of Science thinks so, according to a recent National Journal article. “Science and engineering should look like the rest of the population,” says AAAS’s Daryl Chubin, and if hiring decisions don’t yield the right […]
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Allegations of tenure discrimination have recently been leveled against Emerson College on grounds of race and against DePaul University on grounds of sex. At Emerson, two black scholars were denied tenure, the local chapter of the NAACP became involved, and an investigation has been launched by the Massachusetts Commission against Discrimination. The school has agreed […]
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Does a black professor deserve tenure because his college hasn’t granted tenure to very many black professors in the past? To provide a role model for black students? To help the school achieve ethnic diversity faster than it otherwise might? To ensure that the proportion of black professors matches the proportion of black college students? […]
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While this year has become best known as the fortieth anniversary of Woodstock, it was also forty years ago that the first African-American Studies department was established, at San Francisco State University. Forty-one fall semesters later, there are hundreds of such departments. Has what they teach evolved with the march of time? What should the […]
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John Rosenberg (Discriminations) and Mickey Kaus (Kausfiles) note that the slippery term “cultural competence” pops up often in the health care bill passed by the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Once a harmless term in medical literature referring to the need to understand and communicate with patients of different races and ethnicities, “cultural competence” mutated […]
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“If I couldn’t study something that’s about myself then I wouldn’t want to be here,” the black sophomore once told me, explaining how crucial to him it was to be able to major in African-American Studies. It always stuck with me. The African-American Studies department he was a major in was one of about 300 […]
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We’re looking for any upcoming or recent accounts of freshman orientation from those who’ve undergone the process or shortly will. PC skits, “white privilege” games, and the like, we’re interested in all of this. Any stories are welcome and encouraged. Write us or urge anyone you know who might be going through the process to […]
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A few weeks ago a teenaged pot dealer was shot dead in a Harvard dormitory. That alone was depressing enough. However, Harvard suspects a black senior, Chanequa Campbell, of an association with the pot dealer — Justin Cosby, also black — and last week was barred from her dormitory and prevented from graduating. Campbell grew […]
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About five years ago, shortly before my term ended as a Regent of the University of California (UC), I was having a casual conversation with a very high-ranking UC administrator about a proposal that he was developing to increase “diversity” at UC in a manner that would comply with the dictates of California’s Constitution and […]
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Forty years ago this week, an armed student insurrection erupted on the Cornell campus. I was a sophomore on campus at the time and later wrote a book on the events, Cornell ’69: Liberalism and the Crisis of the American University. To some the drama represented a triumph of social justice, paving the way for […]
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Yesterday, our own John McWhorter participated in a debate on Affirmative Action hosted by the Miller Center. Other participants included Julian Bond and Lee Bollinger. You can watch it here.
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In the early 90s we noticed that Brown and Yale were conducting separate freshman orientations for non-white students. Since then this casual segregation of new students has spread widely and has come to be seen as normal. Typically minority students arrive a week early and are instructed on how to cope with a historically white […]
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The nine-campus University of California system is reducing the number of freshman admissions because of the financial crisis. But “underrepresented groups”—non-Asian-American minorities—shouldn’t worry at all. Apparently all the cuts will come from white and Asian-American applicants. Down in the ninth paragraph of a 13-paragraph Associated Press story in the San Jose Mercury News, we learn […]
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The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) took its customary bystander role in the Ward Churchill case, as it regularly does when academic integrity is the issue and the evidence of malfeasance is obvious. But among the many mealy-mouthed statements by AAUP president Cary Nelson, one was surely true: “Colorado knew what it was getting […]
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