RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2022/01/28/how_universities_will_sidestep_scotus_on_affirmative_action_147107.html

Embracing affirmative action is virtually a job qualification for university administrators. The same is true, alas, for faculty and students in the humanities and social sciences. They march in lockstep toward a society permanently categorized by race, all with the best of intentions but not the best of outcomes.

They aren’t just woke. Their eyelids are sewn open. They have no intention of snoozing if the Supreme Court rules their current admission policies are illegal. They will stand proudly in the schoolhouse door, protecting policies they believe promote “social justice” and “equity.”

Their tactics to evade the court are surprisingly simple. Since admissions tests leave traces of discrimination, they’ll drop them. Having ditched these useful standards, university bureaucrats can sit behind closed doors, choose the applicants they favor, reject those they don’t, and leave no pesky evidence they are violating the law. Asian Americans, Jews, and other disfavored groups won’t have a record to show their test scores are systematically higher than favored groups, who are now being admitted despite their scores. To misquote Martin Luther King, universities are looking at the color of applicants’ skin, not the content of their academic qualifications.

Universities aren’t waiting for the Supreme Court to rule on whether affirmative action is constitutional. They already taking preemptive steps, designed to keep their current practices in place, this time without leaving fingerprints. Some 1,700 colleges and universities have already made SAT and ACT test scores optional for admission.

Why have universities dropped standardized tests? Not because these tests are biased or because they fail to predict academic performance (their primary purpose). Quite the contrary. The tests have been assiduously scrubbed to prevent cultural or racial bias, as they should be, and they are recognized as valuable tools to match students with the colleges where they are most likely to thrive academically.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/harvards-diversity-disgrace-harvard/

In 2014, the non-profit Students for Fair Admissions filed a lawsuit against Harvard University, alleging discrimination against Asian Americans in its admissions process — discrimination resulting from Harvard’s stated commitment to “a diverse class.” After defeats at the District and Court of Appeals level, the suit has arrived at the foot of the United States Supreme Court. The case will be argued in the 2022 term. Harvard’s reputation is not all that’s at stake. The case threatens to bring down the entire system of race-based affirmative action that dominates college admissions.

Looking at the numbers, it’s easy to see why Students for Fair Admissions believe they have a case. According to 90,000 pages of Harvard admissions data, an Asian-American student must score 450 points higher on the SAT to have the same chance of admission as a black student with the same qualifications. Harvard, despite being an academic institution, also scores for “personality,” and consistently gives Asian Americans the lowest ratings. Without discrimination, Asian Americans would make up 43 percent of the Harvard student body, according to Harvard’s own Office of Institutional Research. In the years before the filing of the 2014 suit, Asians were between 15 and 20 percent of the student body.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/01/the_supreme_court_should_reject_racial_preference_in_college_admissions.html

The Supreme Court is going to hear two cases about racial preference in college admissions that allegedly discriminates against Asian students.

In the 1978 Bakke decision, the Supreme Court said race could be a factor in admissions, but as anyone who is sat through an academic committee meeting knows, when race is a factor, it is the only factor.

Even though the Supreme Court in Bakke said that a set-aside for admissions, or quota, was impermissible, colleges and universities routinely use racial quotas masquerading as goals.

The consequence has been that highly qualified Asian students are rejected on trivial and subjective data, such as leadership skills and self-confidence, to increase the proportion of less qualified blacks and Latinos.

How do Asian students achieve high academic status and participate in a range of extracurricular activities while lacking in leadership, self-confidence, and other personality traits? The answer is that when it comes to Asians, the subjective evaluation process is a farce designed to discriminate against them.

Race-based admissions are not the exception but the rule. And no one but diversity, inclusion, and equity experts conducting so-called cultural audits has profited from this policy.

Colleges and universities are run by a professional class of bureaucrats. And if anything, members of bureaucracy know that the very essence of their work is their own survival.

https://www.nysun.com/national/harvard-president-defiant-in-admissions-fight/91981/

Harvard is holding firm in its fight to use race in its admissions process, the university’s president announced in an email delivered yesterday to students, alumni, and faculty on Tuesday. The missive from Lawrence Bacow came just one day after the Supreme Court agreed to hear a challenge to that very policy.

Mr. Bacow wrote that he wished the Supreme Court “would have decided differently,” but his note makes clear that Harvard will do nothing differently absent a high court order.

The future of how America’s oldest university chooses its students will be decided not in faculty lounges in Cambridge, but in judicial chambers in Washington, D.C. As the Sun has reported, the high court looks set to decide the future of college and university admissions after elevating cases against Harvard and the University of North Carolina.

Mr. Bacow struck a defiant note in response to the dramatic legal development, maintaining: “Our admissions process, in which race is considered as one factor among many, makes us stronger.” He promised to “defend with vigor” that approach against “narrowly drawn measures of academic distinction.”

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/26/virginia-governor-youngkin-opens-tip-line-for-parents-to-report-teachers-who-teach-critical-race-theory/

On Monday, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin (R-Va.) announced that his office would be opening up an anonymous tip line for Virginia parents to report teachers and schools that they believed to be teaching curriculum that includes Critical Race Theory (CRT).

As reported by The Daily Caller, Youngkin made the announcement during an interview on the John Fredericks Show, with Youngkin saying that parents “can send us an email at helpeducation@governor.virginia.gov.”

“We’re asking for folks to send us reports and observations that will help us be aware of things like privileged bingo, be aware of their child being denied their rights that parents have in Virginia and we’re going to make sure that we catalogue it all,” Youngkin continued. “It gives us great insight into what’s happening at the school level and that gives us further ability to make sure that we’re rooting it out.”

Youngkin was referring to a recent incident where Fairfax County Public Schools assigned students to play a game called “privilege bingo,” where students were told that they had inherent “privilege” if they were White, male, Christian, cisgender, or the child of a member of the military, among other factors.

Since his inauguration on January 15th, Youngkin has taken numerous actions to eliminate CRT from Virginia’s schools, which was one of his signature promises on the campaign trail last year. His first executive order after taking office called for the end of “the use of inherently divisive concepts – including Critical Race Theory – in public education.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/forbidden-campus-speech-richard-l-cravatts/

As difficult as it is to believe that someone on a contemporary university campus could be so socially tone-deaf that they would publicly utter an ethnic slur, professors do regularly find themselves the target of indignant parties they have “harmed” with their careless, often inappropriate speech.

Consider, for instance, the case of Jackie Buell, an assistant professor in Ohio State University’s School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, who made an outrageous anti-Semitic slur when she referred to “Jewing down” people in an October 18th online lecture.

“Anybody been to Mexico?” Buell said in a video leaked by a student.

“You know, I mean, Jewing down is a way of the world down there, right? You want to buy a blanket and (it) has $5 on it, and you say, ‘I’ll give you $2 for it.’ They say, ‘No.’ You just start walking away. They say ‘Three dollar,’ right? They just want to get what they can out of it. But now they come to this country. We get people that come in the market all the time that want to Jew us down on the vegetables, right?” [Emphasis added.]

This may well be an example of irresponsible, unconscious anti-Semitism, especially given the fact that professor Buell offered up a lame, almost unbelievable excuse for her utterances when she weakly apologized by saying that she had not intended “to be offensive to any particular group,” presumably meaning Jews in particular, and that, she stupefyingly contended, “I have never associated the word ‘Jew’ with any particular person or group.” 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/what-will-it-take-convince-democrats-school-choice-larry-sand/

During the 2020–21 school year, approximately 608,000 students used a voucher, tax-credit scholarship, or education savings account (ESA) to educate their children, according to policy experts Jason Bedrick and Ed Tarnowski. They wrote in August that as a result of the legislation enacted so far in 2021, at least 3.6 million additional students are eligible to participate in the new educational choice programs in seven states, and an additional 878,300 additional students will be eligible in 14 other states. In all, 22 states expanded or created school choice initiatives in 2021.

While this is certainly good news for the still small percentage of lucky families, there is a disturbing, though not exactly surprising reality. As detailed in a study released in the fall by researchers Jay Greene, James Paul, and Lindsey Burke, very few Democratic state legislators vote for school-choice proposals, “and the few that do almost never make a difference in whether those bills receive support of at least 50% of the legislators.” The researchers conclude, that the “empirical evidence is clear that the historical practice of courting Democratic policymakers has not been effective. Indeed, it has likely been counter-productive. Proponents of school choice should make a values-based appeal for choice that could attract more families, and elevate choice as a solution to some of the most pressing education policy fights of the day.”

It is no secret that the teachers unions are Choice Enemy #1, and are a big part of the problem in blue states. With only a handful of organized private schools nationwide, the unions are willing to spend big to advance their self-serving agenda, no matter how family-unfriendly it may be. And that outlay goes almost exclusively in one direction, of course. In 2020, the National Education Association contributed almost $15 million to candidates across the country, handing over 96% of it to Democrats. The American Federation of Teachers spent over $20 million, 99.6% of it going to Dems.