RUTHFULLY YOURS

One microdrama this week came from a leaked document revealing that the Justice Department may staff up an investigation into “intentional race-based discrimination” in college admissions. The left is accusing Justice of dismantling racial preferences, though acceptance practices at elite universities deserve more scrutiny, particularly regarding Asian-American applicants.

In 2015 a coalition of more than 60 Asian-American groups filed a complaint with the Justice Department Civil Rights Division that alleges admissions discrimination at Harvard University, and the details are striking. In 1993 about 20% of Harvard students were Asian-American, and that figure has barely budged over two decades, even as the Asian-American share of the U.S. population has grown rapidly. Harvard’s admitted class of 2021 is 22% Asian-American, according to data on the university’s website, and the numbers are roughly consistent at Princeton, Yale and other Ivy League schools.

Compare that with California, where a 1990s referendum banned the state’s public universities from considering race as an admissions factor. The share at University of California campuses at Berkeley and Los Angeles tops 30%, as the complaint notes. At the private California Institute of Technology, which by choice does not consider race as a factor, more than 40% of students were Asian-American in 2013, up from 26% in 1993.

Also notable is research on how much more competitive Asian-Americans must be to win entry into Harvard or other hallowed progressive halls. All else being equal, Asian-American must score 140 points higher on the SAT than a white counterpart, 270 points higher than a Hispanic student, and 450 points higher than a black applicant, according to 2009 research from Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade and co-author Alexandria Walton Radford.

Schools are allowed to consider race as a “plus” factor, and Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy in recent years has muddied the legal standards, most recently in Fisher v. University of Texas. But the Asian-American disparities look like evidence of de facto admissions quotas that the High Court has explicitly declared illegal.

The threat to free speech in the United States is by no means restricted to colleges and universities, but they have become breeding grounds, training camps, and launching pads in the campaign to curtail liberty of thought and discussion. It is on our campuses where the battle for free speech will be won or lost.

In this year alone, protesters at Claremont McKenna College disrupted a talk by the Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald; protesters at Middlebury College intimidated American Enterprise Institute Scholar Charles Murray and assaulted his host, Professor Allison Stanger; and, in the successful effort to prevent journalist and right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking, protesters at the University of California, Berkeley set private property aflame in a rampage across campus.

These are the tip of the iceberg. For a 2017 report, The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education “surveyed publicly available policies at 345 four-year public institutions and 104 of the nation’s largest and/or most prestigious private institutions.” A disheartening 39.6 percent “maintain severely restrictive, ‘red light’ speech codes that clearly and substantially prohibit constitutionally protected speech.”

Administrators and faculty have conspired to produce an intellectual environment hostile to free speech. The educational authorities teach students to demand trigger warnings for potentially disturbing subject matter; to perceive opinions with which they disagree as forms of “violence” and to scrutinize everyday utterances for actionable microaggressions; to expect the establishment of public “safe spaces” that exclude disfavored opinions; and to disinvite speakers who depart from campus orthodoxies.

Some high-ranking university officials have gone so far as to tout the policing and curtailment of expression as victories for free speech. In April, in a lengthy New York Times op-ed, “What ‘Snowflakes’ Get Right About Free Speech,” Ulrich Baer — vice provost for faculty, arts, humanities, and diversity, and professor of comparative literature at New York University –advanced a supposedly more “sophisticated understanding.”

If “views invalidate the humanity of some people,” he asserted, “they restrict speech as a public good” and so these humanity-invalidating views, he contended, should themselves be restricted to improve free speech. The traditional name for Baer’s policy is censorship.

Commentary magazine’s summer feature “Symposium: Is Free Speech Under Threat?” canvasses a diversity of opinion on the subject, including the academic establishment’s studied obliviousness to the danger. Despite the massive evidence, First Amendment scholar and Columbia University President Lee Bollinger assures in his contribution that the threat is the invention of demagogues. “I do not for a second support the view that this generation has an unhealthy aversion to engaging differences of opinion,” Bollinger writes. “That is a modern trope of polarization, as is the portrayal of universities as hypocritical about academic freedom and political correctness.”

Yet the bulk of the Commentary symposium—which includes 27 distinguished writers, scholars, broadcasters, and university presidents—reveals just the opposite. It illuminates a wide variety of threats to free speech while recognizing—especially in essays by New York University law professor Richard Epstein, Brooklyn College and CUNY Graduate Center history professor K.C. Johnson, and Mac Donald—that the struggle on campuses is pivotal.

The Justice Department plans to invest more resources in investigating a complaint of racial discrimination at American universities. Naturally, so-called liberals are dismayed.

One of the results of the increasing diversity of the United States is that questions involving race and ethnicity no longer amount to whites vs. blacks or whites vs. everybody else — there are more players at the table. But don’t tell that to the editors of the New York Times, who immediately tried to present the question as the Trump administration working to stir up white racial resentment. The Times reported that the DOJ would target “affirmative action admissions policies deemed to discriminate against white applicants,” even as it concedes three paragraphs later that relevant policy document “does not explicitly identify whom the Justice Department considers at risk of discrimination because of affirmative action admissions.”

The Times talks a good game about diversity, but one wonders whether any of the Asian editors on its staff were given the opportunity to consider that sentence.

In reality, as the DOJ itself has now confirmed, the directive involves a complaint filed by a group of 64 Asian-American organizations, a complaint made during the Obama administration, which never got around to resolving it. The DOJ has not received any new policy direction on affirmative action as a general practice, much less as it specifically relates to white students.

It should.

There are questions — legitimate ones — about the ways in which affirmative-action policies in college admissions disadvantage white applicants relative to their black and Hispanic counterparts, questions that are of particular interest when applied to affirmative-action programs that disproportionately benefit wealthy black and Hispanic applicants from abroad rather than the members of struggling domestic minority populations these policies are intended, in theory, to serve.

But the children of white working-class families who pay a racial penalty when competing for college spots against the children of Nigerian college professors and Colombian oil executives are not the only ones with a legitimate complaint. The de facto discrimination against Asian and Asian-American students is spectacular, undeniable, and shameful. They are in effect subjected to the same quota system that the Ivy League once used to keep down its Jewish population — the “bamboo ceiling,” some call it. Asian-American groups pursuing litigation against these policies have demonstrated that students of Asian background on average have to score 140 points above white students to have similar chances of college admission — and 270 points higher than Hispanic students, and 450 points higher than black students. The “Asian penalty” is especially heavy in places such as California’s prestigious state universities.

The DOJ is absolutely in the right to take up this question.

The Justice Department’s new focus on affirmative action is shining a spotlight on a decades-old debate: whether the benefits of using race in college admissions outweigh the costs.

The question is part of a high-profile lawsuit accusing Harvard University of discriminating against Asian-American applicants.

The federal lawsuit, filed in Boston in 2014, was brought by a nonprofit called Students for Fair Admissions, which alleges that Harvard intentionally discriminates against Asian-Americans in its admissions practices by limiting the number of Asian students who are admitted and holding them to a higher standard than students of other races. The group claims the school’s practices violate federal civil rights law and equal protection under the 14th Amendment.

Members of the nonprofit, which advocates for the elimination of affirmative action, include Asian students who were denied admission to Harvard.

The lawsuit’s allegations formed the basis for a separate complaint against Harvard filed in 2015 by a coalition of 64 Asian-American groups. On Wednesday, the Justice Department announced it would begin an investigation of the complaint, which was filed with the department’s civil rights division and other government agencies.

It’s unclear whether the Justice Department will also seek to intervene in the federal lawsuit against Harvard.

Asian-American groups have been raising concerns about the fairness of Ivy League admission practices since at least 1989.

In this case, lawyers for the plaintiffs say their goal is to reach the Supreme Court and overturn racial preferences in university admissions. As part of the lawsuit, the students are asking the judge to prohibit Harvard from using race as a factor in future undergraduate admissions decisions.

Harvard has defended its policies by pointing to a handful of Supreme Court precedents over the past 40 years that have allowed universities to consider race as a factor in admissions to obtain the benefits of a diverse student body.

Harvard’s admissions process reviews many factors and “considers each applicant as a whole person, consistent with the legal standards established by the U.S. Supreme Court,” said a spokeswoman for the university.

The Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld the idea that universities have a compelling interest in assembling a diverse student body because it promotes “cross-racial understanding” and better prepares students for a diverse workforce. In a 2003 ruling involving the University of Michigan Law School, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote that classroom discussion is more enlightening with students of different backgrounds, resulting in better learning outcomes.

In the Harvard lawsuit, the plaintiffs are challenging parts of that premise.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs in May asked Harvard to turn over data showing the academic performance and academic preparation of enrolled students by ethnicity. The request is part of the plaintiffs’ argument that Harvard’s admission of underrepresented minorities who they say are less academically prepared ends up hurting those students in the long run. Known as the “mismatch theory,” the plaintiffs say underprepared minority students get lower grades and opt out of difficult majors in college, reinforcing damaging stereotypes.

The plaintiffs hope to use any data provided by Harvard on student performance by race to show that affirmative action has a negative effect on certain students after they enroll. Such a finding could undermine the justification for considering race in admissions decisions.

The lawsuit also proposed race-neutral ways for the university to achieve diversity, such as giving more weight to socioeconomic status or eliminating legacy preferences, which primarily help white and wealthy applicants to the detriment of minorities.

Harvard’s response to the request is under seal. A spokesman for WilmerHale, the law firm representing Harvard, declined to comment.

In an brief filed earlier in the case, a group of current and prospective Harvard students said the mismatch theory has been repeatedly disproved. They pointed to research showing that while the selectivity of a school doesn’t increase earnings for students as a whole, it does for black and Latino students. These students achieve higher grades and graduate at higher rates than their peers at less selective schools, the brief said.

Last year, U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs ruled that Harvard wasn’t required to produce academic performance data of enrolled students, but said the court may reconsider the issue at a later time. Judge Burroughs did order the university to turn over comprehensive admissions databases.

She also required four top high schools, including Stuyvesant High School in New York and Thomas Jefferson High School in Alexandria, Va., to respond to subpoenas by the plaintiffs seeking evidence of possible discrimination by Harvard, including depositions of guidance counselors or school officials. CONTINUE AT SITE

A new low for these appalling brats.

It often seems that campus activists are less about actually creating positive “change” and more about personal vanity. The latest entry comes from the upper-crust Sarah Lawrence College, where The College Fix reports that some activists feel they deserve to be compensated for their activism.

And not by the organizations they’re working with, but by the very peers they tend to annoy with their antics:

Students at Sarah Lawrence College, a posh, private liberal arts college in New York consistently ranked one of the most expensive colleges in the nation, recently called on peers and others to pay female campus activists for their “emotional labor.”

…

It was posted once on March 26 on Facebook in honor of Women’s History Month, then reposted in April as students exchanged heated words on Facebook over a campus controversy.

“In honor of Women’s History Month, and the labor that women and femmes of color do for Sarah Lawrence every month of the year,” the post states, then lists the student Venmo accounts. Venmo is a payment service app. The post, which includes a brightly colored poster declaring “Give your $ to Women & Femmes of Color,” was inspired by the #GiveYourMoneyToWomen hashtag created by prominent feminists.

Now, keep in mind that Sarah Lawrence is one of the most expensive schools in the country. These activist students are either from wealthy families and don’t need the money, or they’re scholarship students who should appreciate the amazing gift they are already getting from others, or they are receiving loans and working and should have a better sense of the value of a dollar.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t stop this pathetic attempt at extortion: a comment stating “[t]he community is watching you and holding you accountable” sounds an awful lot like a threat to me, and this “labor” they’re demanding to be paid for needs to be negotiated … beforehand.

It’s hardly news that teachers’ union honchos oppose any type of school choice, especially the kind that lets public money follow a child to a public school. But while making her case recently, American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten descended down a rabbit hole.

It started with an event on “school vouchers and racism” hosted by the AFT and the Center for American Progress, a leftist research and advocacy organization financially supported by both the AFT and the National Education Association. CAP had just released a report claiming that educational vouchers were born in the effort by Southern states to resist racial integration after the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Topeka Board of Education ruling. In what segregationists termed “massive resistance,” Virginia’s Prince Edward County closed its public schools in 1959, and then gave vouchers to white families, which were used to pay tuition at segregated private schools. This ugly case represents the “sordid history of school vouchers,” as CAP sees it—conveniently overlooking the G.I. Bill, the country’s first significant voucher program, which was signed into law in 1944, 15 years before Prince Edward County’s gambit.

Taking the podium just a few days after the release of the CAP report, Weingarten declared that the ideas and proposals of school-voucher advocates were “only slightly more polite cousins of segregation.” She described the powerful teachers’ unions as “defenders of America’s public education system,” locked in a “David versus Goliath battle, and in this battle, we are all David.”

Weingarten’s outrageous comments did not sit well with school-choice advocates. Jeanne Allen, president of the Center for Education Reform, called Weingarten’s speech “not just ill-advised hyperbole, it is a deeply offensive, highly inflammatory insult to all the parents and people—of all races, backgrounds, and regions—who have worked to bring options, opportunities and reforms to an education system that has failed them for generations.” Kevin Chavous, founding board member of the American Federation for Children, said that Weingarten’s comments “spat in the face of every African-American and Hispanic child who’s trapped in a school that doesn’t serve [him or her] well.”

While Weingarten cites the segregationists of Prince Edward County, she declines to mention labor unions’ own racist history. As Herbert Hill wrote in Commentary in 1959, in various industries “trade unions practice either total exclusion of the Negro, segregation (in the form of ‘Jim Crow’ locals, or ‘auxiliaries’), or enforce separate, racial seniority lines which limit Negro employment to menial and unskilled classifications. . . . In the South, unions frequently acted to force Negroes out of jobs that had formerly been considered theirs.” Racism in unions was historically a much greater factor than it has ever been in the voucher movement.

Weingarten also ignores the popularity of private-school choice among minorities, the ostensible victims of these supposedly racist voucher programs. She is mum on the latest report from EdChoice’s Greg Forster, who regularly surveys the empirical research on private-school-choice programs. “Ten empirical studies have examined school choice and racial segregation in schools,” he writes. “Of those, nine find school choice moves students from more segregated schools into less segregated schools, and one finds no net effect on segregation. No empirical study has found that choice increases racial segregation.” Think Progress, a progressive news site associated with CAP, reports that American public schools are more segregated now than they were in 1968.

Indeed, government- and union-run schools are much more segregated than the voucher schools that Weingarten disdains. “Less recognized, but equally pernicious, is the structural segregation all across America, where zoned school systems maintain racial and economic segregation,” writes Peter Cunningham, who worked at the Department of Education during the Obama administration. Cunningham also pointed out that New York City, where Weingarten formerly ran the teachers’ union, has one of the nation’s most segregated school systems.

Weingarten engaged in a telling Twitter exchange with her nemesis, Education secretary Betsy DeVos. “@BetsyDeVosED says public $ should invest in indiv students,” Weingarten wrote. “NO we should invest in a system of great public schools for all kids.” DeVos fired back: “They have made clear that they care more about a system—one that was created in the 1800s—than about individual students. They are saying that education is not an investment in individual students. They are totally wrong.” Weingarten and her cronies are more interested in keeping the government-union duopoly in place than in educating children. Protecting the system takes priority.

New law mandates sanctions for free speech disruptors, abolishment of ‘free speech zones’ hhttps://www.thecollegefix.com/post/35137/

In the wake of anti-free-speech demonstrations at colleges across the country, the North Carolina legislature recently passed a law that strengthens free speech protections on college campuses in that state.

House Bill 527 “includes several important provisions that will better protect campus free speech,” according to the Foundation for Equal Rights in Education.

Among the bill’s provisions is a mandate that colleges allow students to distribute literature in “outdoor areas.” As FIRE’s Tyler Coward writes, “[R]oughly 1 in 10 colleges maintain problematic policies that restrict expression to certain areas on campus, oftentimes called ‘free speech zones.’ These misleadingly labeled ‘free speech zones’ are routinely struck down by courts because they unconstitutionally limit student expression to tiny, out of the way areas of campus.” HB527, Coward notes, will hopefully mitigate “the need for litigation over this issue in North Carolina.”

The law also “requires institutions to create a range of sanctions for any person under its jurisdiction who ‘substantially disrupts the functioning of the constituent institution or substantially interferes with the protected free expression rights of others.’” The “substantial” qualifier, Coward points out, is intended to ensure that protected speech such as “fleeting boos” remains protected, while “conduct that materially disrupts or otherwise silences others” can (and will) be sanctioned by universities.

From the report:

The language of this law is different from laws or bills in other states requiring specific mandatory minimum sanctions for students who materially disrupt the free expression of others. Instead, this law reminds institutions that they have an obligation to take action when people engage in conduct that silences their opponents on campus, while giving institutions the flexibility to evaluate each case in its individual context. This helps to ensure that those who shout down a campus speaker aren’t required to be treated the same as those who physically assault a speaker.

HB 527 also states that colleges and universities “may not take action, as an institution, on the public policy controversies of the day in such a way as to require students, faculty, or administrators to publicly express a given view of a social policy.” This language prevents institutions from taking positions on controversial issues in a way that forces others to conform to their view. For example, if an institution felt that marijuana should remain illegal, it could say so, and it could also require students to avoid its use on their campus. But the school could not force students, faculty, or administrators to publicly agree that marijuana should remain illegal. While institutions rarely overtly try to force constituent groups to take positions that conform to the school’s viewpoints, the problem is not unheard of. This law will prevent such an occurrence in North Carolina.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/267454/lsu-conference-forces-engineers-take-mark-tapson

Louisiana State University hosted its second annual Consortium for Innovation in Manufacturing and Materials (CIMM) RII Symposium last week, and some engineering students were confused by the addition of an hour-long workshop on microaggressions, according to Campus Reform.

A befuddled graduate student who went by the user name “CuseTiger” at TigerDroppings, a forum for LSU fans, posed the question, “Who all has had implicit bias, sterotypes, microinsults, microaggressions, and [T]itle IX training? Cause I’m at an engineering symposium in lod cook today and have been dealing with snowflakes and trigger warnings all morning. They scheduled an hour for us to learn about all this.”

CuseTiger added a screenshot of the Symposium’s agenda, which included the “workshop/panel discussion” on “implicit bias, stereotypes, microinsults, microaggressions, [and] Title IX” just before the conference broke for lunch.

“At one point they had us write a microaggression that we gave or someone gave us,” the post continued, providing several pictures of a bulletin board covered with sticky notes.

“When people learn that I am from Colorado, they assume I smoke weed,” wrote one participant, while others complained about stereotyping such as “I thought all Asians were good at math” and “You probably lived on the west side of campus, right?”

Campus Reform has more:

Sara Hernandez, the Associate Dean for Inclusion and Student Engagement at Cornell University, and Dr. Jenna Carpenter, the Dean of Engineering at Campbell University, presented the implicit bias workshop as part of their roles with CIMM’s Diversity Advisory Council (DAC).

Carpenter told Campus Reform that the DAC recommends everybody be educated about the impacts of implicit bias, asserting that “When faculty and students aren’t aware of implicit bias, they unwittingly engage in behaviors that continue the discrimination and discouragement of women and underrepresented minorities in science, mathematics, and engineering disciplines.”

Dr. Pedro Derosa, who chaired the panel discussion, agreed that “social stereotypes” are the main reason for the lack of women and minorities in STEM fields, explicitly rejecting the notion that the observed differences have anything to do with qualities inherent to any of those groups.

“When implicit biases result in entire groups being underpaid or being subjected to higher scrutiny or standards or being excluded from opportunities altogether, we have a problem,” Derosa said.

Emory University professor Scott Lilienfeld, who published a research paper earlier this year calling for “a moratorium on microaggression training” and “abandonment of the term ‘microaggression,’” told Campus Reform that this approach is more likely to “exacerbate racial tensions” by “sensitizing” students to perceived offenses. Exactly.

Rather than trying to promote diversity through such workshops on microaggressions and implicit bias, notes Campus Reform, Lilienfeld suggested that a more effective approach would be for individual professors to lead by example, saying, “Faculty need to invest more time, energy, and effort in mentoring and encouraging minorities and women.”

A philosophy professor argues that white people enjoy a “sense” of importance, calling it “white priority,” a term the scholar coined to summarize her claim that people with white skin feel superior to others. https://www.thecollegefix.com/post/35063/

“White priority concerns a white person’s felt conviction about herself (however egregious or misplaced, and often unconscious) that no matter the quantifiable, statistical details of her life, she is not on the very bottom run of society’s ladder,” writes Professor Shannon Sullivan.

Sullivan, department chair of the philosophy department at the University of North Carolina Charlotte, made the comments in a recent scholarly article in “Critical Philosophy of Race.”

The piece takes issue with the term “white privilege,” with Sullivan writing that it doesn’t quite hit the mark in describing the “advantages of whiteness.” But “white priority” describes a white person’s “sense of coming before someone else,” noted Sullivan, who is white.

“As a poor, struggling white person, I might not be financially privileged or very high up in social circles and many people might disparage me, but at least I’m not the lowest of the low. I come before someone else: people of color and black people in particular,” Sullivan wrote.

The article, headlined “White Priority,” was published in a special issue of “Critical Philosophy of Race” dedicated to “Race after Obama.” A listing of Sullivan’s academic papers shows she’s written on whiteness multiple times throughout her career.

Sullivan did not respond to The College Fix’s request for comment. An automatic reply said she’ll have “irregular access” to her email account until Aug. 10.

In “White Priority,” Sullivan argued that the word privilege suggests one’s lived an easy life and it doesn’t quite fit for white people who’ve faced hardships. White privilege is “the right term to describe middle-class and affluent white people’s particular racial advantages,” but she argued that white priority applies to all white people no matter their financial standing.

This nuance is important, she wrote, because “life after Obama is a time for greater nimbleness and dexterity as we think about race and its intersections with class.” She argued there was a “white backlash” against President Barack Obama during his tenure in the Oval Office, an alleged backlash that stemmed from what individuals saw as his “extremism.” This extremism wasn’t based on Obama’s policies but rather that a black man was president, Sullivan wrote.

“It is as if a black intruder broke in and was allowed to stay, and we could say this almost literally given the white imaginary understanding of blackness as inherently criminal,” Sullivan stated.

As for proof that white priority exists, Sullivan stated she does not exactly have any, noting “white priority is not something that can be empirically verified or disproven.”