RUTHFULLY YOURS

Remember the lecturer at Yale — formerly, a distinguished institution of higher learning and now a playpen for demented children — who warned students not to take Halloween costumes too seriously? Right. She’s gone:

A Yale lecturer who came under attack for challenging students to stand up for their right to decide what Halloween costumes to wear, even to the point of being offensive, has resigned from teaching at the college, the university said Monday.

The lecturer, Erika Christakis, an expert in early childhood education, wrote an email in October suggesting that there could be negative consequences to students ceding “implied control” over Halloween costumes to institutional forces. “I wonder, and I am not trying to be provocative: Is there no room anymore for a child or young person to be a little bit obnoxious,” she wrote, “a little bit inappropriate or provocative or, yes, offensive?”

Diversity: The Invention of a Concept February 25, 2003
by Peter Wood (Author)
Peter Wood traces the birth and evolution of diversity, illuminating how it came to sprawl across politics, law, education, business, entertainment, personal aspiration, religion and the arts as an encompassing claim about human identity.

The issue of affirmative action is now being revisited by the Supreme Court after evaluating the pros and cons of renewing it after 25 years. Read this book to see how it was conceived, legislated and implemented and what happened to some of the prominent challenges such as Regents of the University of California v. Bakke.

Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, case decided in 1978 by the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court held in a closely divided decision that race could be one of the factors considered in choosing a diverse student body in university admissions decisions. The Court also held, however, that the use of quotas in such affirmative action programs was not permissible; thus the Univ. of California, Davis, medical school had, by maintaining a 16% minority quota, discriminated against Allan Bakke, 1940–, a white applicant. The legal implications of the decision were clouded by the Court’s division. Bakke had twice been rejected by the medical school, even though he had a higher grade point average than a number of minority candidates who were admitted. As a result of the decision, Bakke was admitted to the medical school and graduated in 1982.

“It seems that almost every year since the middle 1970s,” wrote Harvard sociologist Nathan Glazer, “we have awaited with hope or anxiety the determination of some major case by the Supreme Court, which would tell us that affirmative action transgressed the ‘equal protection of the laws’ guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment . . . or, on the contrary, determine that this was a legitimate approach to overcoming the heritage of discrimination and segregation and raising the position of American blacks.”

Mr. Glazer wrote that in 1987 and couldn’t possibly have imagined it would hold true some 26 years later. Yet on Wednesday the Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments in this year’s major affirmative-action case, Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin. It will be the high court’s second go-round with the case, which concerns a plaintiff named Abigail Fisher who says the university discriminated against her as a white woman in rejecting her application.

In 2013 the justices voted 7-1 to send the case back to the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals without ruling directly on the constitutionality of Texas’ affirmative-action program. Instead, the appeals court was instructed to re-evaluate whether a race-based admissions policy was really essential to the university meeting its diversity goals. The Fifth Circuit issued a second ruling last year, once again siding with the university, and now the case is back before the Supreme Court.

From a March 28, 1786, letter written by John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, who were American diplomats at the time, to U.S. Secretary of Foreign Affairs John Jay reporting on their conversation in London with the ambassador from Tripoli regarding piracy by the Barbary States:

We took the liberty to make some enquiries concerning the ground of their pretensions to make war upon nations who had done them no injury, and observed that we considered all mankind as our friends who had done us no wrong, nor had given us any provocation.

The Ambassador answered us that it was founded on the laws of their Prophet; that it was written in their Koran; that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners; that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners; and that every Mussulman [Muslim] who was slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.