affirmative action

The Harvard affirmative action trial has brought out a lot of bad arguments in favor of discrimination.

Real diversity exists at many public universities, but students often struggle to stay enrolled.

You have to understand the climate at Harvard at the time.

The lawsuit against Harvard may spell the end of race-based college admissions. Applauding that end is right—but insufficient.

In 2003, the Supreme Court hoped the use of racial preferences would last no more than 25 years. They are becoming permanent.

With a big suit against Harvard looming, public opinion continues to disapprove of race-based college admissions.

The government says there is evidence strongly suggesting that Harvard may be engaging in 'racial balancing.'

In 2016 the College of Charleston ended the practice of considering race and ethnicity in admissions decisions—affirmative action, as it is called. The change went unnoticed in the college community until the Post and Courier, the local daily paper, reported it on July 29. Whereupon, almost within…

Sandra Day O’Connor envisioned a deadline for racial preferences.

Investigating discrimination at Harvard.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was so disturbed by the clash of protesters in Charlottesville that he made a policy decision he may have to reverse: In a speech at the State Department on August 19, he repudiated hatred and racism before addressing what he called “a great diversity gap” in…

Canada’s NAFTA negotiator has now demanded that new chapters be inserted to the agreement which reflect the Trudeau government’s “commitment to gender equality and . . . improving our relationship with indigenous peoples.”

Students for Fair Admissions is at it again.

The Justice Department is pushing back against a New York Times article that claimed it was preparing to investigate and sue universities over affirmative action admissions policies deemed to discriminate against applicants not of the preferred race or ethnicity.

After months of deliberation, Georgetown University has determined how it will address its 19th-century sale of 272 slaves.

New York University will be making it easier for applicants with criminal records to gain admission to the school: NYU announced at the beginning of August it will now ignore the Common Application’s questions about criminal history. Instead, the school will ask more specific questions that focus…

Here's a matter on which elites and the general public sharply differ: affirmative action in higher education. Recall that on June 23 in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin II the Supreme Court upheld the school's use of race in admissions. Leaders at UT-A and competitive schools across the…

Writing for the Supreme Court in the Texas affirmative action case, Justice Anthony Kennedy said that the school's use of race in admissions "can make a difference [as] to whether an application is accepted or rejected." The question for the Court, as Kennedy put it, was whether, "drawing all…

The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with the Hoover Institution's Adam J. White on the Supreme Court's rulings on President Obama's amnesty executive orders and affirmative action.

As we reported here earlier this week, a coalition of Asian-American organizations has asked the Department of Education to investigate the admissions policies at Brown University, Dartmouth College, and Yale University. The coalition says the policies discriminate against Asian-American applicants…

Fellow poets and lovers of poetry, take heart—our art is relevant again!  Though not necessarily for the right reasons.

A front-page story in Tuesday’s Washington Post examines former Florida governor Jeb Bush’s record on ending affirmative action for college admissions. Through a 2000 executive order, Bush banned racial preferences in Florida’s public universities and colleges. The move was controversial at the…

Scott Walker may not be a candidate for president yet, but the Wisconsin governor’s growing political action committee staff is already going after a potential rival in the Republican primary. GOP strategist Liz Mair, CNN reports, has just signed on to consult for Walker’s Our American Revival PAC,…

Terry Eastland reviews A Conflict of Principles in the Wall Street Journal:

In Grutter v. Bollinger, decided in 2003, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor upheld race preferences in higher education but also declared they must have “a termination point.” So when a lawsuit against preferences in admissions is brought, there is a presumption that they could be terminated, perhaps…

Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin is the affirmative action case that won’t go away. It’s been to the Supreme Court once and may return. It is a case that could well turn on a failure to define terms—“critical mass” being the critical term.

It’s a pity that there’s no Portland, Oregon, edition of the New York Post. After all, one can only dream of the headlines the wags at the Post would come up with to describe the ongoing travails of (now former) Multnomah County (home of Portland) Commissioner Jeff Cogen.

 In 2007, the Supreme Court ruled against using race to determine public school assignments. Chief Justice Roberts concluded his plurality opinion with this eloquent statement: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

WEEKLY STANDARD executive editor Terry Eastland reviews the Supreme Court's decisions in Fisher v. University of Texas, United States v. Windsor, and Hollingsworth v. Perry.

The Associated Press reports:

Last week, the online publication Salon took a break from its usual sophisticated political analysis (“Let’s hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American,” the magazine brayed on April 16) to raise a pressing civil rights issue: “Are straight actors in gay roles the new blackface?”

Almost no one understood it at the time, but Lyndon Johnson’s speech at Howard University in June 1965 marked a disastrous change in civil rights policy. Previously, the civil rights movement had sought to overturn the entrenched, often legally mandated discrimination that was the legacy of Jim…

Abigail Fisher, a white applicant to the University of Texas, contends that the university, in giving preference to minority applicants while rejecting her, discriminated against her unlawfully because of her color. The Supreme Court will hear the case this fall; it is likely that Fisher will…

The Arkansas Democratic party is denying presidential candidate John Wolfe the delegates he earned in the state's primary because Wolfe's selected delegates fail to meet the party's standards for diversity. Wolfe is suing the party to seat his delegates after he won over 40 percent of the vote…

Like many colleges and universities, Princeton professes its devotion to “institutional equity and diversity.” The university’s website claims that the school “actively seek[s] students, faculty, and staff of exceptional ability and promise who .  .  . will bring a diversity of viewpoints and…

Rich Lowry: "The Effrontery of Rick Santorum"

A growing body of empirical evidence is undermining the claim that racial preferences in college benefit their recipients. Students who are admitted to schools for which they are inadequately prepared in fact learn less than they would in a student body that matches their own academic level. As an…

Opponents of state ballot initiatives that outlaw race and gender based affirmative action programs have vowed to take their fight all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Ward Connerly, the former University of California Regent who was the galvanizing influence behind Proposition 209, which amended…