Free Republic

After just over a month in his new job as head of the newly formed NBC-Universal News Group, combining NBC News, MSNBC, CNBC, and all streaming operations, Cesar Conde is making news himself. In a video and memo to the approximately 3,000 employees he supervises, Conde announced a goal of 50% of employees being female and 50% "people of color," an expression commonly taken to mean non-Caucasians. Since Caucasians account for more than 76% of the United States population according to the Census Bureau, this amounts to a vow of racial discriminati After just over a month in his new...

No excerpt allowed from Bloomberg, story here.

Here's a part: Let’s say you’re a progressive. In fact, let’s say you are a progressive gay man in a gay marriage, with two adopted children. The civil rights version of the country is everything to you. Your whole way of life depends on it. How can you back a party or a politician who even wavers on it? Quite likely, your whole moral idea of yourself depends on it, too. You may have marched in gay pride parades carrying signs reading “Stop the Hate,” and you believe that people who opposed the campaign that made possible your way of...

The University of Montana asked students, staff and community members to participate in an essay contest on the legacy of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. When the school released the results last month, Montana students and race activists across the country accused university officials of racism and disrespect. That’s because all four winners were white. Turns out some would rather the school had honored King by judging entrants on the color of their skin rather than the content of their submissions. The four contest winners started receiving threats, and the African-American studies program, which had sponsored the contest, removed...

Last November, the voters of Washington State shocked their betters in board rooms, editorial offices, university administrations, and the leadership of both parties by rejecting Referendum 88, an attempt by state Democrats to bring back affirmative action, which had been prohibited in a 1998 referendum. This new, revived affirmative action, they claimed, would not permit quotas or preferential treatment. Referendum 88 disingenuously defined preferential treatment as using race, sex, or ethnicity “as the sole qualifying factor to select a less qualified applicant over a more qualified applicant” in public education, employment, or contracting. This would have offered an open door...

The University of California has been requiring prospective faculty members to affirm that they support diversity. This was Orwellian in its own right—reminiscent of the university system's 1950s loyalty oaths, which required faculty to attest that they were not members of the Communist Party. It now appears that at one campus, UC-Berkeley, the diversity initiative goes much further than previously understood. Whether a candidate has proposed a specific, concrete plan to advance diversity is now being used as a litmus test for some positions. No candidate who fails the test can even be considered for employment. Abigail Thompson, a UC-Davis...

Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon demonstrated his social enlightenment in Davos this week by announcing that the white-shoe investment bank would no longer help companies with exclusively white, male boards go public—as long as its boycott doesn’t hurt business too much. “Starting on July 1 in the U.S. and Europe, we’re not going to take a company public unless there’s at least one diverse board candidate, with a focus on women,” Mr. Solomon said on CNBC Thursday. “We might miss some business, but in the long run, this I think is the best advice for companies that want to drive...

Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon said Thursday that the powerful investment bank will only finance initial public offerings (IPOs) for companies that have at least one nonwhite male board member. Solomon said during a Thursday interview with CNBC that as of July 1 in the U.S. and Europe, Goldman “is not going to take a company public unless there is at least one diverse board candidate, with a focus on women.” “Diversity on boards is a very very important issue, and we've been very very focused on it and so we're trying to find ways to encourage that,” Solomon told...

New York’s top law enforcement official, Attorney General Letitia James, is going after . . . law enforcement. On Monday, James said she’s probing the NYPD’s fare-evasion policing for racial bias. It’s a disgraceful pander. “If NYers have been targeted because of the color of their skin, we will not hesitate to take legal action,” she tweeted. Well, sure: If cops were singling out minorities, she’d be remiss not to act. Yet there’s no evidence — none — of such targeting. From October 2017 to June 2019, James notes, minorities got 70% of the fare-evasion summonses and accounted for 90% of arrests,...

The New York Attorney General is probing whether the NYPD has shown “racial biases” against people of color as it polices fare evasion. The investigation was announced Monday just weeks after bombshell testimony from transit cops alleging racist quotas in the subway system and months after a judge ordered the department to publish its transit enforcement numbers — detailed data that still remains secret. “We’ve all read the stories and seen the disturbing videos of men, women, and children being harassed, dragged away, and arrested by officers in our city’s subway system, which is why we are launching an investigation...

Probably everyone in the academy knows that affirmative action is widely practiced: racial minorities (except Asians) and women are commonly given preference in hiring and admission decisions at American universities. I would guess, however, that some academics — and many more non-academics — are unaware that typical university hiring practices are blatantly illegal. So I’m going to talk about that for a while, in case you find that interesting. Job advertisements commonly say things like that the university rejects discrimination, supports equal employment opportunity, and considers all applicants “without regard to” race, sex, religion, etc. What they actually mean by...

As elite colleges and universities seek to be more diverse, there is one section on the Common Application that has become increasingly loaded: the boxes where prospective students are asked about their identity. Students know they face tougher-than-ever odds of earning admission and feel pressure to answer in a way that gives them an edge, college counselors and families say. Colleges, in turn, are frustrated because they have no way to confirm the information. Questions college counselors are encountering from students and their parents include: Does partial heritage count? If a father is Cuban but you don’t speak Spanish, should...

The economics profession embarked this year on a soul-searching appraisal of perceived hostility to women and minorities in its ranks, and the Federal Reserve—the nation’s largest employer of Ph.D. economists—wants to get ahead of the curve. For the Fed, where three quarters of its research economists are men and most are white, facing up to the lack of women and minorities among these employees isn’t just a matter of appearances. A staff that better reflects the U.S. population could limit the potential for groupthink or blind spots that hinder the central bank’s assessment of how the economy is changing. “The...

Advocate Aurora Health Care is accelerating its initiative for hiring diverse contractors on major construction projects and set a goal of 25% for a showcase $228 million campus in Mount Pleasant. The diversity program builds on goals Milwaukee-based Aurora Health Care previously instituted for spending 15% of construction costs with contractors owned by minorities, women, veterans and other groups, said Daryl Hodnett, Advocate Aurora’s director of supplier diversity and inclusion. “This is an important part of how you help grow and build and develop underserved communities,” Hodnett said. “We’re helping make healthier communities economically — helping create jobs and economic...

... In September 2018, California became the first state to legally compel corporate board diversity with a law mandating that every public company in the state have at least one female director by the end of 2019. The law set off a scramble to find hundreds of female directors, many of whom don’t fit the traditional mold. If companies fail to comply with that mandate, they face a one-time fine of $100,000. By the end of 2021, the law’s requirements ramp up, compelling companies with five board members to have at least two female directors and at least three on...

No excerpt from Bloomberg allowed, story here.

Female entrepreneurs are more likely than their male counterparts to see their loan applications rejected or underfunded, and New York City is launching a program to close the gap. The Department of Small Business Services’ $5 million program will offer lines of credit up to $100,000 at about 12% interest to women-owned businesses, said Gregg Bishop, commissioner of the department. Entrepreneurs with credit scores of at least 620 who have been in business a year or longer and earn $50,000 or more in annual revenue can apply. The department surveyed more than 1,600 entrepreneurs in New York City for a...

A new lawsuit is challenging a California law that requires corporations to elect a minimum number of women to their boards of directors. On Wednesday, the Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF) sued California Secretary of State Alex Padilla, the state official in charge of administering SB 826. That law, passed in 2018, requires that, by 2020, all publicly traded companies headquartered or incorporated in California have at least one woman on their board of directors. Come 2022, companies with five-member boards will need to have at least two female directors. Firms with six or more directors will need at least three...

By a slim margin, Washington state voters appear to have rejected the legislature’s attempt to reinstate racial preferences. (The result is still unofficial.) Both Heather Mac Donald and Peter Kirsanow summarized the history of this issue for NR last month. Essentially, a 1998 voter referendum outlawed the use of racial preferences by the state of Washington, but this year the legislature passed Initiative 1000 that would reverse that referendum. Opponents of preferences, led in large part by Asian Americans, then put a new referendum on the ballot that would allow voters to reject I-1000 and keep the 1998 ban on...

... Last September the state enacted a law requiring all public companies headquartered in California to have at least one female director by the end of 2019 and two by the end of 2021. Democrats claimed that increasing board diversity would benefit corporations. Investors supposedly needed politicians to tell them what was in their best financial interest. Economists at Clemson University tested this hypothesis by examining the effects of the law on public companies in California and how their shareholders reacted vis-a-vis those of companies in other states. About 28% of the 602 public firms headquartered in California needed to...