Free Republic

A lawsuit filed in federal court in Tennessee on Wednesday seeks to end a program designed to funnel tens of millions of dollars to colleges and universities with a large percentage of Hispanic students, charging it is racist and unconstitutional. The suit was filed by the state of Tennessee and advocacy group Students for Fair Admissions against the U.S. Department of Education. In 2023, the advocates’ suit against Harvard University led to the Supreme Court ruling it unconstitutional to consider race in university admissions. A federal funding program designates schools as “Hispanic-Serving Institutions” if they have at least 25% Hispanic-student...

The Illinois Board of Higher Education suspended its state-wide diversity, equity and inclusion scholarship program this month after the Justice Department threatened to sue. Attorney General Pam Bondi said she is “committed to rooting DEI out of American institutions, including in the education system.” She should turn to the University of California system. The UC Board of Regents oversees two main diversity programs: the President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, or PPFP, and the Advancing Faculty Diversity Program, or AFD. PPFP was founded in 1984 to recruit “women and minority Ph.D. recipients” to the UC faculty, and its 2024 cohort includes no...

Measured in Trump time, it took them eons to get around to it, but the White House has finally taken the most important step it can to restore meritocracy to American society: eliminating disparate-impact theory from civil rights analysis and enforcement. Disparate-impact theory holds that if a neutral, colorblind standard of achievement or behavior has a disproportionately negative effect on underrepresented minorities (overwhelmingly, on blacks), it violates civil rights laws. It has been used to invalidate literacy and numeracy standards for police officers and firemen, cognitive skills and basic knowledge tests for teachers, the use of SATs in college admissions,...

Duke University Health System (DUHS) is the subject of a federal civil-rights complaint filed by Virginia-based medical nonprofit Do No Harm. The complaint, filed on March 19 with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, highlights Duke Health’s numerous and blatant uses of race-based preferences in hiring, medical-school admissions, and other initiatives. Also described is an apparent culture of clear and deliberate racial stereotyping, evidenced by the systemic proliferation of views that are extraordinarily controversial at best and outright bigoted at worst. Do No Harm’s filing describes Duke’s actions as “both morally wrong and legally impermissible.” Yet they are...

Should colleges and universities—especially those regarded as elite—use the scores students earned on standardized tests in making admissions decisions? That has been a heated subject of debate for several decades. Opponents of testing claim that the tests are unfair to minority students and help perpetuate the socioeconomic supremacy of affluent whites, while defenders argue that standardized tests help schools distinguish between students who are capable of doing the level of work required and those who aren’t. Which side is right? Does it really matter? In his new book, Higher Admissions: The Rise, Decline, and Return of Standardized Testing, Nicholas Lemann...

To read a book in college, it helps to have read a book in high school.Nicholas dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.This development puzzled Dames...

Mere law has never impeded the Left’s pursuit of its political objectives. The same pattern holds in our universities. Indeed, achieving political objectives now appears to be the primary aim of many American colleges, and willful defiance of the law has been de rigueur in admissions offices for 60 years. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, Proposition 209 in California, Proposal 2 in Michigan, and countless other explicit prohibitions on racial discrimination have done nothing to inhibit the Left’s racist utopian scheming. Thus, it’s no surprise that admissions offices nationwide are ignoring the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling in Students for...

Tuesday’s election was notable for its national turn to the political right, and believe it or not that was true even in states governed by the left. Voters in California, Oregon and elsewhere used direct democracy to reject several bad ideas while adopting sensible reforms. Boeing Co. said late last month it will close its DEI department as it reduces its overall employee head count by 10%. The airplane maker joins such companies as Ford Motor Co., Tractor Supply Co., Caterpillar Inc., John Deere and Toyota Motor Corp. that have reconsidered corporate DEI teams as well as equity programs and...

For several years, the National Association of Scholars (NAS), where I work, has monitored the rise of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) in higher education. DEI entered the mainstream somewhere between the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the death of George Floyd in the spring of 2020. In addition to being a set of ideals, sometimes including “anti-racism” and/or “social justice,” DEI is a set of practices and programs descended from affirmative action and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Recent backlash from both the public and conservative lawmakers, however, has caused some universities, such as the University...

The Minority Teachers for Illinois Scholarship Program violates the 14th Amendment, alleges the Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF) in its Tuesday complaint on behalf of the American Alliance for Equal Rights in the United States District Court for the Central District of Illinois. The racial criteria included in the program have been "excluding students from a state-funded scholarship program because of their race" since its inception, per PLF's press release. The Minority Teachers for Illinois Scholarship Program is not a private initiative; it is funded directly by appropriations from the state budget. The program received $1.9 million, $4.2 million, and $7...

Most industries and occupations have trade associations to promote their interests through lobbying, marketing, and public relations. Lawyers are no exception. One difference between, say, the American Urological Association and the American Bar Association, however, is that instead of merely providing opportunities for professional networking and vacation junkets dressed up as “conventions,” the left-leaning ABA is clothed with quasi-governmental regulatory authority over the entire field of legal education. The ABA effectively oversees the operations of nearly 200 law schools in the United States. Absurdly, this professional cartel regulates itself! The U.S. Department of Education limits eligibility for federal student loans...

For nearly five decades, American universities systematically discriminated against white and Asian Americans. Quotas, “holistic review processes,” and “factors” were used to advance the Left’s racist social policies, first on the pretense that they remedied prior discrimination, next in alignment with the theory that diversity was good for the nation, and most recently to deal with the pretend phenomena known as “systemic racism” and “white privilege.” Such racist, utopian scheming used to be called “affirmative action,” an innocuous term designed to conceal blatantly racist and unlawful discrimination. But despite the anodyne packaging, discrimination against whites and Asians violates the plain...

In June 2023, Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. (SFFA) prevailed in complaints alleging racially discriminatory admissions practices at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina. The 6-3 Supreme Court decision in these cases eliminated decades of ambiguity about what aspects of race were permissible in candidate evaluations at some of our nation’s most prestigious universities. Following the Court’s decision, a number of analysts and commentators noted that Chief Justice Roberts’s majority opinion contained a footnote exempting military service academies. That footnote reads: The United States as amicus curiae contends that race-based admissions programs further compelling interests at our Nation’s...

What is racism’s limiting principle? At times, the answer has to do with practicalities: Xi Jinping would presumably enslave every last Uyghur if geopolitical and administrative circumstances allowed it. Or perhaps religion gets involved: One shudders to think, for instance, how the internment of Japanese Americans might have unfolded had not the nation’s residual Christianity stayed certain hands. In most places, thank God, there are not only pragmatic and religious limits on bigotry but social ones, as well. Yes, we humans egg each other on to evil, but we also keep one another in check, perhaps especially where public morality...

The University of Virginia is facing a choice of historic significance: namely, whether to embrace admissions policies based on our colorblind Constitution or to engage in mass resistance to the supreme law of the land. In Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and UNC, the United States Supreme Court held that the admissions programs at Harvard and UNC violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court’s ruling is, of course, binding on the parties themselves. However, this was no narrow decision. The broad constitutional mandate of colorblindness underlying the majority opinion is applicable to the University of...

The latest Pew Research Center polling suggests that a mere one-third of Americans favor considering race and ethnicity in college admissions. Over 9.65 million California voters rejected a proposal to repeal an existing race-based affirmative-action ban in 2020. Now, with their ruling overturning race-conscious university admissions in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College and the University of North Carolina (UNC), America’s highest court has affirmed this broad national consensus against race-preferential government action. The 237-page-long Court decision is a victory for what Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, sees as “the transcendent aims of the Equal Protection...

A few months ago, I was summarily fired as an editor-in-chief of the kidney section of the most widely used medical reference. UpToDate is used by tens of thousands of physicians every day, helping them make the best and most timely decisions for patient care. Even as I was fired, UpToDate’s leadership team praised my work. So why did they fire me? Over the previous four years, I had publicly questioned the rise of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” or DEI, in health care, expressing particular concern about its ubiquity in medical schools. That included the institution where I taught and...

Eighteen years ago, I published an article in the Stanford Law Review which documented for the first time the enormous breadth and scale of race-based admissions preferences in law schools. At most law schools, the undergraduate grades (UGPA) and median LSAT scores of enrolled Black students were two standard deviations below those of white students at the same school. Outside of a handful of “Historically Black” institutions (where racial preferences were minimal), Blacks in law school were not faring well. They were failing out of school at more than twice the white rate; half of those who did graduate had...

The evidence is everywhere: American colleges and universities are dying. Not all will die very soon—indeed, probably only a modest portion will. But the trend is unmistakably downward. Why? Is it because, suddenly, Americans stopped having babies and therefore the market for students is drying up? While demographics do play a role (not only birth rates but also international migration), the bigger problems are largely self-inflicted—decisions made mostly within the academic villages constituting today’s modern colleges and universities. Let’s start with a little evidence. Enrollment in universities has fallen consistently for years. National Student Clearinghouse data reveal that, in the...

As a direct result of student complaints that his course was too difficult, Maitland Jones will no longer be teaching organic chemistry at New York University (NYU). Jones has a distinguished record, having taught at Princeton for 43 years before retiring. He then continued to teach at NYU for 15 years because he loves his subject and wants to share his enthusiasm with later generations. The termination of his year-by-year contract came because he refused to lower the standards of learning that students were expected to attain. This serves as a sad reminder of the many things that have gone...