Free Republic

For decades, the College Board defended the SAT, which it writes and administers, against charges that the test gives an unfair advantage to middle-class white students. No longer. Under relentless pressure from the racial-preferences lobby, the Board has now caved to the anti-meritocratic ideology of “diversity.” The Board will calculate for each SAT-taker an “adversity score” that purports to measure a student’s socioeconomic position, according to the Wall Street Journal. Colleges can use this adversity index to boost the admissions ranking of allegedly disadvantaged students who otherwise would score too poorly to be considered for admission. Advocates of this change...

The College Board plans to assign an adversity score to every student who takes the SAT to try to capture their social and economic background, jumping into the debate raging over race and class in college admissions. This new number, called an adversity score by college admissions officers, is calculated using 15 factors including the crime rate and poverty levels from the student’s high school and neighborhood. Students won’t be told the scores, but colleges will see the numbers when reviewing their applications. Fifty colleges used the score last year as part of a beta test. The College Board plans...

In December 2018, the New York law firm Paul, Weiss announced its latest class of partners. A scandal erupted: all 12 of the newly promoted lawyers were white, the photo accompanying the announcement revealed. The New York Times published a front-page hit job on the firm headlined: 12 WHITE FACES REFLECT BLIND SPOT IN BIG LAW. ... So why are there not more black partners? The same reasons that there are not more black computer engineers or physicians: the academic skills gap and counterproductive racial preferences. Blacks are hired as summer law interns and first-year associates at rates well above...

... Today’s racial segregation, by contrast, consists of ethnic groups walling themselves off within institutions. In the past two years the National Association of Scholars surveyed 173 colleges and universities, public and private, in all 50 states. We found 46% of schools segregate student orientation programs, 43% segregate residential arrangements, and 72% segregate graduation ceremonies. Though these arrangements are ostensibly voluntary, students can’t easily opt out. The social pressure to conform is overwhelming. This kind of racial separatism on campus isn’t new. We pursued case studies of Yale, Wesleyan and Brown universities, where we found that black students began to...

A prominent Texas medical school will stop considering race or ethnicity in deciding whether to admit applicants, as part of an agreement with the Education Department’s civil rights office. The president of the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center signed the agreement in February, 14 years after the department began investigating a complaint filed by an anti-affirmative action group. The agreement is the first of its kind for the Education Department under Secretary Betsy DeVos, and comes as the Trump administration continues its hard turn against the use of race in admissions. Roger Clegg, general counsel for the Center for...

The FDNY has finally fired its alleged woman-beater smoke-eater. Brooklyn firefighter Clyde Phillips was axed Wednesday after his third arrest stemming from charges of domestic violence, The Post has learned. Phillips was charged on Feb. 23 in Caldwell, NJ with contempt for violating a New York City restraining order put in place after a 2018 attack on an ex-girlfriend, said Katherine Carter, spokeswoman for the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office. Carter said a violation could include anything from phoning or texting to physical contact, but she would not elaborate. The FDNY suspended Phillips on Feb. 27, then fired him on March...

BREAUX BRIDGE, La. — Bryson Sassau’s application would inspire any college admissions officer. A founder of T.M. Landry College Preparatory School described him as a “bright, energetic, compassionate and genuinely well-rounded” student whose alcoholic father had beaten him and his mother and had denied them money for food and shelter. His transcript “speaks for itself,” the founder, Tracey Landry, wrote, but Mr. Sassau should also be lauded for founding a community service program, the Dry House, to help the children of abusive and alcoholic parents. He took four years of honors English, the application said, was a baseball M.V.P. and...

A law professor and an Asian-American politician are suing the University of California for data they believe would reveal that the state university system is illegally using race in its admissions process. The suit, filed Thursday in a California state court, asks for the socioeconomic and academic characteristics of applicants who enrolled in the nine undergraduate colleges that make up the University of California over the last 12 years. The petition follows a high-profile trial this fall over a federal lawsuit alleging that Harvard University discriminates against Asian-American applicants. Richard Sander, an economist and law professor at UCLA who brought...

BOSTON (AP) — Harvard University intentionally uses a vague “personal rating” to reject Asian-American applicants in favor of students from other racial backgrounds, according to lawyers on one side of a trial that began Monday and carries weighty implications for dozens of other U.S. colleges. Harvard’s legal team denied any discrimination in its opening statement at Boston’s federal courthouse, saying race is just one factor that’s considered and can only help a student’s chances of getting admitted. In its hour-long opening, lawyers for Students for Fair Admissions accused Harvard of intentionally discriminating against Asian-Americans through a personal rating score that...

Elizabeth Warren is the epitome of why racial preferences should be outlawed Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) typifies the Democrat shrieking shrew who is angry all of the time. Warren, who falsified her job application to Harvard claiming she was Cherokee (based on her grandmother telling her she had high cheek bones), played the affirmative action card, and allowed Harvard Law School to call her the school’s only Native American professor. Newly released DNA test revealed Warren may have 1/1024 Native-American ancestry. Yet she lied about her ancestry to climb the well-paid academic ladder.

BOSTON—Harvard University’s longtime admissions dean defended the school’s recruitment of prospective students in the first day of a landmark trial accusing Harvard of discriminating against Asian-American applicants. On Monday, lawyers for the plaintiffs focused on internal documents showing Harvard sends targeted letters to high-school students who score well on the PSAT, encouraging them to consider applying to the prestigious school. The score thresholds vary by race. In a recent admissions year, white students in 20 underrepresented states—which Harvard calls “sparse country”—received a recruitment letter if they scored 1310 or higher out of a possible 1600 on the combined verbal and...

Dear Alumni and Friends, As I am sure many of you are aware, the University is being challenged in a lawsuit that alleges discrimination in Harvard College’s admissions policy. The case will go to trial next week, and I write today to share some thoughts with you. Let me be unequivocal: The College’s admissions process does not discriminate against anybody. I am confident the evidence presented at trial will establish that fact. The Supreme Court has twice ruled on this issue and has held up our admissions process as an exemplar of how, in seeking to achieve a diverse student...

The lobby for hundreds of medical schools and teaching hospitals Wednesday said it was “deeply concerned” that the Trump administration was rescinding guidance on consideration of race in university admissions. The 4th of July announcement by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) comes after U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions rescinded 24 Obama-era guidance documents on affirmative action the Trump justice department said were “unnecessary, outdated, inconsistent with existing law or otherwise improper.” A joint letter from the Justice Department and the Department of Education said the Obama administration advocated policy and "positions beyond the requirements of the Constitution,” the...

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration will encourage the nation’s school superintendents and college presidents to adopt race-blind admissions standards, abandoning an Obama administration policy that called on universities to consider race as a factor in diversifying their campuses, Trump administration officials said. The reversal would restore the policy set during President George W. Bush’s administration, when officials told schools that it “strongly encourages the use of race-neutral methods” for admitting students to college or assigning them to elementary and secondary schools. Last November, Attorney General Jeff Sessions asked the Justice Department to re-evaluate past policies that he believed pushed the...

Last year, the University of Texas won the case over its use of racial preferences (Fisher v. Texas), but the Supreme Court did not rule that all racial preference plans were legal. A new suit against Harvard may prove to be successful. Here’s the background. In its affirmative action cases, starting with the Bakke case in 1978, the Supreme Court has justified race-conscious admissions while also emphasizing that they should be “temporary.” Indeed, writing for the Court in the Grutter case in 2003, which upheld race-based admissions to the Michigan Law School, Justice O’Connor described as a “requirement” that “all...

Harvard consistently rated Asian-American applicants lower than any other race on personal traits like “positive personality,” likability, courage, kindness and being “widely respected,” according to an analysis of more than 160,000 student records filed Friday in federal court in Boston by a group representing Asian-American students in a lawsuit against the university. Asian-Americans scored higher than applicants of any other racial or ethnic group on admissions measures like test scores, grades and extracurricular activities, according to the analysis commissioned by a group that opposes all race-based admissions criteria. But the students’ personal ratings significantly dragged down their chances of being...

‘Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away,” observed― Philip K. Dick in “I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon.” Somewhere deep in a file drawer, or on a computer server humming away in a basement, are thousands upon thousands of numbers, with names and identities attached. They’re called grades. They represent an objective reality, which exists independent of what people want reality to be. They sit silently, completely indifferent to indignation, angry petitions, irritable gestures, teachers’ removal from classrooms—all the furor and clamor of institutional politics. Those numbers are now solely within the control of...

The campus mob at the University of Pennsylvania Law School has scored a hit. Prof. Amy Wax will no longer be allowed to teach required first-year courses, the school’s dean announced last week. Now the leader of Black Lives Matter Pennsylvania wants Ms. Wax’s scalp. According to a weekend newspaper report, if she isn’t fired within a week, “he plans to make things on the West Philadelphia campus very uncomfortable.” Ms. Wax’s sin this time was to discuss publicly the negative consequences of affirmative action. Her punishment underscores again the dangers of speaking uncomfortable truths in a university setting. The...

A white University of Pennsylvania law school professor who said she has never seen a black student graduate in the top quarter of the class has been removed from teaching required first-year law courses. Law school dean Ted Ruger said professor Amy Wax spoke “disparagingly and inaccurately” about the performance of black students during an interview with Brown University economics professor Glenn Loury on the “downside of affirmative action” last year.

After engaging in character assassination against Green Bay Packers fans who chose not to protest during Thursday’s National Anthem, FS1's Undisputed co-host Shannon Sharpe did the same with the American flag, declaring it to be merely a racist “piece of cloth” that “nobody fights for.” “The flag, you see, to a lot of people, symbols, patriotism but what does that symbol actually mean? What does — what does – okay — you keep telling me that the flag means so much and it's opportunity and freedom and liberty. Okay. Can you honestly say that everybody in America has freedom and...