In the past, I have been critical of radical leftist university president Rosemary DePaolo. I’ve directed specific criticism towards her for valuing diversity over competence. Thankfully, she has finally seen the light. In a letter written to the entire UNC-Wilmington community on Wednesday, April 8, 2010, she admitted that much of what I’ve said about diversity (for at least seven years’ worth of columns!) is true. I am taking the time today to thank Rosemary for her honesty and humility. For those who are interested, I have reprinted her entire letter below:

Dear Colleagues,

While the core mission of UNCW focuses on academics and providing the most powerful learning experience for our students, athletics also plays an important part in the lives not only of our students but of the entire, broad university community, as well. I know that the search for a new head coach for men’s basketball is on the minds of many people, and I would like to take this opportunity to provide you a brief update.

Since the end of the basketball season, the search committee has been identifying and reviewing potential candidates. We believed we had a firm commitment, but yesterday we learned that was not the case. To be certain, searches are complicated and complex processes, especially where contracts are involved. You might recall in the early 1990s that head basketball coach Bobby Cremins left Georgia Tech where he was extremely successful to go to the University of South Carolina. Three days later, he returned to Georgia Tech after indicating that he had a change of heart. Similarly, Greg Marshall, head coach at Winthrop, was recruited to go to the College of Charleston. He even held a press conference to announce that move, only to return the next day as coach at Winthrop. Ironically, the person who replaced him at College of Charleston was Bobby Cremins.

Why am I telling you this? We all may know of numerous other situations where an individual was recruited by multiple institutions, only to take the one with the best financial package or change decisions for personal reasons. I am providing these examples to remind all of us that, despite rumors and speculation to the contrary, people routinely change their minds during negotiations for a variety of reasons. As disappointing as that may be at times, I have been in this business long enough to know that such situations are common; I also know that in the end, we will be successful.

I am working closely with our athletic director Kelly Mehrtens and our search committee to continue the process of identifying the right coach. I am forced to do so because it has become apparent that Kelly Mehrtens is over her head in this position. That is because her selection for this position was not made on the basis of qualifications. She was selected on the basis of her status as a black female.

Some have made much of the argument that Kelly Mehrtens is incompetent. As evidence, they have cited the following: 1) Her decision to fire our last basketball coach during homecoming week. 2) Her decision to give the last coach a two-year contract extension after only one year of coaching his predecessor’s recruits. 3) Waiting six weeks to form a committee to look for a new coach. 4) The drastic reduction in donations to support the athletic department, etc, etc, etc.

But these criticisms miss the truth about diversity, which I have highlighted in bold letters so all of you can understand: An institution’s commitment to diversity is inversely related to its commitment to competence. Those who are calling for the firing of Kelly Mehrtens miss this fundamental point.

Put simply, if Kelly Mehrtens was hired by considering race (and gender) over competence then it makes no sense to fire her – in effect, saying her incompetence is suddenly more important than her race. After all, she is still black. And there is no evidence that she plans to change her gender.

I know it hurts to lose basketball games. And I know it hurts to see an entire athletic program in shambles. But diversity feels good. And it reminds us we are all really good people at heart.

Go Seahawks!

For those not Swift enough to understand, you have just read a social satire on affirmative action and diversity. Rosemary DePaolo has never told the truth about diversity, nor taken much of an interest in the truth on any given issue. Despite her incompetence, she remains as UNC-Wilmington chancellor because she is a woman. And Kelly Mehrtens remains as her athletic director because she is black.

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**At The End Of The Day, Diversity Has Jumped The Shark, Horrifically (Ann Coulter, 091118)

It cannot be said often enough that the chief of staff of the United States Army, Gen. George Casey, responded to a massacre of 13 Americans in which the suspect is a Muslim by saying: “Our diversity ... is a strength.”

As long as the general has brought it up: Never in recorded history has diversity been anything but a problem. Look at Ireland with its Protestant and Catholic populations, Canada with its French and English populations, Israel with its Jewish and Palestinian populations.

Or consider the warring factions in India, Sri Lanka, China, Iraq, Czechoslovakia (until it happily split up), the Balkans and Chechnya. Also look at the festering hotbeds of tribal warfare — I mean the beautiful mosaics — in Third World hellholes like Afghanistan, Rwanda and South Central, L.A.

“Diversity” is a difficulty to be overcome, not an advantage to be sought. True, America does a better job than most at accommodating a diverse population. We also do a better job at curing cancer and containing pollution. But no one goes around mindlessly exclaiming: “Cancer is a strength!” “Pollution is our greatest asset!”

By contrast, the canard “diversity is a strength” has now replaced “at the end of the day,” “skin in the game,” “blood and treasure,” “jumped the shark,” “boots on the ground,” “horrific” (whatever happened to the perfectly good word “horrible”?), “not so much,” “I am shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on here,” and “that went well,” as America’s most irritating cliche.

We should start making up other nonsense mantras along the lines of “diversity is a strength” and mindlessly repeating them until they catch on, too.

Next time you’re at a cocktail party, just start saying, “Chocolate pudding is dramatic irony” from time to time. Eventually other people will start saying it, without anyone bothering to consider whether it makes sense. Then we’ll do another one: “Nicolas Cage is a two-cycle engine.”

Before you know it, liberals will react to news of a mass murder by muttering, “Well, you know what they say: Nicolas Cage is a two-cycle engine,” while everyone nods in agreement.

Except mere nonsense makes more sense than “diversity is a strength.”

If Gen. Casey’s wildly inappropriate use of this lunatic cliche in the aftermath of the Fort Hood massacre doesn’t kill it, nothing will.

Among the worst aspects of America’s “diversity” is that liberals’ reaction to a heterogeneous population is to create a pecking order based on alleged victimhood — as described in electrifying detail in my book,Guilty: Liberal “Victims” and Their Assault on America.

In modern America, the guilty are sanctified, while the innocent never stop paying — including with their lives, as they did at Fort Hood last week. Points are awarded to aspiring victims for angry self-righteousness, acts of violence and general unpleasantness.

But liberals celebrate diversity only in the case of superficial characteristics like race, gender, sexual preference and country of origin. They reject diversity when we need it, such as in “diversity” of legal forums.

After conferring with everyone at Zabar’s, Obama decided that if a standard civilian trial is good enough for Martha Stewart, then it’s good enough for the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. So Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is coming to New York!

Mohammed’s military tribunal was already under way when Obama came into office, stopped the proceedings and, eight months later, announced that Mohammed would be tried in a federal court in New York.

In a liberal’s reckoning, diversity is good when we have both Muslim jihadists and patriotic Americans serving in the U.S. military. But diversity is bad when Martha Stewart and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed are subjected to different legal tribunals to adjudicate their transgressions.

Terrorists tried in civilian courts will be entitled to the whole panoply of legal protections accorded Stewart or any American charged with a crime, such as the presumption of innocence, the right to a fair trial, the right to exclude evidence obtained in violation of Miranda rights, the right to a speedy trial, the right to confront one’s accusers, the right to a change of venue, the right to examine the evidence against you, and the right to subpoena witnesses and evidence in one’s defense.

Members of Congress have it in their power to put an end to this lunacy right now. If they don’t, they are as complicit in Mohammed’s civilian trial as the president. Article I, Section 8, and Article III, Section 1 of the Constitution give Congress the power to establish the jurisdiction of the lower federal courts and to create exceptions to that jurisdiction.

Congress could pass a statute limiting federal court jurisdiction to individuals not subject to trial before a military tribunal. Any legislator who votes “nay” on such a bill will be voting to give foreign terrorists the same legal rights as U.S. citizens — and more legal rights than members of the U.S. military are entitled to.

In the case of legal proceedings, diversity actually is a strength.

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It’s Time: Bollinger goes to the Supremes (NRO, 021203)

The Supreme Court granted review Monday in two cases challenging the University of Michigan’s use of racial and ethnic admission preferences, one for undergraduates (Gratz v. Bollinger) and the other for law students (Grutter v. Bollinger). This means that the parties’ briefs will be due in the winter, the case will be argued in the spring, and the Court should hand down a decision before its current term ends in June.

The first point to be made is that the Court’s decision to grant review is anything but surprising. The issue has all the earmarks of “certworthiness,” as Court watchers say. There is a great deal of confusion in the lower courts, which only the Supreme Court can resolve — and, indeed, that confusion is in large measure a result of the Court’s own failure to give clear guidance the last time it wrestled with the issue, in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke in 1978. This is also an issue of recurrent, national importance. As studies by the Center for Equal Opportunity have documented over the past several years, admissions discrimination on the basis of skin color and national origin is a problem both wide and deep: Most colleges engage in it, and the degree of discrimination is frequently severe, particularly at the more-selective schools. And, finally, there are a majority of justices who are very uncomfortable with the kind of racial and ethnic discrimination that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit had blessed in Grutter v. Bollinger.

So, despite what you may read in some quarters over the next few days, weeks, and months, the Court’s decision to grant review is not evidence of a decision by the justices to “turn back the clock” on civil rights. To the contrary, the issue is one they could hardly duck, and the only issue is whether civil rights should be redefined to include a right to preferential treatment.

The second point to be made is that the debate over preferences is not one pitting whites against blacks, or even whites and Asians against blacks and (sometimes) Latinos. If the Supreme Court does the right thing and rules against such discrimination, all Americans will win — and none more so than African Americans.

The current system is one in which African Americans are told that they cannot be held to the same admissions standards as individuals of other colors. Now how is that, exactly, supposed to be good for African Americans? It’s not, of course. To the contrary: It’s insulting. And, for continued racial progress in an increasingly multiethnic America, the single most important ingredient is mutual respect — and such mutual respect is impossible unless everyone knows that everyone else is being held to the same standards and playing by the same rules.

The third point is that the Supreme Court will not be telling colleges an universities how to run their admissions programs, will not be micromanaging the schools, will not be engaging in “judicial activism.” It will simply be telling schools that the law — in the Constitution and the civil-rights statutes — forbids them from doing one particular thing, namely discriminating on the basis of race and ethnicity. There’s nothing un-judicial about that determination.

— Roger Clegg is general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity in Sterling, Virginia.

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Michigan’s Supreme Problem (Weekly Standard, 021209)

Dallas Morning News: The law plainly tilts against the University of Michigan’s race-conscious admissions policy.

UPON LEARNING that the Supreme Court had accepted the big affirmative action cases involving her campus, University of Michigan president Mary Sue Coleman said about the only thing that she could, which was that “we are looking forward to presenting our cases.” Ms. Coleman’s—and Michigan’s—problem is the law, and the law tilts pretty plainly against the school’s race-conscious admissions policies.

Before the court are lawsuits challenging the policies used by the undergraduate and law schools. The undergraduate school awards applicants “points,” with 100 (out of a possible 150) sufficing for admission. A perfect SAT score, for example, will net an applicant 12 points. Being African-American, Hispanic, or American Indian is worth 20 points (a number calculated to ensure more or less the same number of minority admissions as had been achieved under a quota system abandoned in 1998 after it became public knowledge).

The law school targets applicants from the same three groups. It doesn’t give points but weights race and ethnicity to such an extent that the odds of admission for the minority students are hundreds of times greater than those for all other students with similar academic credentials. The purpose of so weighting by race is to ensure in each class what administrators call a “critical mass” of minority students—at least 10%.

Michigan proclaims that its policies aren’t quota systems, that they merely “consider” race and ethnicity. But the policies produce numbers similar to those a quota system would yield.

Legally speaking, Michigan has a 14th Amendment problem. No state, says that famous amendment, shall “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” A five-justice majority, with Sandra Day O’Connor writing the critical opinions, has built a body of law insisting that there are not two equal protection clauses—one for minorities and one for non-minorities—but just one. And it protects people of all races and ethnic backgrounds, using the same standards.

Michigan, however, has established racial classifications that prevent applicants lacking the necessary racial status from receiving the same consideration accorded those who possess it. For its admissions policies to survive the O’Connor majority, Michigan must persuade the justices that its use of race serves a “compelling interest.” Michigan offers “diversity” as its (one and only) compelling interest. It argues: Only by taking race into account (awarding points for race, weighting by race) can we create a diverse student body of educational benefit to everyone.

Will the O’Connor majority buy that? It’s doubtful. That majority is wary of, as Justice O’Connor has put it, “race-based decisionmaking essentially limitless in scope and duration.” And race-based decisionmaking grounded in diversity would be limitless in precisely those ways.

Changing demographics mean that groups favored today may be disfavored tomorrow. (As has happened with Asian-Americans.) New “critical masses” may need to be achieved. Affirmative action justified by diversity is unending, simply because there is no reason that it should end.

The other problem Michigan faces is Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which provides that “no person . . . shall on the ground of race, color, or national origin be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.”

Commentary on the Michigan cases has centered on the Constitution and not Title VI. And yet Title VI applies. It makes no exceptions (and certainly not for “diversity”) to its nondiscrimination command. And note this: In the landmark Bakke case of 1978—the first and only time the court spoke to affirmative action in higher education—Justice John Paul Stevens, commonly regarded as a judicial liberal, invoked Title VI to nullify a race-based policy.

It is hardly unthinkable that as many as six justices might vote against Michigan. And maybe more: Justices David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen Breyer see themselves as stout defenders of both equal protection and the laws of Congress.

Supporters of Michigan say the court will be guilty of activism if it strikes down the challenged policies. Not so. The law is what it is. If people don’t like it, they can of course try to change it. The justices, however, will be derelict in their duty if they fail to apply it—and rewrite it instead.

Terry Eastland is publisher of The Weekly Standard.

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Are You Against Diversity: Love and diversity (NRO, 030214)

The proponents of racial and ethnic preferences want to frame the debate as if it hinged on whether racial and ethnic diversity is a good thing or a bad thing. But of course that is not the issue at all. No one, except for a few white supremacists and black separatists, is really opposed to such diversity. The issue, rather, is whether we ought to engage in racial and ethnic discrimination in order to ensure such diversity.

Those who answer yes remind me of the army officer in Vietnam who said that he had to destroy the village in order to save it. The reason that most Americans have positive feelings about diversity is because of their belief that it is un-American to exclude anyone because of characteristics like skin color and where one’s ancestors came from. To use diversity as an excuse for discrimination is bizarre, contradictory, and self-defeating. The discrimination results in precisely the unfairness and divisiveness that ought to be anathema to the celebration of diversity.

Or, to put it another way, diversity’s benefits are like love: Love is wonderful, no one is against love, but it cannot be forced. Or like happiness: One is much more likely to reach it if one is not obsessing about finding it. Diversity achieved by bean-counting and quota-mongering is not only not any good, it is worse than colorblind nondiversity.

It is very important that the Supreme Court rule that a desire for diversity is no excuse for racial and ethnic discrimination. The Bush administration, while urging the Court to strike down the University of Michigan’s discrimination as illegal, has suggested that it can leave unresolved whether such discrimination might be permissible, and instead simply rule that, in all events, UM’s program fails because the university hasn’t tried to achieve diversity by changing its admissions standards. In lawyer’s lingo: The Court can rule that UM’s quotas are not “narrowly tailored” to achieving diversity.

But the Court is unlikely to write such a decision, because it knows the opinion would be nearly worthless. It would leave unresolved the conflict among the various lower courts about whether diversity is a compelling governmental interest. Nor would it answer whether the trial court’s injunction against consideration of race by the University of Michigan law school ought to remain in place.

The opinion suggested by the Bush administration would also be a hard one for the Court to write, since it would require the Court to ignore a great deal of its case law. When laws — even laws neutral on their face, like grandfather clauses — are deliberately written with an eye toward including some and excluding others, on the basis of race, the Court has struck them down. When the “narrow tailoring” is to a racial result, the Court must determine whether the result is itself permissible. If UM changes its admissions standards in order to boost the enrollment of blacks and Latinos and limit the enrollment of whites and Asians, the Court’s cases deem that discrimination, even if the new standards aren’t explicitly racial.

Such an opinion by the Court would also be practically ineffectual. Lee Bollinger — president of the University of Michigan when it was sued, now president of Columbia — would read the Court’s decision, call in his admissions committee, and tell them, “The Supreme Court has ruled that we cannot use racial preferences unless we have first tried other means to achieve diversity. No problem. I want this committee to use our admissions data from the last two or three years and write me a little report.” He pauses and gives them a wink. “I suspect you will conclude that the various race-neutral devices you’ll consider do not achieve the degree of diversity that we need.” He smiles and ends the brief meeting: “Meanwhile, continue to use racial and ethnic preferences.”

A decision by the Court, on the other hand, that said that diversity did not justify the use of racial and ethnic classifications would be much harder to evade. Certainly admissions committees would try to, and the most direct means of doing so would be by going file by file through applications and quietly, surreptitiously ranking the less qualified over the more qualified because of race. But this is much harder to do, especially for large schools.

Moreover, it is one thing to bend the law, another to break it. If it ever leaks out that such discrimination is going on, the consequences will be severe. A school can lose its federal funding. Perhaps even more sobering, those who are engaging in the discrimination will now be personally liable for thousands of dollars if they are caught, and perhaps even criminally liable. And such leaks will occur, no doubt about it. They have in the past, and there are plenty of people, even in the most politically correct schools, who oppose preferences.

It ought not tax President Bush’s imagination for him to foresee a meeting like the one hypothesized above with Lee Bollinger. The president may even have presided over some like it.

While the president says that treating individuals on the basis of race is wrong, at the same time he says that racial diversity itself is a proper concern of government. The administration’s briefs in the Michigan cases say that quotas, arbitrary point systems, and “critical mass” approaches are wrong and illegal, yet in President Bush’s own appointment policies it appears that race, ethnicity, and sex are frequently decisive factors. Rumor has it that there is an unwritten rule requiring at least 40% of the administration’s nominees to be either minorities or women.

Clearly the President does not practice what he preaches — or, at least, what he preaches some of the time is inconsistent with what he practices some of the time. And his practices show clearly the untenability and unfairness of diversity-justified discrimination.

Diversity of race is not necessary to get diversity of thought. The head of the Justice Department’s civil-rights division, Ralph Boyd, and the Education Department’s general counsel, Brian Jones, and Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights, Gerald Reynolds, reportedly endorsed a strong brief ruling out racial and ethnic preferences. Meanwhile, Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell rejected that approach. Yet all five happen to be black.

Individuals who are passed over by a university or by a president for reasons of skin color do not die, but their lives are changed irrevocably and unfairly, and we are all poorer for it. That is true whether the reason is overtly racial, or whether it is a result of selection criteria being chosen with an eye on race, ethnicity, and sex. This is not a problem that will be “worked out” if left alone by the courts. The Constitution was supposed to have removed race from government decision-making; the relevant statutes (the text of which the Court has too often refused to give effect to) could hardly be clearer; and the political process itself, quite predictably, always has been and always will be distorted by racial politics. All levels of government, including public universities, need the Court’s clear guidance.

— Roger Clegg is general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity in Sterling, Virginia.

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Bad Science: Subjective selective evidence (NRO, 030609)

The nub issue in the two University of Michigan affirmative-action cases now pending before the Supreme Court is this: Does a desire for “diversity” in a student body justify racial discrimination in the selection of students in order to achieve it?

In order for the answer to be yes, UM must show that it has a “compelling interest” in such discrimination. At trial, the school tried to do this by presenting the court with an expert-witness report, built on student-survey data, that purports to show a correlation between a racially diverse student body and improved educational outcomes.

There is no precedent for the Supreme Court to allow racial discrimination simply because a social scientist has purported to find a statistical correlation between that discrimination and some social good. And it would be surprising were it otherwise.

After all, there are all kinds of dubious social-science surveys, and no shortage of studies that purport to find a correlation between, in particular, improved educational outcomes and various educational techniques. For instance, there are studies that show a student’s prior piano instruction and a classroom’s interior design are important variables.

But such studies are rarely definitive and frequently subject to refutation or contrary interpretation. Bilingual education, for instance, has its supporters with their studies, and it opponents with theirs. Such is the nature of social science generally and survey data in particular. Which brings us back to the University of Michigan cases.

It has recently been revealed that UM was very selective in the survey data it used in the expert-witness report it presented at trial. It turns out that UM had collected a lot of other survey data that, inconveniently, undermined its claims about the salutary educational effects of a racially diverse student body — but that, conveniently, was ignored in the report it gave the judge.

This evidence was uncovered by freelance journalist Chetly Zarko, and is analyzed in a report by Drs. Robert Lerner and Althea Nagai (posted on the Center for Equal Opportunity’s website). Zarko has requested additional data also possessed by UM, but the school is refusing to share it. (An editorial last week in the Detroit News called on the university to release the information, saying its rationale in refusing to do so is “dishonest and violates the spirit of the Freedom of Information Act”).

This is not the first time the proponents of diversity have refused to share the complete data they have collected in the course of one of their “studies.” The much-cited 1998 book by William Bowen and Derek Bok, The Shape of the River, also purported to “prove” the value of diversity, but the data on which it relied has not been made generally available to other social scientists (Lerner and Nagai, for instance, were explicitly rebuffed in their efforts to obtain the data). The refusal to share evidence is, needless to say, antithetical to true science, social or otherwise.

The UM expert-witness report had already been convincingly refuted in a counter study by Lerner and Nagai, and by another analysis written by Drs. Thomas Wood and Malcolm Sherman. Moreover, a separate study of “diversity” by a highly respected team of analysts — Stanley Rothman, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Neil Nevitte — came to conclusions quite contrary to UM’s report.

Social-science survey evidence is simply too manipulable and indeterminate to justify something as divisive and unfair as racial discrimination. The segregationists in Brown v. Board of Education cited testimony by educators, psychiatrists, and psychologists, including the chairman of the psychology department at Columbia University; the segregationists in the earlier Sweatt v. Painter (involving the University of Texas law school) likewise had their experts and, indeed, cited the former president of Harvard University. It’s no surprise that the current proponents of discrimination have found some experts, too.

But if the Supreme Court were to carve out a “social-science exception” to the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection of the laws, it would set a precedent that, in its long-term consequences, ought to make everyone very nervous.

— Roger Clegg is general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity in Sterling, Virginia.

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High Court Has Split Decision on Affirmative Action (Foxnews, 030623)

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday upheld a controversial affirmative action policy employed at the University of Michigan’s law school, but struck down a plan used by the undergraduate school that gave certain racial groups a head start in admissions.

The 5-4 law school decision validates the policy that allows those in admissions offices at the law school to not only take race into consideration, but to weigh it more than other factors, such as grade point average and test scores on standardized law school entrance examinations.

But the justices, voting 6-3, struck down the undergraduate school admissions policy that automatically gave blacks, Hispanics and Native-American applicants 20 points in a system in which 100 points were needed in order for a student to gain entry into the university.

Students that didn’t fall into these racial categories argued that the policy put them at a disadvantage, since they had to earn all of the 100 points needed for entry based on merit, grades, test scores and other non-race-based criteria.

The school has also “flagged” minority applications, making it easier to keep an applicant in the pool even if he or she failed an initial review.

Both decisions, however, encouraged colleges and universities to explore more non-race-based admissions policies.

Critics of the system at the Ann Arbor campus said the process mirrored that of a quota system, while supporters say the process adds to a more diverse student body.

The policies even drew criticism from President Bush. The White House weighed in on the legal process, filing legal briefs in opposition to the undergraduate school policy.

University officials happily accepted the rulings.

“This is a great victory for all of higher education,” University of Michigan President Mary Sue Coleman told Fox News. “What it means at its core is that the use of affirmative action is upheld in all procedures for admissions.”

With the court’s decision, Coleman said, the campus also now has a “roadmap for bringing our undergraduate admissions in line.”

Coleman would not directly say the school was out of line with its undergraduate program.

“We think that the diversity interest is important for all universities and all institutions,” she said.

But critics say other schools shouldn’t follow the University of Michigan’s example.

“I think few schools can afford the legal risk of using the law school system,” said Terry Pell, president for the Center for Individual Rights (search ), the organization that filed both lawsuits against the school. “Any school that tries to use the law school system risks further litigation.”

He criticized arguments made by supporters of the school’s policies that the system simply tries to further diversity.

“This case isn’t about diversity … this case is about a segregated, two-track admissions system,” Pell said, urging schools to follow the example of five states that have done away with race-based admissions altogether.

“That’s the way to go,” he said.

The law school opinion, written by Associate Justice Sandra Day O’Connor (search ) — who was widely viewed as a significant swing vote in the decision — says that minorities’ life experiences are of particular importance when universities weigh admissions applications.

The Constitution “does not prohibit the law school’s narrowly tailored use of race in admissions decisions to further a compelling interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body,” O’Connor wrote.

Justices John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer joined O’Connor.

Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy and Clarence Thomas dissented.

“This court has long recognized that ‘education is the very foundation of good citizenship’,” O’Connor wrote, quoting from the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling of nearly 50 years ago.

“For this reason, the diffusion of knowledge and opportunity through public institutions of higher education must be accessible to all individuals regardless of race or ethnicity,” she wrote. “Effective participation by members of all racial and ethnic groups in the civic life of our nation is essential if the dream of one nation, indivisible, is to be realized.”

Rehnquist wrote the majority opinion in the undergraduate case. He was joined by O’Connor, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas and Breyer. Stevens, Souter and Ginsburg dissented.

Government has a compelling interest in promoting racial diversity on campus, but the undergraduate school’s admissions policy is not the way to get there, the court majority said.

“The university’s policy, which automatically distributes 20 points, or one-fifth of the points needed to guarantee admission, to every single underrepresented minority applicant solely because of race, is not narrowly tailored to achieve the interest in educational diversity” that Michigan claimed justified the policy, Rehnquist wrote.

In the law school decision, the court upheld a 1978 ruling involving the University of California that said many factors contribute to a diverse and healthy student body — including race, GPA, test scores and life experiences.

The court also said that in the Michigan case, the minority students who got in to the law school under the policy were very qualified and nothing overt was done, preferentially, to get those students into the school.

At the White House, Bush administration officials were meeting to craft a reaction to the policy — a reaction that isn’t expected to be very positive to the decision. The administration has argued that many more qualified students were passed over in the law school application process in favor of less-qualified minorities.

President Bush, who has called the admissions policies “fundamentally flawed,” supports what he calls an “affirmative access” system used in Texas and Florida.

Texas’s practice was begun in 1997, when Bush was governor. The system grants admission to state public colleges to all high school students who graduate in the top 10% of their classes.

The two Michigan cases directly address only admissions at public, tax-supported institutions. But the court’s rationale is expected to have a wide ripple through private colleges and universities, other government decision-making and the business world.

Opponents of affirmative action had hoped the Supreme Court would use this opportunity to ban most consideration of race in any government decisions.

The university has said that having what it calls a critical mass of minority students benefits the whole student body. Minorities must be present in more than token numbers to ensure all students can interact, the university has said.

But Rehnquist dismissed that rationale in a dissenting opinion in the law school case.

“Stripped of its ‘critical mass’ veil, the law school’s program is revealed as a naked effort to achieve racial balancing,” Rehnquist wrote.

In 1997, the year that two white students sued, the school had 13,500 applicants and selected 3,958 of them as freshmen.

The white plaintiffs, Jennifer Gratz and Patrick Hamacher, were Michigan residents with good grades and other qualifications when they were rejected at the flagship Ann Arbor campus. Both have since graduated from other colleges.

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The Abominable Snow Job: Court says discrimination on the basis of race is not unlawful discrimination (NRO, 030624)

History teaches that bad Supreme Court decisions are rarely just wrong, that is to say, they are not simply legally incorrect or poorly reasoned. Bad Supreme Court decisions usually suffer from multiple infirmities: Some are morally repugnant (Dred Scott), some usurp the prerogatives of the legislature and manufacture rights out of whole cloth (Roe), and others are a naked exercise in political and social expediency (Plessy).

Make no mistake: The dual opinions in the Michigan preference cases (Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger) are not on the same practical or moral plane as Dred Scott, Roe, or Plessy. Obviously, the consequences flowing from the Michigan cases are nowhere near as profound. But, the Michigan opinions nevertheless impress for the sheer banality of the tortuous reasoning used to convert the plain, unambiguous language of the Fourteenth Amendment into a license to discriminate...provided it is done artfully.

The two cases are replete with concurrences, dissents, and partial dissents and there are scores of points and counterpoints made throughout each of them. Over the course of the next several days, weeks, and months various aspects of the myriad opinions will be scrutinized and commented upon. Nonetheless, even at this early stage at least three overarching points may be made.

But first a few salient facts: The key opinion is obviously that of Justice O’Connor in Grutter (the law-school case), for it holds that a diverse student body is indeed a compelling state interest. This is by far the Court’s most important determination because state-sponsored institutions across the country may now lawfully consider race in admissions.

Justice O’Connor’s opinion also held that the law school’s preference program, in which race/ethnicity is used as a “plus” factor to achieve a “critical mass” of minorities, is narrowly tailored. (Having held that diversity is a compelling state interest, the Court struck down the undergraduate admissions program as not narrowly tailored.) Justices Thomas and Scalia, in an elegant opinion authored by Justice Thomas, were the only justices to unequivocally reject the claim that campus diversity is a compelling state interest.

Now three observations:

STRICT SCRUTINY NOW MEANS A CURSORY REVIEW

The Court’s holding that student-body diversity is a compelling state interest is not only a rank perversion of the Fourteenth Amendment but is wholly inconsistent with the strict-scrutiny analysis employed by the Court in the past. The Court has previously rejected amorphous concepts such as “societal discrimination” as qualifying as a compelling governmental interest. Only remediation of past discrimination, national security, and perhaps “social emergencies rising to the level of imminent danger to life and limb” qualify.

But the Grutter majority accepts at face value the fuzzy rationale that student diversity is a compelling state interest because a “critical mass” or “meaningful numbers” of minority students “break down barriers” and produce “more spirited discussions.” Aside from the fact that this rationale has been, if not debunked, rendered highly suspect by studies by the National Association of Scholars and Professors Rothman, Lipset, and Nevitte among others, it hardly justifies corrupting the clear language of the Fourteenth Amendment that “no state...shall deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the law.”

Until now, qualifying as a compelling state interest has been perhaps the most difficult legal standard to meet in our nation’s jurisprudence. Nonetheless, the Court simply credits the experts’ studies, reports, and amici briefs from preference proponents to summarily conclude that diversity is a compelling state interest, despite never precisely defining that interest. The Court simply accords the law school broad deference to determine the nature of the interest — a deference, as Justice Thomas notes, completely antithetical to strict scrutiny. It is not an exaggeration to say that today a compelling state interest is any nice idea favored by the elite and backed by flimsy social science.

PERPETUITY IS VERY NARROW

The Court also completely abandons the standards it has erected to evaluate whether a racial classification is narrowly tailored.

The Court’s holding that Michigan’s undergrad preference program is not narrowly tailored is a no-brainer. No one believed the Court would find otherwise. The focus has always been on the law school’s policy of using race as a plus factor to achieve a “critical mass” of minorities on campuses and now the Court has ruled that policy constitutional.

Chief Justice Rehnquist’s dissent eviscerates the majority’s finding that the law school’s program was narrowly tailored. Rehnquist notes that the law school’s program employs guile and artifice to admit preferred minorities at rates that produce a critical mass of minority students that remains suspiciously constant each year. (Can you say quota?) Despite the law school’s claim that race is only one factor among many and used in a flexible fashion, the percentage of black, Hispanic, and Native American applicants correlates so closely with the percentage of those admitted from such groups that there can be no doubt that race is clearly the deciding factor in admission. In fact, the percentage of offers of admission to minority students, just coincidentally has never fallen below 12% and yet the majority insists that there were no numerical quotas.

The Court has consistently held that racial classifications are so pernicious, so inherently suspect, that their use must always be extremely narrow and precise. Nonetheless, the majority accords the law school astonishing temporal latitude regarding the use of race in admissions. Indeed, the Court has created the bizarre paradox that racial preferences designed to remedy actual cases of discrimination must be finite, but those created merely to satisfy the unproven theories of social engineers may be interminable.

SOME GUIDANCE, BUT NO FINALITY

Perhaps recognizing that in upholding a racial classification that appears unlimited in duration the Court has departed from the established strict-scrutiny requirement that preferences have a clear endpoint, the majority makes the astonishing pronouncement that it expects that in 25 years, preferences will no longer be necessary. The Court further suggests that preference programs contain sunset provisions and be periodically reviewed to determine whether or not the preferences are no longer required. This will undoubtedly be a source of further litigation. Claimants will assert that there is no basis for continuing a preference program and colleges will have to marshal evidence that without preferences the ostensible educational benefits of diversity will be lost. Accordingly, college general counsels will advise their clients to not only adopt a preference program that more closely approximates that of the Michigan law school but to include periodic reviews, if not sunset provisions, in such programs. These reviews will likely be formulaic, very similar to the reviews conducted on set-aside programs after the Richmond v. Croson decision. Yet if institutions cannot articulate an ongoing pedagogical need for preferences, they will find themselves in court.

It will take months, if not years, to fully assess the impact of Michigan, but there will be little immediate practical effect. Minority college enrollment will remain virtually unchanged. College-admissions officers will scramble to adjust their respective programs to comport with that of UM Law School. Black and Hispanic reading and math scores, as recently gauged by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, will lag woefully behind those of whites and Asians.

But while the immediate practical effect may be negligible, the long-term social cost will be pronounced. Aside from the violence the decision does to the rule of law, it has consigned at least one more generation of minorities to hard labor under the stigma of perceived incompetency. Politicians and society at large get another pass at addressing the real issues underlying minority academic underachievement — sub-par K-12 education and family environments incompatible with academic proficiency. The purported beneficiaries of preferences will continue to be harmed by the disincentives associated with the preference regime: As Thomas Sowell, Glenn Loury, and others have noted, those beneficiaries will be less inclined to invest time and energy in skill and performance enhancing activities that will allow them to be competitive.

Optimists will say that the good news is that preferences must now be more narrowly tailored and that perhaps the end is in sight; but a Court that can uphold a program that only Lewis G. Carroll could appreciate is not cause for optimism, for racial preferences have now vitiated the equal-protection guarantee of the Constitution and they will not go away for a long time to come.

Everyone wants a society where individuals from every ethnic and racial group have an equal opportunity to achieve their respective dreams. Yet the closer we get to being such a society, the more we seem to count by race. TO BE CONTINUED. . . .

— Peter Kirsanow is a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

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Restoring Equality, Restoring Civil Rights: So much for the long march of civil rights (NRO, 030625)

In a recent debate with Lee Bollinger, current president of Columbia University and the named defendant in the University of Michigan race cases just decided by the Supreme Court, Matt Lauer asked Mr. Bollinger: “Can you have diversity at our universities and schools without taking race into account?” Mr. Bollinger responded: “You really can’t.”

So much for the long march of civil rights that began by declaring all men were created equal; Abraham Lincoln’s belief that we could treat all humans equally because they are all part of “the whole great family of man;” Justice John Marshall Harlan’s dissenting opinion in Plessy v. Ferguson saying “The law regards man as man, and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color....;” and Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream that his children would one day “live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Color of skin, for Mr. Bollinger and those who supported the Michigan’s race-based admissions policies, is to be taken into account — now and, presumably, for the foreseeable future. This position demarks civil wrongs, not civil rights — and this week’s Supreme Court rulings give us little hope that the next generation of Americans struggling through our commitments to equality and liberty will be able to see people as people and not people as categories defined by their race.

The lead plaintiff in the University of Michigan cases, Jennifer Gratz, was denied admission to the university despite a very admirable case for admission: She graduated near the top of her class, maintained a 3.8 G.P.A., and volunteered in her community. But there was one critical fact damning her case for admission: She had the wrong color of skin. That last sentence would have raised hackles if it were written about a minority student in the 1950s or 1960s — today it is met with a shrug of the shoulders because Ms. Gratz is white. What happened to the notion so many of us fought for for so long — that race should be simply irrelevant in law, that we should strive toward a society that does not convey rights or benefits based on the color of one’s skin? It fell toward the wayside.

To see Ms. Gratz’s case — and so many others like hers — as simply coincidental is to ignore the race-based policies used at the University of Michigan. Michigan’s policy actually rewarded admissions points to applicants who were black and Hispanic. On a scale of 150, race counted for 20 points — more than personal achievement and SAT scores combined. In fact, a black student was 174 times more likely to be admitted to the Ann Arbor campus than a white student: That is disparate impact. But far worse, it is taking race into account to convey a right or privilege as well as to deny a right or privilege, and the word for that is, plainly and simply: racism. The Supreme Court struck down the mechanized use of a point system this week, but went on to say that a more “narrowly tailored” plan (read: less obvious use of race), for purposes of a diverse student body, would pass constitutional muster.

Let us keep in mind two things: 1) No historical discrimination against blacks or Hispanics had ever been alleged at the University of Michigan; and 2) “Diversity” is itself a laudable goal if we are talking about intellectual diversity — the diversity of minds, opinions, and intellectual approaches to contemporary and historical problems. Those are goals universities should be committed to. But today’s campuses are some of the most uniformed redoubts of intellectual thinking in America, and it is no accident that not only are our student bodies and professoriate of overwhelmingly singular mind on matters of policy and intellectual approach, but that so many attempts toward integration by claims of “diversity” have led to racial self segregation in the forms of racial study centers, racial dormitories, and racial graduation ceremonies.

Racial diversity for the sake of racial diversity reifies the concept that the crudest characteristic of a human being (his race) will determine the subtlest characteristic of a human being (his thinking and intellectual ability). The notion that race determines thinking was a notion that should have been buried in a Berlin bunker 58 years ago. It should not find renewed succor in today’s Supreme Court or America’s institutions of higher learning. The tough job of admissions counselors should be, in fact, tough: they should work hard to examine and scrutinize applicants and applications, and not simply assume a racial stereotype which will, indeed, lead to more racial consciousness, not less.

On Martin Luther King Jr. day this year, President Bush announced his decision to file a brief on behalf of Jennifer Gratz saying, “Our Constitution makes it clear that people of all races must be treated equally under the law.” While this statement is commonsensical on its face, President Bush’s decision flew in the face of the organized elite — and their many legal briefs — who kowtow to the idea that race must be used to get beyond racism. That is the easy, short-term, and unconstitutional way to address problems of race in this country. Thus, it took courage on the president’s behalf to oppose convention — to oppose political correctness with moral right.

While the decisions announced this week will renew the debate about race and racism in this country, we should remember one thing, and it was taught to us by Thurgood Marshall in his historic brief in Brown v. Board of Education: “Distinctions by race are so evil, so arbitrary and invidious that a state, bound to defend the equal protection of the laws must not invoke them in any public sphere.” Marshall was right in 1954, and so was President Bush on Martin Luther King Day. Race should play no factor in educational opportunity or any other right or privilege in 21st-century America. If the Supreme Court will not acknowledge this, who will?

— William J. Bennett is a former U.S. Secretary of Education, a co-Director of Empower America, and the co-author of Counting By Race, among other books. The following is an updated version of a piece that originally ran in the Ann Arbor News.

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Race-Based Policies Raise Fraud Concerns (Foxnews, 030826)

WASHINGTON — The recent Supreme Court case upholding affirmative action policy at the University of Michigan law school has sparked some provocative questions about race that no one seems to want to answer, say black conservatives.

Among them, what is considered African-American or Hispanic? What if someone is one-third black or one-quarter Latino? Is a man with white skin with some Puerto Rican blood or a great-grandfather who was black meet the criteria for an underrepresented minority group? Who decides?

Like the U.S census, affirmative action programs on campuses nationwide only require applicants to “self-identify” their race with little or no independent verification. Growing resentment over what has been perceived by some as racial quotas that award applicants bonus points for the color of their skin could lead to rampant fraud by students seeking an edge in their applications.

“It’s a logical extension. Why wouldn’t people use it to get a leg up?” asked Walter Williams, a black conservative columnist and professor of economics at George Mason University in Virginia.

Peter Kirsanow, a labor attorney and Republican appointee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, predicted “there will be tremendous fraud,” especially at schools where “race has a greater value than SAT scores.”

Conservatives “are clearly disappointed” with the Supreme Court’s ruling, and are attempting to create controversy where there is none, responded David Bositis, a research analyst for the Center for Joint Economic Studies, an African-American think tank.

“Is [fraud] a significant concern? No. It’s an infinitesimal number of people we’re talking about here,” Bositis said.

In June, the U.S. Supreme Court defeated a challenge to the University of Michigan’s law school admissions process, which gives special consideration to minority students in order to achieve racial diversity in the classroom. The school lost a companion case for its undergraduate affirmative action policy. In that admissions process, which the university now has to revamp, the school literally gave extra points for applicants who were black, Hispanic or Native American.

Julie Peterson, spokeswoman for the university, said concern about race fraud has never plagued the university, and claims of the potential for fraud are “ludicrous.”

“We expect students to be honest on their applications, just as we expect them to be honest in their coursework,” she said. “It’s part of the honor system of the academic world.”

The school does not accept submissions of student SAT scores or high school grade point averages based on the honor system, Kirsanow points out.

Peterson acknowledged that there is no way to verify independently whether any fraud has occurred before.

In the last academic year, 14% of undergraduate students hailed from an “underrepresented minority group,” Peterson said. She balked at the suggestion that many of these students might have gotten in on their skin color alone.

“That idea reflects a complete misunderstanding of our system,” she said. “It has not, and never has been, all about race.”

She noted student applications go through a rigorous vetting, and if any red flags appear, they are reviewed — high schools are called and counselors are consulted.

Affirmative action-related fraud does have precedent. In 1990, the Boston Fire Department found that six of its firefighters had falsely claimed minority status on their applications, including white twin brothers Phillip and Paul Malone.

Initially, the brothers failed to qualify due to low test scores on their first test. On new applications, they claimed a great-grandmother was black. Though they earned the same test scores the second time around, they qualified for jobs under new minority outreach standards. After 10 years on the job, they were fired for fraud.

“There are people who are going to test the limits,” said Rogers Johnson, a black Republican state representative in New Hampshire. “It looks like we will have to establish rules and regulations. But how do we determine how black a person is?”

Williams suggests universities may have to turn to “race boards” like those established by the white South African government in the Apartheid era.

The government created its own definitions of black and white in order to enforce the social and economic segregation between the white minority and black majority populations, said Williams, author of “South Africa’s War on Capitalism.”

“It’s all despicable,” Williams said, calling race-based admissions and employment policies part of a “spoils system” that ultimately pits people against one another. He suggested that the longer a system gives special status to one race over another, resentment, fraud and the need for arbitration will continue to rise.

But Ron Walters, director of the African American Institute (search ) at the University of Maryland, said the recent Supreme Court decision actually forces the University of Michigan to focus less on skin color and more on the applicants’ background, ensuring that race is just one of many factors considered before a student is accepted.

“They [conservatives] have a lot of unchecked assumptions,” Walters said, “You don’t automatically get in [to a university] using your race.”

Kirsanow said he expects that time and interaction between ethnic and racial groups will naturally tear down skin-color barriers.

“We have a multi-racial society. I think the whole concept of race is going to get so scrambled that schools are just going to have a hard time figuring out who gets the preferences,” he said.

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University Shuts Down Anti-Affirmative Action Bake Sale (Foxnews, 030925)

DALLAS — Southern Methodist University shut down a bake sale Wednesday in which cookies were offered for sale at different prices, depending on the buyer’s race or gender.

The sale was organized by the Young Conservatives of Texas, who said it was intended as a protest of affirmative action.

A sign said white males had to pay $1 for a cookie. The price was 75 cents for white women, 50 cents for Hispanics and 25 cents for blacks.

Members of the conservative group said they meant no offense and were only trying to protest the use of race or gender as a factor in college admissions.

Similar sales have been held by College Republican chapters at colleges in at least five other states since February.

A black student filed a complaint with SMU, saying the sale was offensive. SMU officials said they halted the event after 45 minutes because it created a potentially unsafe situation.

“This was not an issue about free speech,” Tim Moore, director of the SMU student center, said in a story for Thursday’s edition of The Dallas Morning News. “It was really an issue where we had a hostile environment being created.”

The sale drew a crowd outside the student center and several students engaged in a shouting match, Moore said.

David C. Rushing, 23, a law student and chairman of Young Conservatives of Texas at SMU and for the state, said the event didn’t get out of hand. At most, a dozen students gathered around the table of cookies and Rice Krispies treats, he said.

“We copied what’s been done at multiple campuses around the country to illustrate our opinion of affirmative action and how we think it’s unfair,” he said.

Matt Houston, a 19-year-old sophomore, called the group’s price list offensive.

“My reaction was disgust because of the ignorance of some SMU students,” said Houston, who is black. “They were arguing that affirmative action was solely based on race. It’s not based on race. It’s based on bringing a diverse community to a certain organization.”

The group sold three cookies during its protest, raising $1.50.

In June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled universities could use race as a factor in admissions under limited conditions. In Texas, universities had been banned from using race as a factor under a 1996 decision by a lower court.

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The Conservative Cookie Rebellion (Foxnews, 031216)

Want to buy a cookie? If you are a white male, that’ll be $1; for white females, 75 cents; blacks, 25 cents. The price structure is the message.

When the leftists began making threats, one of the cookie rebels had called the police because he feared the discussion — hitherto civil — might turn violent. Chambers explained, “Unfortunately, rather than step in and arrest our attackers, the police stood by while the University said we, the peaceful ones, had to shut down because WE were creating an unsafe environment. ... Our protests that the CRs were peacefully demonstrating while the leftists got violent fell upon deaf ears.”

The university allowed a handful of violent students to decide which political views could or could not be expressed on campus. This is called a “heckler’s veto”; it is the last resort of those who cannot win an argument through facts or reason.

Halvorssen commented, “Subsequently, in a frightening betrayal of their fiduciary duty and their obligations to the Bill of Rights, UW’s Board of Regents released an open letter condemning the College Republicans for being ‘hurtful’ while failing to mention the counter-demonstrators’ disruption of the College Republicans’ peaceful expression of their political views on a matter of pressing public concern.”

The University of Washington is not alone.

— The University of California-Irvine shut down its bake sale as discriminatory.

— Northwestern University ordered students to cease selling cookies or face the police.

— Southern Methodist University closed the bake sale after 45 minutes because it created an “unsafe” environment.

— William and Mary officials — claiming to be “shocked and appalled” — also cut off the cookies.

Clearly, universities don’t like the affirmative action bake sales. One reason: The sales, like that at Indiana University, often feature petitions “to ban the collection of racial data, particularly in the admissions and hiring processes.”

But most of all, the politically correct do not like being publicly mocked and revealed as ridiculous.

FIRE is performing the valuable task of shining a bright light on the viciousness with which the PC respond to mockery. Its campaign “will include mailings to alumni, parents, university donors, and state legislators.”

Meanwhile the most effective thing the rest of us can do is to keep laughing.

Boss Tweed — that symbol of political corruption from 19th century New York — used to rail against cartoonists who parodied him without pause. Tweed knew he could politically survive anything except being the brunt of jokes. As with Tweed, so too with AA. That’s the way the cookie and policy crumble.

Wendy McElroy is the editor of ifeminists.com and a research fellow for The Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif. She lives with her husband in Canada.

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Imaginary Friends: How to write a diversity essay (NRO, 030930)

By Peter W. Wood

At the end of August the University of Michigan announced how it would comply with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Gratz v. Bollinger, the ruling in June that outlawed UM’s undergraduate racial quotas for failing to meet the test of being “narrowly tailored.” UM’s response, unveiled on August 28, has three parts. Applicants will now have to divulge information about the educational backgrounds of family members; their high-school counselors or principals will have to respond to a form that asks whether they know of “any socio-economic, personal, or educational circumstance that may have affected this student’s academic achievement, either positively or negatively;” and applicants will have to write a 250-word “diversity” essay.

The diversity essay is a coy device that I believe was first introduced by law schools as an indirect way of asking students about their racial and ethnic identities. The Boston University School of Law, for example, invites applicants to submit an optional essay “to provide information on your ethnic, cultural, or family background that is relevant to your development.” But diversity essays have since caught on in a big way among liberal-arts colleges, and it was widely expected that the University of Michigan would follow suit.

The UM application for the fall of 2004 will give students two options for the diversity essay. They can choose to respond to this:

At the University of Michigan, we are committed to building an academically superb and widely diverse educational community. What would you as an individual bring to our campus community?

Or, if the prospective student doesn’t see himself as bearing diversity gifts, he can respond to this:

Describe an experience you’ve had where cultural diversity — or a lack thereof — has made a difference to you.”

Applicants will also have to write two other essays, a traditional one about “a memorable book, an inspiring person,” etc. and another 500-word account of some “setback, failure, or ethical dilemma” or “an issue of local, national, or international concern.”

Asking prospective students to write a diversity essay looks to many college administrators as the easiest way to maintain racial preferences within the new limits enunciated by the Court. The Los Angeles Times reported UM’s Provost Paul N. Courant, declaring that, “We will be seeking a critical mass” of minority students through the new procedures — just in case anybody thought that the new system might not have a guaranteed racial and ethnic outcome.

“Diversity essays” do, however, have a theoretical rationale. Colleges can claim that by relying on such essays they are considering candidates as “whole persons” whose life experience, not just skin color or identity group, is weighed in the balance. UM’s general counsel, Marvin Krislov, was quoted in USA Today, hitting the right note: “We’re looking at [race] as one element of the whole person.” Of course, this is mostly hooey. The University of Michigan, like the myriad of other colleges that have adopted diversity essays, is primarily concerned with getting the numbers of minority students it has decided it wants.

But the “diversity essay” isn’t merely a smokescreen. It is also a device to ensure that candidates commit themselves, at least rhetorically, to the campus ideology of diversity. I suspect most high-school students are plenty capable of figuring out what kind of essay they need to submit to earn the “diversity bonus” that will vault them ahead of academically better qualified candidates. But The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that leaders of some campus groups expressed fear that “young applicants might have difficulty writing essays that adequately reflected the impact of their race or ethnicity on their lives.” A UM senior, Ricardo Valle, declared that, prior to coming to college, “I did not know what diversity was or how to interpret my experiences as a Latino youth.”

Mr. Valle had to go to college to learn how to give up his individuality and conform to the categories of Leftist identity politics, but help is on the way. Students who need assistance concocting testimonials to the prejudices they have endured and the hardships they have overcome already have a choice of websites and consultants who will help. But in a spirit of public service, I am willing to lend a hand too. Herewith some advice for the high-school student aspiring to attend a college that requires a diversity essay.

The key to a good college-application diversity essay is drama. One of the best approaches is to compose a story that captures the moment at which one of the deep truths of “diversity” crystallized for you. There are three such diversity deep truths (DDTs), and you can choose the one best suits your taste: (DDT 1) the reality of prejudice in American life, (DDT 2) the sheer thrill of encountering cultural difference, and (DDT 3) pride in one’s own diversity. In each case, to bring the dramatic element into focus, you will need to introduce characters other than yourself. This will show that you realize that “diversity” is about the broader community and not just adolescent self. The story, however, will vary a bit depending on which DDT you chose as your theme.

The reality of prejudice in American life. If you choose DDT 1, your story will focus on an incident in which you, having naively assumed that people are people, are brought face to face with an expression of bias. This will work best if you are positioned as a witness, rather than a victim. The first-person victim tale runs the danger of sounding self-pitying rather than mature. So even if you have a first-person story, you should consider recasting yourself as the companion, and put your imaginary friend forward as the target of the unkind words or hurtful actions. Start the essay with a sentence that defines the relationship between you and your imaginary friend:

“I don’t look like my friend Mohammed...”

“When I was six, I wanted more than anything to have braids like my friend Shareen.”

“One summer evening, when Jose and I were palling around outside the bodega...”

“Jimmy Thundecloud and I were shooting hoops one day after school when...”

Don’t overdo it. Mohammed, Shareen, Jose, or Jimmy will need to encounter a definite act of discrimination, but your essay will work best if it is a small act, not a gross indecency. Among other things, your elevation of the small ethnic slight to an epiphany in your own life will demonstrate your fine-tuned diversiphile sensitivity.

The sheer thrill of encountering cultural difference. DDT 2 requires that you tell a story in which you play a part in bringing people together across a social divide. Avoid gushing about your own moment of discovery in which you learned to like the blues, or Korean food, or the Grand Old Opry. That will come across as merely desperate. The cool essay will depict you as a mediator who has friends in every camp. This also requires more characters and a more complicated set-up than DDT 1. Start the essay with a tense situation:

“I didn’t know what would happen the night before the big game when my friend Mike decided to tell the other guys on the football team that she was transgendered...”

“Sissy, who was Korean but raised by white parents, refused to hang out with my friends Jiyan and Jae, who lived with their Korean parents.”

“I was the only one at school who knew that my friend Phyllis was homeless. She lived with her mother at the Motel Six, but when we started work on the senior class play...”

Remember, your job is to tell the story of a small breakthrough, not a social revolution. You have to leave something to accomplish as a college sophomore.

Pride in one’s own diversity. DDT 3 may sound easy and, if you happen to fit into a preferred category, it is indeed not too difficult. If you come from a prosperous black family, for example, just be sure to show your solidarity with the less fortunate:

“My family’s prize possession is a broken tea cup. Great Aunt Carrie carried it with her all the way from Ohio...”

“I met Orlando when I was tutoring kids in math at Mandela School...”

Even if you are not a member of an approved minority, however, you can, with the help of your new imaginary friends, work out of a pretty good story. The dramatic moment you will need to work for is the shining realization that we are all diverse. Your story should show you learning this from someone else.

“I never thought that it would be Daryll, who has Down’s Syndrome, who would teach me the most important lesson in life.”

“I thought I was just like everyone else until one day when my friend Shirley asked why I had so many freckles.”

“Last summer, I visited my friend Charles in Georgia. We had been best friends in what I guess was a mostly white suburb, but his family moved to an all-black neighborhood in Atlanta, and it was the first time I found myself as the only white kid...”

Be careful not to suggest that your honorary “diversity” is as authentic or as educationally enriching as the diversity that comes from belonging to an oppressed minority group. This is a DDT that requires an especially light touch.

Of course, you may choose not to play the game at all, regardless of whether family history gives you an opening. Perhaps you sense that there is something slightly phony about a college asking you to make a big deal out of race, ethnicity, and group identity. If so, your misgiving is well founded. The philosopher Immanuel Kant once urged that we should act to treat humanity — both our individual selves and everyone else, “in every case as an end, and never merely as a means.” But the diversity movement reverses that. The “diversity essay” itself is a little lesson in how to shoplift from your store of memories. It asks you to snag bits of personal experience and fit them to into a politically correct diversity narrative, and it asks you as well to treat your friends and family as resources to be exploited in the way to raising your own personal diversity quotient. Conformity with diversity’s sly standards might help you get into college. But refusing to submit a diversity essay could be the worthier path.

I do not, however, recommend that you forego a college education out of unwillingness to dance to the tune of the diversiphiles who hold the power to block your admission, regardless of how well you have performed in high school and on standardized tests. Your first challenge is to slip past these gentlemen at the gates. I wish you well, and I will take pride if Mohammed, Shareen, Jose, Jimmy, Mike, Sissy, Phyllis, Orlando, or their counterparts help you on your way.

— Peter Wood is author of Diversity: The Invention of A Concept and professor of anthropology at Boston University.

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Still Unconstitutional: Supreme discrimination (NRO, 030930)

It’s a new academic year. Millions of applications will soon be flowing into college admissions offices.

As in previous years, administrators will comb through applicant files separating those who make the grade from those who don’t. This year reviewers will have a powerful new tool at their disposal — Supreme Court license to discriminate on the basis of race.

Sure, many schools were doing it long before Grutter. Now, however, the Court has provided not just a green light but guidance, however scrambled, as to how to discriminate lawfully.

Over the summer colleges consulted with legal counsel to craft admissions policies that would comply with Grutter. Michigan, the school at the center of the preference debate, recently rolled out its new undergraduate-admissions policy. UM revised the undergrad-admissions program that the Court held unlawful to more closely track the law-school program upheld by the Court. Yet its new policy reveals that Michigan hasn’t critically evaluated Grutter’s implications. Indeed, the new policy evinces the kind of hubris displayed by a teacher’s pet who lazily ignores homework instructions believing that, just as in the past, he’ll get a passing grade nonetheless.

There are several infirmities with the new policy, not the least of which is contained in the instructions to admissions officers on how to consider an applicant’s race and ethnicity. The policy states that “[t]he University will continue to seek a critical mass of students from these underrepresented groups . . . (i.e., black, Hispanic, native American).” (Emphasis added.) The problem is that Michigan is seeking that which its own admissions people cannot find. And that exposes UM to litigation under the strict scrutiny analysis.

Consider: Racial classifications must survive “strict scrutiny” to pass constitutional muster. Strict scrutiny requires two things: that a classification further a compelling state interest and be narrowly tailored to serve that interest. The Grutter Court found that the educational benefits flowing from a diverse student body qualify as a compelling state interest. But the Gratz Court struck down Michigan’s undergrad admissions program because it awarded 20 points to applicants from underrepresented groups. The Court found such a system violated the narrow tailoring prong of strict scrutiny. The Court upheld the law school’s admissions program because it conducts a “holistic, individualized review” of applicant files to reach a “critical mass” of underrepresented minorities rather than assign raw point values to minority applicants.

So just what is Michigan’s critical mass of minorities? A review of the trial-court testimony of the individuals charged with formulating and implementing UM Law’s admissions program shows that, well, they know it when they see it.

Dennis Shields, who, as director of admissions, helped design UM Law’s admissions program in 1991, testified that he couldn’t say just what percentage of minorities constitutes a critical mass. He acknowledged that 5% was probably not enough; 10% might be enough, but he didn’t know for sure because it depended on the assessment of others in the law school.

Erica Munzel replaced Shields in 1998. She testified that critical mass isn’t a number or percentage, nor is it a range of numbers or percentages. Rather, critical mass means “meaningful numbers” of minorities — enough that they’ll contribute in the classroom and won’t feel isolated. Munzel asserted that she asks law-school professors for feedback to determine if a critical mass has been reached and if it hasn’t, the dean will let her know.

Okay. So let’s see what the professors and the dean had to say about critical mass.

Despite Munzel’s contention that critical mass isn’t a number or percentage, those to whom she defers have different ideas (especially when pressed on cross-examination). Kent Syverud (now dean of Vanderbilt Law School) testified that a class that’s 7% black represents a critical mass of blacks, although even 5% may work in some settings. In fact, 1-3 (blacks/minorities) per class could, in theory, get the job done.

To be sure, Syverud agrees with Munzel that critical mass means “meaningful numbers” but on cross he was more specific about what that means: A law-school class that’s 16% black, over 5% Hispanic, 1% native American, almost 5% Asian, 2% foreign, and 69% white could have “meaningful numbers.”

The testimony of professor Richard Lempert who chaired the faculty committee that authored the admissions policy was also at odds with Munzel’s contention that critical mass isn’t a range of percentages. On direct Lempert maintained that critical mass wasn’t a range of percentages. But on cross he noted that the benefits of critical mass are associated with classes in which the percentage of black, Hispanic, and Native-American students ranges between 11-17% of the overall student population.

Dean Jeffrey Lehman (now president of Cornell) doubted that 5% constitutes a critical mass but opined that a school can begin to get “benefits” at 10%.

Associate professor Frank Wu of Howard Law School was much more precise. He conceded on cross that a minority population of 14.5% could constitute a critical mass.

Despite these inconsistencies, Michigan’s hierarchy all agreed that critical mass was the point at which there were enough minorities that they’d be comfortable participating in class without feeling as if they were spokesmen for their respective races. This is quite understandable. After all, who would want the burden of presenting the Hispanic stance on the Heisenberg uncertainty principle? Or the Native-American perspective on gradient derivatives? Or even the black position on Gilgamesh? And imagine the clash of cultures regarding the value of pi.

Perhaps the best description of critical mass was provided by Dean Lehman:

You know when you have a critical mass when you see the kind — it is connected to context. And in a given context, sense a critical mass when you have — what we might think of as a kind of break-through movements in the class, break-through conversations where people say I heard something new today that shook a preconception of mine. Or I heard a perspective that I might not have had any preconceptions at all, but I learned something different. I learned a different perspective on a legal problem or a legal issue that now going forward I am going to incorporate into my tool kit so that I can try now to see the world through now the eyes of a different classmate in a different way. (Emphasis added.)

In other words, it’s the point at which shouts of “Eureka!” can be heard throughout campus.

This neatly illustrates the absurdity of the critical-mass rationale. Especially illuminating is Lehman’s reference to “context.” Lehman’s analysis may arguably apply to classes in law, political science, history, sociology, and the like; blacks might have a different take than whites on, say, the residual effects of black codes on black-literacy levels post-Reconstruction. But the curricula of elite schools consist of much more than traditional liberal-arts disciplines. Racially inspired Eureka! moments are rare enough in American-history classes. Their occurrence in oceanography, statistics, organic chemistry, or electrical-engineering classes would be nothing less than miraculous.

It should be noted that, notwithstanding Lehman’s definition of critical mass, many preferences proponents contend that one of the objectives of a diverse student body is to demonstrate that there isn’t a Native-American or Hispanic viewpoint on a given subject. But this is a straw man, and also presumes that only the social sciences are taught in college. Where are all of these benighted souls who actually think there’s a black viewpoint on the speed of light?

Moreover, as former Yale Law School student Jonathan Kay observes, one of the unintended consequences of the use of preferences to produce a “critical mass” of minorities is that it sometimes yields a result completely opposite of the one Lehman describes. Writing in the June 2003 issue of Commentary, Kay notes that the purported benefits of diversity rarely emerged: “[W]hites became increasingly reluctant to offer any comment that might be interpreted as threatening to blacks, while classroom comments by black students on any race-charged issue would almost always go unchallenged. Among my white peers, there was a feeling that sentiments expressed by black students had to be treated as correct for blacks, and therefore immune from refutation. In general, most students were terrified at being accused of racism; and when a subject connected to race came up, they either uttered platitudes or kept their mouths shut.” It should be noted that Kay does not argue that “diversity” per se causes this phenomenon; rather, the means by which the critical mass is achieved (i.e., lowering of standards and the stigma associated therewith) can produce perverse results.

While the testimony of Michigan’s witnesses suggests the definition of critical mass is, to say the least, nebulous, the trial court found that in practice Michigan’s critical mass has been much more precise, i.e., a quota. Michigan’s 1992 draft admissions policy explicitly set 11-17% minorities as a goal. Law-school documents as far back as the 1970s set 10-12% as the desired number. And the testimony of Shields, Lempert, and Lehman all suggest the percentage hovers around 10-12%. In fact, since implementation of the critical-mass policy, minority enrollment has, just coincidently, never fallen below 11%.

The dilemma inherent in Michigan’s critical-mass formulation is that if it consistently yields a 10-12% minority population, it’s a de facto quota; but if it’s as imprecise as Lehman’s description, it’s not narrowly tailored and may even demonstrate that the policy hasn’t been enacted in good faith — especially when the admissions officer keeps running back to the dean to see if they’ve gotten “enough” minorities (again, a quota). Either way, it’s unconstitutional.

Numerous other questions remain in Michigan’s policy. For example, it’s unclear whether the policy will be periodically reviewed or sunsetted as suggested by the Court. It’s also unclear what weight race will be given in the evaluation process. And there’s no evidence that the educational benefits allegedly derived in the law-school context are transferable to the undergraduate experience. All of these things suggest that even aside from the questions regarding the mystical critical mass, Michigan may be courting litigation on a number of fronts.

— Peter Kirsanow is a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

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Scholarship Created for Whites Only (FN, 040215)

BRISTOL, R.I. — A student group at Roger Williams University is offering a new scholarship for which only white students are eligible, a move they say is designed to protest affirmative action.

The application for the $250 award requires an essay on “why you are proud of your white heritage” and a recent picture to “confirm whiteness.”

“Evidence of bleaching will disqualify applicants,” says the application, issued by the university’s College Republicans.

Jason Mattera, 20, who is president of the College Republicans, said the group is parodying minority scholarships.

“We think that if you want to treat someone according to character and how well they achieve academically, then skin color shouldn’t really be an option,” he said. “Many people think that coming from a white background you’re automatically privileged, you’re automatically rich and your parents pay full tuition. That’s just not the case.”

The stunt has angered some at the university, but the administration is staying out of the fray. The school’s provost said it is a student group’s initiative and is not endorsed by Roger Williams.

Mattera, who is of Puerto Rican descent, is himself a recipient of a $5,000 scholarship open only to a minority group.

“No matter what my ethnicity is, I’m making a statement that scholarships should be given out based on merit and need,” Mattera told the Providence Journal.

His group took out a full-page ad in last week’s issue of the university’s student newspaper to tout the scholarship, which was for $50 until two donors came forward to add $100 each during the weekend, Mattera said.

It’s not the first brush with controversy for the group. The school temporarily froze the Republicans’ money in the fall during a fight over a series of articles published in its monthly newsletter. One article alleged that a gay-rights group indoctrinates students into homosexual sex.

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Let the Sunshine In: Mary Frances Berry wants to keep preference practices in the dark (NRO, 040223)

An interesting dust-up at the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights was reported earlier this month on the Chronicle of Higher Education’s website. A special assistant to frequent NRO contributor Peter Kirsanow, one of the sane commissioners, sent out a voluntary survey to various universities, asking them whether and how they used racial and ethnic preferences in admissions (a.k.a. affirmative action). As the Chronicle reports, this has infuriated ultraliberal commission chairman Mary Frances Berry.

Here’s the background. During an April 2003 meeting of the Civil Rights Commission, Kirsanow asked Berry to hold a briefing on Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger, the two cases challenging the University of Michigan’s use of admission preferences that were then pending before the Supreme Court. Berry thought “it would be interesting to have a briefing after they [the Supremes] decide the case.”

The Court handed down its ruling a few months later, last June. So, in July, Kirsanow asked for “a briefing on the ramifications of the Michigan decisions,” to which Berry replied, “Okay.” And then she added these obscure instructions: “And could you, if you think of any issues that you want to make sure they ask somebody to address, could you just let someone know, send an e-mail or do something with the staff director so he will know what you want covered so that he can, to the extent possible, and anybody else can do that, too. So that once you have figured it out, he can make sure that somebody covers whatever that is.”

Anyway, to prepare for the briefing, Kirsanow asked Christopher Jennings, his special assistant, to conduct a comprehensive legal analysis of the Grutter and Gratz decisions. Based on the law alone, Jennings identified many briefing topics of interest to the commissioner; he also concluded that there were too many to address in a single hearing. To narrow the list of topics, Jennings recommended that he survey field professionals to learn how “experts” are responding to the decisions.

Jennings thus developed a survey over the winter and asked Kirsanow’s permission to send the survey to 40 selective colleges. Kirsanow authorized him to do so. Jennings then printed and mailed the surveys on the agency’s stationery. This prompted the extraordinary response from Berry, who called the survey of college practices “illegal, immoral, and unethical.”

Why is Chairman Berry so upset?

The reason is that she knows that racial and ethnic admission preferences are very unpopular with the vast majority of Americans, and that if it became accepted practice for schools to reveal whether they discriminate and how much they discriminate, the resulting political and legal pressure would significantly curtail these preferences.

It is also very likely that providing this information will make many schools vulnerable to lawsuits. Because the fact of the matter is that race is typically used not in the limited, tie-breaking way that the Supreme Court purportedly advocates, but as a dispositive factor.

Peter Kirsanow is not alone in wanting admission preferences to be made more public. The Center for Equal Opportunity has drafted both federal and state legislation that would, respectively, require federally funded universities and state-run institutions to reveal whether and how they grant admission preferences on the basis of race and ethnicity. (Both bills are posted on CEO’s website.) The federal bill has been shared with Senate education committee staff, and the state legislation has been submitted to the American Legislative Exchange Council, an association of state legislators.

It is hard to see how anyone could object to these bills. Even those who support the use of racial and ethnic admission preferences cannot argue that such discrimination ought to take place in secret. Taxpayers have the right to know whether government and government-supported institutions are engaging in racial and ethnic discrimination and, if so, whether they are following the rules the Supreme Court has laid out limiting such preferential treatment.

In addition, the National Association of Scholars is asking its state affiliates to send out freedom-of-information requests to public colleges and universities in their respective states, asking them to provide the same kind of information.

It is heartening that some — and perhaps, or perhaps eventually, a majority of — members of the Civil Rights Commission want this information made available. After all, the original and highest purpose of the commission is to help investigate and shine a spotlight on racial discrimination. The commission, incidentally, has subpoena authority under federal law.

It would be best, of course, if schools would simply decide on their own not to consider race in deciding whom to admit. But if they insist on doing so, that discrimination will be dramatically limited if it has to withstand the glare of publicity. That’s why these new efforts to let the sunshine in are so important, and that’s why Mary Frances Berry is so angry.

— Roger Clegg is general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity in Sterling, Virginia.

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Ditching Diversity: Will elites return to racism? (NRO, 040422)

By John Derbyshire

October of this year marks the tenth anniversary of the publication of The Bell Curve, Richard Herrnstein’s and Charles Murray’s book about the part played by human intelligence in determining individual destinies in our society, and the implications for the structure of that society. By way of advance preparation I have been re-reading my own copy of The Bell Curve — it’s the 1996 paperback edition, with Murray’s spirited afterword rebutting the book’s critics (Richard Herrnstein died three weeks before the book’s first publication). I’m going to hold off until the actual anniversary before discussing the book in full; here I just want to use one of its lesser-noticed passages as the starting point for some speculations.

This particular passage is in Chapter 21, under the sub-heading “The Coming of the Custodial State.” The authors have been writing about the increasing stratification of our society by cognitive ability across the past half-century. Every American community, they note — working- or upper-class, white or black, urban or rural — used to have at least a sprinking of high-IQ types, who could take leadership positions in that community. That those bright people were stuck in such backwaters for want of larger opportunity was an injustice in itself, and reflected systemic injustices in our society. Now those injustices have been swept away. Now the doors are open for any high-IQ American, of any background, to join the well-paid, high-status cognitive elites of lawyers, administrators, CEOs, professors, journalists, technocrats, etc. The downside of this (on the whole) improvement is that the high-IQ folk are vacuumed up from all those scattered communities, leaving large areas of American society IQ-poor, while the cognitive elites pull away from the rest of us, “coalesc[ing] into a class that views America increasingly through a lens of its own.” By “custodial state” the authors mean a sort of Indian-reservation policy whereby the elites might fence themselves off from the feckless, hopeless, solidly low-IQ underclass.

The authors then indulge themselves in some speculations about how this “stratification of the cognitive elite” will work itself out in coming decades. Here is where they got my attention. One of their suggestions is:

Racism will emerge in a new and more virulent form. The tension between what the white elite is supposed to think and what it is actually thinking about race will reach something close to breaking point. This pessimistic prognosis must be contemplated: When the break comes, the result, as so often happens when cognitive dissonance is resolved, will be an overreaction in the other direction. Instead of the candor and realism about race that is so urgently needed, the nation will be faced with racial divisiveness and hostility that is as great as, or greater, than America experienced before the civil rights movement. We realize how outlandish it seems to predict that educated and influential Americans, who have been so puritanical about racial conversation, will openly revert to racism. We would not go so far as to say it is probable. It is, however, more than just possible. If it were to happen, all the scenarios for the custodial state would be more unpleasant — more vicious — than anyone can now imagine.

The reason this got my attention was that I came across it within hours of reading Walter Benn Michaels’s essay “Diversity’s False Solace” in the April 11 New York Times magazine. I knew nothing about Michaels until reading the piece. On the basis of some quick googling, he seems to be a literary theorist of the type that makes my eyes glaze over — “texts,” “signifiers,” “construction of cultural identity,” zzzzzzz. In the Times piece, though, he comes through as an old-style lefty, arguing against “diversity” on the grounds that (I am over-simplifying somewhat here — you can read the piece for yourself) it is all a plot to keep us from noticing that rich folk are much better represented at elite universities than poor folk. “[W]e like policies like affirmative action not so much because they solve the problem of racism as because they tell us that racism is the problem we need to solve.” Whereas, according to Prof. Michaels, the problem we really need to solve is “economic inequality.”

From the Bell Curve point of view, of course, Prof. Michaels has got the wrong end of the stick. The phenomenon he is observing — rich people’s kids over-represented at universities — is just the “stratification of the cognitive elite” that Herrnstein and Murray talk about, caused by meritocratic selection operating on differences in individual ability. Our society is now so friction-free that smart people rise effortlessly to the top: the top colleges, the top jobs, the top incomes. Their kids will, by a well-known statistical principle called “regression to the mean” be smarter than average, on average, if not quite so smart as their parents, and so will naturally be over-represented at top colleges. The interesting thing, though, is that the New York Times, house journal of the liberal establishment, is publishing critiques of the diversity cult. Sure, this one is a critique from the Left, but it’s the New York Times we’re talking about. What do you want, egg in your beer?

There have recently been other straws in this wind. Across the Pond a gentleman named Trevor Phillips caused a sensation recently by saying out loud that multiculturalism had all been a ghastly mistake, and that immigrants to Britain needed to assimilate to British culture a.s.a.p. This was sensational because Mr. Phillips, a black man, is chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, Britain’s leading organizer of anti-racist witch-hunts, and up till now a fervent promoter of multiculturalism. (The U.S. equivalent would be something like the Southern Poverty Law Center.)

Mr. Phillips’s previous appearance in the spotlight was back in January, when he called for the police to arrest an opinion journalist who had written a Sunday newspaper article titled “We Owe Arabs Nothing,” containing such sentiments as that Arabs have contributed nothing to the world apart from oil; referring to them as “suicide bombers, limb-amputators, women repressors;” and wondering aloud: “What do they think we feel about them? That we adore them for the way they murdered more than 3,000 civilians on September 11 then danced in the hot, dusty streets to celebrate the murders?” Mr. Phillips thought these comments likely to “incite racial hatred,” and so he did his duty as a puritanical busybody.

Again, Trevor Phillips’s more recent critique of multiculturalism comes from the Left. From the New Left, in fact: Mr. Phillips is concerned that the swelling unpopularity of multiculturalism in Britain may be undermining support for multi-ethnic immigration, which Phillips, natch, believes to be a jolly good thing. He explains himself in The Guardian, a newspaper so far left it makes the New York Times look like, well, National Review.

Is this the beginning of something? Could American elites dump multiculturalism — the doctrine that any culture is just as good as any other (except of course for the Ice People culture of white Europeans, which is inhuman, oppressive, colonialist, greedy, and cruel)? And could this lead to the prospect that Herrnstein and Murray feared, the prospect of a turn to racism on the part of our cognitive elites?

I wouldn’t rule out either. For all their pompous moralizing, our secular elites are fundamentally amoral, their ideologies founded in nothing but some half-remembered clichés from Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill. As I remarked As I remarked when reviewing Peter Wood’s book about one of those ideologies:

Where did it come from, this ideology of diversity? Peter Wood notes the oddity of the fact that such a powerful idea, energetically propagated across the whole of society for a quarter of a century, has no founding text to refer to, was inspired by no charismatic teacher, was carried forward with no mighty struggles or cruel reverses, has roots in no significant philosophy. “It arrived unparented,’ says Wood, ‘as a kind of collective emanation of ponderous academic silliness.” We just woke up one morning and there it was, demanding that we ‘celebrate’ it. In its impact on the individual psyche, diversity is indeed an ideology in the sense Wood describes; yet it is a shallow and trivial one — essentially a folk superstition, a pop-culture fad like the Hula Hoop or body piercing, with no intellectual moorings at all. One of the author’s key insights, in fact, is the lightness and essential frivolity of diversity, especially by contrast with actual diversity.

As Herrnstein and Murray say, it is an imaginative stretch to conceive of our elites turning against the settled dogma of forty years. Stranger things have happened, though. “Except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it,” and the house of current elite ideology is built on sand, by people who scoff at Divine inspiration. I wish I had a dollar for every time I have had an exchange like the following with a lefty ideologist.

LI: “Racism (or homophobia, or sexism, or whatever) is wrong! Wrong, wrong, wrong!”

JD: “By what standard? What makes it wrong?”

LI: “It causes pain and trauma!”

JD: “So does dentistry, to the patient. So does free-market economics, to the unemployed. So does justice, to the criminal. So do piano lessons, to my son. Are they wrong?”

LI: “Violates fundamental American principles!”

JD: “Which are all premised on ‘Providence,’ or ‘The Creator,’ or ‘God.’ None of which you believe in...”

Without absolute morality, you can adjust “right” and “wrong” to your own convenience. I see no reason to suppose that America’s cognitive elites will be immune to this temptation. In five or ten years’ time, for example, when the Baby Boomers are retiring in large numbers, and looking to their government to help out with paying for their medications, Caribbean cruises, and living expenses, they are going to find that their government does not have enough money to do so. This will cause elite Boomers to look long and hard, and not very sympathetically, at some of the things government spends wads of money on: inner-city school systems, welfare and bureaucratic make-work programs, jails, the Drug War...

And then there is the fact, not quite respectable to mention in polite company, but indubitable none the less, that quite a number of our cognitive elites are Jewish. American Jews have been great supporters of multiculturalism, for reasons perfectly easy to understand. If Jews collectively learned a lesson from the 20th century, it was the terrible danger inherent in being the one conspicuously successful minority in an otherwise-homogenous society. So: The less homogenous the better! Bring on multiculturalism! Unfortunately, if you open the doors of your nation to all the cultures of the world in the early 21st century, and invite them to “celebrate their diversity” on your soil, you might find that an alarmingly high proportion of them are Muslims with viciously antisemitic opinions. Multiculturalism? Hmm, let’s rethink this...

I don’t think, any more than Herrnstein and Murray did ten years ago, that these outcomes are certain. They are surely possible, though. My personal rating of the odds over the next generation (25 years) would be something like:

The elites will drop multiculturalism (i.e., the idea that every culture is just as worth “celebrating” as any other, and that the old idea of assimilation into a common American culture is “oppressive” and “racist”). — Around 90% probability.

They will drop diversity as an ideal (i.e., the idea that every college class, business office, sports team, or other group should contain a suitable mix of races, sexes, and types). — 50%.

They will turn racist, approving a new social order in which legal privileges will accrue to races over-represented in the cognitive elites, and be denied to races over-represented in the underclass. — Perhaps 25%.

We are, as Herrnstein and Murray said, living under a regime of cognitive dissonance, pretending to believe one thing while striving not to notice the opposite thing. It’s an unstable situation, and will only be further destabilized in the future. What will the resolution be? We can only guess. There are my guesses up above. Feel free to make your own.

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Baking Controversy: Turning the heat up on the campus multiculti crowd (NRO, 040505)

At the University of Rochester, bake sales are meant to raise not money, but awareness.

At least that’s what members of the UR College Republicans say about their recent Affirmative Action Bake Sale, held on March 19. Inspired by an ongoing series of similar events at other schools, the CRs peddled the usual treats, but employed an unusual pricing system: one determined not by the product, but by the buyer — and, more specifically, the buyer’s race.

Asian males looking to snag a package of Oreos had to pony up $1.50. White males? $1. Black students lucked out — only 50¢. For Native Americans (with proof of tribal affiliation, naturally), cookies were free.

At the bottom of the price list, the CRs wrote, “Our Goal: $1 For All.”

This witty protest — meant to question prevailing liberal doctrine about race and affirmative action — proved too much for certain members of the UR community. Not for students in ethnic clubs, mind you — not for students at all, actually. Thirty-five faculty members — in an effort spearheaded by James Johnson, associate professor of political science — insisted that the College Republicans be punished just for staging the sale.

The professors wrote to UR president Thomas Jackson: “The students involved clearly have a right to think and say what they want. But words have consequences and those who exercise their right to free expression bear a correlative responsibility for the views they express. In this instance the students who participated in this activity ought to be told quite clearly that their views are bigoted, intolerant, and patronizing.”

In other words, students have the right to say what they want — unless what they say is disagreeable to certain professors, and in that case, they should be formally disciplined.

To the College Republicans, the histrionics over the bake sale seemed ridiculous. (Small wonder: The professors even condemned the CRs’ decision to sell Oreos and Moon Pies — offensive presumably because they’re black and white — even though ten different types of common pre-packaged cookies were offered.) Clarence Hardy, a member of the CRs, dismissed the professors’ hypersensitivity: “As a black person, if I felt in any way it was a racist decision, I would have put a stop to it.” He added, “These professors completely misinterpreted what we were trying to do.”

At least the students didn’t. CR chairman Noah Lebowitz reported, “Those who came up to our table were intrigued, not offended. They wanted to discuss affirmative action with us, and to debate it — and that was the goal of the event.”

The CRs probably know better than the 35 professors whether their event was “bigoted” or created a “hostile environment.” According to Hardy and Lebowitz, the group is diverse. “We have many women, many minorities — Hispanic students, Asian students, a black student, a quadriplegic student. All of these people were in favor of the affirmative action bake sale.” (James Johnson, by the way, is a white male.)

Fortunately for the College Republicans — and UR’s institutional integrity — President Jackson denied Johnson’s punitive demands. But gratifying though this response may have been, the College Republicans have not let the matter drop. For them, there is too much at stake.

First, they are concerned by how Johnson’s complaint was written and circulated — furtively, to avoid discovery by the students it sought to punish. Indeed, Lebowitz said he only learned of the letter in the first place because another professor read it aloud in one of his classes.

“I was surprised,” Lebowitz said. “The letter used incendiary language to demean us just for expressing our views. I was shocked and alarmed, as I knew it was a very serious issue — more than just a couple of faculty members expressing an opinion.”

The letter was, he noted, also in violation of the university’s “Statement of Communal Principles,” which stipulates, “To uphold...freedom of expression and action in the public arena, each person has the responsibility to own his or her ideas and actions...This means that ideas and actions are neither anonymous nor isolated” (emphasis added).

Upset by the disregard for these principles, Lebowitz tried to obtain a copy of the letter, to find out who had signed it. His mission proved frustratingly difficult: Johnson and another professor kept the letter’s contents from Lebowitz, and refused to provide the names of any of the other signatories. Lebowitz ultimately got the letter from Jackson’s assistant, along with the president’s response. But on the matter of the 34 anonymous signatories, Jackson’s office wouldn’t budge.

This illuminated the crux of the CRs’ dilemma. Thirty-four faculty members — quite possibly their professors — thought them “bigoted, intolerant, and patronizing,” and wanted the administration to punish them for it. And the CRs had no way of finding out who they were.

“The response from several people was that they felt intimidated by the letter, and the faculty members who’d called them bigots,” Lebowitz said of his fellow CRs. “They felt that if the administration didn’t take disciplinary action against us, these professors would on their own, when it came to grading.”

Clarence Hardy knows that one of his professors signed Johnson’s letter, and has secured an oral assurance that she will not punish his views through his grades. In this, he is lucky. But, Hardy adds, “I’m still concerned about my academics,” because of the likelihood that the 34 anonymous signatories are concentrated in his major field of study — political science (Johnson’s department). “A lot of the College Republicans are political-science majors,” he notes, “about half. It leaves me feeling really uncomfortable about the whole thing.”

Lebowitz and the other CRs remain uncomfortable, too — which is why they’re seeking official administrative protection. They have been ignored thus far by the administration, and so plan to bring formal harassment charges in the fall — accompanied by a campaign for an official UR academic bill of rights.

In the meantime, however, Johnson has only stepped up his intimidation. In an open letter to the university community, Johnson reiterates his concern that “the ‘Bake Sale’ was designed to question the presence on our campus of individual students who, by virtue of their gender, racial and/or ethnic identities, the College Republicans assume have no rightful place at the University.” (If Johnson — or any of the original letter’s signatories — had actually attended the bake sale, perhaps the sight of women and ethnic minorities among the College Republicans themselves would have quieted their fears.)

According to Lebowitz, Johnson’s latest missive was distributed in political-science classes as professors announced their general support for its message.

While the faculty seem to stack more and more against the College Republicans, their fellow students — whether they agree with the group’s stance on affirmative action or not — at least support their right to have held the bake sale. Lebowitz and Hardy say that several left-leaning student organizations and publications have condemned Johnson’s efforts. Lebowitz observes that “on most issues, student debate is fruitful and structured. The students here are being more mature than the faculty.” (Johnson has, incidentally, declined the CRs’ offers to participate in moderated public discussions of affirmative action; he also refused to comment to NRO.)

In his open letter, Johnson wrote that the bake sale was “a direct, calculated attack” on everyone “who is committed to free inquiry and expression under necessary conditions of inclusiveness and diversity. The College Republicans desperately hope to undermine those conditions. I invite you to join me in deflating their hopes. Speak out for diversity. Defend inclusiveness. Decry bigotry and intolerance. Do so publicly.”

In defending their right to voice opinions unpopular with the University of Rochester’s liberal faculty, that’s exactly what the CRs are doing. Instead of harassing them, shouldn’t Johnson and his groupies be applauding them?

— Meghan Clyne is an NR associate editor.

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One More Result of Racial Politics on Campus (American Enterprise, 030400)

Free speech no longer exists on American college campuses. A comprehensive survey conducted by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) makes it clear: America’s great universities are now officially committed to punishing students who express ideas that depart from Leftist orthodoxy. “College administrators have decided to ban just about any thought they don’t like,” says Emmett Hogan,

FIRE’s survey data, available online at speechcodes.org after March 18, shows that three quarters of America’s well-known universities—ranging from the Ivy League to respected commuter schools—significantly restrict student speech. Under the plain language of many campus speech codes, talking about differences between races and sexes can result in disciplinary action against a student. At public universities, that is a violation of the U.S. Constitution. At private universities there ought to be an outcry from students, professors, alumni, and trustees against these official restrictions on what students can and cannot say.

It hasn’t always been this way: During the 1980s, free speech crusaders in America’s universities thought briefly they had beaten back campus censorship. Successful lawsuits against the public universities of Michigan and Wisconsin, as well as California’s private Stanford University, ended formal speech codes on public college campuses. But now so-called harassment codes have replaced speech codes in most places, and these new rules are in some ways worse.

While speech codes banned students from using narrowly delineated racial and sexual epithets, the “harassment” policies that exist on most American college campuses are so vague they can be interpreted to mean virtually anything. The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill prohibits behavior that “destroys the environment of tolerance and mutual respect.” Princeton bans “unwanted sexual attention that makes a person feel uncomfortable.” Cornell University, along with many other schools, defines “leering” as a form of harassment. Many of these codes are hidden deep in university policy books and operate without most students being made aware of them. They serve to chill free expression just the same.

Moreover, these policies are applied subjectively. The conduct of San Diego State University speech code enforcer Antoinette Jones is typical. Shortly after 9/11, student Zewdalem Kebede approached a group of Arab students in the university library after he heard them praising the terrorist attacks. He got into a heated debate with the students and was eventually charged by Jones with violating the university’s hazing policy. Ultimately, Jones sent Kebede a warning letter but took no formal disciplinary action. When TAE called her, Jones refused to comment, citing a university policy that bars employees from speaking to the press. SDSU spokesman Jason Foster, however, says no such policy exists.

Evenly applied standards requiring courtesy on campus might have a place at some educational institutions. But modern speech codes apply only to particular types of speech offensive to the Left. And it is mostly white students that they single out. Speech code proponents who spoke with TAE were honest about favoring a racial double standard, on the grounds that history and emotion leave non-whites especially vulnerable to insult. “There has to be a different standard,” argues Stanford Law Professor Tom Grey, who defended that university’s speech code before it was overturned.

Speech-restriction proponents like Grey argue that the new style “harassment” codes are actually mandated by federal law that requires universities to avoid a “pervasively hostile environment.” But Grey, though a tenured professor at one of the nation’s best law schools, seems not to understand what even first-year law students learn: Federal harassment laws and regulations apply only to employer-employee relationships, not to life generally. A male student who makes a crude sexual comment about a female classmate has behaved boorishly, but hasn’t violated any law. And even in workplaces, employers don’t have a legal obligation to take disciplinary action against employees who make “hostile” remarks to their peers. It is supervisory relationships that the federal law is primarily concerned with policing.

Colleges have no obligation to crack down on individual students for gender-related comments. Nor are they under any legal obligation on the racial front. No American court has ever upheld a right never to be offended.

How did speech codes become so pervasive in our supposed cradles of open inquiry? Experts point to two trends: the rise of 1960s radicals to positions of power on college campuses, and an influx of academically underprepared minority students as a result of affirmative action.

As the rest of the country turned rightward in the late 1970s and ‘80s, many radicals clustered on campuses. Meanwhile, ill prepared minorities were being pulled into universities in ever greater numbers. Thanks to racial preferences, many of them were promoted to a higher echelon of college than their achievements merited, and they struggled as a result. Many banded together defensively in racial affinity groups, which in turn sparked campus frictions. Rather than confronting low achievement and racial identity politics head-on, administrators found it easier to simply ban as “racist” any politically inconvenient thoughts and arguments.

The ironic result, notes Harvey Silverglate, a Boston civil liberties attorney who co-founded FIRE: “You had a generation that was talking about free speech all of the time. And then when they got into positions of power, their first response was to restrict it.” The influx of minority students, Silverglate argues, provided a justification for censorship.

“With the rise of minority groups on college campuses there was something of an increase in intolerance,” agrees Vanderbilt professor Carol Swain, a black critic of affirmative action. University administrators, she says “tried to keep a lid on things and create an environment where minority students wouldn’t have their feelings hurt.” Swain doubts the formal repeal of speech codes would even have much effect at this point. “The institutions don’t need speech codes any more,” she says. “Those who think the wrong way will just be censored by their peers. There are some issues you just don’t discuss.”

There is no evidence that minority students fare any better at schools which have speech codes. Nor is there much being said on campus that’s particularly inflammatory in the first place. Grey, the Stanford speech codes defender, admits that racial and sexual harassment aren’t major problems at any college he knows of.

Speech codes make immensely patronizing assumptions about minority and female students: that they are so emotionally fragile that a simple insult will disrupt their ability to get a quality education. Students capable of overcoming broken families, awful schools, and chronic neighborhood violence are assumed to be at risk of failing in their educational endeavors if peers make rude remarks. These condescending “protections” offered by college administrators are unnecessary.

Some types of campus restrictions on speech may be defensible. Private institutions that make it clear their educational programs emphasize leftish values (such as Pennsylvania’s Swarthmore College) shouldn’t be prevented from carrying this out for students who want it. Pervasively religious colleges (like Yeshiva University), likewise, would lose their essential character if students were allowed to undermine the principles of the institutions’ faith.

In the main, however, college speech codes stand on shaky legal ground. Those at public universities are plainly un-Constitutional. And private schools that maintain speech codes while advertising themselves as places devoted to free and open inquiry could face civil suits for breach of contract.

Working with a bevy of public interest legal groups around the country, FIRE plans to launch a challenge to campus speech codes in every one of the U.S.’s judicial circuits. The effort will begin with a soon-to-be announced lawsuit against a university in the Third Circuit (which covers Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and the U.S. Virgin Islands), and then expand across the country. “Our hope is if we lose some of them in the district courts, we can appeal them to the courts of appeals, where we will win,” says FIRE head Thor Halvorssen. If two circuit courts of appeals disagree on the Constitutionality of speech codes, a case could go to the Supreme Court to set a binding legal precedent for the entire country.

Created by radicals demanding heightened racial sensitivity, campus speech codes turn out to be far more insidious and destructive than any residual racism they might quell. “Speech codes have to go,” summarizes Halvorssen. “Students need to be free.”

—Eli Lehrer is a TAE senior editor.

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Affirmative action’s future (Washington Times, 040630)

As colleges and universities complete their first round of admissions following last year’s affirmative action decisions in the two Michigan cases, it is becoming clear that final victory for either side is proving elusive.

Opponents of race preferences can try to reverse the holding — that the “compelling state need” for diversity trumps Equal Protection considerations — using the cumbersome, politically divisive process of state referendum. Or they can return to the Supreme Court after one or more deaths or retirements have altered its composition. But that is an “iffy” proposition and carries scant rewards as citizens of California, Texas and Florida discovered when forced to abandon affirmative action. The result: a batch of “Percentage Plans” guaranteeing high school students graduating high in their classes admission to top state universities, and other schemes designed to restore the old numbers far less efficiently than under affirmative action.

But the “victors” have their own set of problems. While approving the law school’s practice of accepting enough minority students to form a “critical mass” for purposes of providing diversity of thought in the classroom, the court rejected an automatic 20-point admissions score bonus for minority candidates. It is noteworthy that in changing its undergraduate admissions procedures to comply with the holdings, Michigan shied away from the “critical mass” approach, as have dozens of other academic institutions.

Why? Because it is an artificial contrivance barren of academic justification and laughably irrelevant to most classroom settings. What special personal experiences, for example, does a black American bring to a German language class? Or Biology 101? Or chemical engineering? And even when the subject turns to constitutional law, the U.S. presidency or advanced sociology, are the views of most minorities so different from that of your basic white liberal? And, of course, if diversity were the real objective, all of academia would be in hot pursuit of Mormons, fundamentalist Christians and maybe even Republicans.

Even Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a supporter of race preferences, found the charade objectionable. “If honesty is the best policy,” she wrote, “surely Michigan’s accurately described, fully disclosed college affirmative action program is preferable to achieving similar numbers through winks, nods and disguises.”

The current constitutional muddle is largely the work of a single justice, Sandra Day O’Connor, appointed to the court by President Reagan, who hoped she would follow the same conservative path as her Stanford law school chum, William Rehnquist. Instead Justice O’Connor placed herself as the “swing” vote on a court divided 4-4 in many critical cases between liberals and conservatives. Her resulting tendency to join first one side and then the other has come at the expense of consistent jurisprudence.

In particular, Justice O’Connor presents a history of “zigging” one way on an issue for years, then “zagging” in the other direction at the critical point of the debate. Through most of the 1980s, she raised the hopes of pro-lifers with nimble critiques of the medical and legal flaws of Roe. Yet when the opportunity arose in Webster and Casey to set aside Roe, she embraced the very cause she had long critiqued.

So it was with affirmative action. By the time she joined the court, a majority had collectively sanctioned a revolutionary shift from the “color-blind” approach of Brown and its progeny toward permitting race preferences to diversify both the academic community and, in some instances, the work force. Liberals on the bench were pressing for even broader license, moved less by the Constitution than the ugliness of the original sin.

For years, Justice O’Connor interpreted traditional standards for judging race preferences — strict scrutiny, compelling need, narrow tailoring — in ways that would rule out discrimination in such areas as state and federal contracting, broadcast licensing and the drawing of political district lines. She used terms like “apartheid” in describing such practices and in her Metro Broadcasting dissent declared, “The interest in increasing the diversity of broadcast viewpoints is clearly not a compelling interest. It is too amorphous, too insubstantial.”

To reach the egregious conclusion that Barbra Grutter had to give up her hope of attending Michigan law school to a less academically qualified minority, Justice O’Connor had to walk away from her language in half a dozen cases. Her reasoning calls to mind a thought from “Through the Looking Glass”: The question is never whether one can make words mean many different things. It is, who will be in charge of the words?

But what if Barbra Grutter didn’t have to give up her place to a less qualified minority? What if both could be admitted? Suppose Michigan, under the lash of legislation, executive order or ballot initiative was compelled to enroll one non-minority student for each affirmative action beneficiary? Justice O’Connor’s constitutional mischief would not be wholly erased. But the human damage would be repaired. And in the legal muddle her opinions have produced, that is not a bad result.

Robert Zelnick is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and is the author of “Swing Dance: Justice O’Connor and the Michigan Muddle.”

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The Affirmative Action Myth (FN, 040714)

The Supreme Court decided one year ago that racial preferences at public universities are legal, as long as they aren’t too mechanically applied.

But this has proved cold comfort to affirmative action supporters besieged by evidence that preferences can’t deliver the results desired. With the constitutional issue resolved, Americans are asking whether affirmative action helps students in the first place.

Just what is affirmative action supposed to do? Educators trumpet the virtues of “diverse” campuses, but their enthusiasm dates suspiciously to a 1972 court decision suggesting diversity as a legal justification for preferences.

Ordinary Americans are more practical. Those sympathetic to affirmative action assume that it offers concrete benefits to disadvantaged students. They hope that preferences will narrow our nation’s painful racial divide along such metrics as income, literacy, home ownership and health.

But affirmative action in this sense is a myth. Admissions preferences do not offer practical empowerment to struggling citizens. They do not bridge society’s racial chasms. They do not address real social problems.

For one thing, affirmative action does not send more minorities to college. Most four-year colleges and universities in America are not selective; they take anyone with a standard high school education and a Pell grant. This means that race-based preferences are relevant only to the 20-30% of American colleges that enjoy substantially more applicants than places. Students attending these schools have many other college options.

The reason that more minority students don’t get college degrees has nothing to do with competitive admissions policies. The truth is that most minority students leave high school without the minimum credentials necessary to attend any four-year school, selective or not.

Freshmen must be “college ready” at virtually all four-year colleges. This means that students must be literate, must have a high school diploma, and must have taken certain minimum coursework. Overwhelmingly, minority students are not college ready. Dr. Jay Greene of the Manhattan Institute found that only 20% of black students and 16% of Hispanic students leave high school with these basic requirements.

Minority under-representation in college is the direct result of the public schools’ failure to prepare minority students. It is a failure that affirmative action does not remedy – college-ready minorities already attend college just as often as their white counterparts.

Affirmative action thus does not send more minority students to college. But it does redistribute college-bound minorities from less academically selective schools to more selective ones. Affirmative action supporters assume that this is helpful to preferred students: that moving a student from the University of Colorado to Cornell will enhance that student’s earning potential.

But economists Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger found that name-brand colleges are the modern equivalent of the Dutch tulip craze. Prices go up and up, but elite colleges offer no financial benefit that less selective schools do not.

Dale and Krueger compared students rejected by selective colleges with students who attended those schools. They discovered that when students’ entering credentials, such as high school grades and test scores, were the same, the rejected students made just as much money as those who attended “top tier” universities.

Students know something about themselves that admissions committees do not. If you think you are Cornell material, you are – even if Cornell doesn’t notice – and statistics show that you are just as likely as Cornell grads to succeed in the game of life. This means that preferences don’t raise minority incomes.

Racial preferences can’t send more minority students to college and don’t raise the incomes of those they move around, but they do reinforce a harmful myth: the myth that credentials, not skills, are the key to success. Students of all backgrounds suffer because elite schools perpetuate this myth.

Ivy league institutions maintain their status by rejecting far more applicants than they accept. To keep applications coming – and parents paying tuition – they practically claim to have bottled success. Anyone can rub elbows with the brilliant and powerful, they imply, and be set for life.

But studies show that skills, not name-brand diplomas, determine advancement in the real world. Harvard grads do well, but they do well because they are skilled and driven, not because they have Harvard degrees.

People hope that preferences will assist minority students whose tested proficiency in English and math lags behind their peers. But instead of addressing the critical skills gap, preferences reinforce the notion that skills aren’t important: that it matters who you know, not what you know. This untrue, self-serving message from the elite academy is among affirmative action’s heavy costs.

Marie Gryphon, a former practicing attorney, is an education policy analyst at the Cato Institute.

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Cultures aren’t equal (townhall.com, 050808)

Michael Barone

Anyone who has been keeping up with British opinion since the July 7 bombings will have noticed that “multiculturalism” is under sharp attack.

Multiculturalism preaches that we should allow and encourage immigrants and their children to maintain and celebrate their own culture apart from the national culture. Society should be not a melting pot but, in the phrase of former New York Mayor David Dinkins, “a gorgeous mosaic.” That mosaic, of course, looks less gorgeous as people surveyed the work of the British-born-and-raised bombers.

In the past, Tony Blair has spoken favorably about multiculturalism. But on July 7, he struck a different note. “It is important, however, that the terrorists realize our determination to defend our values and our way of life is greater than their determination to cause the death and destruction of innocent people and impose their extremism on the world.”

Sadly, the muticulturalist policies of Blair’s Labor government and its Conservative predecessors gave refuge to preachers of Islamist hate in what some have called “Londonistan.”

Even before the bombings that prompted second thoughts, the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality said, “We need to assert that there is a core of Britishness,” and the home secretary introduced English language tests for citizenship. Now, the Blair government has moved to expel Muslim clerics who preach hatred and terrorism, and the left-wing Guardian fired a writer who was a member of Hizb Ut Tahrir, a radical group that advocates a “clash of civilization” and urges Muslims to kill Jews.

Writers in other tolerant countries have been noticing the blowback from multiculturalism. The Dutch novelist Leon de Winter wrote that as traditional Calvinist discipline frayed and Muslim immigrants rejected Dutch tolerance, “the delicate mechanism of Holland’s traditional tolerant society gradually lost its balance.”

In The Age of Melbourne, Australia, Pamela Bone wrote, “Perhaps it is time to say, you are welcome, but this is the way it is here.” The Age’s Tony Parkinson quoted the French writer Jean Francois Revel’s Cold War comment, “A civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself.” Tolerating intolerance, goodhearted people are beginning to see, does not necessarily produce tolerance in turn.

The conservative Telegraph of London ran a series of articles on extolling Britishness and placed on its website the contributions, positive as well as a few negative, of dozens of citizens. The nonagenarian W.F. Deedes, a journalist since the 1930s, perhaps summed it up best: “The reputation we have in distant lands, I have learned in my travels, is higher than we give ourselves. They admire us for our social stability, our parliamentary and diplomatic experience, for fair play, for tolerance, for a willingness to help lame dogs over stiles, as well as for some of the qualities Shakespeare sang about in his plays.”

When I was in Britain for the election in May, I was surprised to hear nothing from Tony Blair (or other politicians) about Britain’s positive contributions to the world. Now, they are being heard.

Multiculturalism is based on the lie that all cultures are morally equal. In practice, that soon degenerates to: All cultures are morally equal, except ours, which is worse. But all cultures are not equal in respecting representative government, guaranteed liberties and the rule of law. And those things arose not simultaneously and in all cultures, but in certain specific times and places — mostly in Britain and America, but also in various parts of Europe.

In America, as in Britain, multiculturalism has become the fashion in large swathes of our society. So the Founding Fathers are presented only as slaveholders, World War II is limited to the internment of Japanese-Americans and the bombing of Hiroshima. Slavery is identified with America, though it has existed in every society and the antislavery movement arose first among English-speaking evangelical Christians.

But most Americans know there is something special about our cultural heritage. While Harvard and Brown are replacing scholars of the founding period with those studying other things, book-buyers are snapping up first-rate histories of the Founders by David McCullough, Joseph Ellis and Ron Chernow.

Mutilculturalist intellectuals do not think our kind of society is worth defending. But millions here and increasing numbers in Britain and other countries know better.

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Burnt offerings on the altar of multiculturalism (Townhall.com, 050718)

Diana West

Without it — without its fanatics who believe all civilizations are the same — the engine that projects Islam into the unprotected heart of Western civilization would stall and fail. It’s as simple as that. To live among the believers — the multiculturalists — is to watch the assault, the jihad, take place un-repulsed by our suicidal societies. These societies are not doomed to submit; rather, they are eager to do so in the name of a masochistic brand of tolerance that, short of drastic measures, is surely terminal.

I’m not talking about our soldiers, policemen, rescue workers and, now, even train conductors, who bravely and steadfastly risk their lives for civilization abroad and at home. Instead, I’m thinking about who we are as a society at this somewhat advanced stage of war. It is a strange, tentative civilization we have become, with leaders who strut their promises of “no surrender” even as they flinch at identifying the foe. Four years past 9/11, we continue to shadow-box “terror,” even as we go on about “an ideology of hate.” It’s a script that smacks of sci-fi fantasy more than realpolitik. But our grim reality is no summer blockbuster, and there’s no special-effects-enhanced plot twist that is going to thwart “terror” or “hate” in the London Underground anymore than it did on the roof of the World Trade Center. Or in the Bali nightclub. Or on the first day of school in Beslan. Or in any disco, city bus or shopping mall in Israel.

Body bags, burn masks and prosthetics are no better protections than make-believe. But these are our weapons, according to the powers that be. These, and an array of high-tech scopes and scanners designed to identify retinas and fingerprints, to detect explosives and metals — ultimately, I presume, as we whisk through the automatic supermarket door. How strange, though, that even as we devise new ways to see inside ourselves to our most elemental components, we also prevent ourselves from looking full-face at the danger to our way of life posed by Islam.

Notice I didn’t say “Islamists.” Or “Islamofascists.” Or “fundamentalist extremists.” I’ve tried out such terms in the past, but I’ve come to find them artificial and confusing, and maybe purposefully so, because in their imprecision I think they allow us all to give a wide berth to a great problem: the gross incompatibility of Islam — the religious force that shrinks freedom even as it “moderately” enables or “extremistly” advances jihad — with the West. Am I right? Who’s to say? The very topic of Islamization — for that is what is at hand, and very soon in Europe — is verboten. A leaked British report prepared for Prime Minister Tony Blair last year warned even against “expressions of concern about Islamic fundamentalism” (another one of those amorphous terms) because “many perfectly moderate Muslims follow strict adherence to traditional Islamic teachings and are likely to perceive such expressions as a negative comment on their own approach to their faith.” Much better to watch subterranean tunnels fill with charred body parts in silence. As the London Times’ Simon Jenkins wrote, “The sane response to urban terrorism is to regard it as an avoidable accident.”

In not discussing the roots of terror in Islam itself, in not learning about them, the multicultural clergy that shepherds our elites prevents us from having to do anything about them. This is key, because any serious action — stopping immigration from jihad-sponsoring nations, shutting down mosques that preach violence and expelling their imams, just for starters — means to renounce the multicultural creed. In the West, that’s the greatest apostasy. And while the penalty is not death — as it is for leaving Islam under Islamic law — the existential crisis is to be avoided at all costs. Including extinction.

This is the lesson of the atrocities in London. It’s unlikely that the 21st century will remember that this new Western crossroads for global jihad was once the home of Churchill, Piccadilly and Sherlock Holmes. Then again, who will notice? The BBC has retroactively purged its online bombing coverage of the word “terrorist”; the spokesman for the London police commissioner has declared that “Islam and terrorism simply don’t go together”; and within sight of a forensics team sifting through rubble, an Anglican priest urged his flock, as The Guardian reported, to “rejoice in the capital’s rich diversity of cultures, traditions, ethnic groups and faiths.” Just don’t, he said, “name them as Muslims.”

Their faith renewed, Londoners soldier on.

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Selective diversity in higher education (Washington Times, 050815)

Selective definitions of “diversity” can exclude some of its vital meanings. On college campuses, for obvious example, the goal of “diversity” has most urgently been focused on racial diversity. But at last, leaders of the higher-education establishment — headed by the American Council on Education — have finally recognized the fundamental basis for all education is diversity of ideas.

The present domination by liberal opinion on many college faculties (often verging on this majority’s intolerant orthodoxies) was revealed in a recent study, “Politics and Professional Advancement among Faculty,” by Stanley Rothman, emeritus professor of government at Smith College; S. Robert Lichter, a professor of communications at George Mason University; and Neil Nevitte, a political science professor at the University of Toronto.

As summarized in the June 24-26 New York Sun, the result of this study, confirmed in previous reports in the widely respected, nonpartisan weekly, the Chronicle of Higher Education, reveals that campus liberal professors “outnumber conservatives 5-to-1. It also concludes that conservatives get worse jobs than liberals.”

In some of these classrooms, conservative students are intimidated into silence, ignored or occasionally ridiculed. Accordingly, although belatedly, the June 23 “Statement of Academic Rights and Responsibilities,” led by the American Council on Education, may finally awaken college trustees and alumni to the degree of indoctrination instead of free inquiry that characterizes much of higher education, particularly in the more elite institutions.

As Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis advised, “Sunlight is the best disinfectant,” and this study, among other similar surveys, may stir parents to look more closely at how free the exchange of ideas actually is among faculty members, and thereby among students, at various colleges.

The release of this statement on behalf of true academic freedom is clearly a recognition, though not explicitly admitted, in the statement of the decline of intellectual diversity in higher education.Otherwise,it wouldn’t be necessary for the statement to emphasize that: “Colleges and universities should welcome intellectual pluralism and the free exchange of ideas. Such a commitment will inevitably encourage debate over complex and difficult issues about which individuals will disagree. Such discussions should be held in an environment characterized by openness, tolerance and civility.” If “openness, tolerance and civility” were not in short supply on too many campuses, that admonition would not have been required. Nor would this remarkable reminder from American Council on Education to faculty, provosts and presidents of colleges: “Academic decisions, including grades, should be based solely on considerations that are intellectually relevant to the subject matter under consideration. Neither students nor faculty should be disadvantaged or evaluated on the basis of their political opinions. Any member of the campus community who believes he or she has been treated unfairly on academic matters must have access to a clear institutional process by which his or her grievance can be addressed.”

It’s about time. Included in the impressive list of signers to this manifesto for freedom of thought in the nation’s citadels of advanced learning (largely ignored by newspapers and television) are, in addition to the American Council of Education, the American Association of University Professors, the Association of American Law Schools, the Association for Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges, the Council for Higher Education Accreditation and the Council of Independent Colleges.

So, what can and should be done to open the minds of faculties and students? I would think the clear answer is that college and university presidents and boards of trustees have to look deeply into how welcome their own campuses are to “intellectual pluralism and the free exchange of ideas.” The statement by the higher-education establishments is just words without accountability. Also, by doing more investigative reporting on freedom of thought on campuses, the media can also be of significant help to future students, faculty and the nation as a whole. We are engaged not only in a war against terrorism, but also in a war of ideas between those committed to freedom and advocates of its lethal opposite.

The prevalence of “political correctness” at many colleges and universities is far from over, but at least a beginning has been made to make freedom of thought part of the curriculum.

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The evil virus upon us (townhall.com, 051020)

by Suzanne Fields

A magazine cover story about postmodern life on the American college campus depicts three monkeys in cap and gown, covering their ears, eyes and mouth, a parody of the hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil caricature. But students at many colleges actually get quite the opposite. They’re required to hear, see, speak and study all about evil, as long as it’s the evil oppression of everybody in American society.

Parents, inoculate yourselves. It may be too late for your children.

There’s an emphasis on multicultural studies, and few campuses have escaped the disease — and it’s not yet Halloween. The title of a course taught to undergraduates in American studies at New York University, for example, is called “Intersections: Gender Race and Sexuality in U.S. History and Politics.” You might think this is a strange way to get at American history. The class spends a week analyzing the murder of Teena Brandon (aka Brandon Teena), a young woman who pretended to be a man, and includes the screening of the movie “Boys Don’t Cry,” the narrative version.

The following week students study the life and murder of Tupac Shakur, the “gangsta” rapper whose rough and raw lyrics glorified drugs, abusing women and the violence that finally took his life. There’s “Queer Lives and Culture,” “Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora,” and a discussion of the relationship of gender, race and war in Haiti through the lens of “Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism.” One teaching assistant of this course describes herself as an “anti-racist queer activist feminist.” That covers just about everything, except a year’s tuition at NYU, for which parents shell out $40,000.

Smith College, the elite school that once was only for women, and still is, sort of, has a different problem. About two-dozen women who arrived as female have become male, more or less. The Financial Times reports that some of the more traditional “girls in pearls” on campus think the new “guys” should transfer to a co-ed college. Smith has long been “gay friendly,” but now that girls have become “boys,” Smithies joke that the school motto is “Queer in a year or your money back.” It’s not a joke, and it costs $37,000 a year.

Somewhere Sophia Smith is spinning. The Massachusetts woman who left her fortune to create a college where women “could develop as fully as may be the powers of womanhood” did not have a third sex in mind. Once known for their dedication to academic rigor, Smith students voted to change the school constitution to purge all “gender-specific” language. No “she” and no “her,” but an all-purpose “student.” The Rev. L. Clark Seelye, the first president of Smith College, said that the study of English should produce clarity of thought and expression. Other seats of higher learning have gone farther, creating synthetic pronouns, using “hir” for “her” or “his,” and “ze” for “she” and “he.” You thought “herstory” for “history” was a joke.

Smith is not alone in disfiguring what passes for education. A popular introductory freshman course at the University of Pennsylvania deconstructs Herman Melville and other dead white males (if not white whales), seeking hidden meanings of homosexuality, pederasty and incest. Majors in the humanities are down, and why not? In “Binge: What Your College Student Won’t Tell You,” author Barrett Seaman finds lots of colleges that promote gay-ity. Vassar College has a “Homo Hop,” and the Queer Student Union at Williams College holds a “Queer Bash” with gay pornography, widely attended by straight students. Adrienne Rich, a lesbian poet, encourages young women to experiment with homosexuality and bisexuality.

An authentic liberal education promotes both character and understanding with a rigorous study of what Matthew Arnold called “the best that is known and thought in the world.” When dead white males like Thomas Jefferson and John Milton are replaced, or must compete with popular studies about transgendered males and newly minted homosexual heroes in classic novels, students are deprived of any trace of disciplined thought. They’re doubly vulnerable when at the same time they’re encouraged to indulge in undisciplined social experimentation without anchors of moral reference.

“Gender Studies, Ethnic Studies, Afro-American Studies, Women’s Studies, Gay, Lesbian and Transgender Studies,” writes Roger Kimball, author of “Tenured Radicals,” in New Criterion magazine, “are not the names of academic disciplines but political grievances. . . . Parents are alarmed, rightly so, at the spectacle of their children going off to college one year and coming back the next having jettisoned every moral, religious, social and political scruple they have been brought up to believe.” These studies inhibit debate, corrupt young minds and infect learning with a virus for which, like bird flu, there is not yet an antidote.

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Multiculturalism has betrayed the English, Archbishop says (Times Online, 051122)

St George’s Day should be celebrated and the English should reclaim their national identity and culture, Dr John Sentamu says, a week before his enthronement in York

BRITAIN’S first black Archbishop has made a powerful attack on multiculturalism, urging English people to reclaim their national identity.

The Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, said that too many people were embarrassed about being English. “Multiculturalism has seemed to imply, wrongly for me, let other cultures be allowed to express themselves but do not let the majority culture at all tell us its glories, its struggles, its joys, its pains,” he said.

He said that the failure of England to rediscover its culture afresh would lead only to greater political extremism.

The new Archbishop also strongly criticised the Terrorism Bill, showing that he is likely to be even more robust in his criticism of the Government than the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams.

Dr Sentamu has consistently denied speculation that his was a political appointment and, as a former judge in Uganda, his attack on counter-terrorism legislation carries particular weight. “The moment you make your laws so tough, even the most law abiding will say, this is a chance to break them,” Dr Sentamu said.

He called for the English to rediscover their cultural identity by properly marking celebrations such as St George’s Day on April 23. “I speak as a foreigner really. The English are somehow embarrassed about some of the good things they have done. They have done some terrible things but not all the Empire was a bad idea. Because the Empire has gone there is almost the sense in which there is not a big idea that drives this nation.”

The Ugandan-born Archbishop, who fled Idi Amin’s regime in 1974, said he would not be where he was today were it not for the British Empire and the English teachers and missionaries who worked in Africa.

Dr Sentamu was speaking to The Times before his enthronement as the Church’s new No 2 at York Minster on November 30. As the most senior black churchman, who during his time as a bishop in London acted as an adviser to the Stephen Lawrence inquiry that found institutional racism in the police, he received racist and abusive letters, some covered in human excrement, after his appointment was announced earlier this year.

But as a direct product himself of the British Empire, he intends to make mission and a passion for English culture, and the Christian roots of that culture, driving forces of the next decade or more that he will spend as primate of England’s northern province.

“What is it to be English? It is a very serious question,” he said. “I think we have not engaged with English culture as it has developed. When you ask a lot of people in this country, ‘What is English culture?’, they are very vague. It is a culture that whether we like it or not has given us parliamentary democracy. It is the mother of it. It is the mother of arguing that if you want a change of government, you vote them in or you vote them out.

“It is a place that has allowed reason to be at the heart of all these things, that has allowed genuine dissent without resort to violence, that has allowed all the fantastic music that we experience in our culture.”

Multiculturalism as a concept failed to convey the essence of what it meant to be English. “England is the culture I have lived in, I have loved . . . My teachers were English. As a boy growing up, that is the culture I knew.”

He disliked the word “tolerance” when used in reference, for example, to people of different cultures. “It seems to be the word tolerance is bad because it just means putting up with it,” he said. “I was raised in the spirit of magnanimity. That is a better word than tolerance. If you are magnanimous in your judgments on other people, there is a chance that I will recognise that you will help me in my struggle.”

He described English culture as rooted in Christianity and, in spite of attempts by secularists to marginalise it, the Church still had a central role to play. “I think the Church in many ways has to be like a midwife, bringing to birth possibilities of what is authentically very good in the English mind.”

He will work closely with Dr Williams, and disclosed the precise nature of that relationship.

“We come from a similar stable,” he said. “He is my Moses. I have chosen in that analogy to try and be a Jethro to him. Jethro was Moses’s father-in-law who was always very practical, making suggestions. In the end it was Moses who had to put them out [into practice].

“People say to me, ‘are you going to play second fiddle to the Archbishop of Canterbury?’ That is not helpful. This is going to be a partnership.”

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What flight? (townhall.com, 051124)

by Thomas Sowell

“The New White Flight” was the title of an eye-opening article in the November 20th issue of the Wall Street Journal. It was about a high school in Cupertino, California, where a growing Asian American student population is causing rising academic standards — and causing many white parents to withdraw their children from the school and some to move out of the community.

The school has some of the highest test scores in the state. But, although everybody is in favor of high academic standards in the abstract, not everyone is in favor of having to struggle to meet those standards.

One white mother who was taking her son to an after-school soccer game noticed all the Asian American parents arriving to take their children to an after-school study program. A few years of her son playing soccer while the Asian kids were hitting the books would be bound to create academic disparities.

The phrase “white flight” is completely misleading. All over the world and throughout history, groups have collected together with people like themselves, whether by race, income, education, religion, or any number of other characteristics. There is nothing unique when white people do it.

A century or so ago, when Polish immigrants began moving into various Detroit neighborhoods, blacks began moving out. The research of pioneering black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier showed long ago that Harlem and other black communities were internally divided, with people of different income, education, and behavior patterns living in distinctly different zones.

When Eastern European Jewish immigrants began arriving in the United States and some began moving into German Jewish neighborhoods in Chicago, the German Jews began moving out. Similar patterns have been found among all sorts of groups.

When blacks move into a neighborhood and whites move out, that is something visible to the naked eye but there is nothing unique about such “white flight.” The phrase is misleading for the same reason that saying white people have toenails would be misleading. It is true in itself but suggests something unique that is in fact common to human beings of all sorts.

It is not just in residential patterns that people sort themselves out in many ways. People tend to marry other people with similar IQs, even when they don’t know what those IQs are. They just tend to gravitate toward people whose levels of understanding are similar to their own.

Cliques form in all kinds of places for all kinds of reasons. Chess players, jazz fans, and gamblers tend to hang out with others who share their interests.

The fact that people sort themselves out in many ways is not usually a big problem — except to those people who cannot feel fulfilled unless they are telling other people what to do. Government programs to unsort people who have sorted themselves out have produced one social disaster after another.

The decades-long attempts to mix black and white school children through school busing produced no real educational benefits but much racial polarization and ill will. The same thing continues to be done in colleges in the name of “diversity” — and with the same bad results.

Among the most unconscionable attempts to unsort people who have sorted themselves out by behavior are government programs to relocate people into neighborhoods where they could not afford to live without subsidies. Often the people in those neighborhoods have sacrificed for years in order to be able to live where they could raise their children in decent surroundings and not have to live in fear of hoodlums — only to have the government import the bad neighbors and hoodlums they have tried so hard to escape.

Both kinds of people may be of the same race but that does not make the consequences any less painful or the resentments any less bitter. Blacks as well as whites have objected to having problem people thrust into their midst through housing subsidies or government housing projects being built in their neighborhoods.

Almost never do the social experimenters relocate dysfunctional and dangerous people into their own elite neighborhoods. They unsort other people’s neighborhoods and embitter other people’s lives.

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Dis-United Kingdom: Multiculturalism isn’t working. (Weekly Standard, 051125)

London

CONDESCENDING SUPERIORITY is a common British attitude towards the French, whose Gallic bureaucracy, artistic pretensions, and recent military record all serve as targets of ridicule. Now the recent wave of rioting across France, largely perpetrated by Muslim youths, has offered new scope to this smugness. Since the conflict began, the British media have been full of sneers about racial problems in French society, which supposedly has been far less successful than Britain in integrating migrant communities.

But this complacency could hardly be less justified. As an Irish-born writer who lives in both France and the United Kingdom, I believe that the British approach to race relations has been disastrous, fostering disunity, tension, and ethnic strife on a much greater scale than anything that has occurred in France. While cars have been torched in large numbers in French cities, Britain has experienced murderous terrorist outrages committed by Muslim men who were born and bred in England. Thankfully, there was only one fatality in the French disturbances. In the London bombings in July, 52 people were killed and over 700 injured.

Nor has Britain been free of serious race riots. Just before the trouble began in Paris, there were several nights of street fighting between Asian and African-Caribbean gangs in Birmingham, England’s second largest city. Two people were killed. And this incident followed years of racial unrest in decaying industrial towns in the north of England, such as Burnley and Bradford, where there are large, radicalized Muslim populations, though the level of disorder is always downplayed by the political establishment and media, anxious not to undermine carefully manufactured images of multiethnic harmony.

In truth, Britain is now a deeply divided land, where suspicion, intolerance, and aggression cast their shadow over urban areas. Only the other day, the government revealed that, in the last twelve months, the number of prosecutions for racial hate crimes had risen by 30%. In a courageous recent speech, Trevor Phillips, a black broadcaster who now serves as the chairman of Britain’s Commission for Racial Equality, warned that the country is “sleepwalking towards segregation,” with society ever more fragmented by ethnicity and religion. Using remarkably frank language, Phillips added that parts of some cities will soon be “black holes into which no one goes without fear.”

This sorry situation has been created by a deliberate act of public policy. For the last three decades, in response to waves of mass immigration, the civic institutions of Britain have eagerly implemented the ideology of multiculturalism. Instead of promoting a cohesive British identity, they have encouraged immigrant communities to cling to the customs, traditions, and language of their countries of origin. The emphasis is on upholding ethnic and cultural differences rather than achieving assimilation. This is in stark contrast to France, which has taken a color-blind approach to immigration, with newcomers expected to adapt to the culture of the host nation. The recently imposed ban on Muslim girls’ wearing the hijab or headscarf in schools is a classic example of the French model.

Britain has moved in exactly the opposite direction. Soon after the French hijab ban was implemented, a British Muslim teenager brought a successful legal action to win the right to wear in school full Islamic dress from head to toe. She was represented in her court case by Cherie Blair, the barrister wife of the prime minister. And Mrs. Blair’s action was typical of the spirit of the Labour-led British ruling class, which has elevated dogmatic multiculturalism into a principle of governance.

Racial segregation is woven into the fabric of British public services. Indeed, under the latest race relations legislation, all public authorities have a statutory duty to promote cultural diversity. So inner city local councils and hospitals in urban areas now print all their public documentation in ethnic minority languages, including Kosovan, Hindi, Greek, Swahili, and Turkish, while many provide extensive interpreting services. One doctor who works in east London told me of her outrage at being sent to take a course in Bengali so she could communicate more effectively with her patients.

Bilingualism is common in urban schools, given that almost 12% of children have a first language other than English. London is now the most linguistically diverse city in the world, with more than 300 languages spoken by pupils, ranging from Punjabi and Nigerian Yoruba to Polish and Tamil. In addition, the government now provides funds to Muslims to set up their own schools, in which there is a predominantly Islamic ethos, imams are involved in teaching, and Arabic is learned for the study of the Koran. At present there are just five such Muslim state schools, but the government has announced plans to take the number to 150, a move that smacks of appeasement towards Islamic separatism. The police have also been infected with this spirit. In recruitment in London, there is an open bias towards applicants who speak “a community language.” And in the Midlands city of Nottingham, the July bombings prompted the chief constable to order his officers to wear green ribbons “to show their solidarity with the Muslim community.”

Thanks to multiculturalism, the provision of public housing, the arts, broadcasting, and community grants is now divided on racial lines. The BBC, the main state broadcaster, has its own Asian network providing news and features inside the U.K. in Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi, and Gujarati. There are now more than 140 housing associations in England catering to ethnic minorities; one of them, the Aashyana in Bristol, provides special apartments for Muslims with the toilets facing away from Mecca. More than 10% of the bodies funded by the Arts Council, such as theaters and dance companies, describe themselves as black or Asian organizations. “British culture is not a single entity. We should rightly speak of British cultures,” says the Arts Council.

Yet the diversity enthusiasts want to celebrate every culture but their own. In the self-flagellating climate of modern Britain, the nation’s traditions are increasingly regarded as reactionary and prejudiced. Britishness has “systematic, largely unspoken racial connotations,” declared the government’s Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain. The commission’s report, published in 2000, described the United Kingdom as “a community of communities” and called for British history to be “revised, rethought or jettisoned.” The official mood of self-loathing, epitomized by the terror of giving offense to any ethnic group, has become even more pervasive in the last five years. In one typical instance, the English inspector of prisons stated that wardens should not wear badges or tie pins with the red cross of St. George, England’s national flag, because this could be “misinterpreted as a racist symbol.”

Another extreme episode that was much discussed in the media five years ago illustrates how multiculturalism can undermine the management of social services. At Haringey Council in north London in February 2000, an 8-year-old child from Ivory Coast, Victoria Climbie, died after suffering a catalogue of cruelty, beatings, and neglect by her great-aunt, Marie-Thérèse Kouao, who claimed that Victoria was possessed by the devil. Social workers and the police, alerted repeatedly to Victoria’s plight, were reluctant to intervene because they did not want to appear culturally insensitive to Kouao’s beliefs or methods of discipline. Indeed, the prevailing mood in the Haringey social work office was one of perverted antiracism, where the woefully incompetent casework manager, Carole Baptiste, held meetings in the dark to discuss African witchcraft and spent much of her time talking about oppression of black women. “It is hard to say how mad it was,” recalled one black social worker. “There were some black staff members who would not speak to white people. Aggressive racial politics permeated the office.”

The English patriot and maverick socialist George Orwell wrote in 1941, “England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their nationality. In left-wing circles, it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution.” More than 60 years later, multiculturalism has provided the ideal vehicle for the left, which now predominates in civic Britain, to exercise its destructive influence. The neurotic official obsession with the politics of racial identity has destroyed any shared sense of national belonging. As the Asian writer Kenan Malik has put it, “The problem is not that ethnic minorities are alienated from a concept of Britishness but that there is today no source of Britishness from which anyone—black or white—can draw inspiration.”

Britain is fast replacing nationhood with a hierarchy of victimhood, with different ethnic groups living in conflict, each trumpeting its own sense of grievance. Age-old liberties, like freedom of speech, are disappearing; a play in Birmingham was recently closed down because a mob of Sikhs threatened to destroy the theater, claiming to be offended by the content of the production. Meanwhile, the endless British accommodation of Islamic extremism, in the name of racial tolerance, has allowed terrorism to flourish in our midst. According to one recent survey, 13% of British Muslims support home-grown terrorism, a terrifying thought given that there are 1.6 million Muslims in Britain.

Multiculturalism is not the road that France should go down. Bomb-scarred Britain proves that integration is not achieved by exacerbating racial division and institutional self-hatred.

Leo McKinstry writes regularly for the Daily Mail, Sunday Telegraph, and Spectator. His biography of Lord Rosebery was published in Britain earlier this year.

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The Q-Word & American Realities: You’re either for meritocracy or you’re not. (National Review Online, 051201)

One of the dirtiest words in the field of public policy is “quotas.” I have never met an elected official or anyone running for public office — regardless of political affiliation — who proclaims support for quotas.

Even when they hide behind the fig leaf of “diversity” and “affirmative action,” which are the functional equivalents of quotas, virtually all political figures regard the characterization of being a supporter of quotas as “fightin’ words.”

Recently, the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative (MCRI) — a ballot proposition patterned after California’s Proposition 209 — won a court battle to be included on Michigan’s Election Day 2006 ballot. MCRI would install language in the Michigan constitution preventing “the state from discriminating against, or granting preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, color, gender, ethnicity or national origin in public employment, public education, or public contracting.”

According to the latest poll, MCRI enjoys favorable support from over 70% of likely Michigan voters. The support among Republicans is over 80%. This is the initiative that Al Sharpton assailed in his political commentary at the recent funeral services of Rosa Parks.

Well, it seems that Reverend Al is not alone in his opposition to this measure. A few Republican candidates for high office in Michigan also announced their opposition to MCRI the day the court handed down its ballot decision — although they had waited for over two years before expressing a position.

First, Michigan Republican gubernatorial hopeful Dick DeVos, a prominent conservative, had this to say:

I do not support this ballot initiative. Like most people in Michigan, I do not favor quotas. With our terrible job situation, we must look for ways to unify and provide equal opportunity for all people in our state — especially improving educational opportunities for all children — and must not distract our focus from the tough issues we face to make our state great again.

Within hours, a leading Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate, Keith Butler, joined the ranks of preference supporters by announcing:

I do not support quotas or set aside programs for anyone. However, after much study of this issue, I have come to the conclusion that I cannot support Ward Connerly’s proposal. I have come to the conclusion that his proposal goes to [sic] far and has hidden unintended consequence [sic].

Let’s be clear, the U.S. Supreme Court in its decisions concerning the University of Michigan outlawed the use of added points for minority applicants. Regarding the University of Michigan Law School, the U.S. Supreme Court said that an applicant’s life circumstances could be evaluated in determining admissions. President George Bush praised the decision saying, “I applaud the Supreme Court for recognizing the value of diversity on our Nation’s campuses. Diversity is one of America’s greatest strengths.” I agree with President Bush and the U.S. Supreme Court.

Butler continued:

This proposal is wrong for Michigan. We still live in a society where some among us still need assistance. We do not need quotas or set-asides for anyone, but is it wrong to encourage young girls to take math and science courses? Is it wrong to support a program that encourages young black men to go to college? Is it wrong to encourage single mothers to complete their education? I don’t believe it is.

In addition to either deliberately or unwittingly misrepresenting the purpose of MCRI, Butler engaged in a Clintonian rhetorical two-step that clearly seeks to have it both ways: oppose quotas while supporting their functional equivalent — “diversity.” Moreover, neither candidate seems to evidence any genuine understanding of why a quota system is so objectionable to the American way of life.

(I might also add that, while I continue to support our president, on the issue of race preferences I do not consider him or the U.S. Supreme Court to be good role models on the issue of race preferences and quotas.)

DeVos certainly must know that a strong economy depends on creative entrepreneurs and industrialists who take their ideas and capital to the marketplace and then rely on the principle of merit to propel their investments into successful ventures.

There is not one major American success throughout our history that can be placed at the doorstep of “diversity.” All that we are as a nation we owe to merit and individual enterprise. A quota system is the antithesis of a meritocracy. Quotas seek to build a workforce, a student body, a team, that “looks like America,” or that “reflects the ethnic and racial composition of the community.” An enterprise or venue based on merit simply tries to be the best that it can be with nary a thought given to the physical or ancestral characteristics of those involved.

A quota is not just a fixed number. It is the effort to engineer the outcome of a competitive process and to achieve proportionality based on group identity. Quotas rely on the principle of group representation. “Critical mass” and “diversity” are nothing more than euphemisms for the word “quotas.” Any effort to subordinate the operation of the meritocratic principle is an effort to achieve a quota.

Although there is universal rhetorical rejection of quotas, there is ample reason to believe that this expressed outrage is little more than political verbiage. To substantiate this view, we need look no further than the nomination of Harriett Miers to the Supreme Court.

There can be little doubt that the president felt obliged to fill the vacancy that existed on the Supreme Court with a female, and that Miers’s primary qualification was her gender. This was a vacancy that had a huge sign with the words “males need not apply.” Moreover, I believe it was understood that a white male would have about as much chance of being nominated and confirmed as a camel would have in navigating the eye of a needle. Were it not for the lack of at least a semblance of conservatism in her published background and qualifications, it is likely that Miers would now be Justice Miers.

The tragedy evidenced by the Harriet Miers nomination is that so many of us were content to accept the underlying quota reality that the nomination represented. As a nation, our ideological senses have been numbed by the constant blather about “diversity.” While we may not feel the pain through our numbness, it is there nonetheless, in the form of an educational system that has been dumbed down in its curriculum and its standards, a workforce that is layered with “affirmative action” programs and “diversity” officers and is not as productive as it otherwise might be, and a contracting system that is often fraudulent due to its set-asides and gender preferences.

America dodged a bullet when Harriet Miers withdrew her name. But the gun remains pointed at our collective heads in every sphere of American life. Whether it is a student body, a Supreme Court, an athletic team, or a private board, any organization or entity that is constituted around the quota mindset will not be the best that it otherwise could be — and the nation suffers because of this.

It is the height of hypocrisy for anyone to profess his belief in the marketplace or in Martin Luther King Jr.’s content-of-character guidance, but then to hide behind the specious rationale of “hidden unintended consequences” as the basis for opposition to initiatives such as Proposition 209 and the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative.

If we are to cleanse our nation of this quota poison, it is critical that we consciously grab hold of the principle of merit and embrace a single standard for all in the private, public, nonprofit, and philanthropic sectors of our society.

— Ward Connerly is founder and chairman of the American Civil Rights Institute and a Bradley Prize recipient..

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US diversity (WorldNetDaily, 060123)

	1920	1970	2004
Foreign Born	13.2%	4.7%	12%
White	89.7%	83.5%	67.4%
Black	9.9	11.1	12.2
Hispanic	—	4.5	14.1
Asian	0.2	0.8	4.1
Other	0.2	0.1	2.2

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The high court, race and education (Washington Times, 060607)

On Monday, the Supreme Court announced it would hear two cases that will have a profound impact on the use of race in admissions to schools across the country. The first case, Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education, is a challenge to a Kentucky school district’s policy of requiring between 15% and 50% black enrollment in order to maintain a prescribed racial balance. The other case, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, challenges a policy of using a racial guideline of 60% minority, 40% white when deciding which students to admit to an already filled school. Both cases were brought by parents whose children were excluded from their schools of choice because of the color of their skin.

The last Supreme Court rulings on the use of racial preferences in education, and the basis for the lower court rulings in both of these two cases, were the 2003 challenges to the University of Michigan affirmative action policies that resulted in underrepresented but lesser-qualified applicants receiving preferential treatment in admissions. While the court in Grutter v. Bollinger decided that racial diversity produces significant educational benefits, and presents a “compelling interest” to higher education, it nevertheless struck down the rigid and mechanical point system for undergraduate admission. That split provides the framework on which the policy in both cases was upheld. As the U.S. District Court in Kentucky noted, “the requirement that any use of race in a higher education admissions plan must further a compelling governmental interest and must be narrowly tailored to meet that interest.” Lower courts in both cases have ruled that the policies satisfied both requirements.

Working from the precedent established in its Michigan rulings, the Supreme Court must consider how the precedent applies to the distinctly different environments of kindergarten through high school, and the issue of whether such fixed percentages, which smack of the mechanical nature of the University of Michigan point system, are too broad to be considered “narrowly tailored.” The implications of this decision will make these two of the most important cases the Roberts court will hear this fall.

Three unusual factors surround the Supreme Court’s decision to hear the cases. The first is that there was no split in rulings from the lower courts. Second, the court considered both cases multiple times — six times for the Seattle case and seven for the Kentucky case — before accepting. And third, the court declined to hear a very similar case six months ago, before Samuel Alito joined the court. It’s not clear whether these circumstances can be interpreted as a more conservative court’s desire to overturn the lower court rulings, and trying to guess what the Supreme Court will do is always a fool’s errand. But both Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Alito strongly opposed the use of race as a factor in admission when they worked in the Reagan administration.

We hope they still do. With Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the swing vote in Grutter v. Bollinger, now retired, Justices Roberts and Alito may be poised to lead the court away from the race-based admissions policies that it enshrined in 2003.

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Discrimination alive and well (townhall.com, 061018)

By Linda Chavez

Racial discrimination is alive and well in American higher education, but it’s not the sort intended to exclude racial and ethnic minorities, unless they happen to be Asian.

For a decade now, my Center for Equal Opportunity has documented the double standards used by colleges and universities in giving preference in admission to blacks and Hispanics while disfavoring better qualified whites and Asians.

In July 2003, the Supreme Court struck down the University of Michigan’s undergraduate affirmative action admissions program, which favored blacks and, to a lesser extent, Hispanics. But three new CEO studies released this week show that preferences, for blacks especially, have gotten worse in subsequent years. And these preferences extend to law and medical school admissions as well.

In 2003, the Supreme Court handed down two decisions on Michigan’s admissions programs. In Gratz v. Bollinger, the Court ruled that the university’s undergraduate program, which awarded extra points on the basis of race or ethnicity, was unconstitutional. In Grutter v. Bollinger, which examined the law school’s admissions procedures, the Court upheld the school’s program, which it contended took race into account but did not mechanically award specific points for race or ethnicity.

Even in the Grutter decision, however, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who wrote the 5-4 majority opinion, said, “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary.” But the evidence from our studies shows the university is not on a path to eliminating preferences in either its undergraduate or graduate programs.

CEO looked at undergraduate, law school and medical school admissions at UM for 1999, 2003, 2004 and 2005, with information provided by the university under a freedom of information request. In all years and at all levels, the University of Michigan routinely admitted blacks and Hispanics with lower test scores and grades than whites or Asians — and the differences were large.

In 2005, for example, the combined median SAT scores for blacks were 190 points lower (on a scale of 1600) than whites and 240 points lower than Asians. Similarly, blacks trailed whites in high school grade point averages by .5 and Asians by .4 (out of a potential 4.0). Over all the years analyzed, 8,000 whites, Asians and Hispanics were rejected who had higher grades and test scores than the median black admittee, including nearly 2,700 such students in 2005 alone.

The odds favoring black undergraduate admittees over whites with the same SAT scores in 2005 were 70 to 1, and 46 to 1 for Hispanics. And such preferences are not limited to undergraduate admissions, which arguably reflect greater disparities in opportunities among racial and ethnic minorities who may have attended poorer performing public schools. Blacks and, to a lesser extent, Hispanics also enjoy preferences in law and medical school admissions.

For example, odds ratios favoring black law school applicants over whites with the same test scores, grades, sex, Michigan residency and alumni connections were 36 to 1 in 1999, though they dropped to a still high 18 to 1 in 2005. For Hispanics, the odds ratios were 4 to 1 in 1999, 2 to 1 in 2003, and more than 3 to 1 in 2004 and 2005.

Perhaps the most disheartening evidence in the CEO studies, however, was that racial preferences don’t even help the intended beneficiaries succeed in college. Based on college GPAs, Hispanics generally did less well than whites or Asians, though the best performing Hispanics (those whose grades put them at the 75th percentile) did about as well as their white and Asian counterparts in one year, 1999.

But blacks, who were awarded the greatest degree of preference in admission, performed more poorly than other groups across the board, with those blacks whose grades put them at the 75th percentile for their racial group performing below the 25th percentile for whites. And both blacks and Hispanics were far more likely to be put on academic probation during their undergraduate career.

But voters in Michigan will have a chance to put a stop to these pernicious practices on Nov. 7 by voting for the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, which bans universities from using race or ethnicity to discriminate against or give preference to any individual. A similar initiative was enacted in California in 1996, and the result has made admissions fairer to everyone, including blacks and Hispanics who can now be confident they are being admitted on merit rather than on the color of their skin.

The full CEO study is available online at www.ceousa.org

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The Big Lie of Diversity: Elite audacity and the MCRI. (National Review Online, 061114)

By Peter Kirsanow

When it comes to racial preferences, elites seem to believe that their opinions matter more than the democratically expressed will of the majority. Within hours after the people of the state of Michigan rendered a pulverizing blow to state-sponsored racial discrimination, the elites, who know better how to socially engineer society than do the benighted natives of that state, threw down the gauntlet: preferences now, preferences forever.

The day after Michigan voters passed Proposal 2 — also known as the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative (MCRI) — banning state-sponsored racial, ethnic, and gender preferences, University of Michigan President Mary Sue Coleman issued a statement impressive for its obstinacy and condescension. She asserted that the University of Michigan “will immediately begin exploring legal action” to overturn the proposition that the voters passed 58% to 42%.

Opponents of racial discrimination, particularly black and Hispanic students, should pray that the University of Michigan litigates, because if the school does go to court, the great emperor of campus diversity will finally be revealed as having no clothes: Not one selective university in the country (save, perhaps, for the service academies) that employs racial preferences in admissions can achieve its diversity goals and still comply with the Supreme Court’s standards in Grutter v. Bollinger. Moreover, not one school will be able to adduce evidence that their version of diversity produces objectively measurable educational benefits.

The preferences given to preferred minorities in college admissions are so powerful that they violate the Supreme Court’s requirement that race not dominate admissions criteria. For example, before Grutter was issued in 2003, University of Texas law professor Lino Graglia noted that the median GPA and LSAT percentiles for admitees to the country’s elite law schools are 3.8 and 98 respectively. Fewer than 20 black law-school applicants in the entire country met those standards. That means that the University of Michigan Law School alone, which has about thirty black law students in each entering class, could admit all of the black students at the median for elite law schools (with ten seats still left to fill), leaving every other top law school in the country with no choice but to admit black students well below the median if it is to reach its diversity goals.

As bad as those figures are, a study released just a few weeks ago by the Center for Equal Opportunity regarding the University of Michigan’s current admissions policies (and using data furnished by the university) shows that the school’s racial preferences have gotten even more severe since Grutter. Given that they can no longer count on a Justice O’Connor to rescue their absurdly unbalanced admissions program, the University of Michigan’s administrators may want to reconsider whether it is wise to raise legal issues that could result in the elimination of racial preferences at every college campus in the country.

Before the university’s administrators expend vast funds trying to overturn Proposal 2, they should at least explain to students, the voters, and taxpayers why the school seeks to perpetuate a program that does manifest and considerable harm to its purported beneficiaries.

Why is it, for example, that the University of Michigan and other selective schools continue to promote racially discriminatory admissions policies that lead to greater academic failure among black and Hispanic students than what results from racially neutral policies? Why do they extol policies that suppress black and Hispanic graduation rates? Is the University of Michigan’s mission to educate and graduate students or is it to placate racial bean counters?

The continued defense of racial discrimination in admissions is no longer contrary just to the principle of equal treatment, but to empirical evidence as well. Perhaps twenty years ago academic elites could hide behind the veil of uninformed good intentions to justify racial preferences; today, hard evidence continues to mount demonstrating that racial preferences have a devastating impact on preferred minorities. Why didn’t President Coleman mention in her address the myriad studies showing that the “benefits of diversity” are, at best, negligible and most likely illusory? Don’t academic elites think that black and Hispanic students should know about (to cite but one example) the studies by UCLA law professor Richard Sander showing that because of the mismatch effect caused by affirmative action (i.e., under-qualified minorities being admitted to schools at which they have difficulty competing) half of black law students cluster at the bottom 10% of their respective law-school classes? Would college administrators continue to mouth platitudes about affirmative action if their students knew that preferential admissions cause black law students to flunk out at two-and-a-half times the rate of whites? Or that black law students are six times less likely to pass the bar? Or that half of black law students never become lawyers?

These aren’t the only questions about affirmative action that academic elites strenuously avoid. They also fail to tell Asian students that many, if not most, admissions offices discriminate against Asian applicants in a manner resembling the Jewish quotas of the 1950s. How many Asian students know that their odds of being admitted at selective schools are 200 times worse than those of a similarly qualified black or Hispanic applicant?

In defending affirmative action, President Coleman stated that she “will not allow this university to go down the path of mediocrity.” Yet affirmative action programs are a big reason why remedial programs are proliferating on college campuses. Maybe it’s not the case at the University of Michigan, but at some schools half of all black and Hispanic students require remedial training in subjects they should’ve learned in high school or even middle school.

Hate groups would be hard-pressed to come up with a more insidious plan to retard black and Hispanic advancement. It would be even harder for them to keep students ignorant about the effects of the plan. But for elites, it’s a piece of cake.

— Peter Kirsanow is a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. He is also a member of the National Labor Relations Board. These comments do not necessarily reflect the positions of either organization.

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Race preferences defeated in Michigan (Townhall.com, 061114)

By La Shawn Barber

If you thought the turbulent Civil Rights Movement – culminating in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 – ended skin color discrimination, you were mistaken.

Half a century ago, America faced a moral and legal struggle to end government-mandated preferential treatment based on race. Half a century later, America faces a moral and legal struggle to end government-mandated preferential treatment based on race.

Our government still treats people differently based on the color of their skin. This time around, minorities (Asians excluded) benefit from unconstitutional race-based programs. So-called equal opportunity policies in federal, state, and local agencies across the country are nothing more than thinly veiled race preferences.

In the last 10 years, however, at least three states have done away with discriminatory programs. In 1996, Californians voted YES on Proposition 209, which amended the state constitution to bar public institutions from discriminating on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin by 54%. In 1998, voters in Washington State passed a similar measure by 58%.

On November 7, 2006, 58% of voters in Michigan said YES to Proposal 2, which bars the state from treating its citizens differently based on race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin.

Groups like the hilariously named Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration and Immigrant Rights and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary (BAMN) tried to defeat the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative (MCRI) every step of the way.

Two years ago, BAMN and other groups challenged the legality of the petition to get MCRI on the ballot. A Michigan circuit court ruled that the petition language was misleading and should not have been approved, but a Court of Appeals panel disagreed, unanimously affirming the legality of the petition language. The case went to the Michigan Supreme Court, which declined to hear it. As a result, MCRI appeared on the ballot as Proposal 2, and the people of Michigan decided that government-backed discrimination had seen its final days.

Some were shocked, of course, including University of Michigan president Mary Sue Coleman. In a meandering post-election speech, she expressed disappointment that voters rejected the government’s use of race preferences and vowed not to allow California’s “failed experiment that has dramatically weakened the diversity of the state’s most selective universities” to “take seed here at Michigan.”

This woman, a state employee at a state institution subject to the will of the people of the state, is barking mad and ill-informed.

Regarding California’s “failed experiment,” minority enrollment and graduation rates have improved since that state banned race preferences. Eryn Hadley of the Pacific Legal Foundation found that the black graduation rate of the freshman class entering UC Berkley in fall 1998 – post-Proposition 209 – increased 6.5%. At UC San Diego, the average freshman GPAs for minorities “all but converged with the GPAs of white and Asian students, just one year after Proposition 209 was implemented.”

In other words, when admission is based on academic qualifications rather than skin color, Hadley contends, black students are capable of competing with whites and Asians.

Skin-color obsessed, race-baiting, and will of the people-hating folks like Coleman couldn’t care less if black admittees are academically underqualified or unprepared to do the work. As long as minority admission rates are impressive on paper (Asians excluded) and brown faces adorn the university’s web sites and admissions brochures, liberals get to feel good about themselves.

And America’s moral and legal struggle continues…

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The End of Affirmative Action (Townhall.com, 061114)

By Mike S. Adams

For years, people have asked me why I switched from being a left-wing Democrat to a right-wing Republican. When I’m not in the mood to talk, I give a one-word response: reality. When I’m feeling more verbose, I give a two-word response: affirmative action.

Affirmative action in theory bears no resemblance to affirmative action in reality. The theory part was taught to me as a doctoral student in a sociology department in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Most of the academic rhetoric focused on what affirmative action isn’t.

But sometimes my professors would calm lingering doubts by saying what affirmative action is; namely, that it is both temporary and a tie-breaker. Those are really the only affirmative statements I’ve ever heard about affirmative action.

But then I graduated from college and finally had an opportunity to experience affirmative action in reality. Those early experiences, like the later ones, were uniformly negative.

As a young Ph.D. student, I was told by a department chair at Memphis State (now the University of Memphis) that, due to race, I had no chance in a head-to-head contest with the only other interviewee, a black male. He was honest enough to say that they were under too much pressure from human resources to give me a fair shake.

So I withdrew from that interview only to learn a year later that I couldn’t fully escape the overt racial discrimination of affirmative action. In my first informal recruitment meeting as a professor in the University of North Carolina system, I listened to a social worker object to an applicant on the grounds that he was a “little too white male.”

Of course, it should come as no surprise that people engage in racial discrimination in hiring when they are specifically asked to do so by human resources. But what is surprising about affirmative action is the extent to which it encourages discrimination along the lines of other variables not classified as “allowable” under official policies.

I have simply lost count of the number of times over the years that my colleagues have brought factors such as political affiliation and religion into discussions of job applicants.

Objections such as “He’s too religious” or “He’s too much of a family man” or “Her husband plays too dominant a role in their marriage” are simply indefensible. And it is worth asking whether such criteria would be so casually considered if human resources did not open a Pandora’s box by deeming some discrimination to be an “acceptable” means to a desirable end.

But the discussion of affirmative action should by no means focus on the bad results it produces for white males like me. The real tragedy is its negative impact on the groups it purports to help. The effect is one I describe with a phrase called the “Reverse Roger Bannister Effect.”

When Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile in 1954, a whole class of people — not a race but those who run them — realized for the first time that a seemingly insurmountable goal could be achieved. So, naturally, others started breaking the four-minute barrier left and right just as soon as the bar of achievement was raised by Bannister.

That is precisely the opposite of what is happening with affirmative action. By lowering the bar and (in the short-term) making things easier for minorities, we guarantee persistent gaps in achievement. President Bush calls this the “soft bigotry” of low expectations. I prefer to call it the “hard reality” of low expectations.

Affirmative action is also an embarrassment for minorities who do not need or want to be measured by a lower standard. A black female student I taught in 1993 summed it up best by saying that although she had been admitted to college on the basis of outstanding grades and test scores, no one believed her. Whites just assumed she was there because of affirmative action. Once a class of people is given credit for something its members did not achieve, individuals in that class forfeit credit for the things they actually did.

I also look back on certain experiences and realize that affirmative action degrades whole institutions, not just individuals.

Twice, our department has flown in a white candidate under the mistaken belief that he or she was black. But we cannot accuse these candidates of lying about their race just to get an interview. In fact, we lie to them when we print “The UNC system does not discriminate on the basis of race” on every application. And I wonder how we still have the moral authority to punish students who plagiarize or cheat.

But maybe widespread lying is the best solution to the problem of affirmative action. If our students would all wake up one day and decide to start checking the box for “African American” on every university form, our affirmative action programs would break down altogether. Then maybe we could replace “race consciousness” with the colorblindness Martin Luther King envisioned.

My idea of lying about race to get ahead is really not original. In fact, it’s one I plagiarized from Professor Ward Churchill.

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Racism By Any Other Name: Not nice. (National Review Online, 061115)

By Jonah Goldberg

It’s time to admit that “diversity” is code for racism. If it makes you feel better, we can call it “nice” racism or “well-intentioned” racism or “racism that’s good for you.” Except that’s the rub: It’s racism that may be good for you if “you” are a diversity guru, a rich white liberal, a college administrator or one of sundry other types. But the question of whether diversity is good for “them” is a different question altogether, and much more difficult to answer.

If by “them” you mean minorities such as Jews, Chinese Americans, Indian Americans and other people of Asian descent, then the ongoing national obsession with diversity probably isn’t good. Indeed, that’s why Jian Li, a freshman at Yale, filed a civil-rights complaint against Princeton University for rejecting him. Li had nigh-upon perfect test scores and grades, yet Princeton turned him down. He’ll probably get nowhere with his complaint — he did get into Yale after all — but it shines a light on an uncomfortable reality.

“Theoretically, affirmative action is supposed to take spots away from white applicants and redistribute them to underrepresented minorities,” Li told the Daily Princetonian. “What’s happening is one segment of the minority population is losing places to another segment of minorities, namely Asians to underrepresented minorities.”

Li points to a study conducted by two Princeton academics last year which concluded that if you got rid of racial preferences in higher education, the number of whites admitted to schools would remain fairly constant. However, without racial preferences, Asians would take roughly 80% of the positions now allotted to Hispanic and black students.

In other words, there is a quota — though none dare call it that — keeping Asians out of elite schools in numbers disproportionate to their merit. This is the same sort of quota once used to keep Jews out of the Ivy League — not because of their lack of qualifications, but because having too many Jews would change the “feel” of, say, Harvard or Yale. Today, it’s the same thing, only we’ve given that feeling a name: diversity.

The greater irony is that it is far from clear that diversity is good for black students either. Peter Kirsanow, a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, notes that there is now ample empirical data showing that the supposed benefits of diversity in education are fleeting when real and often are simply nonexistent. Black students admitted to universities above their skill level often do poorly and fail to graduate in high numbers. UCLA law professor Richard Sander found that nearly half of black law students reside in the bottom ten percent of their law-school classes. If they went to schools one notch down, they might do far better.

Kirsanow asks: “Would college administrators continue to mouth platitudes about affirmative action if their students knew that preferential admissions cause black law students to flunk out at two-and-a-half times the rate of whites? Or that black law students are six times less likely to pass the bar? Or that half of black law students never become lawyers?”

But all this misses the point. Today’s diversity doctrine was contrived as a means of making racial preferences permanent. After all, affirmative action was intended as a temporary remedy for the tragic mistreatment of blacks. But as affirmative action drifted into racial preferences, it became constitutionally suspect because racial preferences are by definition discriminatory. If I give extra credit to Joe because he’s black, I’m making things just that much harder for Tom because he’s white.

The brilliance of the diversity doctrine is that it does an end-run around all of this by saying that diversity isn’t so much about helping the underprivileged, it’s about providing a rich educational experience for everyone.

When the University of Michigan’s admissions policies were being reviewed by the Supreme Court, former school president Lee Bollinger explained that diversity was as “as essential as the study of the Middle Ages, of international politics and of Shakespeare” because exposure to people of different hues lies at the core of the educational experience. That’s another way of saying that racial preferences are forever, just like the timeless works of the immortal bard. That business about redressing past discrimination against blacks is no longer the name of the game.

It’s difficult to put into words how condescending this is in that it renders black students into props, show-and-tell objects for the other kids’ educational benefit.

There was a time when condescension, discrimination, arrogant social engineering along racial lines and the like were dubbed racism. And, to paraphrase Shakespeare, racism by any other name still stinks.

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Beyond the veil (National Post, 061121)

The Islamic face veil has become the most vivid symbol of the struggle to reconcile multiculturalism with feminism. In a two-part series, the Post examines the state of Muslim women in Canada, from what propels the decision to don the head covering, to the push for more inclusive prayer services.

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When his daughter’s primary school held its annual Eid celebration, Gregory Barsoski sat down next to a Muslim mother and struck up a conversation.

The room was packed for the annual potluck feast for Muslims and non-Muslims in the school community, so he grabbed the only seats available, eager to meet his neighbours from Toronto’s diverse Wilkinson School.

“I was being very friendly with her and I think she wanted to talk, but she felt uncomfortable talking,” Mr. Barsoski recalled.

Whether out of shyness or cultural propriety, the Muslim mother covered her face with her veil mid-discussion. “It was difficult to talk to her after that,” he said. “The conversation just kind of died.”

The encounter illustrates the gulf of misunderstanding that exists when even the most open-minded and well-meaning reach out across the cultural divide.

Niqab, the full-face veil, has been singled out for upsetting the delicate balance Western societies face as they seek to protect their cultures while championing diversity. The Dutch Cabinet yesterday proposed legislation to ban the burqa; other nations wrestle with whether the veil is a symbol of liberty or a distasteful perversion of it.

In Canada, where multiculturalism is government policy, considering the boundaries of tolerance and diversity is particularly fraught. It is the focus of two conferences this weekend: in Vancouver, the Trudeau Foundation considers “Muslims in Western Societies,” including a debate specifically about women; in Ottawa, the Canadian Council of Muslim Women is convening, “Muslim Women at a Crossroads: From Integration to Segregation.”

A poll commissioned by the Trudeau Foundation in preparation for its conference reveals the quintessentially Canadian quandary: While 75% of those surveyed felt Muslims contribute positively to Canadian society and more than half felt ethnic minorities should be free to maintain cultural and religious traditions, a striking 81% said they should conform to mainstream beliefs and practices when it comes to women’s issues.

“Canada is a tolerant and accepting society, accepting diversity, however there’s a limit,” said Frederick Lowy, who heads the Montreal-based foundation. “There’s a point beyond which Canadians ... will not feel comfortable with regard to value clashes. So where is that point?”

The passionate reaction on either side of the veiling issue delivers two polarized perspectives on where that limit lies. There are those, like Walter Eibisberger, of Owen Sound, Ont., who insist “the wearing of the niqab by Muslim women in public for religious or cultural reasons suggests a clear intolerance for the Canadian social and political system.”

On the other side are those who say these kinds of reactions show just how ephemeral are Canadian notions of multiculturalism: “Diversity is fine as long as it’s happy pluralism,” says Asha Varadharajan, a professor at Queen’s University, who sees the condemnation of the niqab as evidence that multiculturalism is little more than a fondness for foreign food and music.

Audrey Kobayashi, also of Queen’s, goes further, saying: “One of the mistakes that we make is assuming somehow there is a Canadian culture and that it’s up to people defined as ‘other’ to adapt to Canadian culture.”

The veiling issue, in particular the most extreme niqab, even divides Canadian Muslims, who struggle with a significance and symbolism that goes well beyond mere wardrobe choice.

“It’s kind of a real statement, isn’t it? To say, ‘This is me and you can’t see me,’ and ‘You can only see my eyes, but I can see you,’” says Alia Hogben, executive director of the Canadian Council of Muslim Women, which is meeting in Ottawa this weekend.

She says that while no one should be telling any woman in Canada what to wear — whether it be a niqab or a mini-skirt — the full face coverings impose a barrier between the woman peering out from behind it and those looking back at her obscured face. “I think there are some women who are becoming overzealous, and wanting to separate and wear this,” says Ms. Hogben, who worries that those wearing the niqab may feed negative stereotypes about Muslim women and send a provocative message that will only deepen the chasm between the community and the rest of society.

Erica Marx, an Ottawa children’s book author and mother of five, sees wearing the niqab as a personal choice, not a religious obligation. A convert to Islam, she decided to fully cover her face in a show of gratitude after her daughter’s difficult birth: “I still consider it to be an extra step in Islam. It was an option for me and I took it because I wanted to become more of a religious person.”

Few Muslims in Canada don the niqab, yet among Canada’s diverse population of nearly 600,000 Muslims, opinion on the controversial head-wear is deeply split. A director of the Canadian branch of the Islamic Society of North America told a Toronto newspaper recently that women — especially beautiful ones — should cover their faces to avoid attracting male attention. Meanwhile Farzana Hassan, the president of the Muslim Canadian Congress and a vocal opponent of veiling, complained that her house had been egged because of her outspoken views on the practice.

The question will be put squarely to the panel on Muslim women this weekend at the Trudeau Foundation conference: “Should states in the West accommodate the gendered practices and preferences of immigrant communities, including Muslim immigrant communities?”

Constance Backhouse, a University of Ottawa law professor who is participating in the discussion, acknowledges it is difficult to reconcile feminist desires and cultural dictates. She argues that Muslim women in Canada are forced to choose between whether to battle sexism within their own communities or battle racism and religious intolerance from the outside.

This cultural quandary that makes Western feminists wary about attacking what they see as the untouchable practices of another culture is a hindrance for Muslim women, argues Ms. Hogben.

“We have found that a lot of feminists in the West are using the argument of cultural relativism — that is that somehow we have to bend backward to be accepting of anything and everything done under the name of religion or culture,” she said. “What we as a council are saying is, ‘Hang on, if it’s not good for you, it’s not good for us.’ “

Raheel Raza, a Toronto-based writer who is Muslim, argues that not only is the veil impractical, it is not mandated by Islam and she doesn’t agree with it being portrayed as a religious requirement.

“Islam is a faith of balance and reason and logic and it does not encourage women to look like penguins,” she said. “God has made us with faces, with different faces, and that is our identity.”

She said Muslims coming to Canada who have worn the niqab in their homeland need to seriously consider whether it won’t hinder their ability to fit in.

“I think a little bit of adaptation is a part of the change that we bring about in our lives. I had never worn Western dress before I came to Canada. But the weather requires that you wear trousers, that you don’t wear flimsy saris. It’s not practical. So similarly, the covering of the face is not practical.”

Yet rather than clinging to another country’s custom, many of the women who don the restrictive headwear in Canada are doing so as an overt demonstration of their beliefs and religious freedom.

Newcomers from countries like Turkey, Morocco and Tunisia, for example, are embracing the freedom from strict government policies that restrict Islamic dress as an overtly political rather than personal statement.

For younger women, the decision to wear a hijab or niqab in high school is seen as an overt demonstration of religious piety, says Jasmin Zine, a sociologist who has interviewed teenagers at Ontario religious schools.

“There is this sense of equating, the more strict dress code, the higher the sense of piety,” said Prof. Zine, who teaches at Wilfrid Laurier University. “I think in their minds it is really a demonstration of a heightened sense of piety.”

She said many of the teenagers who wear Islamic garb do so for the sense of empowerment it instills. “They want to regulate visual access over their bodies, they want to protect their bodies from the male gaze.... I don’t know that they would understand it in terms of feminism, but I think that they see it as a kind of feminist move in the sense that they are trying to de-objectify their bodies.”

Ms. Marx vociferously defends her right to wear her niqab, though her awareness of people’s reactions to it has prompted her to make an extra effort to reach out to people from behind her veil.

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What Multiculturalism Hath Wrought (National Review Online, 070129)

David Frum

The British think tank Policy Exchange commissioned a major study of British Muslim youth. The Times reports the findings:

The poll of 1,003 Muslims found that more than a third of 16 to 24-year-olds wanted to live under Islamic law, compared with 17 per cent of the over-55s.

Meanwhile, 31 per cent of young Muslims said that they believed that if a Muslim converted to another religion they should be punished by death, compared with 19 per cent of the over-55s.

The deep divisions between the generations are most starkly illustrated over attitudes to the hijab, with 74 per cent of young people preferring Muslim women to wear them compared with 28 per cent of the over-55s. Thirteen per cent of 16 to 24-year-olds said that they admired organisations such as al-Qaeda, compared with 3 per cent of their parents’ generation.

The think-tank report, Living Apart Together, blames multiculturalism for producing a generation of young Muslims who champion their “right to be different”. The poll found that 86 per cent of Muslims feel that “my religion is the most important thing in my life”.

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Extreme youth: the Muslims who would swap British law for Sharia (TimesOnline, 070129)

A growing number of young Muslims are embracing radical Islam, with more than a third wanting Sharia to replace British law, according to a poll for a Conservative think-tank.

David Cameron will respond today by urging everyone living in Britain to show loyalty to its laws and customs and, by initiating an attack on multiculturalism, calling for “proper integration”.

The startling poll by Populus for Policy Exchange, the think-tank with close links to the Tory leader, reveals how younger Muslims hold aggressively more extreme views than their parents.

The poll of 1,003 Muslims found that more than a third of 16 to 24-year-olds wanted to live under Islamic law, compared with 17 per cent of the over-55s.

Meanwhile, 31 per cent of young Muslims said that they believed that if a Muslim converted to another religion they should be punished by death, compared with 19 per cent of the over-55s.

Munira Mirza, the main author of the report, said: “The emergence of a strong Muslim identity in Britain is, in part, a result of multicultural policies implemented since the 1980s which have emphasised difference at the expense of shared national identity and divided people along ethnic, religious and cultural lines.”

Despite widespread concerns about Islamophobia, 84 per cent of Muslims believe that they have been treated fairly in this society, while 28 per cent of Muslims believe that the authorities in Britain go over the top in trying not to offend Muslims.

Ms Mirza cautioned: “We should be wary of treating the entire Muslim population as a monolith with special needs that are different to the rest of the population. There is considerable diversity amongst Muslims, with many adopting a more secular approach to their religion and a majority feeling they have as much, if not more, in common with non-Muslims in Britain as with Muslims abroad.

“There is clearly a conflict within British Islam between a moderate majority that accepts the norms of Western democracy and a growing minority that does not.”

Mr Cameron will respond to the challenge by saying: “We must demand from everyone in this country that they obey our laws. But loyalty is not just about laws. Loyalty is about giving people something to believe in.

“So we must inspire loyalty by building a Britain that every one of our citizens believes in. And we must each of us do all we can to bring down those barriers that make that dream more difficult to achieve.”

This week the Conservative Party’s policy commission on national security will call for new thinking on community cohesion. It will highlight the removal of teenage Asian girls from school and question whether some Muslim parents are supporting their daughters’ desire for education, as well as calling for forced marriage to be made a criminal offence.

Mr Cameron was criticised for saying that he wanted a new “crusade for fairness”.

Osama Saeed, of the Muslim Association of Britain, described Mr Cameron’s use of the word crusade as “extraordinarily sloppy” and said that it risked undermining his central message.

“It is not a nice word and nice things do not happen on the back of crusades,” he said.

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Free speech controversy at URI (townhall.com, 070501)

By Ashley Herzog

This country is now entering its fourth week of debate over whether the phrase “nappy headed hos” is acceptable speech in a public forum. But as the media focuses on the issue of free speech in broadcast, they overlook a venue where first amendment rights are regularly violated: academia. A story from the University of Rhode Island this week suggests that free speech rights are threatened on many campuses. While making phony paeans to “tolerance,” universities use unconstitutional speech codes to suppress ideas that don’t sit well with the politically correct crowd.

The controversy at Rhode Island began last fall, when the College Republicans advertised a satirical “white heterosexual American male” scholarship in the school newspaper. College Republicans president Ryan Bilodeau said the ad was meant to be a humorous spin on affirmative action and identity-based scholarships.

Is a satirical ad in a school newspaper “speech”? Anyone with minimal understanding of the first amendment would say yes. But the Student Senate didn’t think so and declared that the ad violated URI’s anti-discrimination bylaws. The Senate told the group to apologize or face derecognition, an action that would cut off university funding.

But the College Republicans refused to apologize for something they weren’t sorry about, and on April 23, a Student Senate committee voted to derecognize the group. They only backed down when the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) threatened a first amendment lawsuit.

If you assume that selective censorship, forced apologies, and illegal bans on “offensive” speech are isolated incidents, think again. Groups like FIRE receive thousands of complaints each year, mostly from conservative or religious students whose universities apply speech codes only to them. Examples are not difficult to find:

- In October, San Francisco State University attempted to punish the College Republicans for stomping on Hezbollah and Hamas flags during an anti-terrorism rally.

- Administrators at Stetson University forbade students from distributing a conservative newsletter on campus because “elements of the publication lack sensitivity to and respect for diversity and inclusiveness,” according to a statement issued by the university.

- Professors in the Washington State University School of Education threatened to remove a conservative student from the teacher training program unless he attended “diversity training” classes.

Fortunately, the founding fathers forgot to include the “no hurt feelings” clause in the first amendment, which is why policies like these almost never hold up in court. But that doesn’t stop campus radicals from harassing any student who stands up for basic speech rights.

Last year, Georgia Tech senior Ruth Malhotra filed a lawsuit against the school for its unconstitutional speech code, which banned speech that was “injurous” or “maligning.” Malhotra believed the code was being used exclusively by gay-rights groups to prevent conservative Christians from speaking. Under Georgia Tech’s policy, accurately quoting a Bible passage related to homosexuality could constitute “injurous” speech.

Even people who support the gay-rights movement can recognize that others have a constitutional right to criticize it. But, for supporting the concept that people are allowed to say what they want, Malhotra received letters and e-mails threatening beatings, rape, and strangulation. Gay-rights activists passed out Twinkies to students on campus, explaining that Malhotra was “yellow on the outside, white on the inside” and “a Twinkie bitch” (Malhotra is Asian). Authorities suggested that she travel with a police escort in case the tolerant crowd got testy. Although the court sided with Malhotra, her experience most likely had a chilling effect on potential free-speech advocates.

It is ironic that, in an atmosphere that supposedly values free inquiry, it can take enormous courage to point out that free speech rights are for everyone. Only years of politically correct brainwashing can explain the widespread belief that “offensive” ideas should be banned.

It is also telling that speech totalitarianism is often embraced by extreme leftists – the same people that demand “tolerance” and “open-mindedness” toward certain favored groups. If these people are so concerned with tolerance, why do they turn into Stalinist oppressors the second someone says something they don’t like?

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What the Hate Crimes Law Would Do (townhall.com, 070501)

By Chuck Colson

In George Orwell’s classic novel 1984, the government Thought Police constantly spies on citizens to make sure they are not thinking rebellious thoughts. Thought crimes are severely punished by Big Brother.

1984 was intended as a warning against totalitarian governments that enslave and control their citizens. Never have we needed this warning more urgently than now, because America’s Thought Police are knocking on your door.

Last week the House Judiciary Committee, egged on by radical homosexual groups, passed what can only be called a Thought Crimes bill. It’s called the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act. But this bill is not about hate. It’s not even about crime. It’s about outlawing peaceful speech—speech that asserts that homosexual behavior is morally wrong.

Some say we need this law to prevent attacks on homosexuals. But we already have laws against assaults on people and property. Moreover, according to the FBI, crimes against homosexuals in the United States have dropped dramatically in recent years. In 2005, out of 863,000 cases of aggravated assault, just 177 cases were crimes of bias against homosexuals—far less than even 1%.

Another problem is that in places where hate crimes laws have been passed, hate crimes have been defined to include verbal attacks—and even peaceful speech. The Thought Police have already prosecuted Christians under hate crimes laws in England, Sweden, Canada, and even in some places in the United States.

If this dangerous law passes, pastors who preach sermons giving the biblical view of homosexuality could be prosecuted. Christian businessmen who refuse to print pro-gay literature could be prosecuted. Groups like Exodus International, which offer therapy to those with unwanted same-sex attraction, could be shut down.

In classic 1984 fashion, peaceful speech will be redefined as a violent attack worthy of punishment.

This is the unspoken goal of activist groups. We know this because during the debate over the bill last week, Congressman Mike Pence (R) of Indiana offered a Freedom of Religion amendment to this hate crimes bill. It asked that nothing in this law limit the religious freedom of any person or group under the Constitution. The committee refused to adopt it. It also refused to adopt amendments protecting other groups from hate crimes—like members of the military, who are often targets of verbal attacks and spitting. They also shot down amendments that would protect the homeless and senior citizens, also often targeted by criminals. Nothing doing, the committee said—the only group they wanted to protect: homosexuals.

Clearly, the intent of this law is not to prevent crime, but to shut down freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and freedom of thought. Its passage would strike at the very heart of our democracy.

The full Congress may vote on this bill as early as this week. Unless you want Big Brother telling you what to say, what to think, and what to believe, I urge you to contact your congressman immediately, urging him or her to vote against this bill. If you visit the BreakPoint website, you’ll find more information about this radical law.

If we do nothing, 1984 will no longer be fiction, and Big Brother will be watching you and me—ready to punish the “wrong” thoughts.

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Diversity Education (townhall.com, 070706)

By George Will

WASHINGTON — For most of the 53 years since the Supreme Court’s school desegregation decision, the court, in collaboration with people who fancy themselves “progressive,” has been instructing Americans to unlearn the lesson of those decisions — the lesson that race must not be a source of government-conferred advantage or disadvantage. Last week the court began rectifying its abandonment of that premise in the name of “diversity.”

The court ruled 5-4 that Seattle, which never had school segregation, and Louisville, which did but seven years ago completed judicially mandated remedial measures, must stop using race in assigning children to schools to produce particular racial ratios in enrollments. How did we get from this: “Distinctions by race are so evil, so arbitrary and invidious that a state bound to defend the equal protection of the laws must not invoke them in any public sphere” (the NAACP’s brief, written by Thurgood Marshall, in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education desegregation case), to this: Local public education establishments routinely taking cognizance of race in assigning children to schools?

n 1978, in the Bakke case concerning racial preferences in a medical school’s admissions, Justice Lewis Powell wrote that institutions of higher education have a First Amendment right — academic freedom — to use race as one “plus” factor when shaping their student bodies to achieve viewpoint diversity. Thus was born the “educational benefits” exception to the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection of the laws. But that hardly justifies assigning 6-year-olds to this or that school solely because of their races.

Twenty-five years after Bakke, in 2003, the court approved the University of Michigan Law School’s use of race in admissions, because that use supposedly involves a “highly individualized, holistic review” of applicants. The court simultaneously disallowed Michigan’s undergraduate admissions plan that automatically granted preferences based solely on race — as Seattle has done in high schools and Louisville has done in grades K through 12. Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas joined Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinion for the court, in which Roberts said: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” Anthony Kennedy, although agreeing that Seattle’s and Louisville’s practices are unconstitutional, chastised Roberts for an “all-too-unyielding” opposition to race-based programs. Yet when dissenting in the law school case, Kennedy said: “Preferment by race, when resorted to by the state, can be the most divisive of all policies, containing within it the potential to destroy confidence in the Constitution and in the idea of equality.”

Sandra Day O’Connor, writing the majority’s opinion in that 2003 case, breezily asserted that in 25 years racial preferences would not be “necessary” to further diversity. But diversity preferences appeal to race-obsessed social engineers — a cohort particularly prevalent among today’s educators — precisely because the diversity rationale never expires. The diversity project is forever a work in progress. Seattle’s “race-conscious” policies were devised by the sort of people who proclaimed on the school district’s Web site that “having a future time orientation” (planning ahead), “emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology” and “defining one form of English as standard” constitute “cultural racism” and “institutional racism” and arises from “unsuccessful concepts such as a melting pot or colorblind mentality.” Stephen Breyer, in a dissent joined by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David Souter and John Paul Stevens, said the court should be deferential to such people when they shuffle pupils on the basis of race.

Why race? Although progressive people would never stoop to racial stereotyping, they evidently believe that any black or other minority child, however young, or from whatever social background, makes a predictable and distinctive — you might say stereotypical — contribution to “diversity.”

Breyer said that last week’s decision abandons “the promise of Brown.” Actually, that promise — a colorblind society — has been traduced by the “diversity” exception to the Equal Protection Clause. That exception allows white majorities to feel noble while treating blacks and certain other minorities as seasoning — a sort of human oregano — to be sprinkled across a student body to make the majority’s educational experience more flavorful.

This repulsive practice merits Clarence Thomas’ warning in his opinion concurring with last week’s ruling: Beware of elites eager to constitutionalize “faddish social theories.” Often, they are only theories. As Roberts said, Seattle and Louisville offered “no evidence” that the diversity they have achieved (by what he has called the “sordid business” of “divvying us up by race”) is necessary to achieve the “asserted” educational benefits.

Evidence is beside the point. The point for race-mongering diversity tinkerers is their professional and ideological stake in preventing America from achieving “a colorblind mentality.”

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State Bar of California, Civil Rights Group Spar Over Affirmative Action (Foxnews, 071015)

Does affirmative action work? An explosive study that suggests it does not is pitting the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights against the State Bar of California in a battle over admissions data that could determine once and for all if racial preferences help or hurt minority students.

“Currently only about one in three African-Americans who goes to an American law school passes the bar on the first attempt and a majority never become lawyers at all,” says UCLA law professor Richard Sander.

In an article published in the Stanford Law Review, Sander and his research team concluded several thousand would-be black lawyers either dropped out of law school or failed to pass the bar because of affirmative action.

Known as the ‘mismatch’ effect, Sander claims students who are unprepared and whose academic credentials are below the median are admitted to law schools they are unqualified to attend. If those same students instead were to go to less elite or competitive schools, more would graduate, pass the bar and become lawyers.

“This is a serious issue and we need to see more research in the area of mismatch,” argues Gail Heriot, a professor of law at the University of San Diego and a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. “What we need now is more cooperation from the California Bar” Association.

Recently, a California bar committee voted 5-3 to turn down Sander’s request to use bar data collected over the last three decades on student test scores, law school admissions, academic performance and bar passage rates.

The data, considered a gold standard by affirmative action researchers, is considered key to determine if racial preferences work.

“There is no answer but to give him the information,” says black civil rights attorney Leo Terrell. “What is the state bar afraid of? We need to know.”

But the Bar refuses to give Sander the data.

“The release (bar exam) applicants sign does not allow us to release the information to third parties,” Whitnie Henderson told FOX News. “Looking at all the information we just decided it was not something that fit within the committee’s purview.”

Henderson headed the committee that rejected Sander’s request. Contrary to her statement, twice in the last 15 years the California Bar released individual information to outside researchers.

Law Professor Vikram Amar at UC Davis believes the Bar rejected Sander’s request because the study is “controversial,” examining the huge disparities in bar passage among different racial groups attending the same law school.

Law schools do not disclose attrition, graduation and bar passage rates to minorities admitted through preferences and have opposed pressure to do so. About 62% of today’s top black lawyers attended the most elite U.S. law schools, according to Law Professor Richard Lempert at the University of Michigan.

Unlike Sander, Lempert believes the number of black lawyers would decrease if affirmative action ended. He says race, ethnicity and LSAT scores do not predict future income or satisfaction.

The Board of Governors of the California Bar may reconsider Sander’s request during its November meeting, but for now no one can say whether affirmative action actually does what’s intended.

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New Haven Firefighters Promoted After Winning Landmark Supreme Court Case (Foxnews, 091202)

NEW HAVEN, Conn. — New Haven’s Board of Fire Commissioners has approved the promotions of 14 city firefighters who won a reverse discrimination case in a landmark ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court.

A formal promotion ceremony is scheduled for Dec. 10.

Matt Marcarelli, who earned the top score on the captain’s exam in 2003 and assumed his new rank on Tuesday, says the action by the board was historic. The board approved the promotions after another city board certified the results of the 2003 exam that was at the center of the legal dispute.

Thirteen white city firefighters and one Hispanic firefighter were promoted to lieutenants and captains. They were among the firefighters who sued after the city threw out of the test results because too few minorities would have been promoted.

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Student Diversity Group Seeks Removal of ‘Our Lord’ from Diplomas (Christian Post, 100330)

A student diversity group at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, is rallying their classmates to sign a petition to remove “In the year of our Lord” from their diplomas.

The Trinity Diversity Connection, whose president is a Muslim student at the Presbyterian-founded school, argues that such wording “is in direct conflict with certain religious beliefs,” “does not reflect the inclusiveness of our alma mater,” and would be appropriate to change now “considering that Trinity University is not a religious institution and merely has a covenant relationship with its Presbyterian roots.”

“In order for our diplomas to accurately reflect the diversity that Trinity University proudly upholds, we respectfully ask that they simply state ‘the year two thousand nine [ten, eleven, etc.]’ or use the designation ‘Common Era’,” the petition states.

Not all students are for the change, however, and Trinity President Dennis Ahlburg has noted that, as an institution, Trinity should not ignore its cultural and religious heritage and roots.

Still, in the interest of free and open exchange of ideas and thoughts, Susie Phillips Gonzalez, assistant director of public relations at Trinity, says the university has held a forum to examine the request from a range of viewpoints. The forum, moderated by the university’s debate coach, featured three-minute presentations from Trinity faculty in the disciplines of religion, philosophy, communication, history, and political science, as well as questions and ideas from the students.

“Trinity University promotes a diverse campus population and values the benefits of diversity as we educate the next generation of global leaders,” commented David Tuttle, interim vice president for Student Affairs and Dean of Students.

Founded in 1869 by Cumberland Presbyterians in Tehuacana, Texas, Trinity was formed from the remnants of three small Cumberland Presbyterian colleges that had closed during the Civil War

In 1942, Trinity moved to San Antonio at the request community leaders there and, in 1969, at the initiation of the regional PC(U.S.A.) synod there, the school entered into a covenant agreement that affirmed its historical connections.

In May, the Board of Trustees is expected to consider the question of changing the language of diplomas.

Presently, the student body consists of 2,703 students from 45 states and 64 countries - approximately 43% of which have studied in a different country.

About 70% of students at Trinity describe themselves as Christians, 2% as Jewish, 0.6% as Muslim, and 0.6% as Buddhist. Twenty-four percent, meanwhile opted not to answer, and three percent said “other.”

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The multicultural approach to justice (National Post, 100716)

Barbara Kay

In 2007 Aset Magomadova, at the end of her tether in dealing with a troubled and by her account troublesome 14-year old daughter, strangled the girl to death with a scarf.

Let it be noted, before going any further into this story, that to kill a healthy human being by strangulation, you have to cut off their air supply for 2.5 to 3 minutes. They lose consciousness and go limp long before they are at risk of dying. So you really can’t argue that you have strangled someone in self-defence or by accident or in a moment’s confusion or loss of control. If a person dies after you have had your way with a scarf around her neck, you can be sure the intention behind the attack was not benign.

And now to the sentencing of Aset Magomadova. Calgary Court of Queen’s Bench Justice Sal LoVecchio convicted the mother of manslaughter, acquitting her on the original charge of second-degree murder, and pronounced a sentence of…probation. No jail time. Dead daughter. Mother killed her. No jail time.

In his 25-page decision, the judge said that “Showing mercy does not mean we approve of the act. It simply means sometimes a particular situation may demand a slightly different solution.” (my emphasis)

Apparently Magomadova’s lawyer really got to the judge with an account of the defendant’s “catastrophic” background in war-torn Chechnya, where her husband was killed in conflict while she was pregnant with a son who later was born with Muscular Dystrophy.

I would venture to say that many killers have a “particular situation.” Robert Latimer springs to mind. Robert Latimer was a white Canadian male of European extraction, so perhaps his “particular situation,” that of watching his profoundly disabled daughter Tracy, a victim of Cerebral Palsy, suffer the agonies of the damned for years in spite of every possible medical intervention available (which amounted to, in Latimer’s words, “mutilation and torture”), could not quite compete with the sad tale of a Muslim widow from Chechnya with an irritating daughter and a son with Muscular Dystrophy.

Latimer was convicted of second degree murder, but the judge in his second trial opted for leniency on the grounds that he acted from “compassion,” ordering a light sentence of one year in jail and one under house arrest. Not good enough for the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal, which insisted on the full weight of the law being applied, namely a life sentence. Latimer pleaded to the Supreme Court of Canada that he had had no choice but to end her suffering. Nope, the Supreme Court said, Latimer had other options and a ten-year sentence was not “excessive.”

Well, the Magomadova case is going to the Court of Appeal. Let us keep a careful eye on their appraisal of Judge LoVecchio’s multicultural approach to justice. And if it should go to the Supreme Court, even more so.

This LoVecchio judgment was simply outrageous. In an earlier musing, the judge opined that Aset Magomadova was not a danger to society. Well, she was a danger to an individual who was helpless to escape her rage – her very own daughter. And what message does his “sentence” of probation send to other parents from other countries, war-torn or not, who believe that they have the power of life and death over their children?

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Multiculturalism: Political Correctness Run Amok (Christian Post, 101025)

By Ken Connor

“We … take our form-freedom balance in government for granted as though it were natural. There is form in acknowledging the obligations in society, and there is freedom in acknowledging the rights of the individual…. There is a balance here which we have come to take as natural in the world. It is not natural in the world. We are utterly foolish if we look at the long span of history and read the daily newspapers giving today’s history and do not understand that the form-freedom balance in government which we have had in Northern Europe since the Reformation and in the countries extended from it is unique in the world, past and present.”

- Francis Schaeffer, “The Abolition of Truth and Morality”

German Chancellor Angela Merkel set the tongues of pundits wagging this week when she declared that multiculturalism has “utterly failed” in Germany. Multiculturalism is, of course, one of the sacraments Secularism. It is the idea that people from dramatically different cultures can peacefully coexist as a unified society within a state or nation notwithstanding that they order themselves very differently within society and cling to radically different–and often conflicting–world views. Multiculturalism is the fruit of “cultural relativism” which maintains that all cultures are equally valid, no one being better than another. Cultural relativism, in turn, is the outgrowth of “relativism,” which asserts that there is no such thing as universal truth and that all ideas are equally valid and depend on the circumstances in which they are applied.

Not surprisingy, the political correctness police went into high dudgeon in the aftermath of Ms. Merkel’s speech, suggesting that her comments represented some kind of ominous foreshadowing of a German nationalist resurgence (allusions to Hitler’s Third Reich are perfectly permissible rhetorical tools for liberals, though off limits to conservatives). Their goal was to squelch any thoughtful debate of the premise advanced by the Chancellor. If they could demonize her position, that would have a chilling effect on the willingness of anyone else to embrace it or, perhaps, even to discuss it. In the western world of the 21st century it is no longer fashionable to take pride in one’s national heritage, and patriotism is equated with parochialism.

A recent article by George Friedman, founder of Stratfor (www.stratfor.com), provides us with some historical perspective and points out that Germany’s current integration problems may be traced back to the aftermath of WWII, when immigration was encouraged as a means to compensate for a post-war shortage of workers:

“Labor recruitment led to a massive influx of “Gastarbeiter,” German for “guest workers,” into German society. The Germans did not see this as something that would change German society: They regarded the migrants as temporary labor, not as immigrants in any sense. As the term implied, the workers were guests and would return to their countries of origin when they were no longer needed (many Spaniards, Italians and Portuguese did just this). This did not particularly trouble the Germans, who were primarily interested in labor. The Germans simply didn’t expect this to be a long-term issue.”

Decades later, it’s clear that Germany’s utilitarian approach to immigration in the 1950s and 1960s has become a long term issue, one that poses significant challenges to the social and political stability of the country. Chancellor Merkel is only saying aloud what many Germans – and French, for that matter – have believed for some time now: The Muslim culture (which is inextricably bound up within the Muslim religion) does not comport with western Europe’s liberal democratic tradition. They have concluded that while multiculturalism sounds good in theory, in practice it increasingly appears unworkable.

Fox News personality Bill O’Reilly recently encountered the stifling effects of multicultural political correctness when he appeared as a guest on ABC’s The View. His opinion about the inappropriateness of the Ground Zero mosque project coupled with the statement that “Muslims killed us on 9/11” so enraged hosts Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar that they walked off the set in protest. Days later, O’Reilly addressed the controversy on his program:

“There’s no question that there is a Muslim problem in the world, and if “The View” ladies will not acknowledge that, that’s their problem, because most Americans well understand the danger coming out of the Muslim world…. Right now the nations of Russia, China, the Philippines, many nations in Africa, and Thailand are all fighting Muslim insurrections. The Muslim threat to the world is not isolated, it’s huge, it involves nations and millions of people. Yet the Left in America will not face that fact…. In Germany, however, Chancellor Angela Merkel is getting tough…. Ms. Merkel has an enormous problem with five million Muslims who are not assimilating into German society. In France, the Parliament there has outlawed burqas after that country endured rioting in Muslim areas that the police could not control…. There is a clash of civilizations in play.”

Kudos to Mr. O’Reilly for saying what few on this side of the Atlantic seem willing to say. There is, indeed, a clash of civilizations in play, and it is only a matter of time before the problems plaguing Germany and France manifest themselves in cities and towns across America.

The fact of the matter is that the culture of individual liberty and the rule of law that characterizes the American way stems from a particular worldview: the Judeo-Christian worldview. The form-freedom balance referred to by Francis Schaeffer is the unique product of a religious tradition that views each and every person as equal and precious in the eyes of God, and endowed by that God with inalienable rights. The government exists to protect those rights and our laws are designed to ensure that no one group usurps the rights and liberties of any other. All are equally free to exercise their rights within the limits of the law, and all are equally accountable before the law for their actions.

It should come as no surprise that Muslim immigration to the liberal democratic nations of the West has caused tension and strife. There are several crucial areas in which the civil and cultural traditions of Islam do not align themselves with those of the Judeo-Christian tradition. One need only compare the laws of a country like Saudi Arabia or Iran to understand this point. Stonings, acid attacks, honor killings, state-sanctioned persecution… these are everyday occurrences in Muslim nations where women are still considered the property of their male relatives and where free exercise of speech and religion are considered crimes against the state and against Allah. By refusing to address these differences, and by refusing to insist that immigrants to our shores subscribe wholeheartedly to American democratic values, we run the risk of a “balkanization” of our Muslim population similar to that which is already occurring in western Europe.

Western liberals, like the ladies of The View, like to think that American society has evolved past the primitive sentiments of patriotism, that we’ve become so enlightened that we should be able to celebrate all cultures equally within the framework of western liberal democracy, and that everyone shares their values of inclusiveness. The fact is, however, that some ideas are better than other others and some cultural traditions are superior to others. America has always prided itself on being a true “melting pot” of races, ethnicities, religions, and cultures, and our strength has always come from our collective belief in the values of liberty and equality embodied in our Constitution. Historically, immigrants have come to these shores with the intention of embracing democratic ideals, not supplanting them. Without these ideals, we would cease to be America. If we are unwilling to defend the foundations of our liberty, we must realize that we are at great risk of losing it.

For heaven’s sake, let’s have a robust discussion about whether the tenets of Islam are compatible with the tenets of democracy. The loss of our liberty is too high a price to pay for the sake of political correctness.

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Multiculturalism Today (Christian Post, 101110)

By Chuck Colson

“Multiculturalism,” wrote the British scholar Theodore Dalrymple of the Manhattan Institute, “rests on the supposition—or better, the dishonest pretense—that all cultures are equal.”

So, the argument for multiculturalism goes, no culture is superior to another, and no culture should compete with any other. And if we understand that, we can all get along just fine.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel went along with that idea for years but has recently changed her mind. Earlier this month she dared to tell a meeting of younger members of her conservative Christian Democratic Union party that multiculturalism is a failed experiment that needs to be rejected.

“Starting in the 60s,” she said, “we invited guest-workers to Germany. We kidded ourselves for a while that . . . one day they’d go home. That isn’t what happened. And of course the tendency was to say: let’s be ‘multikulti’ and live next to each other and enjoy being together. [But] this concept has failed, failed utterly.”

By 2002, reported Canada’s Globe and Mail, there were 2.5 million Turks living in Germany, of which fewer than half a million had become German citizens. One study indicates that 80% of Turkish parents cannot participate in parent-teacher conferences at their children’s schools because they don’t speak enough German.

Not that Germany or other European nations ever tried to assimilate immigrants the way we do in the United States. Or, I should say, the way we used to do.

As I have said before, multiculturalism is based on postmodern moral and cultural relativism. It begins with the belief that there is no right or wrong, no better or worse. So every culture—German, Turkish, Muslim, Jewish, Christian, secular, gay, or Goth—is equal. The most you can say is that you prefer one to another—if you dare say even that much.

The trouble is, as Merkel discovered, that multiculturalism has to fail because a society needs cultural cohesion to survive—shared language, shared moral standards, a shared work ethic. Multiculturalism provides no cohesion at all.

Chancellor Merkel went on to say, “We feel tied to Christian values . . . Those who don’t accept them don’t have a place here.”

Well again, don’t be surprised if you haven’t read much about this in the secular media. Now I understand that Merkel is a politician and that Germany’s political winds are blowing against immigration. But telling people to pack up and leave is neither just nor loving, and thus it contradicts the Christian values she feels tied to.

Nonetheless, Merkel’s comments are a serious wakeup call to us Americans that multiculturalism is, in the end, unsustainable.

And it flies in the face of our national motto: “e pluribus unum,” or “out of many, one.” That’s because multiculturalism denies the value or need for the “one,” for unity, and in our case, for a shared commitment to the American creed: “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

But without that creed, America is no longer America. And the farther American society drifts away from its founding creed, the closer it drifts toward its own demise.

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Multiculturalism ‘clearly’ a failure: Sarkozy (National Post, 110210)

PARIS — French President Nicolas Sarkozy declared Thursday that multiculturalism had failed, joining a growing number of world leaders or former leaders who have condemned it.

“My answer is clearly yes, it is a failure,” he said in a television interview when asked about the policy which advocates that host societies welcome and foster distinct cultural and religious immigrant groups.

“Of course we must all respect differences, but we do not want ... a society where communities coexist side by side. If you come to France, you accept to melt into a single community, which is the national community, and if you do not want to accept that, you cannot be welcome in France,” the right-wing president said.

“The French national community cannot accept a change in its lifestyle, equality between men and women ... freedom for little girls to go to school,” he said.

“We have been too concerned about the identity of the person who was arriving and not enough about the identity of the country that was receiving him,” Mr. Sarkozy said in the TFI channel show.

British Prime Minister David Cameron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Australia’s ex-prime minister John Howard and Spanish ex-premier Jose Maria Aznar have also recently said multicultural policies have not successfully integrated immigrants.

Ms. Merkel in October said efforts towards multiculturalism in Germany had “failed, totally.”

The comment followed weeks of anguished debate sparked by the huge popularity of a book by a central banker saying that immigrants, in particular Muslims, were making Germany “more stupid.”

Britain’s Mr. Cameron last week pronounced his country’s long-standing policy of multiculturalism a failure, calling for better integration of young Muslims to combat home-grown extremism.

He urged a “more active, muscular liberalism” where equal rights, the rule of law, freedom of speech and democracy are actively promoted to create a stronger national identity.

The prime minister, who took power in May 2010, argued that “under the doctrine of state multiculturalism, we have encouraged different cultures to live separate lives, apart from each other and the mainstream.”

He said this had resulted in a lack of national identity in Britain which had made some young Muslims turn to extremist ideology.

Mr. Sarkozy said in his television interview Thursday that “our Muslim compatriots must be able to practise their religion, as any citizen can,” but he noted “we in France do not want people to pray in an ostentatious way in the street.”

French far-right leader Marine Le Pen late last year came under fire for comparing Muslims praying in the streets outside overcrowded mosques in France to the Nazi occupation.

Marine Le Pen said there were “10 to 15” places in France where Muslims worshipped in the streets outside mosques when these were full.

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David Cameron says only one black person went to Oxford last year. Actually, at least 20 did. Didn’t Oxford teach him to check his facts? (Daily Telegraph, 110411)

Last week we saw David Cameron claim preposterously that Britain is somehow “responsible” for many of the world’s problems. He got quite lot of flak for that, but today it has emerged he has not learnt his lesson. Far from it, in fact – this is actually worse.

According to the Press Association, David Cameron has been attacking Oxford University’s admissions record. He said: “I saw figures the other day that showed that only one black person went to Oxford last year. I think that is disgraceful, we have got to do better than that.”

No, Prime Minister, I’m afraid it’s you who has to do better. As a five-minute glance at the Oxford University website reveals, Oxford actually admitted at least 20 black British students last year. And that’s only the number to have actually told Oxford their ethnicity.

My best guess is that David Cameron didn’t see figures so much as pluck them from a Guardian article last year by the Labour MP, David Lammy. Lammy claimed to have discovered (presumably also by visiting Oxford’s website) that “just one British black Caribbean student was admitted to Oxford” in 2009.

Lammy’s article was subsequently discredited as it emerged quite how selective he had been with his statistics. Oxford pointed out that only 452 black British students even got the requisite 3 A levels necessary to get into Oxford – relative to 29,000 white students. And black students apply disproportionately for the most competitive courses, such as medicine, where success rates are much lower.

Unlike David Lammy, David Cameron is an alumnus of Oxford. He should know better than to insult it with fabricated statistics. Far from having a “terrible record”, Oxford does more to boost the chances of students from poor backgrounds than any number of our mediocre secondary schools.

UPDATE: Oxford University has now responded. They point out that Oxford admitted 41 British undergraduates from black backgrounds in 2009 and that 22% of Oxford students are from ethnic minority backgrounds. A spokesperson from the university said: “The figure quoted by the Prime Minister is incorrect and highly misleading”. Ouch.

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David Cameron brands ‘all white’ Oxford University a disgrace (Daily Telegraph, 110411)

On a visit to the north of England, the Prime Minister singled out Oxford for criticism when he accused elite institutions of having a “terrible record” of enrolling teenagers from state schools.

Senior officials at the university described the figure as “highly misleading” as it related only to British students who described themselves as black Caribbean. They said Oxford admitted another 27 students who described themselves as black African and another 14 who were mixed race.

The university also said that only 452 black students across the country had even achieved the A-level results demanded by Oxford to meet its minimum entry requirements for the 2009-10 academic year.

Leading academics and MPs said Mr Cameron risked undermining the ancient institution with his “ignorant”, “absurd” and “mind boggling” comments. It followed controversy last week over Mr Cameron’s claim that Britain was responsible for many of the world’s historic problems, including the conflict in Kashmir between India and Pakistan.

The latest fallout will add to growing controversy that the Coalition is attempting to “socially engineer” university admissions by asking top institutions to set targets for recruiting students from state schools, poor backgrounds and ethnic minorities.

Norman Stone, a former Oxford professor now at Bilkent University in Ankara, said Mr Cameron was “quite wrong” to be criticising Oxford over its admissions. “It’s absurd for the Prime Minister to be starting this row,” he said. “This is none of David Cameron’s business. I don’t think any sensible person would come up with lines like this.”

Graham Stuart, the Conservative chairman of the Commons education select committee, suggested that the Government’s approach was wrong. “The problem we have with various minority groups in this country who don’t get into the best universities is that they don’t receive a sufficiently good education in the first place,” he said.

“You don’t solve that by forcing institutions with high standards to lower their intakes, you deal with it by improving the standards of state education for all. That’s the betrayal and the scandal here – we don’t provide good enough education in our schools.

“We let down the poorest and those from ethnic minorities and that’s what we have got to put right, not blame Oxford for the situation we’ve got ourselves into.”

Anthony Smith was president of Magdalen College during the case of Laura Spence 11 years ago, when Gordon Brown called it a “scandal” that Oxford had not admitted the high-achieving state-educated pupil. “It does seem to me that these politicians don’t know anything about the country they are governing,” he said. “The mind boggles. Do they not know what the condition of schools is like in areas where many black Caribbean children are brought up?

“Do they not read the newspapers and see what goes on there, how difficult it is for a child from one of these communities to get into any university?

Speaking at a PM Direct event in Harrogate, Mr Cameron was asked about tuition fees and the effect they might have on deterring students from poorer backgrounds.

He said universities had to adhere to strict rules if they wanted to charge the maximum fee and he said the country’s top institutions needed to attract students from poorer backgrounds.

“I saw figures the other day that showed that only one black person went to Oxford last year,” he added. “I think that is disgraceful. We have got to do better than that.”

The Prime Minister, who studied at Brasenose College, Oxford, said leading universities did not have a good record when it came to admitting state school pupils, claiming the numbers had gone down in the past 20 years. “That is a terrible record,” he said.

An Oxford spokesman said the university was “fully committed” to admitting the most able students regardless of background. “The fact remains that there is a real issue around attainment in schools,” she said.

But No 10 refused to back down, saying that the university’s record on admitting ethnic minorities was “not that impressive”. A source said the only words Mr Cameron omitted in his answer were “British and Caribbean”.

A Downing Street spokesman said the Prime Minister was trying to make a “wider point” that it was “not acceptable for universities such as Oxford to have so few students coming from black and minority ethnic groups”.

Some 16,591 students at Oxford disclosed their ethnicity as they started the 2009-10 academic year. Of those, 12,671 were white, 1,477 were Asian, 1,098 were Chinese, 838 were of mixed race and 254 of other ethnicity. Black students accounted for only 253 undergraduates and postgraduates.

It meant that almost a quarter of students were from ethnic minority backgrounds but just 1.5% were black. According to the 2001 census, 2% of the country was black.

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