Category Archives: Diversity

WTOL.com: Former UT administrator vows to fight for her job

Crystal Dixon Dixon promised to fight the university, saying she had hired many gays and lesbians at UT and that the column was a personal matter, a “divine mandate” to speak out against homosexuality.

TOLEDO — The big news isn’t that conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh has commented on former University of Toledo Human Resources Administrator Crystal Dixon’s termination.

So we won’t start there, though we will say that he compared the firing to something Joseph Stalin might have done. (See video, Crystal Dixon fights back, attached.)

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The Guardian: Not enough done’ against campus antisemitism

Antisemitism in universities remains a major concern and the government needs to do more work to address it, an all party group of MPs has warned.

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Inside Higher Ed: Barack Obama and Affirmative Action

By Richard D. Kahlenberg

Even as Barack Obama became the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee last Tuesday, his continuing failure to win white working-class voters clouds his prospects for November. The inability to connect with noncollege educated whites also undercuts his claim to being a truly transformative candidate — a Robert F. Kennedy figure — who could significantly change the direction of the country. In the fall campaign, however, Obama’s suggestion that he may be ready to change the focus of affirmative action policies in higher education — away from race to economic class — could prove pivotal in his efforts to reach working-class whites, and revive the great hopes of Bobby Kennedy’s candidacy.

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The Chronicle News Blog: Ward Connerly’s Point Man in Missouri Loses Lawsuit Against College

It has been a rough week for Timothy P. Asher, executive director of a campaign to get Missouri voters to ban the use of affirmative-action preferences by public colleges and other state and local agencies.

On Sunday, Mr. Asher’s campaign organization missed a deadline for gathering enough signatures to get its measure on the November ballot.

On Tuesday, the Missouri Court of Appeals for the Western District handed him more bad news. It upheld a lower court’s ruling against him in his lawsuit against North Central Missouri College, which he had accused of firing him from his job as admissions director in 2004 because he complained that one of its scholarship programs discriminated against white students.

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Diverse Magazine: Asian Higher Education Leaders Offer Advice to Break the Bamboo Ceiling

When Dr. Ratna Naik was offered the job of dean of physics at Wayne State University, she was reluctant to accept. Coming from a culture that valued silence and the voices of men over women, Naik was afraid of speaking to large groups and wondered if anyone in a department with two women among 30 faculty members would listen to her anyway. After a year, she took the position.

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Inside Higher Ed: Obama and Clinton on Affirmative Action

Both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton expressed support for affirmative action in higher education in their Pennsylvania primary debate Wednesday night, but with broader definitions of who should benefit. Obama reiterated his view that economic factors — not just race and ethnicity — should count. Obama said that “the basic principle that should guide discussions not just on affirmative action but how we are admitting young people to college generally is, how do we make sure that we’re providing ladders of opportunity for people?” Asked about minority children like his own, who grow up in relatively advantaged circumstances, Obama said: “So if they look at my child and they say, you know, Malia and Sasha, they’ve had a pretty good deal, then that shouldn’t be factored in. On the other hand, if there’s a young white person who has been working hard, struggling, and has overcome great odds, that’s something that should be taken into account. So I still believe in affirmative action as a means of overcoming both historic and potentially current discrimination, but I think that it can’t be a quota system and it can’t be something that is simply applied without looking at the whole person, whether that person is black or white or Hispanic, male or female.” Clinton, asked if she supported such a view, said: “I think we’ve got to have affirmative action generally to try to give more opportunities to young people from disadvantaged backgrounds — whoever they are.” But she then shifted away from affirmative action to list of her education positions. “That’s why I’m a strong supporter of early childhood education and universal pre-kindergarten,” Clinton said. “That’s why I’m against No Child Left Behind as it is currently operating…. That’s why I’m in favor of much more college aid, not these outrageous predatory student loan rates that are charging people I’ve met, across Pennsylvania, 20, 25, 28 percent interest rates. Let’s make college affordable again. See, I think we have to look at what we’re trying to achieve here somewhat differently. We do have a real gap. We have a gap in achievement. We have a gap in income. But we don’t have a potential gap.”

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The Chronicle: Lawsuit Accuses U. of Texas of Illegally Reintroducing Race-Based Admissions

A federal lawsuit filed here on Monday accuses the University of Texas at Austin of improperly considering an applicant’s race when more-effective, race-neutral, ways of achieving diversity were available.

The plaintiff, a white, 18-year-old applicant from Richmond, Tex., who was rejected by the university, filed the suit with the backing of the Project on Fair Representation, a Washington-based legal-defense fund that opposes affirmative action. A copy of the complaint is available on the organization’s Web site.

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The Chronicle: University Television Ads Depict White Dominance, Study Finds

New York — The television advertisements produced by most major universities depict their campuses as overwhelmingly white, privileged environments, likely deterring many minority students from applying, according to a paper being presented here this week as part of the annual conference of the American Educational Research Association.

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The Chronicle: A South African Campus Wrestles With the Legacy of Apartheid

Over the past two decades, the University of the Free State has transformed itself from a conservative bastion of Afrikaans culture into an institute whose student population is 60 percent black. But incidents of racial intolerance have shown that the campus is far from integrated.

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Los Angeles Times: Racist Displays Persist at Minn. College

Bisharo Iman hoped college in St. Cloud would be different than attending high school there — no more taunts of “Go back to your country” aimed at her Somali dress, no more being slammed into lockers.

“I did get away from it — for a while,” said Iman, a junior business major at St. Cloud State University.

That was before a frightening six-week stretch in November and December when vandals carved or scrawled more than a dozen swastikas and other racist images on campus walls, elevators and bathroom stalls.

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The Chronicle News Blog: Racial Discrimination Lawsuit Filed at Historically Black College

An employee of Bluefield State College has filed a racial-discrimination lawsuit against the West Virginia college, according to a report by WVVA, a local television station.

Rebecca Martin, who has worked at the college for more than 25 years, says that she was passed up for two positions, which went to white women.

The college, a historically black institution, has had trouble with discrimination charges in the past. In 1998 the college was ordered to reinstate a professor who said he had been harassed and fired after he criticized the racial composition of the college. At that time, the college was only 7 percent black and had recently fired its last black professor, although it was getting more than $1-million a year in federal funds as a historically black institution.

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The New York Times:Revising a Name, but Not a Familiar Slogan

MORE than 35 years after its debut, the slogan for the United Negro College Fund, “A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Waste,” remains one of the most recognized in American advertising history.

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The Chronicle: Campaign to Limit Affirmative Action in Missouri Wins a Legal Victory

A state court judge handed a major victory on Monday to advocates of a proposed referendum to amend the Missouri Constitution to ban public colleges and other state agencies from using affirmative-action preferences.

In a case focused on the wording of the proposed referendum, Judge Richard G. Callahan of the State Circuit Court for Cole County rejected as “insufficient and unfair” the summary language that Missouri’s secretary of state had placed on the measure over the objections of its backers. As required under state law, Judge Callahan drafted and certified new summary language for the measure, which is proposed for this November’s ballot, and the language that he used was welcomed by the measure’s proponents.

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