Sacramenton Bee: Racial battle could spread
Building on his success in Michigan, Ward Connerly announced Wednesday he is exploring possible ballot measures in nine more states to ban racial preferences in public education, employment and contracting.
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Inside Higher Ed: hree Michigan universities are seeking a federal court order to allow them to complete the current cycle for admissions decisions without having to change their policies to comply with Proposition 2, a measure approved by Michigan voters last month to bar the consideration of race and ethnicity in admissions decisions. “It would be extremely difficult, and unfair to prospective students, to change our admissions and financial aid processes in mid-stream,” said Mary Sue Coleman, president of the University of Michigan, in a statement. Michigan State University and Wayne State University also joined in seeking the legal ruling. A lawyer for the Pacific Legal Foundation, which has pledged to oppose moves to water down Proposition 2, said that the group would “most likely” challenge the universities’ request.
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Detriot News: Proposal 2 won’t alter U-M hiring
Proposal 2 may change admissions policies at the University of Michigan’s Ann Arbor campus, but it won’t affect the school’s aggressive affirmative action hiring program.
University leaders say they will continue to set hiring goals for minorities and women and monitor whether those goals are met, despite the ballot measure’s ban on race and gender preferences in public education.
To back away from those programs, U-M officials maintain, would violate a presidential order that large institutions must have affirmative action policies if they receive federal money.
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The Chronicle: Law School in Michigan Revises Admissions Policy to Comply With New Ban on Racial Preferences
In response to Michigan voters’ approval last month of a constitutional amendment that prohibits state and local government agencies, including colleges, from granting preferences based on race, color, ethnicity, national origin, or gender, Wayne State University has adopted a new law-school admissions policy that removes such considerations from the evaluation of applicants.
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Los Angeles Times: Conservative Jews OK gays for seminaries
Judaism’s much-divided Conservative Movement voted Wednesday to allow seminaries to enroll homosexuals as rabbinical students and to let rabbis perform blessings for same-sex couples, but kept in place a restriction on sexual activity.
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Washington Post: A Slide Toward Segregation
A half-century after Brown v. Board of Education, it’s come, amazingly, to this: The Supreme Court, in the name of preventing race discrimination, is being asked to stop local schools from voluntarily adopting plans to promote integration.
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The Philadelphia Inquirer: In search of more Latino teachers
Holy Family University in partnership with a sister university in Puerto Rico and a local Latino advocacy agency announced a new program yesterday to help the Philadelphia School District cultivate more Latino and bilingual teachers.
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USA Today: Diversity programs may face ax
The Supreme Court appeared ready Monday to strike down public school diversity programs that use race as a factor in deciding where students go to school.
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Inside Higher Ed: Proxies for race
When voters abolish affirmative action programs, universities seeking to preserve diverse student bodies frequently look for criteria that are race neutral, but that may help a disproportionate number of minority applicants. That’s how Texas ended up with the 10 percent plan that guarantees admission to those at the top of their high school class.
With last month’s vote in Michigan to abolish affirmative action in public higher education, that state’s universities are looking for new approaches to admissions. One of the first concrete plans — by the law school at Wayne State University — is already setting off controversy. The faculty there will vote on a plan that would replace its current admissions policy with a race-neutral one. However, preferences would be added for students who are Native Americans, have overcome discrimination or prejudice, or live in Detroit.
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DIVERSITY in higher education was a major topic of discussion at a recent conference in Cambridge . The focus, however, was not on the familiar concept of diversity as a desirable mix of races, genders, and ethnic groups. Rather, participants deplored the lack of intellectual and political diversity on college campuses.
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Austin American-Statesman: Racist past lingers at UT
On a recent Thursday morning, University of Texas senior Mitchell McCradic was perusing the college networking Web site Facebook.com when he saw something that put him on edge.
In a picture highlighted on a friend’s profile, he saw a white student wearing brown costume paint, foil on his teeth, a sideways hat and an oversized T-shirt. He was posed next to a black student with a caption that read, “Can you tell which one is real?”
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Press-Register: 25-year lawsuit could end in month
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civilrights.org: College Leaders Reach into Their Wallets to Help Defeat Michigan’s Proposed Ban on Preferences
Some national higher-education associations are among the groups and people who have been reaching deeply into their pockets to try to defeat a Michigan ballot measure to limit affirmative action.
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The American Prospect: Affirmative Action Measure on Michigan Ballot
Though it perhaps plays a more positive role than ever before in American popular culture, race has played an unmistakably divisive role this election season. The Republican leadership showed its true colors with the instantly infamous ad it funded in Tennessee playing into the lingering aversion among Southern voters to interracial sex. Americans shouldn’t quickly forget that though the ad attacking black congressman and Senate candidate Harold Ford was pulled by many Tennessee TV stations late last month, it wasn’t pulled everywhere.
AP: Mich. weighs ban on affirmative action
Jennifer Gratz was turned away from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in 1995. The white high school honor student suspects she would have been admitted if she were black or Hispanic.
Eleven years later, in a campaign Gratz helped set in motion, Michigan voters will decide whether to bar the state government from using race and gender to determine who gets into college, who gets hired and who receives contracts.
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Inside Higher Ed: Women Turning Down Harvard’s Offers
While the proportion of women receiving tenure-track offers to join Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences rose for the third straight year in 2005-6, the share of women who accepted positions declined dramatically, according to an internal report.
In what the report’s author calls a “troubling reversal,” slightly more than 20 percent of those who accepted tenure-track offers in Harvard’s main undergraduate college last year were women, down from 40 percent in 2004-5. Thirty-nine percent of tenure-track offers were to women last year.
Inside Higher Ed: Beyond Michigan’s Race Referendum
On election night next month, many eyes will be on Michigan, where voters will consider a proposal that would broadly ban race or sex-based affirmative action in all government programs, including college and university admissions. But while that may be the most visible state ballot measure related to higher education this year, dozens of others — on such diverse issues as state tax and spending limits, eminent domain and gay marriage — could significantly affect colleges and universities.
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Diverse Magazine: Scholars Gear Up to Defend School Desegregation
As the U.S. Supreme Court gears up to hear a school desegregation case brought on by parent groups in Seattle and Louisville, Ky., a group of legal and education scholars filed briefs this week in support of desegregation efforts.
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The Washington Times: State has failed to desegregate universities, suit says
An advocacy group with ties to Morgan State University has filed a lawsuit to dismantle several new academic programs at traditionally white campuses, arguing Maryland has failed to desegregate its colleges and universities.
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The death of school diversity
Seattle Times: The death of school diversity
A week ago, I pondered whether public-school integration was dead.
I got my answer Monday as I sat in the audience listening as the nine justices of the U.S. Supreme Court probed and prodded on the matter of race.
Diversity, as a tool of public education, is dead as a doornail.
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