Category Archives: Equity

AP: End in sight for state’s decades-old college desegregation case

Alabama students will be able to receive financial aid from a needs-based program included in an impending settlement that would end the state’s decades-old college desegregation case, attorneys said Monday.

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Inside Higher Ed: Fighting Back for Black Colleges

Frustrated by what they perceive as federal and state inaction, advocates for public black colleges are planning to try to revive — in spirit if not necessarily name — a landmark desegregation case.

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The Arizona Republic: Worker bias suit targets University of Phoenix

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has sued the University of Phoenix, alleging religious discrimination against non-Mormon enrollment counselors.

The federal lawsuit, announced a day after the country’s largest private university signed on as the naming sponsor of Cardinals Stadium, says the company treated employees who were not members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints less favorably when it came to sharing recruiting leads on new students, tuition waivers and reprimands.

The Chronicle: Federal Agency Sues U. of Phoenix, Alleging Discrimination Against Non-Mormon Employees

A federal agency that enforces U.S. civil-rights laws sued the University of Phoenix this week, accusing the mammoth for-profit university of religious discrimination against non-Mormon employees who work as student recruiters.

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AP: Missouri State, ACLU settle lawsuit over women’s tennis

Missouri State University and the American Civil Liberties Union on Thursday announced a settlement in a lawsuit filed on behalf of four members of the women’s tennis team, whose program was eliminated for the 2006-07 school year.

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Boston Globe: Few minorities get the reins in college football

The Chronicle: More Minority Candidates Are Interviewed for Football-Coaching Jobs, but Few Get Hired, Report Says

College athletics officials are interviewing increasing numbers of minority applicants for jobs as head football coaches, but white candidates are still landing most of the top positions, according to a report scheduled to be released today by the Black Coaches Association.

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USA Today: Gender still hinders women scientists

Gender bias — not any biological difference between the sexes — stifles the careers of female scientists at the nation’s universities, says a new report that calls for wide-ranging steps to level the playing field.

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Inside Higher Ed: Bias or Interest?

When polled privately, professors tend to explain gender gap in sciences as a matter of choices, not discrimination.

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Inside Higher Ed: Long-Fought Win for Gay Rights

Missouri State University’s board on Friday added sexual orientation to the list of factors on which the institution barred bias. The 5-3 vote followed debate that included denunciations of the gay “sexual lifestyle” and years of intense discussion of the issue.

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Daily Herald: Ex-BYU professor teaching at UVSC

At Boston College, where former-BYU professor Jeffrey Nielsen earned his master’s degree, there’s a saying that all good theologians get condemned at least twice.
“Most philosophers who play that gadfly role get in trouble,” he says. “If you are going to be good and provocative, then you are going to raise some questions that make people uncomfortable. Hopefully in the long term, people realize that’s a good thing.”

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247gay.com: California Med School Criticized for Banning Gay Student Groups

The Gay and Lesbian Medical Association Monday publicly decried the decision of the Touro University College of Osteopathic Medicine, a private medical school in Vallejo, CA, to ban a student group that focuses on the needs of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) patients and students.

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The Chronicle: Emory U. Settles Gender-Discrimination Complaint by Rehiring Coach

Emory University has settled a federal gender-discrimination lawsuit by rehiring its former head women’s soccer coach in a less prominent position.

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The Guardian: Women scientists face pay discrimination, finds survey

Discrimination plays a significant role in the pay gap between men and women scientists working in UK universities, according to new research carried out at the University of East Anglia.

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Statline.org: Affirmative action on Michigan ballot

A proposal on Michigan’s ballot to ban racial and gender preferences in public university admissions and government hiring – in effect, to end affirmative action – has led to table-tossing protests, accusations of fraud and deception, and a string of court battles.

This year’s election has reignited the state’s contentious debate over affirmative action, last settled in 2003 when the U.S. Supreme Court scrutinized the University of Michigan’s admissions processes. The high court threw out the undergraduate school’s system that awarded extra points to minority applicants, but it upheld the law school’s admissions process that took race into consideration but did not award points.

The Michigan ballot measure would end preferences for women and minorities and is modeled after proposals passed by voters in California in 1996 and Washington state in 1998. All three ballot campaigns were spearheaded by African-American businessman Ward Connerly, formerly a University of California regent.

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Detroit Free Press: Judge allows MCRI to remain on ballot but blasts promoters

A federal judge in Detroit refused Tuesday to remove the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative from the Nov. 7 ballot, even though he said promoters “engaged in systematic voter fraud by telling voters that they were signing a petition supporting affirmative action.”

The proposal would ban the use of race, gender, color, ethnicity or national origin in government and public school hiring, contracting and university admissions in Michigan.

U.S. District Judge Arthur Tarnow said he couldn’t remove the proposal from the ballot because the MCRI group targeted all voters without regard to race while gathering petition signatures.

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Washington Post: Creating Equitable Public Education in the U.S.

For more than fifty years this country has been staring in the face of educational inequities. Efforts have been made to address the root causes of these inequities; the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision outlawed formally segregated public schools, and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 targeted funds to disadvantaged students in public schools. But despite these efforts, our nation’s education system remains one of great injustice.

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The Times: Professor’s nostalgia for the days of ‘pawing’ by male dons

A PROFESSOR has said that she yearns for the days when male dons spiced up tutorials with their “groping” of students.
Mary Beard, Professor of Classics at Cambridge University, stunned fellow academics with her fond recollections of female students putting up with the fumblings from older professors to get inspirational teaching. She wrote: “It is hard to repress certain wilful academic nostalgia for that academic era before about 1980 when the erotic dimension of pedagogy which had flourished since Plato was firmly stamped out.”

She made the remarks as she criticised colleagues for failing to record that the respected Latin scholar Eduard Fraenkel was a notorious groper. She said that this side of Professor Fraenkel’s character had been omitted from biographies, even though “any academic woman older than her mid-forties” would be ambivalent to it.

Professor Beard, 51, said that a female tutor used to warn students that although they would learn a lot from Professor Fraenkel, they would probably be “pawed about a bit”.

Professor Beard’s remarks have been criticised by academics and student leaders but she remained unrepentant. She said she was sorry if she had given an impression that she was in favour of male sexual harassment but said that other academics had acknowledged the link between “pawing” and teaching.

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Inside Higher Ed: Sociology, Gender and Higher Ed

Issues of equity and group differences are always front and center in sociology — and that’s certainly the case at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, which started Friday, in Montreal.

A number of scholars turned their attention inward, to academe, to examine trends in gender equity. Among the findings presented this weekend in Montreal: Overt gender discrimination is rapidly disappearing in faculty careers, but is being replaced by more subtle forms of bias; the decision to become increasingly specialized in research has some surprising impacts on the advancement of male and female faculty members; and participation in athletics may play a significant role in narrowing the gender achievement gap among high school students preparing for college.

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Inside Higher Ed: Church, State and Campus

Over the last year, law schools have been the setting for disputes over whether student groups should have the right to receive institutional funds while restricting membership to those who share their religious beliefs — in violation of anti-bias rules.

This week, lawyers representing those groups indicated that they are taking their campaign beyond law schools by challenging the way two University of Wisconsin campuses are treating Christian organizations. The religious groups are now threatening to sue — and lawyers from a variety of perspectives are predicting that this may be the next major higher education case to reach the U.S. Supreme Court.

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