For brief moments over the past couple of years, it seemed like that colleges and universities would have to start at least pretending to obey the same laws imposed on every other business in the nation. The principle is simple. You can’t refuse to hire someone based on their race. As difficult as it is to believe, where a mom-and-pop dry cleaner could be sued into oblivion for managing the racial and ethnic makeup of its workforce, mega-corporations like Harvard and Yale and Stanford not only have the legal right to do so, they actually employ staff to do just that.
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Then the Trump administration, acting on behalf of fairness and equity and basic equity brought court cases to force institutions of higher education to act as though they were American citizens and not Petri dishes for the growth of Critical Race Theory. In October, the Justice Department sued Yale University for unlawful racial discrimination:
The complaint also alleges that Yale injures applicants and students because Yale’s race discrimination relies upon and reinforces damaging race-based stereotypes, including in particular such stereotypes against Yale’s racially-favored applicants. And, the complaint alleges that Yale engages in racial balancing by, among other things, keeping the annual percentage of African-American admitted applicants to within one percentage point of the previous year’s admitted class as reflected in U.S. Department of Education data. The complaint alleges similar racial balancing about Asian-American applicants.
The department’s complaint alleges that Yale’s race and national origin discrimination violate Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The lawsuit is the result of a multi-year investigation into allegations of illegal discrimination contained in a complaint filed by Asian American groups concerning Yale’s conduct.
Yes, dear readers, Yale engaged in racial stereotypes. They went full Charlie Chan on Asian American by using student evaluation to ding applicants on their lack of leadership ability and other personal traits that seemed ripped from something like Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. (Did you know that Asian American kids were referred to as “white adjacent”?)
This is how I describe it in American Higher Education Is About to Melt Down in a Way That Would Make Karl Marx LOL.
Yale is just the canary in the coal mine. The entire Ivy League monopoly works in the same way. According to an internal Harvard study, if students were admitted on empirical academic criteria, about 43% would be Asian and 38% white.
If President Trump is re-elected and Justice continues to push back against the idea that if a little discrimination in the service of a good cause is okay, then massive, industrial-scale racial discrimination to further the cause of wokeness has to be God’s work, then every admission scheme by any US college or university that fancies itself as selective is illegal.
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As Helen Andrews writing at American Conservative points out, we don’t know where this is going. The number of college-age kids is declining each year, putting higher education under an extreme strain in the best of times. With Justice and the woke applying pressure against the very idea of selectivity, the outcome looks grim. (Please give this article a click because Ms. Andrews brought together a lot of stray thoughts on this subject that I’ve been collecting for a couple of months like Irony Alert: How Blatant Racial Discrimination Just Might End Affirmative Action.)
Well, President Trump did not get a second term and in the Biden kakistocracy Critical Race Theory is the state religion. And so, just a few hours ago, Biden’s Justice Department pulled the plug on the Yale lawusit.
The Justice Department withdrew a lawsuit that alleged Yale University violated federal civil-rights law by discriminating against white and Asian-American undergraduate applicants, the latest indication that the Biden administration is shifting the federal government’s stance on civil-rights enforcement from that of former President Donald Trump.
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In addition to withdrawing its suit against Yale, the Justice Department withdrew its notice letter finding that Yale’s practices violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color or national origin in any program receiving federal funds.
There is still hope that the assault on legalized racial discrimination will succeed. The federal bench and appeals courts are well-salted with men and women who know that racial discrimination is anti-American and does nothing but divide and pile grievance on top of grievance. In the words of Chief Justice John Robert, “It is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race.” But what is abundantly clear is that an administration that came into being on the strength of race-baiting is not going to abandon the tool that got it this far.
