1. The National Association of Scholars has signed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin. Together with the Pacific Legal Foundation, the American Civil Rights Institute, and the Center for Equal Opportunity, the NAS calls on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to reverse and remand the district court’s decision to uphold the University’s use of race-based admissions. The brief states, "Because racial balancing clearly has been prohibited by the Supreme Court, the University calls its racial balancing 'diversity.' But its policy lays its true intent bare. It is racial balancing by a different name, and cannot survive the demands of strict scrutiny." 2. MIT apparently now stands for Merit Is Taboo. Inside Higher Ed reports today that theMassachusetts Institute of Technology has published a report on trends in the promotion of minority faculty members. The report contains a section with philosophical musings weighing the benefits of meritocracy against those of "diversity":
Meritocracy is a concept that is key to the ideals at MIT. Although it is important to strive for this ideal, there is tension created by the outward presumption that true meritocracy is already essentially achieved at MIT. [...] Furthermore, although the ideal of a meritocracy is, in general, one that can be appreciated by many, there are flaws in the belief that merit is equitably assigned to different kinds of contributions.
Roger Clegg, NAS friend and president of the Center for Equal Opportunity, gave an excellent response:
The problem is that the authors of the MIT report do not want the best individuals, regardless of skin color or national origin, to be picked. They want a predetermined racial and ethnic mix (“diversity”), and are happy for there to be subtle and not-so-subtle discrimination in order to achieve it. My essay ["Another Bad Idea: 'Diversifying' Science Faculties"] discusses why such discrimination is bad policy—and illegal. A useful tool to use as one plows through the MIT report is to substitute “underrepresented white men” every time you read “underrepresented minorities” and ask whether what’s being proposed is persuasive as a matter of policy and passes legal muster.
3. Remember back in the 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger case when Sandra Day O'Connor, delivering the opinion of the court, said, "We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today"? By now, we should have only 18 years to go, right? Wrong. Former Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O'Connor is backtracking. In a recently published essay she wrote, "That 25-year expectation is, of course, far from binding on any justices who may be responsible for entertaining a challenge to an affirmative-action program in 2028." Another NAS friend, Center for Individual Rights president Terry Pell is quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education story saying, "What I found surprising was the extent to which the authors confirmed everyone's worst fears about this 25-year limit — namely, that is not a limit at all, but rather an opening bid in an effort to justify the use of race preferences in perpetuity."
