Affirmative Action Antics
“Diversity” trumps honesty and the rule of law at UCLA.
Higher education is in free fall. At college campuses around the nation, protestors veto mainstream commencement speakers, students receive “trigger warnings” when exposed to uncomfortable ideas, and trendy radical dogma regularly displaces classics in the curriculum. It’s becoming increasingly clear that the higher education system has been taken over by left-wing zealots who will resort to extraordinary measures—including violating the law—to achieve their policy objectives, which include multiculturalism, identity politics, and “racial justice.” The latest example of academic politics run amok can be found in political scientist Tim Groseclose’s exposé of racial discrimination in admissions at the University of California at Los Angeles. The UCLA administration, with the active complicity of faculty members, violated the law by considering race. Groseclose blew the whistle on UCLA’s admission practices, which he chronicles in Cheating.
In 1996, California voters passed Proposition 209, also known as the California Civil Rights Initiative, which amended the state constitution to prohibit the state from discriminating against, or in favor of, any individual or group based on race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin. Along with barring preferences in hiring and contracts, CCRI explicitly outlawed racially conscious “affirmative action” in university admissions. Despite the predictable legal challenges, both the California Supreme Court and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the measure. (A similar law passed in Michigan in 2006, which the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed this year in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action.)
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