He was held up as the poster boy of racial preferences in the fight against California’s Proposition 209, the ballot initiative outlawing preferences passed overwhelmingly in 1996. An ardent defender of preferences, in 1995 he was profiled as their best defense in the pages of The Nation, The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times.
The Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, D.C., released in June a very damning evaluation of the Foreign Student Program. Conducted by George Borjas, Pforzheimer Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, the evaluation finds the program rife with corruption and failing abysmally at achieving its advertised benefits.
The recent ruling (now on hold) by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to declare the Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional and therefore not fit for public schools is just one of the bewildering changes taking place in our public schools. At this moment, maybe it’s time to take stock of what is — and what isn’t — allowed nowadays.
The stage is set for the Supreme Court to tackle that thorniest of issues, the legality of racial preferences in college admissions. All that remains is for the Court to decide to review the case.
Just from reading the preamble to Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, one would not suspect it was the preamble to 30 years’ of controversy, fights over interpretation, compliance tests, and the noxious slew of bureaucratic miasma that followed: “No person in the U.S. shall, on the basis of sex be excluded from participation in, or denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any educational program or activity receiving federal aid.”
The terrorist attacks on the United States and the subsequent U.S. war on terrorism were the subjects of a recent teach-in at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and were also referenced by North Carolina State University students during two recent campus events focusing on an entirely different subject, the racial climate.
New courses inspired by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 have been developed on college campuses nationwide. Most deal matter-of-factly with the issues, but some have come under criticism for being “gadfly courses” and “politically correct pseudo-courses.”
Some illegal immigrants may now pay resident tuition to attend public universities in California, thanks to legislation signed last year by Gov. Gray Davis and a vote this week by the University of California Board of Regents. In North Carolina, a bill before the Senate would create a commission to study doing the same thing here.
Controversy continues to swirl around what the University of North Carolina at Wilmington did to a professor for chiding a student’s mass-distributed e-mail as “bad speech.”
Controversy continues to swirl around what the University of North Carolina at Wilmington did to a professor for chiding a student’s mass-distributed e-mail as “bad speech.” As well as around what UNCW didn’t do.
