It started with Harvard University. Then Notre Dame, Cornell, Ohio State University and the University of Michigan.
Colleges are racing to close or rename their diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) offices, which serve as the institutional infrastructure to ensure fair opportunity and conditions for all. The pace is disorienting and getting worse: since last January, 181 colleges in all.
Often this comes with a formal announcement via mass email, whispering a watered-down name change that implies: “There is nothing to see here. The work will remain the same.” But renaming the offices is something to see, and it changes the work that can be done.
Colleges say the changes are needed to comply with last January’s White House executive orders to end “wasteful government DEI programs” and “illegal discrimination” and restore “merit-based opportunity,” prompting them to replace DEI with words like engagement, culture, community, opportunity and belonging.
One college went even further this month: The University of Alabama ended two student-run magazines because administrators perceived them to be targeting specific demographics and thus to be out of compliance with Attorney General Pamela Bondi’s anti-discrimination guidance. Students are fighting back while some experts say the move is a blatant violation of the First Amendment.
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With the one-year mark of the original disruptive executive orders approaching, the pattern of response is nearly always the same. Announcements of name changes are followed quickly by impassioned pronouncements that schools should “remain committed to our long-standing social justice mission.”
University administrators, faculty, students, supporters and alumni need to stand up and call attention to the risks of this widespread renaming.
True, there are risks to not complying. The U.S. State Department recently proposed to cut research funding to 38 elite universities in a public-private partnership for what the Trump administration perceived as DEI hiring practices. Universities removed from the partnership will be replaced by schools that the administration perceives to be more merit-based, such as Liberty University and Brigham Young University.
In addition to the freezing of critical research dollars, universities are being fined millions of dollars for hiring practices that use an equity lens — even though those practices are merit-based and ensure that all candidates are fairly evaluated.
Northwestern University recently paid $75 million to have research funding that had already been approved restored, while Columbia University paid $200 million. Make no mistake: This is extortion.
Some top university administrators have resigned under this pressure. Others seem to be deciding that changing the name of their equity office is cheaper than being extorted.
Many are clinging to the misguided notion that the name changes do not mean they are any less committed to their equity and justice-oriented missions.
As a long-standing faculty member of a major public university, I find this alarming. In what way does backing away from critical, specific language advance social justice missions?
In ceding ground on critical infrastructure that centers justice, the universities that are caving are violating a number of historian and author Timothy Snyder’s 20 lessons from the 20th century for fighting tyranny.
The first lesson is: “Do not obey in advance.” Many of these changes are not required. Rather, universities are making decisions to comply in advance in order to avoid potential future conflicts.
The second is: “Defend institutions.” The name changes and reorganizations convey that this infrastructure is not foundational to university work.
What Snyder doesn’t warn about is the loss of critical words that frame justice work.
The swift dismantling of the infrastructures that had been advancing social justice goals, especially those secured during the recent responses to racial injustice in the United States and the global pandemic, has been breathtaking.
This is personal to me. Over the 15 years since I was hired as a professor and community health equity researcher at Chicago’s only public research institution, the university deepened its commitment to social justice by investing resources to address systemic inequities.
Directors were named, staff members hired. Missions were carefully curated. Funding mechanisms were announced to encourage work at the intersections of the roots of injustices. Award mechanisms were carefully worded to describe what excellence looks like in social justice work.
Now, one by one, this infrastructure is being deconstructed.
The University of Illinois Chicago leadership recently announced that the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Equity and Diversity will be renamed and reoriented as the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Engagement. The explanation noted that this change reflects a narrowed dual focus: engaging internally within the university community and externally with the City of Chicago.
This concept of university engagement efforts as two sides of one coin oversimplifies the complexity of the authentic, reciprocal relationship development required by the university to achieve equity goals.
As a community engagement scientist, I feel a major loss and unsettling alarm from the renaming of “Equity and Diversity” as “Engagement.” I’ve spent two decades doing justice-centered, community-based participatory research in Chicago neighborhoods with community members. It is doubtful that the work can remain authentic if administrators can’t stand up enough to keep the name.
As a professor of public health, I train graduate students on the importance of language and naming. For example, people in low-income neighborhoods are not inherently “at risk” for poor health but rather are exposed to conditions that impact their risk level and defy health equity. Health is “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being,” while health equity is “the state in which everyone has the chance to attain full health potential.” Changing the emphasis from health equity to health focuses the system’s lens on the individual and mutes population impact.
Similarly, changing the language around DEI offices is a huge deal. It is the beginning of the end. Pretending it is not is complicity.
Jeni Hebert-Beirne is a professor of Community Health Sciences at the University of Illinois Chicago School of Public Health and a public voices fellow of The OpEd Project.
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Last year, Project 2025 was a conservative wish list: a grab bag of proposals large and small that would transform the federal government, including in education.
Months later, many of those wishes have become reality. That includes, at least in part, Project 2025’s ultimate goal of doing away with the Education Department.
The department still exists — getting rid of it completely would require congressional action— but it is greatly diminished: Much of the department’s work is being farmed out to other federal agencies. Half of its workforce of about 4,100 people have left or been fired. And Education Secretary Linda McMahon wrote after her confirmation that she was leading the department’s “final mission.”
Eliminating the Education Department was just one of many goals, however. While the administration did not meet all the other tasks in this “to-do” list below, compiled by The Hechinger Report and taken directly from Project 2025, there’s still three more years to go.
Early childhood
Eliminate Head Start: NO. Head Start, which provides free preschool for low-income children, still exists, though some individual centers had problems accessing their money because of temporary freezes from the Department of Government Efficiency and the prolonged government shutdown. The federal government also closed five of 10 Head Start regional offices, which collectively served 22 states.
Pay for in-home child care instead of universal (center-based) daycare: NO. Project 2025 states that “funding should go to parents either to offset the cost of staying home with a child or to pay for familial, in-home childcare.” There have been no moves to fulfill this goal, but the budget reconciliation bill the president signed in July increased the child tax credit and introduced “Trump Accounts” for children under age 18.
Expand child care for military families:YES. The National Defense Authorization Act, passed on Dec. 17 and sent to the president for his signature, authorizes over $491 million to design and build new child care centers for these families, among other provisions. The Department of Defense provides child care to military families on a sliding scale based on income. However, about 20 percent of military families who need child care can’t get it because there is not enough space.
Give businesses an incentive to provide “on-site” child care: NO. Project 2025 states that “across the spectrum of professionalized child care options, on-site care puts the least stress on the parent-child bond.”
K-12 education
Move the National Center for Education Statistics to the Census Bureau; transfer higher education statistics to the Labor Department: NO. Education data collection remains at the Education Department. However, the agency’s capacity has been sharply reduced following mass firings and the termination of key contracts — a development not envisioned in Project 2025. At the same time, Donald Trump directed the center to launch a major new data collection on college admissions to verify that colleges are no longer giving preferences based on race, ethnicity or gender.
Expand choice for families by making federal funding portable to many school options: PARTIAL. In January, the president signed an executive order encouraging “educational freedom.” One of the order’s provisions requires the departments of Defense and Interior — which run K-12 schools for military families and tribal communities, respectively — to allow parents to use some federal funding meant for their children’s education at private, religious and charter schools. However, that initiative for Indian schools ended up being scaled back after tribes protested. The “big, beautiful” spending bill signed in July created a national voucher program, but states have to opt in to participate.
Send money now controlled by the federal government, such as Title I and special education funding, to the states as block grants: NO. In the current fiscal year, about $18.5 billion in Title I money flowed to districts to support low-income students. States received about $14 billion to support educating children with disabilities. Project 2025 envisions giving states that money with no strings attached, which it says would allow more flexibility. While the administration has not lifted requirements for all states, it is considering requests from Indiana, Iowa and Oklahoma that would allow those states to spend their federal money with less government oversight. Also, in his fiscal 2026 budget proposal, Trump floated the idea of consolidating several smaller education programs, such as those supporting rural students, homeless students and after-school activities, into one $2 billion block grant. That would be far less than the combined $6.5 billion set aside for these programs in the current budget.
Reject “radical gender ideology” and “critical race theory,” and eliminate requirements to accept such ideology as a condition of receiving federal funds:YES. Immediately after Trump was sworn into office, he reversed a Biden administration rule that included protection of LGBTQ+ students under Title IX, which bans sex-based discrimination in education programs and activities that receive federal money. Trump also signed an executive order threatening to withhold federal dollars from schools over what the order called “gender ideology extremism” and “critical race theory.” In the months since, the administration launched Title IX investigations in school districts where transgender students are allowed to participate on sports teams and use bathrooms that align with their gender identity. It sent letters to schools across the country threatening to pull funding unless they agree to its interpretation of civil rights laws, to include banning diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies and initiatives. The Education Department also pulled federal research grants and investigated schools and colleges over DEI policies it calls discriminatory.
Pass a federal “parents’ bill of rights,” modeled after similar bills passed at the state level: NO. House Republicans passed a Parents’ Bill of Rights Act two years ago, which would have required districts to post all curricula and reading materials, require schools receiving Title I money to notify parents of any speakers visiting a school, and mandate at least two teacher-parent conferences each year, among other provisions. The Senate did not take it up, and lawmakers have not reintroduced the bill in this session of Congress. About half of the states have their own version of a parentsʼ bill of rights.
Shrink the pool of students eligible for free school meals by ending the “community eligibility provision” and reject universal school meal efforts: NO. Under current rules, schools are allowed to provide free lunch to all students, regardless of their family’s income, if the school or district is in a low-income area. That provision remains in place. The Trump administration has not changed income eligibility requirements for free and reduced-price lunch at schools: Families that earn within 185 percent of the federal poverty line still qualify for reduced lunch and those within 130 percent of the poverty line qualify for free lunch.
Higher education
Roll back student loan forgiveness and income-driven repayment plans: PARTIAL.Three income-driven repayment plans will be phased out next year and a new one — the Repayment Assistance Plan — will be added. RAP requires borrowers to make payments for 30 years before they qualify for loan forgiveness. The administration also reached a proposed agreement to end even earlier the most controversial repayment plan known as SAVE (Saving on a Valuable Education). Trump officials have referred to the SAVE plan as illegal loan forgiveness. Under the plan, some borrowers were eligible to have their loans cleared after only 10 years, while making minimal payments.
End Parent PLUS loans: PARTIAL. These loans, which parents take out to help their children, had no limit. They still exist, but as of July 2026, there will be an annual cap of $20,000 and a lifetime limit of $65,000 per child. Grad PLUS loans, which allow graduate students to borrow directly on behalf of themselves, are being phased out. Under the Repayment Assistance Plan, graduates in certain fields, such as medicine, can borrow no more than $50,000 a year, or $200,000 over four years.
Privatize the federal student loan portfolio: NO. The Trump administration reportedly has been shopping a portion of the federal student loan portfolio to private buyers, but no bids have been made public. Project 2025 also called for eliminating the Federal Student Aid office, which is now housed in the Education Department and oversees student loan programs. Education Secretary Linda McMahon said the Treasury Department would be a better home for the office, but no plans for a move have been announced.
End public service loan forgiveness: NO. PSLF allows borrowers to have part of their debt erased if they work for the government or in nonprofit public service jobs and make at least 120 monthly payments. The structure remains, but a new rule could narrow the definition of the kinds of jobs that qualify for loan forgiveness. The proposed rule raises concerns that borrowers working for groups that assist immigrants, transgender youth or provide humanitarian aid to Palestinians, for example, could be disqualified from loan forgiveness. The new rule would go into effect in July.
Rescind Biden-era rules around sexual assault and discrimination: YES. The Department of Education almost immediately jettisoned changes that the Biden administration had made in 2024 to Title IX, which governs how universities and colleges handle cases of sexual assault and discrimination. Under the Biden rules, blocked by a federal judge days before Trump’s inauguration, accused students were no longer guaranteed the right to in-person hearings or to cross-examine their accusers. The Trump Education Department then returned to a policy from the president’s first term, under which students accused of sexual assault will be entitled to confront their accusers, through a designee, which the administration says restores due process but advocates say will discourage alleged victims from coming forward.
Reform higher education accreditation: YES. In an executive order, Trump made it easier for accreditors to be stripped of their authority and new ones to be approved, saying the existing bodies — which, under federal law, oversee the quality of colleges and universities — have ignored poor student outcomes while pushing diversity, equity and inclusion. Florida and Texas have started setting up their own accreditors and said the administration has agreed to expedite the typically yearslong approval process. The Department of Education has earmarked $7 million to support this work and help colleges and universities switch accreditors.
Dismantle DEI programs and efforts: PARTIAL. Though the administration called for eliminating college DEI programs and efforts, most of the colleges that have shut down their DEI offices have done so in response to state-level legislation. Around 400 books removed from the Naval Academy library because of concerns that they contained messages of diversity or inclusion, but most of the books were ultimately returned. The National Science Foundation canceled more than 400 grants related to several topics, including DEI.
Jill Barshay, Ariel Gilreath, Meredith Kolodner, Jon Marcus, Neal Morton and Olivia Sanchez contributed to this report.
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HONOLULU (AP) — A lawsuit filed Monday in U.S. court in Honolulu challenges an admissions policy of a wealthy and prestigious private school that gives preference to applicants who are Native Hawaiian.
A leading opponent of affirmation action launched a campaign last month to test the policy’s legality and stop Kamehameha Schools from favoring Hawaiians. It’s part of a movement to expand the legal definition of racial discrimination in education, which comes on the heels of a Supreme Court ruling against affirmative action in college admissions and is bolstered by the Trump administration’s war against diversity, equity and inclusion.
Now, they’re targeting scholarships, academic programs and admissions policies tied directly or indirectly to race.
The lawsuit was expected after Students for Fair Admissions — led by Edward Blum, a leading opponent of affirmative action — set up a website posing the question, “Is your child barred from Kamehameha Schools based on ancestry?”
The lawsuit doesn’t include any named or anonymous plaintiffs other than Students for Fair Admissions. But the complaint says the group has members who are “injured by Kamehameha’s discrimination,” and members who are “ready and able” to apply to the private school system, which has an endowment valued at more than $15 billion.
A Kamehameha spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to an email from The Associated Press seeking comment on the lawsuit.
Trustees said previously they are confident the policy aligns with established law.
Kamehameha Schools was founded by the will of Bernice Pauahi Bishop, the great-granddaughter of King Kamehameha I. When she died in 1884, her will directed the establishment of schools that give preference to Native Hawaiians.
Each year, the number of applications exceeds the number of spaces by as much as 17 to 1, depending on the campus and grade, according to the Kamehameha website. Alumni and parents of current students say a Kamehameha education is highly desirable because it’s affordable, offers stellar academics and is grounded in the culture of Hawaii’s Indigenous people.
“Nothing about training future leaders, or preserving Hawaii’s unique culture, requires Kamehameha to block its students from learning beside children of different ancestries — Asian, black, Hispanic, or white,” the lawsuit said.
The comment shows the group behind the lawsuit doesn’t understand what is means to be Hawaiian or multiracial, said state Sen. Jarrett Keohokalole, who is running for Congress.
He noted that his mother, Marilyn Stewart, is a white woman from Medford, Oregon, making him Scottish, German, French, Tahitian and Hawaiian.
The challenge to Kamehameha Schools is coming from “tone deaf outsiders who know nothing about Hawaii,” said Keohokalole, who applied in 1995 for seventh grade, and two years later for high school, but was rejected and graduated from a Catholic boys school.
There’s an understanding among Hawaii residents that only students with Hawaiian blood will be admitted. Many see the policy as a way to remedy disparities stemming from U.S. colonization and the 1893 overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom by a group of American business owners.
The lawsuit says that if not for the admissions policy, there are non-Hawaiian families who would apply for reasons including: “bad experiences with local public schools,” Kamehameha’s “high-quality programs” and for its networking and career opportunities “that would benefit the daughter for the rest of her life.”
This isn’t the first time Kamehameha has had to defend its admissions policy.
More than 15,000 people protested after a 2005 ruling by a panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the policy of restricting admission to Hawaiians, ruling it violated federal civil rights law. Kamehameha sought a rehearing.
The following year, the court upheld the policy. Kamehameha later settled with the family of the white student who brought the case when he was denied admission.
According to the recent lawsuit, that settlement was $7 million.
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
President Donald Trump wants to collect more admissions data from colleges and universities to make sure they’re complying with a 2023 Supreme Court decision that ended race-conscious affirmative action. And he wants that data now.
But data experts and higher education scholars warn that any new admissions data is likely to be inaccurate, impossible to interpret and ultimately misused by policymakers. That’s because Trump’s own policies have left the statistics agency inside the Education Department with a skeleton staff and not enough money, expertise or time to create this new dataset.
The department already collects data on enrollment from every institution of higher education that participates in the federal student loan program. The results are reported through the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). But in an Aug. 7 memorandum, Trump directed the Education Department, which he sought to close in March, to expand that task andprovide “transparency” into how some 1,700 colleges that do not admit everyone are making their admissions decisions. And he gave Education Secretary Linda McMahon just 120 days to get it done.
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Expanding data collection on applicants is not a new idea. The Biden administration had already ordered colleges to start reporting race and ethnicity data to the department this fall in order to track changes in diversity in postsecondary education. But in a separate memorandum to the head of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), McMahon asked for even more information, including high school grades and college entrance exam scores, all broken down by race and gender.
Bryan Cook, director of higher education policy at the Urban Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C., called the 120-day timeline “preposterous” because of the enormous technical challenges. For example, IPEDS has never collected high school GPAs. Some schools use a weighted 5.0 scale, giving extra points for advanced classes, and others use an unweighted 4.0 scale, which makes comparisons messy. Other issues are equally thorny. Many schools no longer require applicants to report standardized test scores and some no longer ask them about race so the data that Trump wants doesn’t exist for those colleges.
“You’ve got this effort to add these elements without a mechanism with which to vet the new variables, as well as a system for ensuring their proper implementation,” said Cook. “You would almost think that whoever implemented this didn’t know what they were doing.”
Cook has helped advise the Education Department on the IPEDS data collection for 20 years and served on technical review panels, which are normally convened first to recommend changes to the data collection. Those panels were disbanded earlier this year, and there isn’t one set up to vet Trump’s new admissions data proposal.
Cook and other data experts can’t figure out how a decimated education statistics agency could take on this task. All six NCES employees who were involved in IPEDS data collection were fired in March, and there are only three employees left out of 100 at NCES, which is run by an acting commissioner who also has several other jobs.
An Education Department official, who did not want to be named, denied that no one left inside the Education Department has IPEDS experience. The official said that staff inside the office of the chief data officer, which is separate from the statistics agency, have a “deep familiarity with IPEDS data, its collection and use.” Former Education Department employees told me that some of these employees have experience in analyzing the data, but not in collecting it.
In the past, there were as many as a dozen employees who worked closely with RTI International, a scientific research institute, which handles most of the IPEDS data collection work.
Technical review eliminated
Of particular concern is that RTI’s $10 million annual contract to conduct the data collection had been slashed approximately in half by the Department of Government Efficiency, also known as DOGE, according to two former employees, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation. Those severe budget cuts eliminated the technical review panels that vet proposed changes to IPEDS, and ended training for colleges and universities to submit data properly, which helped with data quality. RTI did not respond to my request to confirm the cuts or answer questions about the challenges it will face in expanding its work on a reduced budget and staffing.
The Education Department did not deny that the IPEDS budget had been cut in half. “The RTI contract is focused on the most mission-critical IPEDS activities,” the Education Department official said. “The contract continues to include at least one task under which a technical review panel can be convened.”
Additional elements of the IPEDS data collection have also been reduced, including a contract to check data quality.
Last week, the scope of the new task became more apparent. On Aug. 13, the administration released more details about the new admissions data it wants, describing how the Education Department is attempting to add a whole new survey to IPEDS, called the Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement (ACTS), which will disaggregate all admissions data and most student outcome and financial aid data by race and gender. College will have to report on both undergraduate and graduate school admissions. The public has 60 days to comment, and the administration wants colleges to start reporting this data this fall.
Complex collection
Christine Keller, executive director of theAssociation for Institutional Research, a trade group of higher education officials who collect and analyze data, called the new survey “one of the most complex IPEDS collections ever attempted.”
Traditionally, it has taken years to make much smaller changes to IPEDS, and universities are given a year to start collecting the new data before they are required to submit it. (Roughly 6,000 colleges, universities and vocational schools are required to submit data to IPEDS as a condition for their students to take out federal student loans or receive federal Pell Grants. Failure to comply results in fines and the threat of losing access to federal student aid.)
Normally, the Education Department would reveal screenshots of data fields, showing what colleges would need to enter into the IPEDS computer system. But the department has not done that, and several of the data descriptions are ambiguous. For example, colleges will have to report test scores and GPA by quintile, broken down by race and ethnicity and gender. One interpretation is that a college would have to say how many Black male applicants, for example, scored above the 80th percentile on the SAT or the ACT. Another interpretation is that colleges would need to report the average SAT or ACT score of the top 20 percent of Black male applicants.
The Association for Institutional Research used to train college administrators on how to collect and submit data correctly and sort through confusing details — until DOGE eliminated that training. “The absence of comprehensive, federally funded training will only increase institutional burden and risk to data quality,” Keller said. Keller’s organization is now dipping into its own budget to offer a small amount of free IPEDS training to universities.
The Education Department is also requiring colleges to report five years of historical admissions data, broken down into numerous subcategories. Institutions have never been asked to keep data on applicants who didn’t enroll.
“It’s incredible they’re asking for five years of prior data,” said Jordan Matsudaira, an economist at American University who worked on education policy in the Biden and Obama administrations. “That will be square in the pandemic years when no one was reporting test scores.”
‘Misleading results’
Matsudaira explained that IPEDS had considered asking colleges for more academic data by race and ethnicity in the past and the Education Department ultimately rejected the proposal. One concern is that slicing and dicing the data into smaller and smaller buckets would mean that there would be too few students and the data would have to be suppressed to protect student privacy. For example, if there were two Native American men in the top 20 percent of SAT scores at one college, many people might be able to guess who they were. And a large amount of suppressed data would make the whole collection less useful.
Also, small numbers can lead to wacky results. For example, a small college could have only two Hispanic male applicants with very high SAT scores. If both were accepted, that’s a 100 percent admittance rate. If only 200 white women out of 400 with the same test scores were accepted, that would be only a 50 percent admittance rate. On the surface, that can look like both racial and gender discrimination. But it could have been a fluke. Perhaps both of those Hispanic men were athletes and musicians. The following year, the school might reject two different Hispanic male applicants with high test scores but without such impressive extracurriculars. The admissions rate for Hispanic males with high test scores would drop to zero. “You end up with misleading results,” said Matsudaira.
Reporting average test scores by race is another big worry. “It feels like a trap to me,” said Matsudaira. “That is mechanically going to give the administration the pretense of claiming that there’s lower standards of admission for Black students relative to white students when you know that’s not at all a correct inference.”
The statistical issue is that there are more Asian and white students at the very high end of the SAT score distribution, and all those perfect 1600s will pull the average up for these racial groups. (Just like a very tall person will skew the average height of a group.) Even if a college has a high test score threshold that it applies to all racial groups and no one below a 1400 is admitted, the average SAT score for Black students will still be lower than that of white students. (See graphic below.) The only way to avoid this is to purely admit by test score and take only the students with the highest scores. At some highly selective universities, there are enough applicants with a 1600 SAT to fill the entire class. But no institution fills its student body by test scores alone. That could mean overlooking applicants with the potential to be concert pianists, star soccer players or great writers.
The Average Score Trap
This graphic by Kirabo Jackson, an economist at Northwestern University, depicts the problem of measuring racial discrimination though average test scores. Even for a university that admits all students above a certain cut score, the average score of one racial group (red) will be higher than the average score of the other group (blue). Source: graphic posted on Bluesky Social by Josh Goodman
Admissions data is a highly charged political issue. The Biden administration originally spearheaded the collection of college admissions data by race and ethnicity. Democrats wanted to collect this data to show how the nation’s colleges and universities were becoming less diverse with the end of affirmative action. This data is slated to start this fall, following a full technical and procedural review.
Now the Trump administration is demanding what was already in the works, and adding a host of new data requirements — without following normal processes. And instead of tracking the declining diversity in higher education, Trump wants to use admissions data to threaten colleges and universities. If the new directive produces bad data that is easy to misinterpret, he may get his wish.
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Avanza Network to Hold 9th Annual Conference as Hispanic Heritage Month Kicks Off – MIT Alumni group to visit over 25 High Schools in Underserved Communities
EL PASO, Texas, September 17, 2024 (Newswire.com)
– After a five-year hiatus brought on by the pandemic, the Avanza Network (“Avanza”) organization will gather in El Paso this year for its annual conference beginning Wednesday, September 18, and through Sunday, September 22. The gathering brings together MIT Mexican-American alumni and friends from throughout the U.S. to promote higher education through school visits featuring inspirational stories told by the group’s members. As in past conferences, Avanza also plans to meet with students and their parents in an informal Q&A session held at the University of Texas El Paso. Since its formation in 2011, the group has reached out to and inspired thousands of high school students in cities across the country.
“It is more important now than ever to continue to inspire our youth, particularly those in poor, underprivileged communities similar to the ones many of us grew up in,” stated Jacob Rael, Co-President of Avanza. “Getting in front of kids and showing them that Si Se Puede is sometimes the spark that they need to make them realize anything is possible with hard work, determination and an education.”
“And now that universities have changed their admissions policies after the recent Supreme Court decision against Affirmative Action, it’s crucial that these kids aim high and start to prepare for a higher education early on,” adds Eddie Grado, Co-President of Avanza. “These kids have the grit and smarts to accomplish anything they set their minds to.”
Avanza will also be distributing copies of its Avanza books to schools as part of its annual conference. Avanza has two volumes to its book and both are a compilation of inspiring true stories of several Avanza members and their diverse paths towards a higher education and successful careers. The books are available online at https://bookstore.weeva.com/search?q=avanza.
Avanza Network is a national organization founded by M.I.T. (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Mexican-American alumni and friends who are dedicated to the empowerment and advancement of current and aspiring Mexican-American professionals and members of underserved communities. Through its grass-roots efforts, Avanza stimulates Mexican-Americans and underserved communities to achieve full potential by increasing awareness of the transformational power of a college education, increasing college graduation rates for these groups, emphasizing the benefits of diverse career paths, highlighting the key benefits of STEM careers, and cultivating the group’s pipeline of talent through the professional development lifecycle.
For more information on its grass-root outreach efforts, the college application process or other tools for college-bound students, please visit www.avanzanetwork.org or follow MIT Avanza on Facebook and LinkedIn.
Some selective colleges are reporting drops in the number of Black students in their incoming classes, the first admitted since a Supreme Court ruling struck down affirmative action in higher education. At other colleges, including Princeton University and Yale University, the share of Black students changed little.
Several schools also have seen swings in their numbers of Asian, Hispanic and Native American students, but trends are still murky. Experts and colleges say it will take years to measure the full impact of last year’s ruling that barred consideration of race in admissions.
The end of affirmative action isn’t the only factor affecting the makeup of freshman classes. Some colleges are changing standardized test requirements, heightening their importance. And the federal government’s botched rollout of a new financial aid form complicated decisions of students nationwide on where and whether to attend college.
“It’s really hard to pull out what one policy shift is affecting all of these enrollment shifts,” said Katharine Meyer, a fellow at the Brookings Institution think tank. “The unsatisfying answer is that it’s hard to know which one is having the bigger impact.”
On Thursday, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill reported drops in enrollment among Black, Hispanic and Native American students in its incoming class. Its approach to admissions has been closely watched because it was one of two colleges, along with Harvard University, that were at the center of the Supreme Court case.
The population of Black students dropped nearly 3 percentage points, to 7.8%, compared with the UNC class before it. Hispanic student enrollment fell from 10.8% to 10.1%, while the incoming Native American population slid half a percentage point to 1.1%, according to the university. The incoming Asian student population rose 1 percentage point to 25.8%. The share of white students, at 63.8%, barely changed.
It is “too soon to see trends” from the affirmative action decision, said Rachelle Feldman, UNC’s vice provost for enrollment. She cited the delays in the Free Application for Federal Student Aid application process as another possible influence on the makeup of the incoming class.
“We are committed to following the new law. We are also committed to making sure students in all 100 counties from every population in our growing state feel encouraged to apply, have confidence in our affordability and know this is a place they feel welcome and can succeed,” Feldman said.
Some colleges reported sharp declines in the percentages of Black students in their incoming class, including drops from 15% to 5% at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and from 11% to 3% at Amherst College. At Tufts University, the drop in the share of Black students was more moderate, from 7.3% to 4.7%. At Yale, the University of Virginia and Princeton, the change year-over-year was less than a percentage point.
Many colleges did not share the demographics of applicants, making it impossible to know whether fewer students of color applied, or were admitted but chose not to attend.
Changes in other demographic groups also did not follow a clear pattern. At MIT, for example, the percentage of Asian students increased from 40% to 47% and Hispanic and Latino students from 16% to 11%, while the percentage of white students was relatively unchanged. But at Yale, the percentage of Asian students declined from 30% to 24%. White students at Yale went from 42% of the class to 46%, and Hispanic and Latino students saw an increase of 1 percentage point.
Colleges have been pursuing other strategies to preserve the diversity they say is essential to campus life.
JT Duck, dean of admissions at Tufts, emphasized the school would work on expanding outreach and partnerships with community organizations to reach underrepresented, low-income and first-generation students. He cautioned against reading too much into year-to-year changes in enrollment.
“The results show that we have more work to do to ensure that talented students from all backgrounds, including those most historically underrepresented at selective universities, have access to a Tufts education. And we are committed to doing that work, while adhering to the new legal constraints,” he said in an email. “We’ve already done a lot of work toward these ends and look forward to doing even more.”
At UNC, Feldman said it is a priority to offer substantial financial aid to low-income families, along with retaining students through investments in undergraduate advising and other initiatives. She said there are no plans for dramatic changes in light of the new enrollment data.
The university wants to make sure “anyone from any background knows they can earn their way here,” she said at a news conference.
Sharp declines in the number of students of color can impact how prospective students view schools, leading some to choose other colleges where they might feel a stronger sense of community, said Mitchell Chang, a professor of higher education at the University of California, Los Angeles.
“If we’re below a certain threshold, people who see themselves as having a more difficult time developing a sense of belonging will choose elsewhere,” he said. That’s especially true at selective colleges, where admitted students may be choosing between multiple top-tier schools.
So far, the drops in underrepresented minority students are smaller in scope than when states like Michigan and California passed bans on affirmative action decades earlier, Meyer said. But since those bans, colleges have developed more best practices for effective, non-race-based ways of recruiting and enrolling a diverse class, Meyer said.
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President Joe Biden is advocating for significant reforms to the United States Supreme Court, following a series of landmark decisions and controversies involving several justices and their spouses.In remarks from the LBJ Presidential Library on Monday, Biden said the court is being used to weaponize an extreme agenda, and, in recent years, extreme opinions have undermined long-established civil rights protections. “In 2022, the court overruled Roe v. Wade, and the right to choose that had been the law of the land for 50 years,” Biden said, “The following year the same court eviscerated affirmative action, which had been upheld and reaffirmed for nearly 50 years as well.”Under Biden’s proposal, each justice would be limited to one 18-year active term, with the current president appointing a new justice every two years. Biden is also asking for an enforceable code of ethics that would require justices to disclose gifts and to recuse themselves when they or their spouses have a conflict of interest. Finally, Biden is asking Congress to start work on a constitutional amendment limiting presidential immunity, stating that no former president is above the law. “We need these reforms to restore trust in the courts. To preserve the system of checks and balances that are vital to our democracy,” Biden said.Biden’s call comes as trust in the high court is dropping among Americans. A June poll from the Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that seven in 10 Americans think justices are influenced by ideology. Four in 10 say they have hardly any confidence in the people running the Supreme Court. “I think we’ll have a problem if we don’t do something about Supreme Court ethics,” said Alan Morrison, an Associate Dean at the George Washington University Law School.”It would be constitutional to do it by statute, but I do not think that’s a good idea,” Morrison went on to say. “If it’s done by statute, it can be undone by statute.” Accomplishing any reforms will prove challenging, with Republicans already pushing back on the plan. House Speaker Mike Johnson says the proposal would “tilt the balance of power,” and is “dead on arrival.””Democrats want to change the system that has guided our nation since its founding simply because they disagree with some of the court’s recent decisions,” Johnson said.The party split in Congress is not the only reason Morrison believes the plan is unlikely to move forward anytime soon. “That has to go through not only two-thirds of both Houses but also three-quarters of the states. It’ll be a long time coming,” Morrison said. Justice Clarence Thomas, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito would be the first three justices who could potentially be affected by term limits.
AUSTIN, Texas —
President Joe Biden is advocating for significant reforms to the United States Supreme Court, following a series of landmark decisions and controversies involving several justices and their spouses.
In remarks from the LBJ Presidential Library on Monday, Biden said the court is being used to weaponize an extreme agenda, and, in recent years, extreme opinions have undermined long-established civil rights protections.
“In 2022, the court overruled Roe v. Wade, and the right to choose that had been the law of the land for 50 years,” Biden said, “The following year the same court eviscerated affirmative action, which had been upheld and reaffirmed for nearly 50 years as well.”
Under Biden’s proposal, each justice would be limited to one 18-year active term, with the current president appointing a new justice every two years. Biden is also asking for an enforceable code of ethics that would require justices to disclose gifts and to recuse themselves when they or their spouses have a conflict of interest. Finally, Biden is asking Congress to start work on a constitutional amendment limiting presidential immunity, stating that no former president is above the law.
“We need these reforms to restore trust in the courts. To preserve the system of checks and balances that are vital to our democracy,” Biden said.
Biden’s call comes as trust in the high court is dropping among Americans. A June poll from the Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that seven in 10 Americans think justices are influenced by ideology. Four in 10 say they have hardly any confidence in the people running the Supreme Court.
“I think we’ll have a problem if we don’t do something about Supreme Court ethics,” said Alan Morrison, an Associate Dean at the George Washington University Law School.
“It would be constitutional to do it by statute, but I do not think that’s a good idea,” Morrison went on to say. “If it’s done by statute, it can be undone by statute.”
Accomplishing any reforms will prove challenging, with Republicans already pushing back on the plan. House Speaker Mike Johnson says the proposal would “tilt the balance of power,” and is “dead on arrival.”
“Democrats want to change the system that has guided our nation since its founding simply because they disagree with some of the court’s recent decisions,” Johnson said.
The party split in Congress is not the only reason Morrison believes the plan is unlikely to move forward anytime soon.
“That has to go through not only two-thirds of both Houses but also three-quarters of the states. It’ll be a long time coming,” Morrison said.
Justice Clarence Thomas, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito would be the first three justices who could potentially be affected by term limits.
Here is some background information about affirmative action as well as a few notable court cases.
Affirmative action policies focus on improving opportunities for groups of people, like women and minorities, who have been historically excluded in United States’ society. The initial emphasis was on education and employment. President John F. Kennedy was the first president to use the term in an executive order.
Supporters argue that affirmative action is necessary to ensure racial and gender diversity in education and employment. Critics state that it is unfair and causes reverse discrimination.
Racial quotas are considered unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court.
The state of Texas replaced its affirmative action plan with a percentage plan that guarantees the top 10% of high-school graduates a spot in any state university in Texas. California and Florida have similar programs.
1954 – The US Supreme Court, in Brown v. Board of Education, rules that the “separate but equal” doctrine violates the Constitution.
1961 – President Kennedy creates the Council on Equal Opportunity in an executive order. This ensures that federal contractors hire people regardless of race, creed, color or national origin.
1964 – The Civil Rights Act renders discrimination illegal in the workplace.
1978 – In Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, a notable reverse discrimination case, the Supreme Court rules that colleges cannot use racial quotas because it violates the Equal Protection Clause. As one factor for admission, however, race can be used.
1995 – The University of Michigan rejects the college application of Jennifer Gratz, a top high school student in suburban Detroit who is white.
October 14, 1997 – Gratz v. Bollinger, et al., is filed in federal court in the Eastern District of Michigan. The University of Michigan is sued by white students, including Gratz and Patrick Hamacher, who claim the undergraduate and law school affirmative action policies using race and/or gender as a factor in admissions is a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment or Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
December 3, 1997 – A similar case, Grutter v. Bollinger, is filed in federal court in the Eastern District of Michigan. Barbara Grutter, denied admission to the University of Michigan Law School, claims that other applicants, with lower test scores and grades, were given an unfair advantage due to race.
December 2000 – The judge in the Gratz v. Bollinger case rules that the University of Michigan’s undergraduate admissions policy does not violate the standards set by the Supreme Court.
March 2001 – The judge in the Grutter v. Bollinger case rules the University of Michigan Law School’s admissions policy is unconstitutional.
December 2001 – The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals hears appeals in both University of Michigan cases.
May 14, 2002 – The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals reverses the district court’s decision in Grutter v. Bollinger.
April 1, 2003 – The US Supreme Court hears oral arguments on the two cases. US Solicitor General Theodore Olson offers arguments in support of the plaintiffs.
June 23, 2003 – The Supreme Court rules on Grutter v. Bollinger that the University of Michigan Law School may give preferential treatment to minorities during the admissions process. The Court upholds the law school policy by a vote of five to four.
June 23, 2003 – In Gratz v. Bollinger, the undergraduate policy in which a point system gave specific “weight” to minority applicants is overturned six to three.
December 22, 2003 – The Supreme Court rules that race can be a factor in universities’ admission programs but it cannot be an overriding factor. This decision affects the Grutter and Gratz cases.
November 7, 2006 – The Michigan electorate strikes down affirmative action by approving a proposition barring affirmative action in public education, employment, or contracting.
January 31, 2007 – After the Supreme Court sends the case back to district court; the case is dismissed. Gratz and Hamacher settle for $10,000 in administrative costs, but do not receive damages.
2008 – Abigail Noel Fisher, a white woman, sues the University of Texas. She argues that the university should not use race as a factor in admission policies that favor African-American and Hispanic applicants over whites and Asian-Americans.
July 1, 2011 – An appeals court overturns Michigan’s 2006 ban on the use of race and/or gender as a factor in admissions or hiring practices.
November 17, 2014 – Students for Fair Admissions sues Harvard University, alleging Harvard intentionally discriminates against Asian-Americans. Students for Fair Admissions is run by Edward Blum, a conservative advocate, who sought Asian-Americans rejected by Harvard.
Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey (R) signed into law a sweeping bill that prohibits public schools and universities from maintaining or funding diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, as well as also requiring public universities to “designate restrooms on the basis of biological sex.” What do you think?
“There’s a severe lack of funding for homogeneity and exclusion programs.”
Andrea Byrd, Theramin Tuner
Perfect 4.0 Student Rejected From University Just For Being White Rapist
“No lady governor’s going to tell me I can’t practice diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
Marco Sharp, Toothpaste Flavorer
“I’m just surprised Alabama has schools to ban DEI in.”
Here’s a look at some of the most important cases decided by the US Supreme Court since 1789.
1803 – Marbury v. Madison This decision established the system of checks and balances and the power of the Supreme Court within the federal government.
Situation: Federalist William Marbury and many others were appointed to positions by outgoing President John Adams. The appointments were not finalized before the new Secretary of State James Madison took office, and Madison chose not to honor them. Marbury and the others invoked an Act of Congress and sued to get their appointed positions.
The Court decided against Marbury 6-0.
Historical significance: Chief Justice John Marshall wrote, “An act of the legislature repugnant to the constitution is void.” It was the first time the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional a law that had been passed by Congress.
1857 – Dred Scott v. Sandford This decision established that slaves were not citizens of the United States and were not protected under the US Constitution.
Situation: Dred Scott and his wife Harriet sued for their freedom in Missouri, a slave state, after having lived with their owner, an Army surgeon, in the free Territory of Wisconsin.
The Court decided against Scott 7-2.
Historical significance: The decision overturned the Missouri Compromise, where Congress had prohibited slavery in the territories. The Dred Scott decision was overturned later with the adoption of the 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery in 1865 and the 14th Amendment in 1868, granting citizenship to all born in the United States.
1896 – Plessy v. Ferguson This decision established the rule of segregation, separate but equal.
Situation: While attempting to test the constitutionality of the Separate Car Law in Louisiana, Homer Plessy, a man of 1/8 African descent, sat in the train car for whites instead of the blacks-only train car and was arrested.
1954 – Brown v. Board of Education This decision overturned Plessy v. Ferguson and granted equal protection under the law.
Situation: Segregation of the public school systems in the United States was addressed when cases in Kansas, South Carolina, Delaware and Virginia were all decided together under Brown v. Board of Education. Third-grader Linda Brown was denied admission to the white school a few blocks from her home and was forced to attend the blacks-only school a mile away.
The Court decided in favor of Brown unanimously.
Historical significance: Racial segregation violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.
Situation: Clarence Earl Gideon was forced to defend himself when he requested a lawyer from a Florida court and was refused. He was convicted and sentenced to five years for breaking and entering.
The Court decided in favor of Gideon unanimously.
Historical significance: Ensures the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee to counsel is applicable to the states through the 14th Amendment’s due process clause.
1964 – New York Times v. Sullivan This decision upheld the First Amendment rights of freedom of speech and freedom of the press.
Situation: The New York Times and four African-American ministers were sued for libel by Montgomery, Alabama, police commissioner L.B. Sullivan. Sullivan claimed a full-page ad in the Times discussing the arrest of Martin Luther King Jr., and his efforts toward voter registration and integration in Montgomery were defamatory against him. Alabama’s libel law did not require Sullivan to prove harm since the ad did contain factual errors. He was awarded $500,000.
The Court decided against Sullivan unanimously.
Historical significance: The First Amendment protects free speech and publication of all statements about public officials made without actual malice.
1966 – Miranda v. Arizona The decision established the rights of suspects against self-incrimination.
Situation: Ernesto Miranda was convicted of rape and kidnapping after he confessed, while in police custody, without benefit of counsel or knowledge of his constitutional right to remain silent.
The court decided in favor of Miranda 5-4.
Historical significance: Upon arrest and/or questioning, all suspects are given some form of their constitutional rights – “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you. Do you understand the rights I have just read to you? With these rights in mind, do you wish to speak to me?”
1973 – Roe v. Wade This decision expanded privacy rights to include a woman’s right to choose pregnancy or abortion.
Situation: “Jane Roe” (Norma McCorvey), single and living in Texas, did not want to continue her third pregnancy. Under Texas law, she could not legally obtain an abortion.
The Court decided in favor of Roe 7-2.
Historical significance: Abortion is legal in all 50 states. Women have the right to choose between pregnancy and abortion.
1974 –United States v. Nixon This decision established that executive privilege is neither absolute nor unqualified.
Situation: President Richard Nixon’s taped conversations from 1971 onward were the object of subpoenas by both the special prosecutor and those under indictment in the Watergate scandal. The president claimed immunity from subpoena under executive privilege.
The Court decided against Nixon 8-0.
Historical significance: The president is not above the law. After the Court ruled on July 24, 1974, Richard Nixon resigned on August 8.
Situation: Allan Bakke had twice applied for and was denied admission to the University of California Medical School at Davis. Bakke was white, male and 35 years old. He claimed under California’s affirmative action plan, minorities with lower grades and test scores were admitted to the medical school when he was not, therefore his denial of admission was based solely on race.
The Court decided in Bakke’s favor, 5-4.
Historical significance:Affirmative action is approved by the Court and schools may use race as an admissions factor. However, the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment works both ways in the case of affirmative action; race cannot be the only factor in the admissions process.
Situation: The constitutionality of the sweeping health care reform law championed by President Barack Obama.
The Court voted 5-4 in favor of upholding the Affordable Care Act.
Historical significance: The ruling upholds the law’s central provision – a requirement that all people have health insurance or pay a penalty.
2013 – United States v. Windsor This decision ruled that the Defense of Marriage Act, which defined the term “marriage” under federal law as a “legal union between one man and one woman” deprived same-sex couples who are legally married under state laws of their Fifth Amendment rights to equal protection under federal law.
Situation: Edith Windsor and Thea Spyer were married in Toronto in 2007. Their marriage was recognized by New York state, where they lived. Upon Spyer’s death in 2009, Windsor was forced to pay $363,000 in estate taxes, because their marriage was not recognized by federal law.
The court voted 5-4 in favor of Windsor.
Historical significance: The court strikes down section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act, ruling that legally married same-sex couples are entitled to federal benefits.
Situation: This case was about determining whether or not the portion of the Affordable Care Act which says subsidies would be available only to those who purchase insurance on exchanges “established by the state” referred to the individual states.
Historical significance: The court rules that the Affordable Care Act federal tax credits for eligible Americans are available in all 50 states, regardless of whether the states have their own health care exchanges.
Situation: Multiple lower courts had struck down state same-sex marriage bans. There were 37 states allowing gay marriage before the issue went to the Supreme Court.
The Court ruled 4-3 in favor of the University of Texas. Justice Elena Kagan recused herself from the case, presumably because she dealt with it in her previous job as solicitor general.
Historical Significance: The court rules that taking race into consideration as one factor of admission is constitutional.
Situation: Gerald Bostock filed a lawsuit against Clayton County for discrimination based on his sexual orientation after he was terminated for “conduct unbecoming of its employees,” shortly after he began participating in a gay softball league. Two other consolidated cases were also argued on the same day.
Situation: Mississippi’s Gestational Age Act, passed in 2018 and which greatly restricts abortion after 15 weeks, is blocked by two federal courts, holding that it is in direct violation of Supreme Court precedent legalizing abortion nationwide prior to viability, which can occur at around 23-24 weeks of pregnancy, and that in an “unbroken line dating to Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court’s abortion cases have established (and affirmed and re-affirmed) a woman’s right to choose an abortion before viability.” The court said states may “regulate abortion procedures prior to viability” so long as they do not ban abortion. “The law at issue is a ban,” the court held.
Mississippi appeals the decision to the Supreme Court.
The 6-3 opinion in favor of the plaintiff, written by Justice Samuel Alito states that “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start…Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences. And far from bringing about a national settlement of the abortion issue, Roe and Casey have enflamed debate and deepened division.”
In a joint dissenting opinion, Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan heavily criticized the majority, closing: “With sorrow – for this Court, but more, for the many millions of American women who have today lost a fundamental constitutional protection – we dissent.”
Historical Significance: The ruling overturns Roe v. Wade and there is no longer a federal constitutional right to an abortion, leaving abortion rights to be determined by states.
1944 – Korematsu v. United States – The Court ruled Executive Order 9066, internment of Japanese citizens during World War II, is legal, 6-3 for the United States.
1961 – Mapp v. Ohio – “Fruit of the poisonous tree,” evidence obtained through an illegal search, cannot be used at trial, 6-3 for Mapp.
1967 –Loving v. Virginia – Prohibition against interracial marriage was ruled unconstitutional, 9-0 for Loving.
1968 – Terry v. Ohio – Stop and frisk, under certain circumstances, does not violate the Constitution. The Court upholds Terry’s conviction and rules 8-1 that it is not unconstitutional for police to stop and frisk individuals without probable cause for an arrest if they have a reasonable suspicion that a crime has or is about to occur.
2008 – District of Columbia v. Heller – The Second Amendment does protect the individual’s right to bear arms, 5-4 for Heller.
2010 – Citizens United v. FEC – The Court rules corporations can contribute to PACs under the First Amendment’s right to free speech, 5-4 for Citizens United.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit unanimously dismissed a lawsuit by the organization Do No Harm against the Pfizer Corporation, alleging the latter operates a discriminatory fellowship program. While all three judges on the panel agreed the suit should be dismissed for a lack of standing, they disagreed about why. In particular, they disagreed about whether an association that seeks to establish Article III standing based upon the alleged injury to an individual member must identify that member by name when seeking a preliminary injunction.
Judge Robinson wrote the majority opinion in Do No Harm v. Pfizer, and was joined by Judge Jacobs. Her opinion begins:
Defendant-Appellee Pfizer Inc. (“Pfizer”) sponsors a Breakthrough Fellowship Program (the “Fellowship”) that seeks “to advance students and early career colleagues of Black/African American, Latino/Hispanic, and Native American descent.” J. App’x 45. Do No Harm, a nationwide membership organization, filed suit against Pfizer on behalf of its members, alleging that Pfizer unlawfully excludes white and Asian-American applicants from the Fellowship in violation of federal and state laws.
When Do No Harm moved for a preliminary injunction, the district court dismissed the suit for lack of subject matter jurisdiction. Do No Harm v. Pfizer Inc., 646 F. Supp. 3d 490, 517–18 (S.D.N.Y. 2022). In particular, the district court concluded that Do No Harm lacked Article III standing because, among other reasons, it failed to identify a single injured member by name. Id. at 504–05.
The decisive issues in this appeal are (1) whether, for purposes of establishing Article III standing under the summary judgment standard applicable to a motion for a preliminary injunction, Cacchillo v. Insmed, Inc., 638 F.3d 401, 404 (2d Cir. 2011), an association that relies on injuries to individual members to establish its standing must name at least one injured member; and (2) whether, if a plaintiff fails to establish Article III standing in the context of a motion for a preliminary injunction, the district court must dismiss their claims without prejudice for lack of standing, or whether the court should simply deny the preliminary injunction and allow the case to proceed in the ordinary course if the plaintiff alleged sufficient facts to establish standing under the less onerous standard applicable at the pleading stage.
We conclude that the district court did not err in determining that Do No Harm lacked Article III standing because it did not identify by name a single member injured by Pfizer’s alleged discrimination, and that the district court properly dismissed Do No Harm’s claims after reaching that conclusion.
According to Judge Robinson, the conclusion that an association must identify at least one injured member by name (at least at the summary judgment stage or when seeking a preliminary injunction) follows from the logic of Supreme Court precedents (such as Summers v. Earth Island Institute) rejecting associational standing based upon the statistical probability of harm.
From the opinion:
A naming requirement makes sense as an element of associational standing. An association that premises its standing on harm to its members must demonstrate that those members suffered an injury in fact that is concrete and particularized and actual or imminent, as opposed to conjectural or hypothetical. Lujan, 504 U.S. at 560. In this case, it requires proof that members are ready and able to apply to the challenged program but for its allegedly discriminatory criteria. Gratz, 539 U.S. at 262. Although a name on its own is insufficient to confer standing, disclosure to the court of harmed members’ real names is relevant to standing because it shows that identified members are genuinely ready and able to apply, and are not merely enabling the organization to lodge a hypothetical legal challenge. A member’s name does not merely check a box; it is a demonstration of the sincerity of the member’s interest in applying for a fellowship. These are quintessential Article III standing concerns. . . .
Moreover, a naming requirement flows from the rationale underlying associational standing. We allow an association to sue on behalf of its members only when those individuals “would otherwise have standing to sue in their own right.” Hunt, 432 U.S. at 343. While procedures exist to allow parties to proceed anonymously to the public when certain conditions are met, . . . we do not allow parties to remain anonymous to the court. . . . Although the caselaw requiring plaintiffs to identify themselves to the court typically turns on an analysis of federal procedural rules rather than Article III, it would nevertheless be incongruous, especially at the summary judgment stage, to allow an association to rest its standing on anonymous member declarations when we would not allow those members, as individual parties, to proceed anonymously to the court in their own right.
Judge Wesley wrote separately, concurring in part and concurring in the judgment. While he agreed that Do No Harm lacks standing, he did not agree that the anonymity of affected members of the association is the reason why. His separate opinion begins:
The same day it filed this case, Do No Harm chose to seek an “extraordinary” remedy. Winter v. Nat. Res. Def. Council, Inc., 555 U.S. 7, 24 (2008). It asked the district court to freeze Pfizer’s Breakthrough Fellowship program— and reconfigure the Fellowship’s selection process—through a preliminary injunction. Do No Harm did so knowing that it faced a demanding burden to prove its connection to the harm alleged, that it lacked a developed factual record, and that its members who claimed injury used pseudonyms. It also knew that none of its members had applied for the Fellowship in the first place.
I agree with the majority that Do No Harm lacks Article III standing. I fully endorse two important aspects of the majority’s standing framework: (1) once it moved for a preliminary injunction, Do No Harm had to prove standing under a summary judgment standard, see Cacchillo v. Insmed, Inc., 638 F.3d 401, 404 (2d Cir. 2011); and (2) when Do No Harm failed to meet its heightened standing burden, the proper action was to dismiss the case.
But I part ways with the majority as to why Do No Harm lacks standing. In my view, Members A and B did not show an imminent injury from the Fellowship’s selection process. As our precedents require, neither member provided sufficient evidence to show they were “ready” to apply to the Fellowship. That is the fundamental way that we analyze standing; it suffices to end this case. The majority passes on that analysis, and instead holds that to check the standing box, an organizational plaintiff relying on injury to some of its members must also provide those members’ actual names. We have no basis to impose this new constitutional rule.
I concur in the judgment affirming dismissal, but I cannot concur in full because the majority pronounces an unfounded “real name” test for associational standing. That is an unfortunate ruling for organizations everywhere.
NEW YORK — A federal judge in Texas has ordered a 55-year-old U.S. agency that caters to minority-owned businesses to serve people regardless of race, siding with white business owners who claimed the program discriminated against them.
The ruling was a significant victory for conservative activists waging a far-ranging legal battle against race-conscious workplace programs, bolstered by the Supreme Court’s ruling last June dismantling affirmative action programs in higher education.
Advocates for minority-owned businesses slammed the ruling as a serious blow to efforts to level the playing field for Black, Hispanic and other minority business owners who face barriers in accessing financing and other resources.
Judge Mark T. Pittman of the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of Texas, who was appointed by former President Donald Trump, ruled that the Minority Business Development Agency’s eligibility parameters violate the Fifth Amendment’s equal protection guarantees because they presume that racial minorities are inherently disadvantaged.
The agency, which is part of the U.S. Commerce Department, was first established during the Nixon administration to address discrimination in the business world. The Biden administration widened its scope and reach through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in 2021, making it a permanent agency and increasing its funding to $550 million over five years.
The agency, which helps minority-owned businesses obtain financing and government contracts, now operates in 33 states and Puerto Rico. According to its yearly reports, the agency helped businesses raise more than $1.2 billion in capital in fiscal year 2022, including more than $50 million for Black-owned enterprises, and more than $395 million for Hispanic-owned businesses.
In a sharply worded, 93-page ruling, Pittman said that while the agency’s work may be intended to “alleviate opportunity gaps” faced by minority-owned businesses, “two wrongs don’t make a right. And the MBDA’s racial presumption is a wrong.”
Pittman ruled that while the agency technically caters to any business that can show their “social or economic disadvantage,” white people and others not included in the “list of preferred races” must overcome a presumption that they are not disadvantaged. The agency, he said, has been using the “unconstitutional presumption” for “fifty-five years too many.”
“Today the clock runs out,” Pittman wrote.
Dan Lennington, deputy counsel at the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, which filed the lawsuit, said called it “a historic” victory that could affect dozens of similar federal, local and state government programs, which also consider people of certain races inherently disadvantaged. He said the ruling will pave the way for his and other conservative groups to target those programs.
“We just think that this decision is going to be applied far and wide to hundreds of programs using identical language,” Lennington said.
Justice Department lawyers representing Minority Business Development Agency declined to comment on the ruling, which can be appealed to the conservative-leaning 5th U.S. Circuit of Appeals in New Orleans. In court filings, the Justice Department cited congressional research showing that minority business owners face systemic barriers, including being denied loans at a rate three times higher than nonminority firms, often receiving smaller loans and being charged higher interest rates.
John F. Robinson, president of the National Minority Business Council, said the ruling is “a blow against minority owned businesses,” and does nothing to help majority-owned businesses because they already enjoy access to federal resources through the Small Business Administration.
“It has the potential of damaging the whole minority business sector because there will be less service available to minority-owned businesses,” Robinson said.
In a similar ruling last year, a Tennessee judge struck down a program run by the Small Business Administration that steered some government contracts toward minority-owned businesses.
Several other lawsuits have targeted government and private sector programs designed to benefit minority-owned businesses, including the case against the Fearless Fund, an Atlanta-based organization that provides early-stage funding to businesses owned by women of color.
Arian Simone, CEO of the Fearless Fund, criticized what she called dwindling corporate commitment to equity programs in the face of the growing legal challenges.
“Practically every day there seems to be a new legal ruling that chips away at our attempt to close economic gaps that exist for people of color,” she said in a statement. “The inaction by those who claim to be committed to equity has created the vacuum for this to happen.”
But Alphonso David, president & CEO of The Global Black Economic Forum, who is helping to represent the Fearless Fund, said the Texas ruling is not necessarily predictive of how those other cases will play out.
He pointed to another ruling Wednesday in which a conservative group lost its attempt to reinstate a lawsuit against pharmaceutical giant Pfizer over a fellowship program for Black, Latino and Native American professionals.
The New York-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Wednesday that the group, Do No Harm, lacked standing because it didn’t identify the plaintiffs by name. David said the Fearless Fund is making a similar argument against the American Alliance for Equal Rights, the conservative group that filed its lawsuit on behalf of anonymous women.
Do No Harm Chairman Dr. Stanley Goldfarb said he was “disappointed by the Court’s decision” and would continue to pursue appeals.
Pfizer did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The company, despite winning dismissal of the original lawsuit, changed the criteria of its fellowship program last year to open it to all races.
DEI advocates celebrated a separate win on Tuesday when a Florida law that limits discussions on race and diversity in the workplace was ruled to be unconstitutiona l by a federal appeals court.
“I think what we’re going to see over the next months — and years — is just a flurry of lawsuits from different directions, with conservative and liberal judges around the country reaching totally contradictory decisions to one another,” said David Glasgow, executive director of the Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging at New York University’s School of Law. “And that ultimately it’s going to have to wind its way back to the Supreme Court.”
___
AP Race & Ethnicity reporter Graham Lee Brewer and AP Business Writer Haleluya Hadero contributed to this story.
A psychology professor warned that hiring based on race alone was illegal, even as the University of Washington (UW) psychology department was downgrading white and Asian candidates, an audio recording obtained by Newsweek has shown.
The university later banned the faculty from hiring tenure-track employees for two years after finding major discrimination in hiring practices.
In an audio recording of a meeting from March 16, 2023, psychology professor Ione Fine objected to the hiring process in which the first- and second-ranked candidates, who were white and Asian American, respectively, got overlooked in favor of the third-ranked hopeful, who was Black.
For that to be achieved, a new “threshold” system was introduced in which any candidate could be chosen once they reached a certain level, circumventing the previous practice of hiring the highest-ranking candidate.
In 1998, Washington state passed a referendum banning race-based hiring in universities, which appears to have been ignored by the psychology department.
At the meeting, Fine objected to staff having just a 15-minute meeting to approve the decision of the selection committee.
“I feel like this idea that we are just deciding on candidates above threshold is a huge change in what we are looking at as a department and I think it should be something that we discuss as a faculty, not something that is decided by the planning committee,” Fine told the meeting.
She added: “I personally am in favor of affirmative action but we are legally not allowed to do it. I actually think we do owe the taxpayers who pay our salaries—the fact that it is illegal and has been democratically decided to be illegal by the taxpayers.”
Students at the University of Washington are pictured on March 6, 2020, in Seattle, Washington. The university has banned its psychology department from hiring tenure-track employees for two years after finding discrimination against white and Asian candidates. Karen Ducey/Getty Images
“So can you explain how we are respecting taxpayers? How are we not doing a [work-] around on what we are legally supposed to do?” she asked.
In response, a member of the selection committee denied that they were hiring based on race alone.
“This is not kind of like we are giving someone a position because of their identity. We have three extremely qualified candidates and we are making a strategic offer based on what the department has deemed the most important … so that is not at all what is happening,” the committee member told Fine.
Fine’s objections came one month before the Black candidate was hired after some Black faculty members urged that she be hired over the white candidate, who was then downgraded from first to third in the rankings.
An internal report discovered the discrimination in hiring procedures.
Other violations included the absence of white staff from meetings with job candidates, deleting a passage from a hiring report to hide discrimination, and discussing ways to “think our way around” a Supreme Court ruling that banned affirmative action in colleges.
A UW spokeswoman told Newsweek on January 3 that the case was exposed when “the dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, responding to an internal whistleblower, requested an internal review of this process by what was then called UCIRO (University Complaints, Investigation and Resolution Office) and is now the Civil Rights Investigation Office.”
The UW report found that when five finalists for a tenure-track assistant professor position were selected in January 2023, they were due to be interviewed by the Women Faculty and Faculty of Color groups so they could assess the general atmosphere of the faculty.
The report said a member of the Faculty of Color did not want any white women at the meeting and complained that the interviews were “awkward” when there was a white candidate. The names of everyone involved are redacted from the UW report.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
I wrote in November about the court decision allowing the challenge to NYU Law Review’s race, sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity preferences to proceed pseudonymously; Judge Victor Marrero allowed Doe to proceed pseudonymously, though “without prejudice to New York University’s right to move the Court to direct Plaintiff to disclose his identity, or any other appropriate relief, once the Clerk of Court assigns this case to a District Judge.” But the judge’s order didn’t give any reasons; and Doe’s memorandum, which must have provided various reasons that did sway the judge (whether or not he endorsed them all), had been filed under seal.
With the help of UCLA law student Maria Cafferata, I filed a motion to unseal that memorandum, and on Thursday the judge granted it. It’s an interesting and forceful argument, which I think some of our readers will agree with and still more will find interesting—it’s signed by, among other lawyers, conservative star lawyer Jonathan Mitchell (as well as Gene Hamilton of America First Legal Foundation, Ronald Berutti of Murray-Nolan Berutti LLC, and Christopher Mills of Spero Law LLC):
Plaintiff John Doe, a first-year law student at New York University, should be permitted to proceed under pseudonym. This lawsuit pertains to his personal beliefs and characteristics, and he risks significant retaliation from the NYU Law Review, his peers, his professors, NYU administrators, and potential employers if his identity is exposed. NYU faces no prejudice from Doe’s proceeding under a pseudonym, particularly at this early stage of litigation involving legal claims that do not focus on Doe’s own facts or credibility. Likewise, the public has little interest in knowing which specific student challenged the NYU Law Review’s generally applicable practices. Because the plaintiff’s interest in remaining anonymous significantly outweighs any competing interests, the Court should grant the motion and permit Doe to proceed under pseudonym….
[1.] First, this litigation involves matters that are highly sensitive and of a personal nature. They pertain to Doe’s personal characteristics — his race, sex, gender identity, and sexual orientation. See Doe #1 v. Syracuse University, No. 18-cv-0496, 2018 WL 7079489, at *4 (N.D.N.Y. Sept. 10, 2018), adopted, 2020 WL 2028285 (N.D.N.Y. Apr. 28, 2020) (“[C]laims involving sexual orientation … are examples of matters that qualify as being highly sensitive and of a personal nature.”).
The claims also implicate Doe’s personal beliefs in a matter of great controversy, particularly his belief that academic honors such as law-review members be awarded based on merit without any regard to an applicant’s race, sex, gender identity, or sexual orientation. Cf. Doe v. Porter, 370 F.3d 558, 560 (6th Cir. 2004) (“This suit … forces Plaintiffs to reveal their beliefs about a particularly sensitive topic that could subject them to considerable harassment.”); Doe v. Stegall, 653 F.2d 180, 185–86 (5th Cir. 1981) (permitting plaintiffs to proceed pseudonymously because the lawsuit revealed their unpopular personal beliefs); Choice, Inc. of Tex. v. Graham, 226 F.R.D. 545, 548 (E.D. La. 2005) (granting plaintiffs’ motion to proceed pseudonymously after finding that they “made revelations about their personal beliefs”).
Most people at NYU and at NYU Law School do not share Doe’s beliefs. And there is no question how the University—including its professors and administrators—will respond to the plaintiff’s lawsuit.
The law school and the university have fully embraced the tenets of “anti-racism” that call for discrimination against white men such as Doe to achieve the university’s goals of racial balancing and equity. In May, shortly before the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admission v. President and Fellows of Harvard College (2023), NYU’s President issued a university-wide communiqué bemoaning the “shadow hanging over higher education” from that case. He pledged that whatever “this ruling may change, it will not alter NYU’s” “core values” of “diversity and inclusion.” On the day that the Court’s decision dropped, the President sent another letter lamenting the “difficult day” that “[w]e” “see” “as a step backwards.” He declared that: “At NYU, diversity is a core part of our identity,” and defiantly announced that “we will not forsake [that] commitment.”
The university even quoted a dissenting opinion complaining about “a superficial rule of color-evasiveness.” A university website about the decision promotes statements from professors that are all opposed to colorblindness in higher education. And the theme of the materials on NYU’s official “Anti-Racism Education Resource List” is that white students like the plaintiff are inherently oppressors who should be discriminated against in the name of equity. One of those resources boasts that most people “involved in antiracist endeavors generally assume that all whites have a racist perspective unless demonstrated otherwise.” Filing a lawsuit to ensure equal educational opportunities regardless of race would solidify these people’s assumptions about Doe.
In short, the beliefs that Doe seeks to advance in this lawsuit “constitute a ‘modern day Scarlet Letter.’” They “involve timely ‘hotbutton’ issues that are frequently discussed and debated in many different settings across the country” and “implicate the highly sensitive and personal matters of racism[ and] sexism.” Courts in similar cases have granted anonymity to individual Plaintiffs, reasoning that “it is abundantly evident that the[se] issues” “are a matter of highly charged political debate” and “[t]he extreme emotions on both sides of this debate make likely the risk of ridicule and mental or physical harm.” See Menders v. Loudon County School Board (E.D. Va. 2021) (involving similar anti-racism concepts); see also Does 1– 2 v. Hochul (E.D.N.Y. 2022) (relying on “the unique sensitivities that exist within the current political climate and social context” in granting anonymity); Does 1 through 11 v. Board of Regents of University of Colorado (D. Colo. 2022) (because “neither the court nor the litigants undertake litigation in a vacuum,” “the political climate and public attitudes concerning [the underlying issue] exist and must be considered by the court”); Publius v. Boyer-Vine (E.D. Cal. 2017) (granting anonymity and reasoning that “[a]s a matter of common sense and knowledge, political opinions, like religious beliefs, especially if they are controversial and in the minority, can certainly be a source of social ostracization”).
[2.] This litigation also poses a risk of retaliation, which is exacerbated by the plaintiff’s status as a student and the defendant’s control over his education. The university environment is characterized by an “inherent power asymmetry between” the school and its students. Courts properly recognize the realities of this environment by granting anonymity in university-student cases in circumstances that, in other environments, may not warrant it. See Doe v. Colgate University (N.D.N.Y. 2016) (collecting cases); see also Doe v. New York University (S.D.N.Y. 2021) (granting anonymity because “revealing [the plaintiff’s identity in a lawsuit pertaining to her violations of COVID-19 protocols could impede her progress” toward “her stated career goals”).
Most obviously, Doe faces a risk of retaliation from the NYU Law Review, whose selection process presents ample opportunities for applicant names to be discovered as it requires personal statements, grades, and résumés. Even if the Law Review purports to anonymize documents, it would still be easy for someone to match a résumé with publicly available information about a student. So even if Doe were to obtain timely relief, he faces an obvious threat that the Law Review and its student leaders who adopted these discriminatory policies will blackball his future application. Cf. Dep’t of Commerce v. New York (2019) (noting that courts are “not required to exhibit a naiveté from which ordinary citizens are free”). Maintaining anonymity is the only way to ensure Doe to have an honest opportunity to compete for law-review membership based on his own merit. In other words, absent anonymity, “the injury litigated against would be incurred as a result of the disclosure of the plaintiff’s identity.”
Doe also faces a risk of retaliation from law-school professors, staff, and his fellow students. As discussed, Doe faces a “community hostile to the viewpoint reflected in [his] complaint.” Given the coercive environment of the university and the extreme, often violent protests directed at those with disfavored viewpoints on university campuses, Doe’s lawsuit “invite[s] an opprobrium analogous to the infamy associated with criminal behavior.” {E.g., Protesters Screaming ‘Nazi’ Shut Down Virginia Anti-Abortion Campus Lecture, Washington Examiner (violent protest at an anti-abortion event at Virginia Commonwealth University); College Free Speech Rankings, FIRE (“Administrators and student governments routinely punish dissenting students … and visiting campus speakers are shouted down, blocked from entering lecture halls, or disinvited from speaking.”); Riley Gaines Assaulted by Trans Activists at San Francisco State University, Yahoo News (describing how protesters harassed and attacked a speaker on campus); Charlie Kirk Event at UC Davis Prompts Violent Protest, Foundation for Individual Rights & Expression (campus event “was met with violent protests at University of California, Davis, with some protesters shattering windows and breaking down the doors of the event venue”); I Was Literally Attacked for Holding A Conservative Political Event On My Campus, Washington Examiner (describing how protesters violently disrupted a speaking event and forced the speaker to leave campus under police protection).}
“We live in an era in which elected public officials are openly calling for harassment of persons with opposing views, and speakers on college campuses”—and law-school campuses—”are being threatened with violence by students and others who do not share their opinions.” As Professor Volokh has explained, “many students … are finding themselves facing ideological discrimination based on their beliefs and statements” in law schools. “[T]hings in law school have been getting worse,” as “they encourage people to try to build intellectual and emotional divides” and “encourage or tolerate [students] shouting down those” they disagree with. “[T]he cause of the problem” is “cultural both among students and among the administrators,” and “there are lots of levers short of formal punishment that administrators have if they do want to suppress speech.” The official “message to students” who ascribe to or even listen politely to dissenting views is that “they themselves are hateful people who may merit being shunned.”
Many concrete examples show what follows from this pervasive university pressure: individuals being “condemned,” “threatened,” “doxed,” “physically intimidated or assaulted,” and investigated for “harassment” or “engaging in hateful behavior.” These threats are exacerbated here because “local and national media outlets have reported concerning the relevant events and could publish [the plaintiff’s] name[] in an update to their ongoing coverage.” Doe #1; see, e.g., Conservative group sues NYU, claiming law journal student staffing discriminates against straight, white applicants, NBC News.
One specific potential method of retaliation is via NYU’s Bias Response Line, which urges students to report their classmates for perceived “bias” incidents. Such reporting can lead to “formal investigation,” referral, and “appropriate” “disciplinary action.” NYU’s “Non-Discrimination and Anti-Harassment Policy” for students contains a sweeping definition of “prohibited harassment,” which includes “unwelcome verbal … conduct” that might “create[] an intimidating, hostile, or offensive academic” environment. Alleged violations of this policy are investigated by the Office of Equal Opportunity, with violators referred to the Dean for “sanctions.” Even “incidents” that violate no policy can trigger “refer[ral] [of] the matter to the appropriate BRL partner or Global Inclusion Officer” and unspecified “mechanism[s]” for resolution. At schools with similar regimes, one of the issues involving “the largest numbers of reported complaints” has been “affirmative action.” And courts have concluded that students reasonably fear enforcement of these open-ended bias response policies.
All of these threats of retaliation support anonymity here. See Doe v. Del Rio (S.D.N.Y. 2006) (“Where litigants risk public scorn or even retaliation if their identities are made public, unpopular but valid complaints may not be pursued.”); Does 1–2 (relying on “chilling effect” and “potentially adverse implications for Plaintiffs’ future employment”); see also EW v. New York Blood Center (E.D.N.Y. 2003) (granting anonymity without a “particularized showing of any specific harm or stigma to [the plaintiff] caused by prosecuting the case under her own name”).
[3.] Next, this suit relates to the Defendant’s receipt of government funds for use in higher education, so the university’s status as a private party matters little. Generally, “the government is viewed as having a less significant interest in protecting its reputation from damaging allegations than the ordinary individual defendant.” But “Defendant is not an ordinary private party, with interests relating solely to its personal life and business reputation—rather, [NYU] is organized solely to perform an important, public service,” namely, “to be a top quality international center of scholarship, teaching and research.” “Thus, this case is analogous to one involving a government defendant, where personal anonymity is more readily granted because of the existence of a public interest in the action and a lesser interest in personal reputation.” Further, as noted, NYU proudly and publicly proclaims its desire to discriminate in favor of women and non-Asian racial minorities, so it can hardly claim that this suit causes it reputational damage.
[4.] NYU is not prejudiced by allowing the plaintiff to press his claims anonymously, especially at this early stage of litigation. This suit challenges the legality of a discriminatory law-review policy, and the identity of the plaintiff makes no difference to NYU’s defense. The plaintiff’s factual knowledge or credibility is not at issue. Instead, the issue is whether the law review is discriminating on the basis of race or sex, and NYU has no need to know the plaintiff’s identity to address that question or defend itself in this litigation. See Yacovelli v. Moeser (M.D.N.C. 2004); Board of Regents of University of Colorado (“the identity of each of the Plaintiffs is of little-to-no value to the underlying allegations of the complaint”).
That is especially true at this “early stage in litigation.” Should some situation arise later that would require reconsideration of the plaintiff’s anonymity, the parties can address the issue at that time, but there is no reason now to force the plaintiff to reveal his identity now.
[5.] The public has only a weak interest in the plaintiff’s identity because of the nature of the claims. The plaintiff’s identity matters little to these claims, as they relate entirely to the law review’s generally applicable practices. This lawsuit “seeks to raise an abstract question of law” that plausibly “affects many similarly situated individuals.” Because “the public will know that a group of people in the [p]laintiffs’ position were” allegedly discriminated against “and are seeking to vindicate what they believe to be their constitutional rights,” there is a “uniquely weak public interest in knowing the litigants’ identities.” Does 1–2 (summarizing and quoting Board of Regents of University of Colorado); see Doe v. Cuomo (N.D.N.Y. 2013) (similar, and collecting cases); Free Speech v. Reno (S.D.N.Y. 1999) (“[B]ecause the particular plaintiffs in this … challenge are essentially interchangeable with similarly situated persons, there appears little public interest in which particular persons have actually sued.”).
[6.] Last, the plaintiff’s identity has thus far been kept confidential, and there are no alternative mechanisms for protecting his confidentiality. The plaintiff’s identity is not known to either NYU or the public, and “[t]here are no other mechanisms currently in place to protect [the plaintiff’s] identit[y] if [he] cannot proceed with this litigation anonymously.”
In sum, “in comparison to the [P]laintiff’s interest in h[is] privacy, the First Amendment interest in access to the [P]laintiff’s name in the course of these proceedings appears to be primarily theoretical” at this juncture.
My tentative view, which I also passed along in the original post: Plaintiff is understandably worried that suing would lead to social ostracism, possible loss of job opportunities, and perhaps possible rejection by the NYU Law Review itself (not based on plaintiff’s race, sex, and sexual orientation, but based on his having sued).
Yet as a general matter, such concerns, which are present in many cases—especially in employment cases, where many plaintiffs reasonably fear being identified as litigious employees—don’t justify pseudonymity. To quote Doe v. Delta Airlines, Inc. (2d Cir. 2016) (not binding precedent, but still likely persuasive in N.Y. federal courts and consistent with many other cases),
The public interest in scrutinizing judicial proceedings combined with the prejudice [defendant] would face from defending against claims prosecuted by an anonymous person at trial far outweigh Doe’s interest in not suffering professional embarrassment and any concomitant financial harm.
Plaintiffs argue that disclosure of A-D’s identities will leave them vulnerable to retaliation from their current employers, prospective future employers and an organized bar that does “not like lawyers who sue lawyers.” In our view, A-D face no greater threat of retaliation than the typical plaintiff alleging Title VII violations, including the other women who, under their real names and not anonymously, have filed sex discrimination suits against large law firms.
Furthermore, while Plaintiff fears that revealing her identity risks harm from other companies and individuals in media known for “blacklisting,” courts in this Circuit have repeatedly held that a plaintiff’s “desire to avoid … economic loss is insufficient to permit h[er] to appear without disclosing h[er] identity.” Free Mkt. Comp. v. Commodity Exch., Inc., 98 F.R.D. 311, 313 (S.D.N.Y. 1983); see also Townes, 2020 WL 2395159, at *4 (“[C]ourts have consistently rejected anonymity requests predicated on harm to a party’s reputational or economic interests.” (quoting Abdel-Razeq v. Alvarez & Marsal, Inc., No. 14 Civ. 5601 (HBP), 2015 WL 7017431, at *4 (S.D.N.Y. Nov. 12, 2015), and collecting cases)); see also Abdel-Razeq, 2015 WL 7017431, at *4 (collecting additional cases); Guerrilla Girls, Inc. v. Kaz, 224 F.R.D. 571, 573 (S.D.N.Y. 2004) (“Courts should not permit parties to proceed pseudonymously just to protect the parties’ professional or economic life.”).
This having been said, cases are split about whether plaintiffs could proceed pseudonymously in especially politically controversial disputes, on the theory that they would face unusually high risk of retaliation because of the controversy (see the cases canvassed in this post).
Courts also sometimes allow pseudonymity in cases that are both controversial and involve purely legal challenges, on the theory that the plaintiff’s identity is irrelevant to those cases. These have generally been lawsuits against the government, often challenging statutes on their face, but the motion plausibly argues that this reasoning can be adapted to what seems to be a facial challenge to the NYU Law Review’s policy. Again, it’s not clear whether the judge here accepted all these rationales, just some of them, or yet another rationale that he himself came up with.
Note that it does seem likely that at some point Doe will have to disclose his identity to someone on NYU’s side. Even in a purely legal challenge, there may be collateral questions related, for instance, to the plaintiff’s standing, that would require the defendant to know plaintiff’s identity. But such a disclosure might be done on an attorneys’-eyes-only basis—or (perhaps more likely) subject to a protective order that would let some NYU administrators know defendant’s identity but bar broader disclosure, for instance disclosure to the NYU Law Review editors, other students, and professors. (The NYU Law Review, unlike some other journals, doesn’t have an independent legal structure, so it’s NYU that is being sued and that is having to defend the case.)
There are often difficult questions about when a party’s identity can be concealed from the public at large (the subject on which my pseudonymity posts have focused). The plaintiff’s identity can only very rarely be concealed even from the defendant’s lawyers.
Thanks to Donald Trump’s presidential term, the conservative legal movement has been able to realize some of its wildest dreams: overturning the constitutional right to an abortion, ending affirmative action in college admissions, and potentially making most state-level firearm restrictions presumptively unconstitutional. That movement long predates Trump, and these goals were long-standing. But, like the rest of conservatism, much of the conservative legal movement has also been remade in Trump’s vulgar, authoritarian image, and is now preparing to go further, in an endeavor to shield both Trump and the Republican Party from democratic accountability.
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The federal judiciary has become a battleground in a right-wing culture war that aims to turn back the clock to a time when conservative mores—around gender, sexuality, race—were unchallenged and, in some respects, unchallengeable. Many of the federal judges appointed during Trump’s presidency seem to see themselves as foot soldiers in that war, which they view as a crusade to restore the original meaning of the Constitution. Yet in practice, their rulings have proved to be little more than Trump-era right-wing punditry with cherry-picked historical citations.
The 2016 Trump administration was focused on quickly filling the judiciary with judges who are not just ideologically conservative but dedicated right-wing zealots. But that administration “didn’t have all of the chess pieces completely lined up” to get right-wing ideologues into every open seat, Jake Faleschini, of the liberal legal-advocacy group Alliance for Justice, told me. More restrained conservative jurists filled some of those seats. Trump and his allies will be better prepared next time, he said. “Those chess pieces are very well lined up now.”
The federal district judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a former anti-abortion activist, is the prototypical Trumpist judge. He has publicly complained about the sexual revolution, no-fault divorce, “very permissive policies on contraception,” and marriage equality, and has opposed nondiscrimination protections for the LGBTQ community. And like many of his Trump-appointed peers, Kacsmaryk has predictably issued rulings flouting precedent when doing so is consistent with his personal morals.
One of the most egregious examples came in September, when he dismissed a lawsuit filed by students at West Texas A&M University after the school’s president, Walter Wendler, banned a drag-show benefit aimed at raising money for the Trevor Project, an LGBTQ-focused suicide-prevention organization. Wendler made clear his political objections to the show, referring to drag as “derisive, divisive and demoralizing misogyny.” But even Wendler himself recognized that the show, as expressive conduct, was protected speech; amazingly, he admitted that he was violating the law. He would not be seen to condone the behavior of the show’s actors, Wendler wrote in his message banning the event, “even when the law of the land appears to require it.”
The case landed on Kacsmaryk’s desk. And because Kacsmaryk does not like pro-LGBTQ speech, he simply ignored decades of precedent regarding free-speech law on the grounds that, by his understanding of history, the First Amendment does not protect campus drag shows. The drag show “does not obviously convey or communicate a discernable, protectable message,” Kacsmaryk wrote, and consists of potentially “vulgar and lewd” conduct that could, he suggested, lead to “the sexual exploitation and abuse of children.” (The confidence with which conservatives have accused their political opponents of child sexual exploitation in recent years is remarkable, especially because their concern applies almost exclusively to situations, like this one, that justify legal suppression of their favored targets. It is far easier to find examples of pedophilia in religious institutions—hardly targets of either conservative ire or conservative jurisprudence—than it is to find drag queens guilty of similar conduct.)
The key to Kacsmaryk’s ruling was “historical analysis,” which revealed a “Free Speech ecosystem drastically different from the ‘expressive conduct’ absolutism” of those challenging Wendler’s decision. Echoing the Supreme Court’s recent emphasis on “history and tradition” in rulings such as Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned the constitutional right to an abortion, and New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, which struck down gun restrictions in New York State, Kacsmaryk simply decided that the First Amendment did not apply. If not for its censorious implications, the ruling would be an amusing example of some conservative beliefs about free speech: A certain form of expression can be banned as “nonpolitical”—nothing more than obscenity—even as those banning it acknowledge their disapproval of that expression’s political implications.
The invocation of “history and tradition,” however, is no joke. The prevailing mode of conservative constitutional analysis for the past half century has been “originalism,” which promises to interpret the Constitution as it was understood at the time of its writing. As the dissenters pointed out in Dobbs, the Founders themselves imposed no such requirements on constitutional interpretation, noting that the “Framers defined rights in general terms, to permit future evolution in their scope and meaning.” And in practice, originalism has just meant invoking the Framers to justify conservative outcomes.
“It’s a very subjective inquiry,” the NYU law professor Melissa Murray told me. “This insistence on originalism as history and tradition ties you to a jurisprudence that’s going to favor a particular, masculine kind of ideology. Because those are the only people making meaning at that moment in time.”
In 1986, the late conservative legal scholar Philip B. Kurland observed, “We cannot definitively read the minds of the Founders except, usually, to create a choice of several possible meanings for the necessarily recondite language that appears in much of our charter of government. Indeed, evidence of different meanings likely can be garnered for almost every disputable proposition.”
“History should provide the perimeters within which the choice of meaning may be made,” Kurland wrote. “History ordinarily should not be expected, however, to provide specific answers to the specific problems that bedevil the Court.”
Right-wing justices have in all but name imposed this expectation, despite Kurland’s warning. It is no surprise that Kurland was not heeded—he testified against the nomination of Robert Bork, the father of originalism, to the Supreme Court, and cautioned that “he will be an aggressive judge in conforming the Constitution to his notions of what it should be,” one “directed to a diminution of minority and individual rights.” Now, with six Republican appointees on the Supreme Court, every judge is slowly being forced to conform the Constitution to Bork’s notions of what it should be.
In Dobbs and Bruen, and in a later case striking down race-based affirmative action in college admissions, the conservative justices cited historical facts that strengthened their arguments while ignoring those that contradicted them, even when the evidence to the contrary was voluminous. In Dobbs, Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the majority opinion, ignored the history of legal abortion in the early American republic and the sexist animus behind the 19th-century campaigns to ban it. In Bruen, Justice Clarence Thomas was happy to invoke the history of personal gun ownership but dismissed the parallel history of firearm regulation. In the affirmative-action case, Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, Thomas’s imposition of modern right-wing standards of “color blindness” on the debate over the Fourteenth Amendment was ahistorical enough that it drew an objection from Eric Foner, the greatest living historian of the Reconstruction era.
Not every right-wing judge is as blatantly ideological in their decision making as Kacsmaryk, nor is every Republican appointee a Trumpist zealot. But those with ambitions to rise up the ranks stand out by how aggressively they advertise both qualities. And the proliferation of the language of “history and tradition” is turning originalism from an ideology of constitutional interpretation into something more like a legal requirement. Judges are expected to do historical analysis—not rigorous analysis, but the kind that a prime-time Fox News host will agree with. Conservative originalists seem to see themselves as the true heirs of the Founders, and therefore when they examine the Founders, they can see only themselves, as if looking in a mirror.
It is no coincidence that as conservatism has become Trumpism, originalism has come to resemble Trumpist nationalism in its view that conservatives are the only legitimate Americans and therefore the only ones who should be allowed to wield power. The results for the federal judiciary are apparent as right-wing appeals courts turn “fringe ideas into law at a breakneck pace,” as the legal reporter Chris Geidner has put it, in the hopes of teeing up cases for the Roberts Court, which can hide its own extremism behind the occasional refusal to cater to the most extreme demands of its movement allies.
It is not only the substance of the rulings that has changed—many now resemble bad blog posts in their selective evidence, motivated reasoning, overt partisanship, and recitation of personal grievances—but the behavior of the jurists, who seek to turn public-service roles into minor celebrity by acting like social-media influencers.
Fifth Circuit Judge James Ho, a favorite of the conservative legal movement and a potential future Trump Supreme Court nominee, is one example. In 2022, Ho announced that he was striking a blow against “cancel culture” by boycotting law clerks from Yale after an incident in which Yale students disrupted an event featuring an attorney from a Christian-right legal-advocacy group. In 2021, the Trump-appointed judge Barbara Lagoa complained publicly that American society had grown so “Orwellian” that “I’m not sure I can call myself a woman anymore.” She later upheld an Alabama law making gender-affirming care for minors a felony, arguing, of course, that such care was not rooted in American “history and tradition.” In June 2023, in the midst of a scandal over Justice Thomas receiving unreported gifts from right-wing billionaires with interests before the Court, the Trump-appointed judge Amul Thapar went on Fox News to promote his book about Thomas, and defended him with the zeal of a columnist for Breitbart News.
All of this and more will continue should Trump win a second term. Conservative civil servants who placed their oath to the Constitution above Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election were depicted by Trump loyalists not as heroes but as internal enemies to be purged. Republican-appointed judges will take note of which path leads to professional advancement and which to early retirement.
Already imitating Trump in affect and ideology, these judges are indeed unlikely to resist just about any of Trump’s efforts to concentrate power in himself. They will no doubt invoke “history and tradition” to justify this project, but their eyes are ultimately on a future utopia where conservative political power cannot be meaningfully challenged at the ballot box or in court.
This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “A MAGA Judiciary.”
The admissions consultant described what it takes to get into an elite college: Take 10 to 20 Advanced Placement courses. Create a “showstopper project.”
Asian American students need to be extremely strategic in how they present themselves, “to avoid anti-Asian discrimination,” the consultant, Sasha Chada of Ivy Scholars, said at the October webinar to an audience of mostly Asian parents and students.
Edward Yen, who doesn’t consider himself a “tiger parent,” wondered what extreme accomplishments his 11-year-old daughter will need to get into USC — considered a relative shoo-in back in the 1990s, when he attended.
Parents and students at an annual college and career fair at Temple City High School.
(Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)
“I appreciated the honesty,” Yen said of Chada’s presentation, which was co-hosted by the Los Angeles County Asian American Employees Assn. and the nonprofit Faith and Community Empowerment.
At seminars like Chada’s around Southern California this fall, some held in Korean or Mandarin for immigrant parents, consultants reinforced the message — even students with superhuman qualifications are regularly rejected from Harvard and UC Berkeley.
Parents who didn’t grow up in the American system, and who may have moved to the U.S. in large part for their children’s education, feel desperate and in the dark. Some shell out tens of thousands of dollars for consultants as early as junior high, fearing that anything less than a name-brand school could doom their children to an uncertain future. Sometimes, anxious students are the ones who ask their parents to hire a consultant.
Some consultants say they try to push schools that fit the student best, not necessarily the top-ranked ones — even as skeptics wonder whether they are scare-mongering in an attempt to drum up business. But especially for parents from countries like South Korea, China and India, where a single exam determines a student’s college choices, the lack of objective standards can be overwhelming.
“The worst part of stress comes out when kids feel helpless, not when someone sets a high bar for them,” said Chada, whose Indian father grew up in Northern Ireland.
Julie Lin, left, and her 14-year-old daughter Jasmine Liao visit an annual college and career fair at Temple City High School.
(Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)
“A lot of our Asian parents are thinking it’s a golden ticket if you’re able to get into Harvard or Yale,” said Yen, president of the Los Angeles County Asian American Employees Assn., who lives in San Marino and whose parents immigrated from Taiwan. “I just want my daughter to be healthy, safe, and I want her to be successful in life.”
Srikanth Nagarajan, a 52-year-old manager at DirecTV and an immigrant from India, has been nudging his daughter to shoot for top schools like Harvard.
Sam Srikanth, a senior at El Segundo High, has a 4.41 GPA and has taken seven AP courses, which she said was the maximum number offered at her school. She is captain of the varsity swim team and is working on a research project about the role of race in college basketball recruiting.
After asking teachers and school counselors to read her admissions essays, Srikanth decided to hire a private counselor. But she ended up not using the counselor’s suggestions because they didn’t feel like her voice.
Srikanth said her “hopes got a little bit higher” after the Supreme Court’s decision.
But with her last name, she said, “you actually fill out the application and realize there’s no way colleges won’t figure out what race you are.”
Her older sister, who applied to colleges five years ago with a similar resume, got rejected from 18 of 20 or so schools and ended up at Boston College.
“I can’t be let down if my expectations are already so low,” Srikanth said.
When Sunny Lee came to the U.S. from South Korea in 2006 for postdoctoral work at USC, she thought that people could succeed in America even if they didn’t go to college.
But after moving to San Marino about a decade ago to raise her three sons — the oldest is now in 7th grade — she saw neighbors hiring athletic coaches and academic consultants for kids who were still in elementary school.
The moms she knows fret about students who seem like slam dunks being denied by top schools.
“A student known as a genius at San Marino High ended up going to Pasadena City College,” said Lee, 48, a researcher at USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center. “Moms were having a mental breakdown.”
A friend told Lee that she regretted spending only $3,000 for a consultant to go over her child’s admissions essays. For her next child, the friend would spend at least $10,000.
With both her and her husband working full-time, Lee feels an admission consultant is necessary just to keep up, especially with opaqueness and unpredictability of college admissions.
“It’s a fight over information,” she said.
She said she doesn’t think her oldest son needs a consultant yet. But she would like her middle son, a fifth-grader, to start working with one.
On the outskirts of Koreatown in July, dozens of Korean American students and parents attended a five-hour seminar hosted by Radio Seoul.
Several admissions consultants said in Korean and English that the end of affirmative action could improve Asian American students’ chances of getting into elite colleges.
One urged parents to give up their hobbies — no more golfing every weekend — so they can hover over their children.
Won Jong Kim, director of the college consulting firm Boston Education, described several students who got into elite schools.
Anna, who got into Harvard, took AP Calculus AB in 7th grade. Ben, who got into Stanford, took 15 AP classes.
Esther’s academics weren’t “stellar,” Kim said — only a 4.3 GPA, 1520 SAT and nine AP courses. But in her personal statement, she wrote about her mother’s fight with breast cancer. And she was admitted to the University of Pennsylvania.
“That was her trump card. It was a unique situation that she overcame,” Kim said. “To be frank, she got really lucky.”
In an interview, Kim said he wanted to show the “common characteristics” of those who get into Ivy League schools.
“Every year, the bar goes up for students looking to get into top colleges,” he said.
Chung Lee, the chief consultant at Ivy Dream, said he tries to share information in free seminars hosted by various community organizations.
Ethan Chen, 17, left, and Audrey Balthazar, 16, both Arcadia High students, browse through material at a college and career fair at Temple City High School.
(Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)
“The colleges’ lack of transparency has created this sense of fear,” he said.
In Temple City, Shun Zhang said she doesn’t want to put pressure on her son, Connor Sam.
Zhang, a 48-year-old realtor, wants to give him the support structure she didn’t have growing up as an immigrant from China.
Her only requirement is that he play a sport, to stay active and healthy. Still, Sam, a senior at Temple City High who is on the varsity soccer team and interns for Assemblymember Mike Fong, feels the need to push himself. He wants to double major in sociology and some kind of science at UCLA.
Hoping to be “more organized and put together,” he asked his parents for a personal admissions counselor to help him reflect on his accomplishments and brainstorm essay topics. He has been working with the counselor for two years and finds it helpful.
Sam, whose father is a refugee from Vietnam and works as a project manager, said he thinks about how well his parents have provided for him and wants to be as successful.
Going to a good college would go a long way in securing a good job and “maintain where I am,” he said.
But for all his hard work and preparation, he views college admissions as a crapshoot.
“I don’t really know what they are looking for,” he said.
“I’m under no illusion that humanity will completely eradicate the racial tribal instinct or racism or bigotry itself. But I feel that colorblindness is the North Star that we should use when making decisions,” argues Coleman Hughes during a live taping of The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie podcast in New York City.
Hughes is a writer, podcaster, and opinion columnist who specializes in issues related to race, public policy, and applied ethics. His new book, The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America is about returning to the ideals of the American Civil Rights movement because our departure from the “colorblind ideal has ushered in a new era of fear, paranoia, and resentment.” When his recent TED talk was seen as “hurtful” by some TED conference attendees, for example, he discovered that TED actually suppressed his presentation. Hughes describes how that situation left him concerned, “that TED, like many organizations, is caught between a faction that believes in free speech and viewpoint diversity and a faction that believes if you hurt my feelings with even center left, center right or, God forbid, right-wing views, you need to be censored.”
The end of affirmative action has triggered a reconsideration of legacy admissions. When universities extend advantages to the families of donors and alums, they discriminate against others, especially lower-income and Black students.
Legacy admissions began to get more attention after the Department of Education initiated a civil rights investigation in July 2023 into Harvard’s legacy practice. That was a good beginning, but donors and alums are also responsible for legacy preferences.
Let’s be clear: If it is wrong for universities to give preference to alums and donors, it is wrong for alums and donors to seek those privileges.
When donations to a university are followed by preferential admissions, donors are complicit in the discrimination, inequality and injustice that follow. When donors give with an eye toward future privileges for themselves or for their offspring, they may be engaging in moral licensing: doing good to do bad. Their generosity does not entitle them to advantages that deprive others of opportunities.
It is not surprising that many elite institutions still offer legacy advantages. The policy is a win-win — for donors, alums and the receiving institutions.
But there are losses for the students not admitted, for our sense of justice and for other universities that might have received the donations.
To be fair, not all donors are looking for a win-win. Some are guided by a moral compass. They give to colleges and universities that promote diversity and equality, with a focus on Black students and middle- and lower-income students.
In 2020 for example, MacKenzie Scott donated $560 million to 23 Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs).
If it is wrong for universities to give preference to alums and donors, it is wrong for alums and donors to seek those privileges.
In August of that year, Jack Dorsey donated $10 million to Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research — even though Dorsey didn’t finish college and didn’t attend Boston University.
In the fall of 2022, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation gave $100 million to the United Negro College Fund and to other institutions that promote higher education as a means to equality for lower income, Black, Latinx and Indigenous students.
This fall, Blue Meridian Partners’ gave $124 million to 40 HBCUs.
All of this hints at a change in giving norms.
Simply put: There are people in the world who will give generously to support racial equality in higher education. Their giving doesn’t target their alma mater. They don’t anticipate legacy advantages. Their gifts promote the right to education, and do so without deepening inequality.
When donors choose this path, their donations will have a positive impact on a greater number of students, many of whom have endured bias and discrimination. Although these donations cannot compensate for past wrongs, they can promote future good.
Philanthropy is an important mechanism for achieving justice. It gives those who have benefited from collective efforts an opportunity to give back, and some donors agree. As MacKenzie Scott said, “There’s no question in my mind that anyone’s personal wealth is the product of a collective effort, and of social structures which present opportunities to some people, and obstacles to countless others.”
This is not to say that it is always wrong to benefit from one’s charitable actions. Certainly, the warm glow of generosity is a reward in and of itself. But that is very different from a pay-to-play scenario in which giving entails a benefit to the donor at a cost to others.
It is true, however, that legacy preferences can build a sense of community and generate the donations universities need to do the work they want to do. Some donors might not give but for legacy advantages.
Also, an “all in the family” approach to admissions creates a community, one that enhances college life. But who is excluded from that community? And what are the consequences for those left out?
In other contexts, when a donation is linked to a wrong, or a human rights violation, the donor is seen as complicit in that wrong. Donors who give to anti-LGBTQ+ nonprofits are complicit in discrimination against members of the queer community, and those who give to the NRA share responsibility for gun violence.
In the case of legacy admissions, elite universities are effectively discriminating against less privileged students for the benefit of the wealthy — and some donors are enabling them.
Fortunately, some universities have already taken legacy preferences off the table. MIT and Wesleyan, for example.
Their actions and the recent donations to HBCUs signal an important change in giving norms and perhaps a bandwagon effect. Hopefully, others will follow the money and legacy practices will soon be a thing of the past. Donors are the engine that drive legacy admissions. They can end them swiftly. Why wait for universities to end legacy admissions, when donors have the power to do so?
Patricia Illingworth is a professor of philosophy at Northeastern University and a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Her most recent book, “Giving Now: Accelerating Human Rights for All,” argues that philanthropy can and should protect human rights.
This story about donors and legacy admissions was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.
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Charles E. Young, the fiery, fiercely outspoken chancellor of UCLA credited with turning the campus into an academic powerhouse, died of natural causes Sunday at his home in Sonoma, Calif. He was 91.
At the helm of UCLA for 29 years, Young oversaw its transformation from a small regional campus to one of the nation’s premier research universities.
“During his long tenure, Chuck Young guided UCLA toward what it is today: one of the nation’s most comprehensive and respected research universities and one that is profoundly dedicated to inclusiveness and diversity,” UCLA Chancellor Gene Block said in a statement announcing Young’s death.
When Young started in the job at the age of 36 in 1968, he was the youngest chancellor in University of California history. When he retired in 1997, he would be one of the longest-serving leaders of an American university.
UCLA grew rapidly under his watch. Its annual operating budget increased tenfold to $1.7 billion. The number of undergraduates increased from 19,000 to 24,000. And the number of endowed professorships rose from one to more than 100.
At the time of his retirement, the president of the American Council on Education called Young “one of the most admired and respected figures in American higher education.”
Young regularly sparred with his bosses on the UC Board of Regents.
Just months after becoming chancellor, Young famously refused to fire political activist Angela Davis, then an acting professor in UCLA’s philosophy department, despite pressure from the regents after they learned she was a member of the Communist Party.
Young would call the episode a “seminal moment” in his career, catapulting him into the national spotlight and allowing him to clearly carve out a position on academic freedom.
And when the board debated how to implement a ban on affirmative action in admissions, Young, a staunch supporter of affirmative action, rallied loudly against the plan. He often spoke publicly about the importance of ensuring public universities are easily accessible to students of color.
“The notion that we’re doing it for ‘them’ is wrong,” Young said a year before he retired. “This is something we do for all of us.”
Through the years, the academic leader widely known as “Chuck” rode out the turbulence of campus radicalism and state politics. He was a commanding figure who came to be recognized as a superb manager with an exceptionally quick mind. And he lived down early skepticism that he was too young, too much the hand-picked choice of his predecessor, Franklin D. Murphy, and not enough of a scholar to last long amid the intellectual battles of academia.
Charismatic and sometimes hot-tempered, Young defied the image of a bookish academic leader. He sought to run UCLA more like a private institution and was a respected fund-raiser who developed a network of high-profile entertainment friends such as composer Henry Mancini, movie producer Walter Mirisch and actor Charlton Heston.
Young earned a doctorate in political science from UCLA — only eight years before becoming the campus’ chancellor — but he had little or no work published in academic journals.
“Young makes no pretense of being a scholar,” said a 1968 article in Time magazine about his selection by the Board of Regents to head UCLA. He was chosen, the magazine said, “primarily because of his record as an administrator who can get along with students,” during a time of heightened political tension because of the Vietnam War and the growing Black empowerment movement.
By the time he retired, UCLA’s faculty had doubled and the school’s operating budget was more than 10 times larger than when he started. On his watch, the number of endowed professorships climbed from one to nearly 120.
During his reign, UCLA emerged as an athletic powerhouse, winning 61 men’s and seven women’s NCAA Division I team championships in an array of sports. He was not a distinguished athlete himself — his main achievement in organized sports was playing football in his senior year of high school. But he was an enthusiastic spectator at UCLA athletic events, rarely missing a home football or basketball game.
Early on, Young earned praise for his sympathetic handling of student unrest. A few months after he became chancellor, two student members of the Black Panther Party were killed on campus in an alleged dispute over the leadership of the Black Studies Center. Young helped calm the jittery school. Later, during Vietnam War protests, he refused to allow police to clear out students who had occupied administration offices.
But one of Young’s most dramatic challenges came shortly after his formal inauguration as chancellor on May 23, 1969, when he defied UC regents by refusing to fire Davis over her membership in the Communist Party. The regents themselves eventually ousted Davis at UCLA, although she later returned to the UC system to teach at UC Santa Cruz and, in 2014, nearly a half-century after her ouster from UCLA, triumphantly returned to campus as a Regent’s Lecturer in gender studies, a prestigious appointment.
Young’s defense of Davis’ right to work at UCLA led to what he later described as an emotionally draining series of confrontations with then-Gov. Ronald Reagan, who urged regents to oust Davis.
In 1970, Young told The Times, “At some point there has got to be a time when somebody in this university stands up and says, ‘I’ve had it. I’ve had enough.’ This is a real case of academic freedom because Angela Davis is an undesirable character to much of the public…. The place where you find out whether the system works is in the tough cases, not the easy ones everybody agrees with.”
Years later, Young elaborated, saying, “I was not supporting Angela Davis, I was supporting the principle. Angela Davis was a mediocre scholar and a mediocre lecturer and a mediocre person, as far as I could tell.” Other academics, however, had a far more favorable view of Davis, whom they saw as an important intellect whose call for anti-racist action is only now being embraced.
Over his long tenure, Young encountered criticism over financial and compensation issues. An associate, a UCLA vice chancellor, was prosecuted, fired and forced to repay the university’s fund-raising foundation $85,000 in disallowed expenses. Investigations found no impropriety by Young in that episode or with UCLA donors paying the rent for the chancellor’s summer beach house, yacht club membership or vacation trip to Tahiti — but criticism mounted.
In the early 1990s, particularly after an unsuccessful bid to become president of the UC system, Young was faulted by critics for becoming a disengaged chancellor who was living like a highly paid corporate CEO. A Times investigation in the mid-1990s found that Young and his top aides in some cases were instrumental in giving special consideration in admissions, at the request of donors and other well-connected figures, to less-qualified or rejected applicants.
Young, in turn, occasionally unleashed his temper on his opponents. He triggered a brief flap with then-UC Regent Ward Connerly, a foe of affirmative action, by comparing him to the late Jesse Helms, a staunch conservative Republican senator from North Carolina who had voted against civil rights legislation. Young, though an ardent supporter of affirmative action, later apologized to Connerly.
When he announced his plans to retire, Young was widely praised for elevating UCLA’s stature, but some critics said his departure was overdue.
Young endured turmoil and tragedy in his personal life. He was arrested for drunk driving after a car wreck near the campus in 1975, during a period of personal problems. Later on, he called it a “near-crisis situation” and admitted he had a problem with alcohol, which he resolved by getting sober.
Young was born in San Bernardino on Dec. 30, 1931, the only son of two psychiatric nursing aides at Patton State Hospital in Highland. His parents separated when he was a child.
In his oral history, Young recalled a childhood of growing up in a rural, orange-growing region. He taught himself to read by age 4 and got his first job at a local packinghouse at 12.
He attended San Bernardino Valley College, where he met his first wife, Sue Daugherty. They married in 1950, when both were 18.
Young soon dropped out of school and took a job in the appliance department of a department store. He was then called to active duty with the Air National Guard during the Korean War and served in Japan.
After his stint in the military, Young returned to San Bernardino Valley College and became a determined, standout student. He went on to receive his bachelor’s degree at UC Riverside, where he was the new campus’ first student body president. From there he earned a master’s and a doctorate in political science at UCLA.
After serving as a congressional fellow in Washington, D.C., Young joined the staff of UC President Clark Kerr in 1959. In that role, he worked on the creation of the state’s master plan for higher education, which continues to guide policy in California.
In 1960, the same year he earned his doctorate with a dissertation on legislative redistricting, Young went to work on the Westwood campus as an assistant to Murphy, then the school’s new chancellor. He quickly moved up the ladder, eventually becoming vice chancellor for administration and a full professor in the political science department before being named by UC Regents to succeed Murphy in 1968.
Two years after retiring from UCLA, Young accepted what was to be a short-term interim appointment as the president of the University of Florida in Gainesville, but he wound up staying for four years. Later, at age 72, he became president of an educational and scientific foundation in Qatar, a stint that lasted slightly over a year.
In the fall of 2008, at the age of 76, Young returned to UCLA to teach an undergraduate public policy and political science course on the history of the American presidency. That same year, Young was asked by philanthropist Eli Broad to help lead the Museum of Contemporary Art out of financial peril after its endowment shriveled from $40 million to $6 million in just nine years.
Seemingly unable to retire for long, Young agreed in 2017 to take over as superintendent of the public school district in Sonoma, where he and his wife retired to be closer to family. The K-12 district was battered by financial difficulties and led by what he believed was a dysfunctional school board.
But his affection for UCLA never waned, and he returned again and again, sometimes simply to stroll across the campus.
“I’m amazed at the fact that I can wander around this campus and be treated like an old friend,” Young said. “And I think, in a way, that’s the accomplishment.”
His wife of 51 years, Sue K. Young, a major force in UCLA fundraising, died in 2001 after battling breast cancer for years. One of their two children, Elizabeth, died in 2006 after suffering a cerebral aneurysm while walking on the beach near Malibu.
Young is survived by his wife, Judy Cornell, whom he married in 2002, and son, Charles Jr. In a statement Sunday, UCLA said it is planning an event in the coming months to celebrate his legacy.
For more than half a century, I have been studying the shifting relations between white and Black Americans. My first journal article, published in 1972, when I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, was about Black political power in the industrial Midwest after the riots of the late 1960s. My own experience of race relations in America is even longer. I was born in the Mississippi Delta during World War II, in a cabin on what used to be a plantation, and then moved as a young boy to northern Indiana, where as a Black person in the early 1950s, I was constantly reminded of “my place,” and of the penalties for overstepping it. Seeing the image of Emmett Till’s dead body in Jet magazine in 1955 brought home vividly for my generation of Black kids that the consequences of failing to navigate carefully among white people could even be lethal.
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For the past 16 years, I have been on the faculty of the sociology department at Yale, and in 2018 I was granted a Sterling Professorship, the highest academic rank the university bestows. I say this not to boast, but to illustrate that I have made my way from the bottom of American society to the top, from a sharecropper’s cabin to the pinnacle of the ivory tower. One might think that, as a decorated professor at an Ivy League university, I would have escaped the various indignities that being Black in traditionally white spaces exposes you to. And to be sure, I enjoy many of the privileges my white professional-class peers do. But the Black ghetto—a destitute and fearsome place in the popular imagination, though in reality it is home to legions of decent, hardworking families—remains so powerful that it attaches to all Black Americans, no matter where and how they live. Regardless of their wealth or professional status or years of law-abiding bourgeois decency, Black people simply cannot escape what I call the “iconic ghetto.”
I know I haven’t. Some years ago, I spent two weeks in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, a pleasant Cape Cod town full of upper-middle-class white vacationers and working-class white year-rounders. On my daily jog one morning, a white man in a pickup truck stopped in the middle of the road, yelling and gesticulating. “Go home!” he shouted.
Who was this man? Did he assume, because of my Black skin, that I was from the ghetto? Is that where he wanted me to “go home” to?
This was not an isolated incident. When I jog through upscale white neighborhoods near my home in Connecticut, white people tense up—unless I wear my Yale or University of Pennsylvania sweatshirts. When my jogging outfit associates me with an Ivy League university, it identifies me as a certain kind of Black person: a less scary one who has passed inspection under the “white gaze.” Strangers with dark skin are suspect until they can prove their trustworthiness, which is hard to do in fleeting public interactions. For this reason, Black students attending universities near inner cities know to wear college apparel, in hopes of avoiding racial profiling by the police or others.
I once accidentally ran a small social experiment about this. When I joined the Yale faculty in 2007, I bought about 20 university baseball caps to give to the young people at my family reunion that year. Later, my nieces and nephews reported to me that wearing the Yale insignia had transformed their casual interactions with white strangers: White people would now approach them to engage in friendly small talk.
But sometimes these signifiers of professional status and educated-class propriety are not enough. This can be true even in the most rarefied spaces. When I was hired at Yale, the chair of the sociology department invited me for dinner at the Yale Club of New York City. Clad in a blue blazer, I got to the club early and decided to go up to the fourth-floor library to read The New York Times. When the elevator arrived, a crush of people was waiting to get on it, so I entered and moved to the back to make room for others. Everyone except me was white.
As the car filled up, I politely asked a man of about 35, standing by the controls, to push the button for the library floor. He looked at me and—emboldened, I have to imagine, by drinks in the bar downstairs—said, “You can read?” The car fell silent. After a few tense moments, another man, seeking to defuse the tension, blurted, “I’ve never met a Yalie who couldn’t read.” All eyes turned to me. The car reached the fourth floor. I stepped off, held the door open, and turned back to the people in the elevator. “I’m not a Yalie,” I said. “I’m a new Yale professor.” And I went into the library to read the paper.
I tell these stories—and I’ve told them before—not to fault any particular institution (I’ve treasured my time at Yale), but to illustrate my personal experience of a recurring cultural phenomenon: Throughout American history, every moment of significant Black advancement has been met by a white backlash. After the Civil War, under the aegis of Reconstruction, Black people for a time became professionals and congressmen. But when federal troops left the former Confederate states in 1877, white politicians in the South tried to reconstitute slavery with the long rule of Jim Crow. Even the Black people who migrated north to escape this new servitude found themselves relegated to shantytowns on the edges of cities, precursors to the modern Black ghetto.
All of this reinforced what slavery had originally established: the Black body’s place at the bottom of the social order. This racist positioning became institutionalized in innumerable ways, and it persists today.
I want to emphasize that across the decades, many white Americans have encouraged racial equality, albeit sometimes under duress. In response to the riots of the 1960s, the federal government—led by the former segregationist Lyndon B. Johnson—passed far-reaching legislation that finally extended the full rights of citizenship to Black people, while targeting segregation. These legislative reforms—and, especially, affirmative action, which was implemented via LBJ’s executive order in 1965—combined with years of economic expansion to produce a long period of what I call “racial incorporation,” which substantially elevated the income of many Black people and brought them into previously white spaces. Yes, a lot of affirmative-action efforts stopped at mere tokenism. Even so, many of these “tokens” managed to succeed, and the result is the largest Black middle class in American history.
Over the past 50 years, according to a study by the Pew Research Center, the proportion of Black people who are low-income (less than $52,000 a year for a household of three) has fallen seven points, from 48 to 41 percent. The proportion who are middle-income ($52,000 to $156,000 a year) has risen by one point, to 47 percent. The proportion who are high-income (more than $156,000 a year) has risen the most dramatically, from 5 to 12 percent. Overall, Black poverty remains egregiously disproportionate to that of white and Asian Americans. But fewer Black Americans are poor than 50 years ago, and more than twice as many are rich. Substantial numbers now attend the best schools, pursue professions of their choosing, and occupy positions of power and prestige. Affirmative action worked.
But that very success has inflamed the inevitable white backlash. Notably, the only racial group more likely to be low-income now than 50 years ago is whites—and the only group less likely to be low-income is Blacks.
For some white people displaced from their jobs by globalization and deindustrialization, the successful Black person with a good job is the embodiment of what’s wrong with America. The spectacle of Black doctors, CEOs, and college professors “out of their place” creates an uncomfortable dissonance, which white people deal with by mentally relegating successful Black people to the ghetto. That Black man who drives a new Lexus and sends his children to private school—he must be a drug kingpin, right?
In predominantly white professional spaces, this racial anxiety appears in subtler ways. Black people are all too familiar with a particular kind of interaction, in the guise of a casual watercooler conversation, the gist of which is a sort of interrogation: “Where did you come from?”; “How did you get here?”; and “Are you qualified to be here?” (The presumptive answer to the last question is clearly no; Black skin, evoking for white people the iconic ghetto, confers an automatic deficit of credibility.)
Black newcomers must signal quickly and clearly that they belong. Sometimes this requires something as simple as showing a company ID that white people are not asked for. Other times, a more elaborate dance is required, a performance in which the worker must demonstrate their propriety, their distance from the ghetto. This can involve dressing more formally than the job requires, speaking in a self-consciously educated way, and evincing a placid demeanor, especially in moments of disagreement.
As part of my ethnographic research, I once embedded in a major financial-services corporation in Philadelphia, where I spent six months observing and interviewing workers. One Black employee I spoke with, a senior vice president, said that people of color who wanted to climb the management ladder must wear the right “uniform” and work hard to perform respectability. “They’re never going to envision you as being a white male,” he told me, “but if you can dress the same and look a certain way and drive a conservative car and whatever else, they’ll say, ‘This guy has a similar attitude, similar values [to we white people]. He’s a team player.’ If you don’t dress with the uniform, obviously you’re on the wrong team.”
This need to constantly perform respectability for white people is a psychological drain, leaving Black people spent and demoralized. They typically keep this demoralization hidden from their white co-workers because they feel that they need to show they are not whiners. Having to pay a “Black tax” as they move through white areas deepens this demoralization. This tax is levied on people of color in nice restaurants and other public places, or simply while driving, when the fear of a lethal encounter with the police must always be in mind. The existential danger this kind of encounter poses is what necessitates “The Talk” that Black parents—fearful every time their kids go out the door that they might not come back alive—give to their children. The psychological effects of all of this accumulate gradually, sapping the spirit and engendering cynicism.
Even the most exalted members of the Black elite must live in two worlds. They understand the white elite’s mores and values, and embody them to a substantial extent—but they typically remain keenly conscious of their Blackness. They socialize with both white and Black people of their own professional standing, but also members of the Black middle and working classes with whom they feel more kinship, meeting them at the barbershop, in church, or at gatherings of long-standing friendship groups. The two worlds seldom overlap. This calls to mind W. E. B. Du Bois’ “double consciousness”—a term he used for the first time in this publication, in 1897—referring to the dual cultural mindsets that successful African Americans must simultaneously inhabit.
For middle-class Black people, a certain fluidity—abetted by family connections—enables them to feel a connection with those at the lower reaches of society. But that connection comes with a risk of contagion; they fear that, meritocratic status notwithstanding, they may be dragged down by their association with the hood.
When I worked at the University of Pennsylvania, some friends of mine and I mentored at-risk youth in West Philadelphia.
One of these kids, Kevin Robinson, who goes by KAYR (pronounced “K.R.”), grew up with six siblings in a single-parent household on public assistance. Two of his sisters got pregnant as teenagers, and for a while the whole family was homeless. But he did well in high school and was accepted to Bowdoin College, where he was one of five African Americans in a class of 440. He was then accepted to Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, where he was one of 10 or so African Americans in an M.B.A. class of roughly 180. He got into the analyst-training program at Goldman Sachs, where his cohort of 300 had five African Americans. And from there he ended up at a hedge fund, where he was the lone Black employee.
What’s striking about Robinson’s accomplishments is not just the steepness of his rise or the scantness of Black peers as he climbed, but the extent of cultural assimilation he felt he needed to achieve in order to fit in. He trimmed his Afro. He did a pre-college program before starting Bowdoin, where he had sushi for the first time and learned how to play tennis and golf. “Let me look at how these people live; let me see how they operate,” he recalls saying to himself. He decided to start reading The New Yorker and Time magazine, as they did, and to watch 60 Minutes. “I wanted people to see me more as their peer versus … someone from the hood. I wanted them to see me as, like, ‘Hey, look, he’s just another middle-class Black kid.’ ” When he was about to start at Goldman Sachs, a Latina woman who was mentoring him there told him not to wear a silver watch or prominent jewelry: “ ‘KAYR, go get a Timex with a black leather band. Keep it very simple … Fit in.’ ” My friends and I had given him similar advice earlier on.
All of this worked; he thrived professionally. Yet even as he occupied elite precincts of wealth and achievement, he was continually getting pulled back to support family in the ghetto, where he felt the need to code-switch, speaking and eating the ways his family did so as not to insult them.
The year he entered Bowdoin, one of his younger brothers was sent to prison for attempted murder, and a sister who had four children was shot in the face and died. Over the years he would pay for school supplies for his nieces and nephews, and for multiple family funerals—all while keeping his family background a secret from his professional colleagues. Even so, he would get subjected to the standard indignities—being asked to show ID when his white peers were not; enduring the (sometimes obliviously) racist comments from colleagues (“You don’t act like a regular Black”). He would report egregious offenses to HR but would usually just let things go, for fear that developing a reputation as a “race guy” would restrict his professional advancement.
Robinson’s is a remarkable success story. He is 40 now; he owns a property-management company and is a multimillionaire. But his experience makes clear that no matter what professional or financial heights you ascend to, if you are Black, you can never escape the iconic ghetto, and sometimes not even the actual one.
The most egregious intrusion of a Black person into white space was the election (and reelection) of Barack Obama as president. A Black man in the White House! For some white people, this was intolerable. Birthers, led by Donald Trump, said he was ineligible for the presidency, claiming falsely that he had been born in Kenya. The white backlash intensified; Republicans opposed Obama with more than the standard amount of partisan vigor. In 2013, at the beginning of Obama’s second term, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, which had protected the franchise for 50 years. Encouraged by this opening, Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Texas moved forward with voter-suppression laws, setting a course that other states are now following. And this year, the Supreme Court outlawed affirmative action in college admissions. I want to tell a story that illustrates the social gains this puts at risk.
Many years ago, when I was a professor at Penn, my father came to visit me. Walking around campus, we bumped into various colleagues and students of mine, most of them white, who greeted us warmly. He watched me interact with my secretary and other department administrators. Afterward, Dad and I went back to my house to drink beer and listen to Muddy Waters.
“So you’re teaching at that white school?” he said.
“Yeah.”
“You work with white people. And you teach white students.”
“Yeah, but they actually come in all colors,” I responded. I got his point, though.
“Well, let me ask you one thing,” he said, furrowing his brow.
“What’s that, Dad?”
“Do they respect you?”
After thinking about his question a bit, I said, “Well, some do. And some don’t. But you know, Dad, it is hard to tell which is which sometimes.”
“Oh, I see,” he said.
He didn’t disbelieve me; it was just that what he’d witnessed on campus was at odds with his experience of the typical Black-white interaction, where the subordinate status of the Black person was automatically assumed by the white one. Growing up in the South, my dad understood that white people simply did not respect Black people. Observing the respectful treatment I received from my students and colleagues, my father had a hard time believing his own eyes. Could race relations have changed so much, so fast?
They had—in large part because of what affirmative action, and the general processes of racial incorporation and Black economic improvement, had wrought. In the 1960s, the only Black people at the financial-services firm I studied would have been janitors, night watchmen, elevator operators, or secretaries; 30 years later, affirmative action had helped populate the firm with Black executives. Each beneficiary of affirmative action, each member of the growing Black middle class, helped normalize the presence of Black people in professional and other historically white spaces. All of this diminished, in some incremental way, the power of the symbolic ghetto to hold back people of color.
Too many people forget, if ever they knew it, what a profound cultural shift affirmative action effected. And they overlook affirmative action’s crucial role in forestalling social unrest.
Some years ago, I was invited to the College of the Atlantic, a small school in Maine, to give the commencement address. As I stood at the sink in the men’s room before the event, checking the mirror to make sure all my academic regalia was properly arrayed, an older white man came up to me and said, with no preamble, “What do you think of affirmative action?”
“I think it’s a form of reparations,” I said.
“Well, I think they need to be educated first,” he said, and then walked out.
I was so provoked by this that I scrambled back to my hotel room and rewrote my speech. I’d already been planning to talk about the benefits of affirmative action, but I sharpened and expanded my case, explaining that it not only had lifted many Black people out of the ghetto, but had been a weapon in the Cold War, when unaligned countries and former colonies were trying to decide which superpower to follow. Back then, Democrats and some Republicans were united in believing that affirmative action, by demonstrating the country’s commitment to racial justice and equality, helped project American greatness to the world.
Beyond that, I said to this almost entirely white audience, affirmative action had helped keep the racial unrest of the ’60s from flaring up again. When the kin—the mothers, fathers, cousins, nephews, sons, daughters, baby mamas, uncles, aunts—of ghetto residents secure middle-class livelihoods, those ghetto relatives hear about it. This gives the young people who live there a modicum of hope that they might do the same. Hope takes the edge off distress and desperation; it lessens the incentives for people to loot and burn. What opponents of affirmative action fail to understand is that without a ladder of upward mobility for Black Americans, and a general sense that justice will prevail, a powerful nurturer of social concord gets lost.
Yes, continuing to expand the Black professional and middle classes will lead to more instances of “the dance,” and the loaded interrogations, and the other awkward moments and indignities that people of color experience in white spaces. But the greater the number of affluent, successful Black people in such places, the faster this awkwardness will diminish, and the less power the recurrent waves of white reaction will have to set people of color back. I would like to believe that future generations of Black Americans will someday find themselves as pleasantly surprised as my dad once was by the new levels of racial respect and equality they discover.
This article appears in the November 2023 print edition with the headline “Black Success, White Backlash.”
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