Recalibrating Affirmative Action

[ogc163]

Voters reject Prop. 16, which would have allowed affirmative action policies in California

A statewide ballot measure that would allow affirmative action programs to be reinstated in California was rejected by voters in Tuesday’s election.

Under Proposition 16, public universities would have been allowed to consider race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin to address diversity in admissions and other programs. State and local governments also would have been allowed to consider those factors when hiring government employees and awarding government contracts.

The proposition was placed on the ballot by the Democrat-controlled California Legislature to repeal Proposition 209, a highly controversial measure approved by voters in 1996 that barred affirmative action programs in the state.

Supporters of Proposition 16 raised more than $20 million, enough to support an aggressive statewide advertising campaign in the month before election day. Opponents raised roughly $1.5 million, but recent polls showed that the measure has faced strong opposition.

Ward Connerly, a former UC regent who championed Proposition 209 and led efforts to end affirmative action across the country, said California voters saw Proposition 16 as an affront to the principle of fairness.

“[Proponents] still have not persuaded the people that it is OK to discriminate against one group of people in the interest of trying to benefit another,” Connerly said Tuesday night.

Assemblywoman Shirley Weber (D-San Diego) said California voters approved Proposition 209 when California was steeped in political and ethnic division, enflamed by a series of ballot measures in the mid-1990s including Proposition 187 to strip government services from immigrants who entered the country illegally. Weber said the passage of Proposition 209 has set back women and Black, Latino, Asian American and Native American people for generations.

“This change put California out of step with the nation — being one of only eight states that have had this ban on equal opportunity — and serves as an impediment to local and state policies to address the economic and social disparities experienced by women and people of color,” said Weber when advocating for the amendment in the Legislature. Weber wrote the legislation for Proposition 16.

Weber argued that research has shown that teacher diversity can have a profound effect on closing the achievement gap for nonwhite students. She also noted that police agencies and schools are barred from recruiting based on race because of Proposition 209.

Tom Campbell, a former Republican congressman from the Bay Area who supported Proposition 209 in 1996, said reinstating affirmative action programs through Proposition 16 would be fundamentally unfair, particularly at the state’s public universities — including those in both the University of California and California State University systems.

“I think that if a state keeps somebody out of college or from a contract or employment, because of their race, if they do that, that’s wrong,” said Campbell, who is now a law professor at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law and an opponent of Proposition 16.

Campbell said California’s universities need to do more to have their student bodies reflect the demographics of California’s overall population, including increasing the number of Latino and Black students. But he believes there are ways to do that without enacting racial preferences.

Voters reject Prop. 16, which would have allowed affirmative action policies in California

 

[Scholar]

 

[GnauzBookOfRhymes]

They'll make it income based which I honestly don't think is a bad idea

 

[ogc163]

"Demographics"

 

[get these nets]

Voters reject Prop. 16, which would have allowed affirmative action policies in California

A statewide ballot measure that would allow affirmative action programs to be reinstated in California was rejected by voters in Tuesday’s election

Like I wrote here, and in other threads about this topic, this issue is really galvanizing the communities grouped as Asian Americans. The nature of their political engagement is evolving. Look for them to be pro active about this issue in other states.

The member who said that my take was wishful thinking might want to step out of his echo chamber. Since he wrote his post , a Supreme Court Justice was confirmed, and it appears that 2 Senate seats are heading for runoffs. When the Presidential race is decided for good, we can all get a clearer picture of what the political landscape will be.

 

[ogc163]

 

[get these nets]

US appeals court upholds Harvard’s use of race in considering admissions
Court rejects challenge by affirmative action opponents who said school’s policy discriminates against Asian Americans

Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Thu 12 Nov 2020

A US appeals court on Thursday upheld Harvard University’s use of race in undergraduate admissions, rejecting a challenge by affirmative action opponents who said the elite Ivy League college’s policy discriminates against Asian Americans.

Opponents of the decision by the first US circuit court of appeals in Boston promised to appeal to the US supreme court, where legal experts believe the 6-3 conservative majority could use the case to end more than 40 years of allowing race as a factor in higher education admissions.

The appeals court rejected claims by Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), a nonprofit founded by anti-affirmative action activist Edward Blum, which drew support from the Trump’s administration.

SFFA said Harvard engaged in impermissible “racial balancing” to make it easier for Black and Hispanic people to win admission, and did not narrowly tailor its use of race.

It said this violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which the school must comply with in order to receive federal funding.

US circuit judge Sandra Lynch, however, said Harvard’s use of race was not “impermissibly extensive” and was instead “meaningful,” because it prevented diversity from plummeting.

“Harvard’s race-conscious admissions program ensures that Harvard can retain the benefits of diversity it has already achieved,” she said.

Blum in a statement pledged to ask the supreme court “to end these unfair and unconstitutional race-based admissions policies at Harvard and all colleges and universities”.

The supreme court has allowed race to be used in college admissions to promote diversity in the classroom.

Harvard spokeswoman Rachael Dane said Thursday’s decision reflected efforts to “create a diverse campus that promotes learning and encourages mutual respect and understanding … Now is not the time to turn back the clock on diversity and opportunity.”

The 2-0 decision upheld an October 2019 ruling by US district judge Allison Burroughs in Boston. A third judge on the appeals court panel, Juan Torruella, died last month.

Burroughs had concluded that Harvard’s admissions program was “not perfect” but that the school had no “workable and available race-neutral alternatives”.

Lynch said the nature of Harvard’s admissions process, including that applicants win approval from a 40-person committee before being offered admission, “offset any risk of bias”.

The US justice department had, in the Trump administration, backed SFFA, arguing in a “friend-of-the-court” brief that Harvard “actively engages in racial balancing that supreme court precedent flatly forbids”.

The Trump administration filed a similar lawsuit on 8 October against Yale University, accusing that Ivy League – a small group of elite, private US universities – school of discriminating against Asian and white applicants.

Yale said it “does not discriminate against applicants of any race or ethnicity,” and would not change its admissions policies because of what it called the government’s “baseless” lawsuit.

SFFA is also pursuing a similar case against the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill challenging its consideration of race as a factor in its admissions process. A non-jury trail in that case began on Monday

 

[get these nets]

Student Organization Brings Race Bias Suit Against Yale
February 25, 2021
Weeks after the Biden administration said it would not pursue an admissions bias suit against Yale University, a student group sued the Connecticut Ivy League school.

Yale University
(CN) — Accusing Yale University of bias against white and Asian American students, the organization Students for Fair Admissions filed a federal lawsuit against the school on Thursday.

The student group, which said its membership includes more than 20,000 students and parents, said Yale’s policies consider race and ethnicity when determining whether to accept a candidate and are discriminatory.

One plaintiff, an Asian-American applicant, says she wasn’t admitted to the school because of its admissions rules.

The applicant “was denied the opportunity to compete for admission to Yale on equal footing with other applicants on the basis of race or ethnicity because of Yale’s discriminatory admissions policies,” alleges the 39-page complaint, filed in federal court in Connecticut.

Starting in the 1970s, Yale enacted rules to balance its admissions to increase enrollment among Black, Hispanic, Indigenous and Asian Americans, the complaint says — but in the late 1980s, the school removed Asian American applicants from the list.

Now, the complaint says, “Yale has intentionally discriminated against Asian-American applicants for admission on the basis of race or ethnicity based on prejudicial and stereotypical assumptions about their qualifications.”

The Students for Fair Admissions is seeking a permanent injunction barring Yale from continuing its admissions policies based on race and ethnicity.

“Students applying to undergraduate and post-graduate programs should be judged on their individual talents, character, academic skills, extra-curricular achievements and socio-economic background but not the color of their skin,” said Edward Blum, president of the student group.

This isn’t the group’s first lawsuit making such accusations against an Ivy League university.

The same day it filed suit against Yale, the student organization asked the Supreme Court to review a similar, long-running suit it brought against Harvard University, which the group lost in federal court in Massachusetts.

“After six and one-half years of litigation, the hundreds of Asian-American students who were unfairly and illegally rejected from Harvard because of their race may soon have this lawsuit reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court,” Blum said in a statement Thursday. “It is our hope that the justices will accept this case and finally end the consideration of race and ethnicity in college admissions.”

During the Trump administration, the student group had support from the Department of Justice, which in October 2020 sued Yale itself over admissions processes that consider race and ethnicity as factors, after first sending the school a letter noting it was conducting an investigation.

Yale’s “diversity goals are not sufficiently measurable,” said the letter, sent in August 2020. “Our investigation indicates that Yale’s diversity goals appear to be vague, elusory, and amorphous.”

Earlier this month, President Joe Biden’s DOJ said it would not pursue the case.

The new filing by the Students for Fair Admissions “resurrects the misleading statistics, factual errors, and legal misstatements that the Trump administration included in its suit,” a Yale representative said.

Practices at Yale look at “the whole person” when determining whether or not to accept an applicant, the school said.

“Yale remains fully committed to assembling an excellent and diverse student body.”

 

[get these nets]

This is just wishful thinking on your part because well - you’re you.

Are you still sticking your head in the sand about what's happening?

 

[Red Shield]

Are you still sticking your head in the sand about what's happening?

he might be right...

but it's obvious the asians/whites are gonna keep pushing this.

 

[get these nets]

he might be right...

but it's obvious the asians/whites are gonna keep pushing this.

He might be right about what?
Rose colored glasses he was wearing might have prevented him from seeing which way the wind was blowing on this issue.
"If Biden wins, it will all be okay" was his response.

 

[Red Shield]

He might be right about what?
Rose colored glasses he was wearing might have prevented him from seeing which way the wind was blowing on this issue.
"If Biden wins, it will all be okay" was his response.

He might be right about Biden's doj dropping the cases..

 

[Houston911]

They'll make it income based which I honestly don't think is a bad idea

did they speak on this?

 

[get these nets]

University of North Carolina can consider race in admissions, court rules

October 20th 2021

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — A federal judge has ruled that North Carolina's flagship public university can continue to consider race as a factor in its undergraduate admissions, rebuffing a conservative group's argument that affirmative action disadvantages white and Asian students.

U.S. District Judge Loretta Biggs ruled late Monday that the University of North Carolina has shown that it has a compelling reason to pursue a diverse student body and has demonstrated that measurable benefits come from that goal.

"In sum, the Court concludes that UNC has met its burden in demonstrating that it has a genuine and compelling interest in achieving the educational benefits of diversity," Biggs wrote.

Students for Fair Admissions sued UNC in 2014, arguing that using race and ethnicity as a factor in college admissions violates the equal protection cause of the Constitution and federal civil rights law. The group contended that UNC had gone too far in using race as a factor in admissions and had thus "intentionally discriminated against certain of (its) members on the basis of their race, color, or ethnicity."


The group's president, Edward Blum, told The Associated Press in an interview Tuesday that it would appeal by day's end to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. His group already appealed a denial in a similar lawsuit against Harvard University. Blum said he hopes both cases get bundled together so that the U.S. Supreme Court rules simultaneously on private and public universities.

"Shame on Harvard, shame on UNC and shame on all universities who take federal funds from considering race as an element," said Blum, who has long sought to rid college admissions of race-based admissions policies.

The Supreme Court in June asked the Justice Department to weigh in on Blum's Harvard lawsuit, which was supported by former President Donald Trump's administration. Trump's Justice Department also challenged Yale University's admissions practices in a suit President Joe Biden's administration dropped earlier this year.

UNC countered in court that its admission practices are legally and constitutionally permissible and that race-neutral alternatives would not enable it to achieve its diversity goals. Of roughly 20,000 undergraduate UNC students this fall 2021 semester, approximately 56% are white, nearly 13% Asian, about 10% Hispanic, and 8.5% Black, the university said.


"This decision makes clear the University's holistic admissions approach is lawful," said an emailed statement from Beth Keith, a spokesperson for the university. "We evaluate each student in a deliberate and thoughtful way, appreciating individual strengths, talents and contributions to a vibrant campus community where students from all backgrounds can excel and thrive."

Judge Biggs wrote that she applied the U.S. Supreme Court's University of Texas precedent, which established that schools may consider race in admissions in ways narrowly tailored to promote diversity.

She noted that UNC "offered a principled and reasoned explanation," supported by research, for its pursuit of a diverse student body, citing a 2005 report by a UNC task force that its academic goals depend on "a critical mass" of students from underrepresented groups.

"The University has presented substantial evidence demonstrating its good faith in pursuing the educational benefits that flow from diversity," the judge concluded.


The Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law represented a racially diverse group of students who intervened in the case demanding that the university to even more to support minorities. Its statement said considering race in admissions helps ensure that talented applicants from historically marginalized groups aren't overlooked.

"As our clients demonstrated with their trial testimony and evidence, race is an integral part of a students' identity, and must be treated as such during the admissions process," attorney Genevieve Bonadies-Torres said


In 2014, the group Students for Fair Admissions filed the lawsuit. It alleged that the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill unfairly uses race to give significant preference to underrepresented minority applicants to the detriment of White and Asian-American applicants while ignoring race-neutral alternatives for achieving a diverse student body.

The judge wrote that “the University’s admissions program engages in a highly individualized, holistic review of each applicant’s file, giving serious consideration to all of the ways an applicant may contribute to a diverse educational environment. Further, the University’s use of race in the admissions process is narrowly tailored in that the University considers race flexibly as a plus factor as one among many factors in its individualized consideration of each and every applicant.”

 

[qwer]

University of North Carolina can consider race in admissions, court rules

October 20th 2021

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — A federal judge has ruled that North Carolina's flagship public university can continue to consider race as a factor in its undergraduate admissions, rebuffing a conservative group's argument that affirmative action disadvantages white and Asian students.

U.S. District Judge Loretta Biggs ruled late Monday that the University of North Carolina has shown that it has a compelling reason to pursue a diverse student body and has demonstrated that measurable benefits come from that goal.

"In sum, the Court concludes that UNC has met its burden in demonstrating that it has a genuine and compelling interest in achieving the educational benefits of diversity," Biggs wrote.

Students for Fair Admissions sued UNC in 2014, arguing that using race and ethnicity as a factor in college admissions violates the equal protection cause of the Constitution and federal civil rights law. The group contended that UNC had gone too far in using race as a factor in admissions and had thus "intentionally discriminated against certain of (its) members on the basis of their race, color, or ethnicity."


The group's president, Edward Blum, told The Associated Press in an interview Tuesday that it would appeal by day's end to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. His group already appealed a denial in a similar lawsuit against Harvard University. Blum said he hopes both cases get bundled together so that the U.S. Supreme Court rules simultaneously on private and public universities.

"Shame on Harvard, shame on UNC and shame on all universities who take federal funds from considering race as an element," said Blum, who has long sought to rid college admissions of race-based admissions policies.

The Supreme Court in June asked the Justice Department to weigh in on Blum's Harvard lawsuit, which was supported by former President Donald Trump's administration. Trump's Justice Department also challenged Yale University's admissions practices in a suit President Joe Biden's administration dropped earlier this year.

UNC countered in court that its admission practices are legally and constitutionally permissible and that race-neutral alternatives would not enable it to achieve its diversity goals. Of roughly 20,000 undergraduate UNC students this fall 2021 semester, approximately 56% are white, nearly 13% Asian, about 10% Hispanic, and 8.5% Black, the university said.


"This decision makes clear the University's holistic admissions approach is lawful," said an emailed statement from Beth Keith, a spokesperson for the university. "We evaluate each student in a deliberate and thoughtful way, appreciating individual strengths, talents and contributions to a vibrant campus community where students from all backgrounds can excel and thrive."

Judge Biggs wrote that she applied the U.S. Supreme Court's University of Texas precedent, which established that schools may consider race in admissions in ways narrowly tailored to promote diversity.

She noted that UNC "offered a principled and reasoned explanation," supported by research, for its pursuit of a diverse student body, citing a 2005 report by a UNC task force that its academic goals depend on "a critical mass" of students from underrepresented groups.

"The University has presented substantial evidence demonstrating its good faith in pursuing the educational benefits that flow from diversity," the judge concluded.


The Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law represented a racially diverse group of students who intervened in the case demanding that the university to even more to support minorities. Its statement said considering race in admissions helps ensure that talented applicants from historically marginalized groups aren't overlooked.

"As our clients demonstrated with their trial testimony and evidence, race is an integral part of a students' identity, and must be treated as such during the admissions process," attorney Genevieve Bonadies-Torres said


In 2014, the group Students for Fair Admissions filed the lawsuit. It alleged that the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill unfairly uses race to give significant preference to underrepresented minority applicants to the detriment of White and Asian-American applicants while ignoring race-neutral alternatives for achieving a diverse student body.

The judge wrote that “the University’s admissions program engages in a highly individualized, holistic review of each applicant’s file, giving serious consideration to all of the ways an applicant may contribute to a diverse educational environment. Further, the University’s use of race in the admissions process is narrowly tailored in that the University considers race flexibly as a plus factor as one among many factors in its individualized consideration of each and every applicant.”

You really be dropping gems bro thanks