The status of Michigan's new ban on affirmative-action preferences remained uncertain last week as lawyers fought over whether the measure should be enforced immediately, down the road, or never. Proposal 2, approved by 58 percent of Michigan voters in the November 7 elections, amends the state's Constitution to bar public colleges and other state…

Increased academic attention has been drawn to democratisation in higher education, following the implementation of affirmative action in America. However, the models of Access policies presented by certain European educational systems deserve more attention. France and Britain share a common position on elitism, although they define it according…

Critics of affirmative action announced last week efforts to get bans on racial and ethnic preferences on the ballots in four states--Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, and Oklahoma--as part of a plan to thrust the issue into the national spotlight in the November 2008 elections. Ward Connerly, the prominent anti-affirmative-action activist who played a…

Thirty years ago, Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. sent the nation's selective colleges down a path where few had ventured before. In the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark ruling in "Regents of the University of California v. Bakke," he wrote that colleges were legally justified in giving some modest consideration to their applicants' race, so…

"The first law of unintended consequences is that you can never know what they will be or how far they will reach." Professor Ellis examines the injuries American higher education has sustained through the unintended consequences of diversity. (Contains 4 footnotes.)

The U.S. Supreme Court's decisions in 2003 in the affirmative action cases of "Gratz v. Bollinger" (2003) and "Grutter v. Bollinger" (2003), sometimes referred to as the "Michigan cases," provided the first indication of the role that race-conscious admission policies will play in higher education in the new century since the Court's decision…

The nation's military-service academies could be stripped of one of their chief tools for bringing in black, Hispanic, and American Indian students as a result of regulatory changes being considered by the Department of Defense, officials of the U.S. Air Force Academy said last week. The proposed change in the department's directives to its…

Those involved in higher education understand that the admissions process has less to do with rewarding each student's past performance--although high performance is clearly essential--than it does with building a community of diverse learners who will thrive together and teach one another. Reports have noted that many leading public universities…

In his keynote address at "Race and Gender Preferences at the Crossroads," a January 2008 conference organized by the California Association of Scholars, Ward Connerly confidently asserts that the era of explicit race preferences will soon be "deader than a doornail." However, it is up to those who remember (in the words of John F. Kennedy) that…

Race preferences and the postmodern version of multiculturalism have always triggered opposition in academia, but it has seldom come from the political left. Now things are changing. Growing unease in the academic "priesthood" over preferences and multiculturalism may herald their end. Longstanding opponents of racial discrimination and identity…

This article discusses the curious mix of good and bad news the American higher education community found in the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling last summer, in "Parents Involved v. Seattle School District" and "Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education," about the use of race-based policies by public elementary and secondary…

This paper looks at the net societal balance of post-independence affirmative action policies in Malaysia. Social imbalances prompted the country to implement affirmative policies to uplift the majority natives (Malays, Indigenous people of Sabah and Sarawak, etc.). These policies were reluctantly accepted by the immigrant communities (Chinese,…

Ranked purely on the basis of the available reliable and valid measures, the demographic composition of incoming medical students fails to meet societal concerns regarding under-represented minorities (URM). Admissions offices are squeezed, administratively and legally, between honouring objectively measured individual merit and addressing…

Professor Cohen describes the arduous path to the passage of Proposition 2 in Michigan in 2006. In considering the reasons for its victory, he shows how claims (sometimes well-intended) "for" preferences rest on truly bad arguments. (Contains 8 footnotes.)

In June 2007, the United States Supreme Court rendered its most recent decision on the constitutionality of race-based education policies. The Court decided that race-based student assignment policies implemented in two school districts to ensure racially integrated schools violated the United States Constitution. Since the implementation of the…