Hot Air readers will be shocked to hear that racial discrimination is alive and well in American universities. Say it ain’t so!
In fact, academic institutions have been a hotbed of racial discrimination in hiring and student selection for decades, and the problem is only getting worse. One could even call it “systemic racism.”
That’s why it is so important that we have legal eagles dedicated to fighting systemic racism, and America First Legal Foundation is doing its part to make America a fairer, more color blind society. Kudos!
Over the weekend, America First Legal, through its Center for Legal Equality, filed a landmark class-action lawsuit against Texas A&M University over its racially discriminatory faculty-hiring programs. AFL seeks declaratory and injunctive, as well as the appointment of a court monitor to oversee the A&M’s faculty hiring and its “diversity office” to ensure that the university does not violate the nation’s civil-rights laws.
I think we can all agree that nobody should get away with violating civil-rights laws, right? And because of that we can expect a slew of amicus curiae briefs in support of the America First Legal Foundation’s case.
Yeah right.
Here’s the nub of the case as described in the Washington Free Beacon:
The plaintiff, a University of Texas at Austin finance professor named Richard Lowery, argues that the hiring programs violate three different civil rights laws: the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which prohibits race discrimination in contracting; Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits race discrimination at federally funded universities; and the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, which bars public universities from using racial preferences in nearly all situations.
At issue is the fact that the University of Texas at Austin established a program to preferentially hire minority candidates. Hiring people based upon race is clearly illegal.
As part of a new initiative to attract “faculty of color,” Texas A&M University set aside $2 million in July to be spent on bonuses for “hires from underrepresented minority groups,” according to a memo from the university’s office of diversity. The max bonus is $100,000, and eligible minority groups are defined by the university to include “African Americans, Hispanic/Latino Americans, Native Americans, Alaskan Natives, and Native Hawaiians.”
In other words the University has decided that it can hire and/or compensate people differently solely upon the basis of their skin color, and not more concrete factors such as prestige or performance. On its face this violates a ton of established law. For instance, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act states:
No person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.
I think we can all agree that hiring or paying people more or less money based upon one’s skin color clearly violates this law. I am not a lawyer, but if I were on a jury I would be hard pressed to see how A&M’s program could pass the smell test here.
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Here is how Texas A&M describes the program:
Texas A&M University’s Accountability, Climate, Equity, and Scholarship (ACES) Faculty Fellows Program is a faculty hiring program that connects early career faculty advancing outstanding scholarship with relevant disciplinary units on campus. Faculty are hired as ACES Assistant Professors with the expectation of transitioning to tenure track (pending departmental review) by the end of the fellowship period. ACES is administered by the Office for Diversity…
The $2 million set aside for providing bonuses to minority faculty hires came from the “ACES-Plus” program. The program is justified, Texas A&M argues, because providing students with a faculty that more closely represents their own diversity serves a critical role in their education. Which means, I assume, that no white person could learn physics well from a black professor?
I am quite certain that this is not only insanely wrong, but not what they mean. What they mean is that no black person could learn physics as well from a white professor as a black one. Which is equally absurd.
For decades colleges have tried to get around civil rights laws in order to rejigger the racial balance of their student bodies and faculty. Sometimes they succeed in skirting the law, other times they fail. In all of these cases, though, they are doing their best to ignore the plain meaning of civil rights laws in order to achieve a manifestly political end.
How do we know the end is political? Easy. Go read any “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” manifesto. It’s cultural Marxism dressed up as concern for the oppressed.
Programs like this one are endemic to academia. Nearly every day you can find a story about how some institution or another is skirting or breaking the law in order to prove their woke bona fides or feather the nest of their DEI bureaucracy. It is one of the many reasons that higher education has had the highest inflation rate in the country for decades. And the madness extends beyond academia as well:
Such violations are increasingly de rigueur in both academia and corporate America. A faculty hiring plan at George Mason University, announced in April 2021, drew criticism from law professors over its apparent use of racial quotas, which are illegal under federal law. Google, Pfizer, Microsoft, and IBM have capped or outright excluded white and Asian applicants from prestigious fellowships, while Amazon offers “Black, Latinx, and Native American entrepreneurs” a $10,000 stipend to launch their own delivery startups—a program that, like Texas A&M’s initiatives, is now the subject of a lawsuit.
No doubt the America First Legal Foundation and indeed all critics of programs like this will be smeared as “racists” for defending basic civil rights laws, but those accusations are losing their force through constant repetition. If one has been accused of racism a thousand times, the thousand and first fails to sting.
I wish we weren’t having these fights every single day. The fact is that academic ability can be found in people of all races, from all regions, and from members of the two sexes. Most of my own doctors are female, and the rest are “people of color.” My sole concern is that they be smart, educated, and easy to deal with. Although I must admit that the first time I had a prostate exam I sorta wished my doctor were male, but I got over it.
Focusing so much on race inhibits the longer term integration of diverse groups of people into every sector of the economy and society. We distrust each other more. We are led to question the abilities of people because we suspect they got where they are based upon race. It’s all so unnecessary.
The best way to end racism is to stop being racist. We can all get on board with that, can’t we?
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