Columbia University President Lee Bollinger has announced “a $30 million commitment to the recruitment and support of outstanding female and underrepresented minority scholars.” What’s more, the money comes “with an insistence on accountability and achieving measurable movement toward our goals.”
Can you say, “quotas”?
The “Faculty Diversity” initiative is indefensible as a matter of law, and nonsensical and immoral as a matter of policy.
Bollinger is no stranger to politically correct discrimination. As president of the University of Michigan, he aggressively defended his school’s use of racial preferences in admissions, winning one case (Grutter v. Bollinger, involving the law school) and losing another (Gratz v. Bollinger, involving undergrad admissions) before the Supreme Court in 2003. And he’s continued to champion race-based decision-making ever since.
Let’s consider the legal problems first. Bollinger is apparently relying on the high court’s 2003 rulings that universities can discriminate — to a limited degree — on the basis of race and ethnicity in student admissions. But he’s wrong to assume that it must also be OK for universities to weigh race and ethnicity (and sex) in the same “diversity”-driven way when hiring faculty.
Sorry: The Grutter decision said nothing about Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which covers employment and which has different language and jurisprudence than Title VI, which applies to student admissions. The federal courts have never recognized a “diversity” exception to Title VII, and are unlikely to. (In fact, when the Supreme Court was about to decide that issue in the late 1990s, the civil-rights establishment hastily raised enough money to settle the case.)
Sometimes school officials assert that their affirmative-discrimination efforts are justified because minority or female students need “role models” (as if we’re not allowed to admire people who have a different skin color than we do). Yet the high court rejected this argument more than 25 years ago, in Wygant v. Jackson Board of Education.
The only exception the Supreme Court has carved out of Title VII’s categorical ban on discrimination is for “manifest imbalances” in “traditionally segregated job categories” — which is not a rationale that Columbia can (or does) rely on in 2012, especially given the meat-ax approach it has taken.
Bollinger may argue that setting aside $30 million to hire female and underrepresented minority scholars isn’t necessarily discrimination, since there is other money for hiring white males. Really — separate but equal?
Or, to put the shoe on the other foot: Would anyone claim that having a $30 million fund for white-males-only isn’t discrimination, so long as non-white-non-males had access to the school’s general funds?
So Columbia is breaking the law. Of course, it’s also morally wrong: This is discrimination based on skin color, gender and/or what country someone’s ancestors came from. That ought to be simply unacceptable in America in 2012.
A frequent rationale for giving a hiring preference to minorities or women isn’t ethnicity or sex per se, but some quality that, supposedly, naturally correlates with ethnicity or sex. Thus, Columbia’s announcement extols the “different backgrounds and perspectives” found in a community that is “culturally and socio-economically” diverse.
But what is the justification for using race, ethnicity and sex as a proxy for people’s backgrounds, perspectives and the like? In any other context, this would be condemned as stereotyping. (If some still insist that there really is something uniquely to be added by ethnicity/gender, one must ask: “So what is the Latina perspective on quantum mechanics?”)
Note, too, that Columbia’s new initiative is quite explicit in promising to discriminate against some racial and ethnic minorities. The phrase “underrepresented minority” was coined to cover the fact that it’s not just whites who need to be discriminated against, but “overrepresented minorities” as well (typically Asians, including Arab-Americans).
So a rich, 10th-generation American who happens to have a Latino last name will be given a preference over a first-generation and not very rich Asian-American. And Elizabeth Warren will get that preference, too, whether or not she’s 1/32nd Native American.
Here’s the last, most obvious point: If Columbia weighs race, ethnicity and sex in hiring and recruiting, then it won’t be hiring and recruiting simply the best qualified people. The research won’t be as good, the teaching won’t be as good — and the university won’t be as good.
Roger Clegg is president and general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity.