EdSource Article Promoting Racial Preferences Cheapens Higher Ed

A rational person would reason that in the aftermath of the Harvard University Claudine Gay antisemitism, diversity-hire catastrophe, and plagiarism scandal, the only important diversity is that of thought. Merit, rather than skin color is supposed to be the hiring qualification, or admittance requirement.

However, a rational person would be wrong in 2024.

EdSource, an online education news outlet which claims it “works to engage Californians on key education challenges with the goal of enhancing learning success,” published an obnoxious article Tuesday titled “White and male college leadership fails to reflect California’s racial, ethnic diversity.”

They are doubling down on diversity nonsense, apparently not having learned anything, even in the shadow of the Harvard debacle.

One might reason that there is a lot at stake in the racial preference scheme.

Let this example from the EdSource article simmer:

“White men dominate the leadership positions within the University of California, California State University and California Community College systems, even as two-thirds of undergraduates across the state identify as Latino, Black, Asian or Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders, according to a new report released Tuesday by the Campaign for College Opportunity.”

Yet, the author acknowledges “Notably, the three systems are each led by a person of color:

…a Black man at UC, an Afro-Latina at Cal State and an Indian-American woman at the community colleges, but the report highlights that those leading academic senates, tenured positions, departments and senior administrative positions are disproportionately white and male.”

The author concludes, “California college leaders and faculty are mainly white and male. They fail to reflect state and student diversity.” Apparently the persons of color leading the three college systems don’t count – enough.

Why does the leadership at California’s colleges and universities have to “reflect” state and student diversity? By today’s standards as declared by the left, only a trans-woman of BIPOC African heritage with a disability would be acceptable.

The left describes diversity entirely by ones’ outward appearance – gender, “person of color,” LGBTQ sexuality, as if everyone wears their sexuality on their sleeve.

How does this have anything to do with educating children and college students, or leading an education system? Shouldn’t merit, educational rigor and accomplishments take precedence?

“As the Claudine Gay debacle at Harvard underscores, the leadership at our higher education institutions should be based on meritocratic factors, not on identity politics,” Lance Izumi told the Globe. Izumi is the Senior Director of Education Studies at the Pacific Research Institute. He continued: “Importantly, Californians strongly rejected Proposition 16, which would have overturned California’s anti-race-preference constitutional provision. Californians want to live in a society where people are judged on their merits, not their skin color.”

EdSource continues: “Seeing instructors, staff members, administrators and presidents from diverse backgrounds on college campuses has been shown to help all students perform better academically, the campaign’s research shows.”

The “research” they offer as proof is a link to the publication, “Still Left Out: How Exclusion In California’s Colleges & Universities Continues To Hurt Our Values, Students, and Democracy,” published January 2024, which claims:

This “demographic mismatch” has absolutely nothing to do with students’ learning. Great teachers and academic leaders do not practice “ideological and woke orthodoxy,” as Victor Davis Hanson refers to it. He also asks, “How in less than five years did our elite universities destroy meritocracy, abolish SAT requirements, require DEI oaths and pledges, and mirror the worst commissariat institutions of the old Warsaw Pact nations and Soviet Union?”

The leadership positions within universities and colleges used to be held by accomplished scholars and intellectuals. Today, as EdSource is apparently promoting, only “Latinx, Black, underrepresented Asian American and NHPI, and AIAN” need apply.

Here’s the graph they feature showing the undergraduate racial breakdowns:

If demographics is so important in educational admissions and leadership, how does EdSource explain the outrageous discrimination by Harvard University of Asian-American applicants, the case that was eventually decided by the United States Supreme Court in favor of Asian-American applicants.

Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard was a group of highly qualified Asian-American college applicants seeking admission to Harvard. These applicants alleged that Harvard practiced longstanding admissions discrimination against them in favor of less-qualified minorities, Kenny Xu wrote in the New York Post in 2021. “It’s been argued that Asian Americans have to score as much as 450 points higher on the SAT to have a similar chance of admission as black students. In 2020, Duke economics professor Peter Arcidiacono found that a black student in the fourth-lowest academic decile has a higher chance of admissions than an Asian in the top decile.” Kenny Xu is the author of “An Inconvenient Minority: The Attack on Asian American Excellence and the Fight for Meritocracy.”

In the Supreme Court decision, the justices wrote:

Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard filed separate lawsuits against Harvard and UNC, arguing that their race-based admissions programs violate, respectively, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Harvard’s and UNC’s admissions programs violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

…the Fourteenth Amendment provides that no State shall “deny to any person . . . the equal protection of the laws.”

Because Harvard’s and UNC’s admissions programs lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points, those admissions programs cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause.

“Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it,” the Justices wrote. (Chief Justice John Roberts authored the 6-3 majority opinion, with Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh each writing a concurring opinion).

Throughout the EdSource article the focus on racial preferences and unconscious bias misses the purpose of the higher education system, and Claudine Gay is the poster child for this:

“Now-resigned president Claudine Gay’s meteoric career was based on a flimsy record of a mere 11 articles – the majority of them plagiarized. Her entire career was fueled by the tired pretext that the privileged Gay was somehow deserving of special deference given her race and gender,” Professor Hanson wrote.

Lance Izumi continued: “Californians have shown repeatedly at the ballot box that they oppose the proportional-representation ideology that states that jobs must be filled according to racial population proportions. People want to decisions about public employment, college admissions, and government programs to be made on a colorblind meritocratic basis, not on a numbers game that has nothing to do with whether people are best qualified.”