“Diversity Checks” in University Hiring

John Sailer, director of higher education policy at the Manhattan Institute, has acquired documents from institutions across the country that show how routine diversity checks have become embedded in hiring processes, “often enforced with serious consequences for searches that fail to ‘pass muster,’” he writes. “This practice raises not only significant legal questions but also highlights how such policies can concentrate power in the hands of individual administrators, granting them effective veto authority over one of a university’s most consequential decisions: the hiring of tenure-track faculty.” 

Read more here about the practice and some of the email exchanges Sailer obtained.  

Last month, in Fuld v. PLO, the Supreme Court ruled that the Palestinian Authority and the Palestine Liberation Organization can be sued in U.S. courts for supporting terrorism abroad. 

“The ruling is a major victory for victims, who can now hold foreign terrorist organizations accountable in U.S. courts,” write Erielle Azerrad and Mark Pinkert. Read about what the decision means for antiterrorism policy here.

For decades, the Environmental Protection Agency has been granting California waivers to federal clean air rules, allowing the state to enact vehicle-emissions standards stricter than national rules. This policy forced automakers to make two sets of cars—one for California and another for the rest of the country. “Over time, as more states adopted the stricter guidelines, the stricter limits have become the de facto national standard,” Kerry Jackson explains.  

Now, with President Trump and Congress pushing back, this arrangement could be on the verge of unraveling. Read more about the waivers here.

The idea that economic choices come without trade-offs has become prevalent in both the public and private sectors. Such thinking was fueled by near-zero interest rates that persisted between 2008—the start of the financial crisis—and 2021, when the Fed began raising rates to slow down inflation.  

“Cheap money enabled the illusion that budgetary limitations were gone, that opportunity costs no longer mattered, and that any initiative that grew the economy would pay for itself,” Allison Schrager writes. But trade-offs are unavoidable, she argues, “and ignoring them leads to consequences—often dangerous ones.” 

Read her take in our spring issue here.

Tech billionaire Elon Musk is testing a new frontier in politics. In this episode, Charles Fain Lehman, Jesse Arm, Rafael Mangual, and Daniel Di Martino explore Musk’s proposed America Party—what it means for the right, why it’s gaining traction across conservative media, and whether it’s more than X posturing.

They also tackle the One Big Beautiful Bill—a trillion-dollar effort to rein in spending without touching Social Security or Medicare. Is it serious reform, or just another political stunt? Plus: July Fourth, national identity, and the conservative fight to reclaim America’s founding story.

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