“Universities Wake Up and Break the Law”

Race-based hiring at universities has gone on for years. As a professor once told John Sailer, “every day, the universities wake up and break the law.”

Sailer has accumulated countless examples. For instance, a job rubric he acquired from UT San Antonio listed “female/URM” (underrepresented minority) as a scoring category. Another rubric he acquired, this one from UT Austin, showed that 25 percent of candidates’ overall score came from the “DEI” category. And an email he acquired from Northern Illinois University revealed a search committee scoring applicants on their “Diversity,” awarding points for those who were “non-male or non-cauca[s]ian.”

That may now change. Last month, the Justice Department sent a nine-page letter to federal grant recipients listing hiring practices that constitute illegal discrimination. It’s a welcome development, Sailer writes, and could serve as a long-overdue reckoning for universities.

Read more about the memo here.

Even though the second Trump administration contains many of the same personnel, it is drastically different from the first. This is perhaps most evident in how administration officials project “calm, confidence, and strategic focus,” Christopher F. Rufo writes. He met with some of those leaders recently and was struck by their clear sense of mission and energy in pursuing it.

Read more from his visit here.

Last month, Inside Higher Ed published a reply to the Manhattan Statement on Higher Education. The reply’s author, John Wilson, warns that the Manhattan Statement, which calls for universities to advance truth over ideology if they are to receive federal funding, threatens “massive federal control over colleges.”

But this control has existed for decades—as it should, Pavlos Papadopoulos observes. He writes that the federal government should withhold tax dollars “from public or private colleges that employ racially discriminatory hiring or admissions practices.” And it’s not “repression” to do so, since “schools don’t have a right to it in the first place,” he writes.

Last year, the Delaware Court of Chancery found that Elon Musk’s Tesla pay package was unfair to the company and to its shareholders and forced Musk to return the stock. When Tesa shareholders voted to approve the package again, the Court of Chancery found that the vote was ineffective.

Both decisions are on appeal to the Delaware Supreme Court. And they help explain why so many companies are considering leaving Delaware for Texas or Nevada, Robert T. Miller points out. “With most public companies incorporated in Delaware, the Delaware courts, globally renowned for their objectivity and commercial sophistication, supply corporate law to the nation. They are an important national asset,” he writes. “To maintain their integrity, the state’s supreme court should overrule the Court of Chancery’s decision.”

Read more about the case’s background and how it could all play out.

“Anyone who treats delusion with mutilation should not be allowed to treat anyone.”

Photo credit: Bill Pugliano / Stringer / Getty Images News via Getty Images