Race-Based Hiring at Cornell

In 2021, Cornell University received $16 million from the National Institutes of Health to create the Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation (FIRST) program. FIRST’s goal was to increase faculty diversity by hiring ten new professors.

John D. Sailer argues that the program’s four-stage process raises legal concerns. “By demanding that search committees repeatedly revise their selections to ensure ‘as diverse a pool as possible,’ the Cornell FIRST program was tailored to yield discriminatory results,” he notes. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 makes it unlawful for employers to limit or classify applicants in any way that would deprive them of employment based on race.

“With the aid of federal money, a small team at Cornell built an elaborate mechanism to micromanage the hiring process and mold it according to a racialist ideology,” Sailer writes.

In Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, the Supreme Court upheld a Texas law that requires porn sites to verify users’ ages. The decision “reflects a pragmatic recognition of the Internet’s contemporary dangers for children,” John Ketcham writes. Read why he believes social media will be the next legal frontier in this regard.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has long confused paperwork with protection, which is why President Trump should abolish it and replace it with a regulator fit for a nuclear resurgence, Christopher Koopman argues. “The problem with the NRC is its structure and the culture that that structure produces. Bureaucracies optimize for process, not outcomes,” he writes.

Even as business leaders and billionaires are alarmed at the prospect of New York electing socialist Zohran Mamdani as mayor, Bill Clinton, Hakeem Jeffries, and Chuck Schumer have all congratulated him. “If this trend continues,” Seth Barron writes, “the Democrats will have to undergo their own catastrophic molting, shedding centrists and donors, as the party becomes something closer in appearance to the British Labour Party, with socialism and anti-Zionism at the center of its agenda.” Read his take here.

Built in the 1960s, Britain’s Milton Keynes has grown from a city of almost nothing to become a hub of startups, with a population of a quarter of a million people.

Even so, the city is depressing, Theodore Dalrymple argues in the spring issue. “If one were to design not just a soulless city but one destined to remain so forever, Milton Keynes would serve as an excellent model,” he writes. “Built on a grid system, its main roads are wide, expansive, and featureless. Lined with modernist office blocks—not the worst of their kind, but uniformly cold—they differ within the constraints of their style, though this is hardly a virtue when the style itself is so inhuman.” Read his observations here.

Charles Fain Lehman, Ilya Shapiro, John Ketcham, and Renu Mukherjee discuss the big wins from recent Supreme Court decisions, President Trump’s actions on TikTok, social media platforms society could do without, and presidents worth adding to Mount Rushmore.

“The whole income inequality thing is a bogus distraction. Poor people don’t become poor because rich people take their money. And poor people don’t become poorer when rich people become richer. No one ever suffered hunger pangs because someone else ate in an expensive restaurant. When Elon’s wealth doubled, no one’s wealth halved as a result. Changes in the wealth of the wealthy never made being unemployed more difficult. The two live in different, independent worlds. Income inequality is simply a way of expressing envy. And at one time, envy was one of the seven deadly sins.”

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