Articles

GOP governors like Florida’s Ron DeSantis and Alabama’s Kay Ivey have been making splashy headlines for attacking diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs and environmental, social and governance (ESG) standards at companies like BlackRock and Disney. But the laws of their own states allow racial preferences in education, employme ...

This article first appeared in the winter 2023 edition of Sword&Scales. In the mid-nineties, Jerry Thompson was headhunted for a Texas company that paid good money. He was a whiz at sales. So he moved his wife, Theresa, and two kids from Michigan to Texas. He loved living in Texas. But two years in, he … ...

Since the Supreme Court put an end to college affirmative action programs last summer, many have been wondering what’s next. Employment? Military academies? Public contracting? All three, it turns out. But nothing highlights the absolute failures of racial preferences more than a new lawsuit in Houston challenging the city’s nearly 40-y ...

It’s a brave new world out there for college admissions officers. Gone are the days when they could use racial stereotypes as a stand-in for an applicant’s personal qualities or deduct points for being Asian American. When the Supreme Court finally put an end to these racist and unconstitutional admissions practices in June, it left &# ...

The Supreme Court has ended affirmative action as we knew it with its decision in the Students for Fair Admissions cases against Harvard and the University of North Carolina. From now on, college admissions officers can no longer use an applicant’s race to decide who gets in and who stays out. So, what now? A … ...

Barbara Grutter was no stranger to a challenge. She worked in a doctor’s office while getting her Bachelor of Science degree in 1978, when few women did. She raised two small children while learning information systems, when the concept barely existed. Later she founded and ran an IT consulting business, training healthcare companies to manag ...

Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology is in hot water with parents again. Administrators used “equity” as a justification for withholding information from students that may impact the trajectory of their academic futures. In the final weeks of 2022, Thomas Jefferson parent Shawna Yashar made an odd discovery. Her son h ...

At Thomas Jefferson High School in Fairfax, Virginia, it no longer matters that one of the eighth graders applying for admission this fall has been building robots in his garage since he was 10, or that another won her middle school’s Math Olympiad last year and dreams of working for NASA someday. All that matters … ...

Two hundred and four. That’s how many times the word “diversity” came up during the recent marathon Supreme Court oral arguments over whether to end affirmative action in college admissions. With characteristic bluntness, Justice Clarence Thomas remarked about midway through that, “I’ve heard the word ‘diversity̵ ...