Are We Due For an Anonymous Donation?

There's an interesting game afoot where thirteen university presidents have accepted a combined $68 million over the past two months, with the stipulation that they cannot go looking for the donor(s) and that the majority of the money go towards scholarships for women and minorities. (Put aside, for the moment, the ethics of just such a scholarship, especially for women when they currently outnumber men in college.)

What do the thirteen colleges and universities have in common? They are all led by women.

As such, some bloggers have been asking what college might be next and given that more than one criteria are shared by Claremont McKenna -- obscurity, more likely private than public, led by women, existence of other minority/women scholarships -- it would seem to me that Claremont McKenna is a natural choice.

I love mysteries. Here's to hoping this one gets uncovered sooner, rather than later.

Supreme Court to Decide Racial Preferences, Special CMC Professor Cameo

I'm an opponent of racial preferences. Somebody once asked me if there was any issue that I felt was just manifestly RIGHT that I believe in one hundred percent. Without batting an eye, I answered racial preferences.

Oftentimes, to be opposed to racial preferences is to be a racist. Witness one of the questions one of my co-judges asked me about interracial dating. She said, "Wow, given all I have heard about you, I thought you wouldn't believe in that kind of thing."

"Believe in them? I've even practiced them," I responded. 

It has never struck me as sound thinking that race matters. If race is a construct, then it can be deconstructed and a better construct, based upon better values like individualism, can be left in its place. Will we finally make the transition that Henry Maine once wrote about, a change from status to contracts? 

Just such a question is before the Supreme Court in the case, Ricci v. DeStefano. The long and short of it is that some white firefighters took an exam, the exam didn't give the results that the diversocrats wanted (read: not enough blacks got a high enough score), and so they threw the results out. The firefighters are unhappy and so they sued. It has no worked its way up to the Supreme Court. 

The media hasn't really been covering this case, which I suppose is a good thing, given that the media would try this case on CNN, rather than in the court, with predictably ugly constitution results. In any event, John Derbyshire of National Review has written "The Husks of Dead Theories," which insofar as I can tell is the best discussion of what the whole case is about and why it is important.  He mentions two books from Frederick Lynch, a CMC government professor, whose class "Inequality and Public Policy" I am currently taking. Here are the some of the books Derbyshire lists by Lynch: 

1989

Invisible Victims: White Males and the Crisis of Affirmative Action

Frederick Lynch

1997

The Diversity Machine: The Drive to Change the “White Male Workplace”

Frederick Lynch

And here are the essential graffs from Derbyshire's article: 

On this (I’ll admit not-very-solid) basis, I put forward a hypothesis: From the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, having got rid of unjust laws, we were patiently waiting for things to equal out via education and the workings of the meritocracy. From the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s, baffled that things werenot equaling out, we devoted ourselves to cooking up theories about why this was so, and what might be done about it. From the mid-2000s onward, confronted at last with the emptiness of all the theories, and with our inability to move any of the needles even a millimeter on their dials, we gave up. We still clapped along to the happy-face rhetoric, but in our hearts we no longer believed any of it.

. . . yet we were still stuck with all that accumulated jurisprudence, the husks and dried shells of false hopes and abandoned theories. That’s the law we live with today.