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Harvard students and supporters marched through Harvard Square during a rally on Saturday to oppose the Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmation action.
…. on the Supreme Court’s overturning of affirmative action.
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In an email to “members of the Harvard community,” the university’s president, Lawrence S. Bacow, and other senior leaders said it would comply with the ruling. Noting that Chief Justice Roberts had said that colleges could still take into account essays in which applicants discussed how race had affected their lives, they said they were writing to reaffirm the importance of diversity in “backgrounds, perspectives and lived experiences.”
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[S]ome scholars say that dire predictions over sharp declines are alarmist and that schools will ultimately return to more racially diverse classes as they adjust to the new paradigm. They point to the University of California, which increased outreach in low-income communities. Over time, the number of Black and Hispanic students increased at most schools in the system.
Richard Sander, a law professor at U.C.L.A. who opposes race-based affirmative action, said that graduation rates for Black students improved after affirmative action was banned in California.
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Justin Driver, a professor at Yale Law School and an expert on the Supreme Court’s education rulings, predicted that the affirmative action decision could cause some state universities to move to race-neutral strategies for increasing diversity, such as the “top percent” model used in Texas.
In that state, students with the highest grade point averages at each high school are guaranteed admission to a public university, including the system’s flagship, the University of Texas at Austin.
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Wuh Oh…!
College admissions experts anticipate there will be increased pressure on elite schools to end preferential treatment for children of alumni, who are more frequently white and affluent, as a result of the Supreme Court’s decision.
Next thing you know we’ll be hearing there was something wrong with admitting dummy Jared Kushner to Harvard because his father gave the school 2.5 million dollars! Where the hell is this going?
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From another source:
Democrats and blue-chip universities ought to move toward merit and income-based admissions while striving to eliminate legacy preferences.
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Back to the NYT:
In 2020, with Donald Trump on the ballot, Democratic leaders in California launched a campaign to reinstate race-conscious affirmative action in California.
The governor and U.S. Senators and state legislators and a who’s who of business, pro sport and labor elites banded together, outspent opponents 19 to 1 and declared that restoring affirmative action in college admissions and hiring was a matter of racial and social justice.
Yet in a state dominated politically by Democrats and liberals, this referendum, Proposition 16, lost badly, with more than 57 percent of voters opposing it.
A recent Times analysis of that vote exposed a gulf between the party establishment and its voters. The analysis found that the opposition included a majority of Asian American and white voters and half of all Hispanics. Only Black voters offered majority support for the referendum. [See also… And see, from a scholar at the Progressive Policy Institute…]
The California results suggest the issue — and the Supreme Court decision — might have far less political salience than some Democratic activists predict.
In today’s newsletter: A stalemate between lecturers and universities has left thousands of exams and dissertations ungraded – what’s the dispute about, and how might it end?
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Good morning. Finishing the last exam of your degree course should be one of the happiest moments of a student’s career. The stress of finals is over, the hard work has paid off. Graduation beckons and, beyond that, the next exciting stage of life.
But for tens of thousands this summer, the reality is proving very different. A marking boycott by the union representing many UK university lecturers means that tests are being left ungraded and dissertations unassessed.
Net zero | The government’s plans to hit net zero have been criticised in a report by its own advisers that warns targets are being missed on nearly every front. Lord Deben, outgoing chair of the CCC, said the UK had “lost the leadership” on climate action shown at Cop26 in 2021 and done “a number of things” that were “utterly unacceptable”.
Julian Sands | A body that was discovered in the wilderness near Mount Baldy in California on Saturday has been confirmed to be that of the missing British actor Julian Sands. San Bernardino county sheriff’s department had been coordinating a search for the actor who was reported missing on 13 January.
Health | Senior doctors in England have voted to go on strike over pay for the first time in nearly 50 years. Hospital consultants will strike for two days on 20 July, which will bring major disruption to services that have already had to reschedule 651,000 appointments since a wave of NHS strikes began last December.
Covid | Matt Hancock has said he is “profoundly sorry” for his part in mistakes that meant the UK was not properly prepared for Covid. He told the Covid public inquiry that he had not properly challenged assurances that sufficient planning was in place.
UK economy | The UK’s largest mobile and broadband companies have been accused of fuelling “greedflation” after pushing through the biggest round of price hikes for more than 30 years. Six companies controlling most of the telecoms market all charged a 3.9% supplement on top of their annual inflation-linked increases this year, meaning millions of customers have faced mid-contract price increases of up to 17.3%.
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University says about 20% of final-year students will face delays if industrial action continues
More than 1,000 final year students at Durham University could be left without a degree this summer because of the marking boycott disrupting universities across the UK.
Durham, one of 145 universities affected by the industrial action over pay and working conditions called by the University and College Union (UCU), said about 20% of its 5,300 final year students would “at the moment, face delays in receiving all their marks and final classifications”.
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My former colleague Osman Durrani, who has died aged 77, was a scholar of German literature and culture with a broad range of research interests. He wrote books on Goethe, Faust and the Bible (1977) and Faust: Icon of Modern Culture (2004), and another on fictions of Germany in the modern novel. He also edited an anthology of German Romantic poetry and had a collection of his poems, After Sunset, published in 1978.
There was more to Osman’s range than classical literature, though. He was a close observer of the contemporary literary scene, a friend of the novelist Joseph von Westphalen, and a key participant in the 1990s at conferences on post-unification German themes, one of which he organised himself at University College Durham in 1994, resulting in the publication The New Germany: Literature and Society after Unification, co-edited with Colin Good and Kevin Hilliard. To the end of his life he enjoyed reviewing books, for academic journals and the Times Literary Supplement, insisting that a review should never take more than a day to write.
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Small number could attend graduation but later be told they have failed as pay dispute affects assessments at 145 universities
Tens of thousands of university students are being left in limbo without their final degree results this summer, including some who could attend graduation ceremonies only to be told later that they have failed.
About a third of the UK’s 500,000 final-year undergraduates are thought to have been affected by the marking and assessment boycott at 145 universities, part of the pay dispute between the University and College Union (UCU) and employers that has strained relations between staff, students and management.
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The last time math performance was this low for 13-year-olds was in 1990.
Voters outside the Alameda County Courthouse casting their ballots in the 2020 election in Oakland, Calif.
Elizabethton City Schools in Tennessee provided English tutoring this year for 404 elementary and middle school students with the increased funding.
At institutions like Cornell University, first-year applicants are not required to submit SAT or ACT scores.
Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Va., instituted an admissions process that reserved spots for the top students at every public middle school in the area.
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