‘Equity’ is all the rage in education, but it might not be in the future. A legal case points the way.
Louis K. Bonham writes at Minding the Campus:
Coalition for TJ v. Fairfax County School Board: The Shape of Things to Come?In the last few years, academia has utterly embraced the concept of “equity” as articulated by Ibram X. Kendi; i.e., that if a particular identity group is statistically under- or over-represented in anything, the reason for the imbalance is indisputably systemic discrimination, and thus positive discrimination to correct the imbalance is not only proper but mandatory. Indeed, many universities now require students and faculty to undergo indoctrination in this fallacious tripe and to pledge allegiance to it as a condition of admission/employment. Questioning the wisdom, effectiveness, or legality of “equity” usually results in the cancel culture mobs coming after you, as my friends Dorian Abbot and Gordon Klein can attest.As a lawyer and longtime student of constitutional law, one of the most disturbing things about academia’s adoption of the Kendian “equity” concept as official policy is that it is so clearly illegal…Nevertheless, just as fundamental economic realities exist regardless of contrary wishful thinking, those who have adopted the Kendian concept of “equity” as official policy are learning that the law is not so easily ignored. An excellent example of this occurred last week in the case of Coalition for TJ v. Fairfax County School Board, where a federal court entered a summary judgment declaring such a Kendian program flatly illegal.The case arose out of a new admissions program for Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (“TJ”), a highly regarded public high school in affluent Northern Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C.. Historically, admission to TJ has been extremely competitive, with applicants having to satisfy certain minimum requirements (such as a minimum core GPA of 3.0 and scores above certain thresholds on three standardized tests) to be eligible to apply for admission. As with many other STEM-focused programs, this merit-based admission process resulted in large numbers of Asian-American students at TJ: the 2020-21 class was 71.79% Asian-American, 18.34% white, 3.05% Hispanic, and 1.77% Black, whereas the overall student population of the area was 36.8% white, 27.1% Hispanic, 19.8% Asian-American, and 10% Black.
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