Commenting on the Clegg-Meloy debate on whether the recent Supreme Court decision in Ricci v. DeStefano might influence employment practices on campuses, George concludes that it’s impermissible for public colleges, like other govenment entities, to rule out job openings for individuals because they lack the racial identities favored by the institutions.
Peter Wood also weighs in on this issue, lamenting that Ricci won’t help much to counter the insidious role of identity politics in higher education:
Higher education has become America’s last great fortress of this kind of unfairness. Ricci doesn’t even try to bridge its moat, but it registers once again how isolated the academy has become in its determination to keep race at the center of things. The great irony here is that colleges and universities like to think of themselves as far in advance of the rest of society. That is surely what the ideologues at Virginia Tech are thinking as they try to impose a litmus test of contributions to “diversity” for faculty promotion and tenure, or to make “inclusive excellence” a substitute for actual achievement. The mumbo jumbo never ceases, but as of today, an ordinary person of any race has a better shot at fair treatment in the New Haven Fire Department than at Virginia Tech or a myriad of other colleges and universities.