Academia’s “No Whites Allowed” Racism Must End Now
Federal authorities have challenged race-based "affinity housing" in college dormitories that exists on half of American campuses, calling it a violation of anti-discrimination law.
Housing Secretary Scott Turner last week issued a formal warning to universities nationwide that race-based “affinity housing” constitutes a clear violation of federal anti-discrimination law, according to New York Post.
The announcement comes despite such segregated housing arrangements existing on roughly half of American campuses for years without federal intervention. While universities characterize these arrangements as voluntary, the legal principle remains unchanged: discrimination is never truly voluntary for those being excluded, and the Supreme Court invalidated separate-but-equal arrangements generations ago.
Beyond Dormitories: Systematic Racial Preferences
Segregated housing represents merely the surface of a far deeper problem of institutionalized racial discrimination throughout higher education. Until the Supreme Court’s landmark 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, racial quotas dominated university admissions processes across the country.
Evidence uncovered during that case and its companion lawsuit against the University of North Carolina revealed systematic discrimination against white and particularly Asian applicants in favor of black and Latino candidates. Harvard rejected Asian students with SAT scores hundreds of points higher than admitted black students, justifying these disparities by claiming Asian applicants possessed inferior personal qualities.
Rather than comply with the Supreme Court decision, universities responded by eliminating standardized testing requirements altogether, using COVID-19 as justification. The true motive became clear when administrators including Erwin Chemerinsky, law dean at the University of California Berkeley, and Timothy Lynch, general counsel at the University of Michigan, were recorded discussing methods to maintain racial preferences in ways that would be difficult to prove legally.
Faculty Hiring and Institutional Bias
Racial discrimination extends well beyond student admissions into faculty recruitment, particularly over the past decade. Research by the Manhattan Institute’s John Sailer has documented extensive evidence of this institutional racism in publicly available college postings and internal documents.
The consequences for minority students admitted under these preferential systems prove devastating. Data from 2016 within the University of California system showed that among minority students entering science programs, fewer than 25 percent earned science degrees within five years, while over 40 percent failed to graduate at all in that timeframe.
Academic Standards in Decline
To accommodate struggling students admitted through racial preferences, universities have systematically lowered academic standards. Grade inflation reached such extremes at Harvard that A grades comprised 60 percent of all marks awarded, forcing the institution to impose per-course limits.
Faculty pushback has emerged at some institutions. More than 1,400 professors at Berkeley now demand restoration of SAT requirements, which were abandoned in 2020, arguing that current admissions practices bring in students incapable of handling even introductory coursework. MIT and most Ivy League schools have already reinstated standardized testing.
Reversing admissions discrimination may prove simpler than reforming faculties shaped by years of politically motivated hiring practices. Tenured professors, whether they benefited directly from racial preferences or share the far-left ideology that enabled them, will resist fundamental change.
Restoring American higher education to its proper purpose requires confronting the institutional racism that now pervades it at every level.
With information from New York Post
