HANNAH E. MEYERS:  “Trans Criminals:  The Problem We Refuse to Define:  Our willful ignorance undermines our ability to make good policy“

JOHN O. McGINNIS:  “The Road to Campus Serfdom.”  “Federal control over education has grown so powerful because progressives empowered the government for their own ideological goals.”  And the road to that serfdom runs through a little Christian college in southeastern Pennsylvania called Grove City College.

There have been a lot of complaints from progressives that it is unfair to cut off Harvard and Columbia from all their federal funding when their sins, if any, were isolated.  Well … own it, guys.  You’re the ones who made the law that way. (Typo fixed.)

AND HOLY TOLEDO, STILL MORE ACTION!:  Trump has signed a new Executive Order on school discipline.

I wrote on this issue a few years back.  The Obama Administration school discipline policy was truly deranged.  Since then, there’s nowhere to go but up.

MORE ACTION!:  Trump’s new Executive Order on disparate impact, entitled “Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy,”  is here.

To learn the sorry story of disparate impact liability, see my “Title VII Disparate Impact Liability Makes Almost Everything Presumptively Illegal.”  Our laws really are crazy.

TRUMP’S NEW EXECUTIVE ORDER ON ACCREDITATION IS HERE:  Meanwhile, Peter Kirsanow and I are working on a more permanent statutory solution to the problem with Senate staff.  (Executive Orders can be easily withdrawn.). This is progress.

WORLD ENDS TONIGHT, WOMEN & MINORITIES TO SUFFER MOST:  “Women Could Be Most Affected by Trump’s Penalties for Overdue Student Loans.”

MORE OF THIS PLEASE:  U. Louisville Pays Almost $1.6M to Settle Case with Professor who Criticized Trans Ideology.

CRAZY DAY IN SACRAMENTO:  Today, the California Legislature plans to hold several hearings on so-called “reparations” bills.

*Assembly Bill 7 would allow state colleges and universities to give preferential treatment in admissions to the descendants of American slavery.

*Assembly Bill 57 would make possible “home purchase assistance” for the descendants of American slaves (if at some point a Bureau for the Descendants of American Slavery is established (see Senate Bill 518), which will identify who is and who isn’t a descendant of American slavery).

*Senate Bill 437 would provide funding for California State University to further research slavery reparations and especially to figure out how to determine who is descended from American slaves and who isn’t.

*Assembly Bill 742 would provide preferential treatment in licensing for descendants of slaves (if at some point a Bureau for the Descendants of American Slavery is established (see Senate Bill 518), which will identify who is and who isn’t a descendant of American slavery).

And there are more such bills.

Note that California was not even a slave state.

Oh … and there’s a new effort to repeal (partially) Proposition 209.  It never ends.  We whipped their butts when they tried to repeal Proposition 209 back in 2020, despite being outspent by MORE than 14 to 1.  We managed to derail last year’s effort to repeal it by trickery through Assembly Constitutional Amendment 7 (ACA7) (which passed the Assembly, and which looked like it would pass in the Senate, but mercifully did not).  That effort would have allowed the governor to make virtually unlimited exceptions to Proposition 209.

This year’s effort is also called ACA7, but I believe that is just a coincidence.  The new ACA7 exempts education from Proposition 209’s prohibition of preferential treatment based on race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin.  For K-12, the exemption would be total.  For higher education, the exemption would exclude admissions (since that is already prohibited by the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. President & Fellows of Harvard College (2023)).  But discrimination in financial aid and everything else would no longer be prohibited by Prop 209.

None of these bills has passed either the Assembly or the Senate and with luck they never will.  It’s hard to tell at this point whether they should be taken seriously.  I can’t imagine that Governor Gavin Newsom, who is desperately trying to position himself as a “Not Crazy” Presidential candidate, would be happy to have to take a stand on them.  Still, we at the American Civil Rights Project don’t like to take chances.  We’ve filed opposition letters to several of the bills.

But with all the problems California has—fires, crime, water shortages, transportation messes, homeless encampments, drug abuse, immigration—it’s incredible the Legislature thinks it has time for this.

By the way, there are so many bills they can’t handle them all in one day.  Tomorrow, Assembly Bill 1071, a criminal procedure bill to combat white supremacy and systemic racism, will be heard.

NEW!!:  Please don’t get rid of the Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1995.  It helps discourage devil worship and other creepy crawlies.  (I’m not kidding … not entirely anyway.)

I LOVE A HERO:  And so does the Carnegie Hero Fund.  The Fund, founded by Andrew Carnegie, “awards the Carnegie Medal to individuals in the United States and Canada who risk death or serious physical injury to an extraordinary degree saving or attempting to save the lives of others.”

Thank you, Andrew Carnegie for helping to foster a culture where heroism is valued.  But most of all, thank you to those individuals (yes, they are mostly men, but there was woman among this group and a boy) who instinctively came to the rescue of their fellow human being.  God bless you (and, to the men among you, God bless your toxic masculinity).

COLLEGE FIX:  “Top Conservative Civil Rights Advocates Seek Repeal of Minority-Serving Institutions Programs.”  (Original Letter here.)

CHANGE:  UConn Med School Drops Mandatory DEI-infused Hippocratic Oath.

AN IDEA WHOSE TIME HAS COME?:  In “How Trump Can Ensure Fair Admissions,” Kristen Shapiro has an excellent suggestion:  Require schools to publish and report admissions data in a way that would make it much easier for the federal government to detect race discrimination.

My colleagues and I had a number of similar (but not identical) ideas when I first joined the Commission on Civil Rights.  But it was around the tail-end of the GWBush Administration and the beginnings of the Obama Administration.  And it was pre-SFFA. Our ideas didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell then.  But maybe things are different now.

WAIT, THIS ISN’T AN APRIL FOOLS JOKE?:  “U Portland theology majors no longer have to take ‘Biblical Texts’–can take ‘queer’ class instead.“

I’M TOLD THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION IS FOCUSED ON DISMANTLING DISPARATE IMPACT LIABILITY:  That’s great!  My advice is to focus first on demolishing the argument that Title VI’s regulations impose disparate impact liability on federal funding recipients.  No, they don’t, and if they do, they are beyond the scope of the power of any executive branch agency.  Once they’ve gotten that far, it may be easier to persuade the Supreme Court that disparate impact liability as first applied in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971) was wrongheaded from the start and needs to be ditched.  It has caused harm to everyone.  A good rule of thumb is that a legal doctrine that presumptively outlaws everything can’t be good.

HOT!:  Why are more and more families opting for alternatives to public schools for their children?  (It’s because they’re not crazy.)

HERE’S WHAT THE NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION FUNDS:  The level of woke jargon is very high here:

Despite well-intentioned university efforts to support Black undergraduate STEM students, policy and practice reforms run the risk of not appropriately benefiting all Black people due to pervasive, deficit-based assumptions about Black racial identities and the types of structural engagement needed to advance holistic, racial well-being in transformative and sustainable ways. Stated simply, STEM contexts do not adequately support Black undergraduate STEM students because STEM educators and practitioners remain unsure of what Blackness means for individuals, thereby constraining true racial equity endeavors. Contemporary literature regarding race posits instead that embodiment(s) of Blackness differ across multiple dimensions and axes, including ethnic identity (e.g., African American, Caribbean American, Nigerian American), place identity (e.g., South, Midwest), and generational identity (e.g., first-generation, second-generation, third plus generation). Black students from different ethnic and generational identities having varied perceptions of the racial climate and understandings of their STEM experiences. Recognizing the scope of Blackness and its implications for creating and sustaining holistic, heterogenous conceptions of racial equity in STEM, the team will establish a collaborative network among six institutions (two HBCUS, two PWIs, one majority Black institution, and one HSI) located across the Mid-Atlantic, Southeast, Southwest, and Midwest regions of the US to study how Black undergraduate STEM students? notions of Blackness vary with respect to these dimensions. … (Rest of Abstract here.)

This project–entitled “Examining Blackness in Postsecondary STEM Education through a Multidimensional-Multiplicative Lens”–fetched $1,633,132.00.  So far only $767,25 has been disbursed.

SHOT IN THE DARK:  ATTENTION TRUMP ADMINISTRATION LAWYERS:  Don’t let anybody tell you that the regulations that have been issued under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act prohibit disparate impact based on race.  The argument in this article is made in the context of school discipline, but it applies broadly.

MANNY KLAUSNER, RIP:  I learned yesterday evening that Manny Klausner has passed away at the age of 85.  He was a wonderfully optimistic soul and a great ally in the fight for liberty and equal protection under the law–the happiest of warriors.  It was impossible not to love him.  More on Manny here.

MAN’S BEST FRIEND:  RATS!!!:  National Geographic reports that in Africa, rats are used to detect tuberculosis:

Carolina is an African giant pouched rat who can screen 100 sputum (i.e phlegm) samples for tuberculosis in 20 minutes—much faster than a human, who takes four days to process the same amount of information with a microscope. And she’s part of a cohort of 40 rats belonging to nonprofit APOPO who are helping to combat the tuberculosis epidemic in Tanzania and Ethiopia.

According to the article, rats can be used to detect land mines too.

RINGSIDE AT THE RECKONING:  “Congress has created programs that dole out money to colleges that admit blacks and Hispanics at or above a fixed percentage.”  Yes, that’s unconstitutional.

HERE’S YOUR CHANCE TO HELP THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION TO DEAL WITH DEI-STYLE HARASSMENT IN SCHOOLS:  The Department of Education has set up a web site entitled “enddei.ed.gov.”  It says:

The U.S. Department of Education is committed to ensuring all students have access to meaningful learning free of divisive ideologies and indoctrination.  This submission form is an outlet for students, parents, teachers, and the broader community to report illegal discriminatory practices at institutions of learning.  The Department of Education will utilize community submissions to identify potential areas for investigation.

I should caution that not everything that is “divisive” is illegal.  Nor is everything that might be classified as “indoctrination.”  But Title VI, which prohibits race, color, and national origin discrimination by federal funding recipients has long been interpreted to prohibit conduct that rises to the level of racial, color, or national origin harassment.  Some of the DEI training and general DEI activity rises to that level.  If you have a story to tell, now would be a good time to tell it.  The information may be valuable to the officials there in sorting out what is and what isn’t an actual violation of the law.

NEW TREASURE OF SIERRA MADRE:  Peter Wood:  “Minority Serving Institutions Are a Modern Illusion of Equity.”

ATTENTION TRUMP ADMINISTRATION:  Wenyuan Wu:  “Accrediting Agencies Have Long Required Racial Preferences.  Civil Rights Commissioners Are Now Pushing Back.”

A bit more here.

HERE’S A BILLION DOLLARS FOR YOU, MR. MUSK:  Yesterday, Pete Kirsanow, Dan Morenoff and I sent a letter to Congressional Leaders about the unconstitutional Minority Serving Institution programs.  Did you know that if at least 25% of a college or university’s students are Hispanic, it is eligible for a pile of money that schools with less than 25% cannot access?  There is no requirement that the school prove that either it or its students have ever been discriminated against on account of race or ethnicity.  Absurd and unconstitutional.