students for fair admiss
ed blum front fuckery
KOCHADEMIA?
HARVARD FED SOC
salon 11 22
"He really is the living embodiment of the Dunning-Kruger effect," a friend responded in a group text over the weekend. We had been sharing stories about the bouts of dumbassery on display, as Elon Musk starts his ill-advised reign of Twitter.And hoo boy, there was plenty to share. Did you see the one about Musk telling software engineers to print out 30 days of code, only to tell them to shred it when he likely realized this exposed how he doesn't know what he's doing? Or how he plans to take a bazooka to the content moderation team, even though doing so will likely send advertisers packing? Or how he thought carrying a sink around was a hilarious joke? Or how he tweeted an asinine conspiracy theory about the Paul Pelosi attack, only to delete it hours later?
None of this should be surprising. From day one, this entire saga has been a story of a man with far more money than brains. After all, this all started when Musk stupidly offered to buy Twitter at a price way over its valuation, for no other reason than a fit of trollish pique. It was only after he realized what a foolish idea it was to set $44 billion on fire that he started coming up with disingenuous excuses to escape the deal, only to discover that it was too late, legally, to back out.
Yet, somehow, much of this still feels surprising. The idea that Musk is "smart" has persisted through years of very public evidence to the contrary. Even now, many of his critics offer pre-emptive caveats that they don't think he's stupid, before explaining why the latest of his endless string of idiotic choices is a bad one. This notion of Musk's intelligence clings to the discourse around him for one simple reason: He is very, very rich.
The myth of the American meritocracy is a stubborn one. Americans can't help but believe that someone as rich as Musk must have something going on for him beyond dumb luck. To imagine otherwise is too unsettling. So many people block out what should be an obvious truth: You probably would have never heard of Elon Musk if he wasn't a white man from a wealthy family that literally owned an emerald mine in South Africa.
To be fair, it's entirely possible that, at one point, Musk wasn't a total birdbrain. His resume suggests there was a time when he was relatively competent at computer science, though there's no reason to think that such skills mean fluency in any other higher-functioning tasks. But regardless of what some IQ test from back in the day might have said about Musk, it's clear that in the past couple of decades, his brain has turned to total mush.
The irony is that the very wealth and privilege that tricks people into thinking he must be a genius likely contributed to the current state of affairs. Being surrounded by nothing but flattery makes it hard to distinguish between thoughts you have that are smart and useful and thoughts you have (such as right-wing conspiracy theories) that are idiotic. Either way, the people in your life — and for Musk, his legions of fanboys on Twitter — are swooning over what a super genius you are. The lack of meaningful feedback would damage most people's capacity for critical thinking. Musk's narcissism renders the diagnosis of his rational capacity terminal.
One can only hope the daily updates on Musk's antics will put some dent into the American myth of meritocracy. But then again, having to endure four years of a Donald Trump presidency didn't seem to make much difference, even as he shared moments of Trumpian wisdom like telling people to inject bleach into their lungs to cure COVID-19 and trying to "correct" a weather map drawn by actual meteorologists because he felt it would better serve his ego for a hurricane to make landfall in Alabama. Trump was elected in no small part because he had convinced large numbers of Americans that he was a successful businessman and therefore smart. In reality, he was a historically terrible businessman whose wealth exists because other rich white guys spent decades bailing him out of his self-inflicted financial woes.
The insidious nature of the meritocratic myth is on full display this week, as the Supreme Court heard arguments in a lawsuit over affirmative action at Harvard University. Unfortunately, polling shows that 63% of Americans oppose universities considering race in their admissions process, naively believing that ending affirmative action means some objective measure of "merit" will be used instead. In reality, the opposite is true: Far from being meritocratic institutions, Ivy League schools are largely devoted to elevating rich white kids at the expense of people who have more talent. As Mark Joseph Stern at Slate explains, "Harvard has a preference for four specific groups of applicants known as ALDC: athletes, legacies, those on the dean's list (frequently because of family donations), and the children of faculty." He continues:
In theory, ALDC preferences are colorblind. In practice, they operate as a massive affirmative action program for white applicants. Over a recent six-year period, 2,200 out of 4,993 admitted white students were ALDC—a figure significantly higher than the overall number of admitted students who are Black (1,392) and Hispanic (1,283). White ALDC students are not overrepresented because they happen to be more qualified; to the contrary, about three-fourths of them would have been rejected without the ALDC boost.
The existing race-based affirmative action program is mostly an attempt to make up for the diversity that is lost giving such a massive advantage to white applicants. And yet, somehow, you hear no complaints from most conservatives about the ALDC preferences. That's because they don't actually want a meritocracy. They want a system where white people can get twice as far while being half as talented. Or where the richest man in the world keeps getting called a genius, even as we can all see — if we're willing to look — that he's just another privilege-addled idiot who lost his capacity for critical thinking many billions of dollars ago.
==
1019
federal judge rules Harvard can continue to use race as one of its factors in admissions decisions
Vinay Harpalani, The Conversation
, Me. — A former mayor of Poway, a small city in Southern California, wrote a column in August in his local newspaper with this headline: “A gun to my head.”
He was upset about how a state law had forced Poway to redo its voting districts so Latinos would have a better chance of winning elections.
Reading the piece on his computer 3,000 miles away, Edward Blum knew he had found his newest case.
Seeing one of his bêtes noires — racial gerrymandering — at work, Mr. Blum recruited the former mayor, Don Higginson, as a plaintiff, and on Oct. 4 filed a federal lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the California Voting Rights Act.
Mr. Blum is not a lawyer. But he is a one-man legal factory with a growing record of finding plaintiffs who match his causes, winning big victories and trying above all to erase racial preferences from American life.
Mr. Blum, 65, has orchestrated more than two dozen lawsuits challenging affirmative action practices and voting rights laws across the country. He is behind two of the biggest such cases to reach the Supreme Court: one attacking consideration of race in admissions at the University of Texas, which he lost; the other contesting parts of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, widely considered one of this country’s most important pieces of civil rights legislation, which he won.
Now, in his most high-profile cause of the moment, he has asserted that Harvard University’s affirmative action policies amount to an illegal quota system that denies high-achieving Asian-American students admission in numbers commensurate with their qualifications. He has already forced Harvard to turn over, under court seal, years of highly sensitive data about demographics, test scores and even some personal essays, and he now has a powerful ally in the Justice Department, which is looking into a similar complaint.
2x
Mr. Blum said he was acting on a pure principle — that people should never be judged by the color of their skin.
“Most Americans don’t want race to be part of your application to college,” he said. “They don’t want the police to use race as a profiling tool to prevent crime. They don’t want prosecutors to use race in the makeup of a jury. Your race and your ethnicity should not be something used to help you or harm you in your life’s endeavors.”
How a financial adviser without a law degree has managed to bring so many cases that make, as he calls it, “big law,” is a testament to his methods. He is a matchmaker bringing together two forces: students and others who believe they are being mistreated in the name of racial justice, and conservative donors who finance his work and that of the high-powered, establishment Republican lawyers who take the cases to court.
In the current environment, Mr. Blum has been called many things, including a courageous man of the moment willing to take on entrenched, politically correct policies, and a tool of rich conservatives trying to extinguish efforts to help historically oppressed minorities overcome the long shadow of racism.
In most of his cases, Mr. Blum either sues under the name of his own organizations, or he recruits plaintiffs to challenge racial policies he thinks are unfair. Although he claims to have 22,000 members in his group Students for Fair Admissions, the plaintiff in lawsuits against Harvard and other colleges, Harvard says in court papers that he is a gadfly whose organization is nothing but his “alter ego.”
Rachel Kleinman, senior counsel at theNAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said that Mr. Blum’s opposition to affirmative action was related to “this fear of white people that their privilege is being taken away from them and given to somebody else who they see as less deserving.”
Mr. Blum said he was acting on a pure principle — that people should never be judged by the color of their skin.
“Most Americans don’t want race to be part of your application to college,” he said. “They don’t want the police to use race as a profiling tool to prevent crime. They don’t want prosecutors to use race in the makeup of a jury. Your race and your ethnicity should not be something used to help you or harm you in your life’s endeavors.”
How a financial adviser without a law degree has managed to bring so many cases that make, as he calls it, “big law,” is a testament to his methods. He is a matchmaker bringing together two forces: students and others who believe they are being mistreated in the name of racial justice, and conservative donors who finance his work and that of the high-powered, establishment Republican lawyers who take the cases to court.
In the current environment, Mr. Blum has been called many things, including a courageous man of the moment willing to take on entrenched, politically correct policies, and a tool of rich conservatives trying to extinguish efforts to help historically oppressed minorities overcome the long shadow of racism.
In most of his cases, Mr. Blum either sues under the name of his own organizations, or he recruits plaintiffs to challenge racial policies he thinks are unfair. Although he claims to have 22,000 members in his group Students for Fair Admissions, the plaintiff in lawsuits against Harvard and other colleges, Harvard says in court papers that he is a gadfly whose organization is nothing but his “alter ego.”
Rachel Kleinman, senior counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said that Mr. Blum’s opposition to affirmative action was related to “this fear of white people that their privilege is being taken away from them and given to somebody else who they see as less deserving.”
Pointing to his own upbringing and the anti-Semitism his family experienced in the South in the 1950s and ’60s, when his father was a traveling salesman and some hotels did not accept Jewish guests, Mr. Blum said such criticism missed the mark.
He recalled living in Orlando, Fla., when his family’s synagogue received a bomb threat and the congregation asked a neighboring church to join it in forming a citizen patrol. The church refused — until, Mr. Blum said, his father called a bomb threat to the church.
“I seem to come from a line of compulsive people who believe in certain things and just don’t let go of them easily,” he said, smiling.
Victory Inspired by Loss
His first lawsuit was a product of personal experience. Mr. Blum (pronounced Bloom) ran for Congress in Houston as a Republican in 1992, and lost. What bothered him most, he said, was the district’s tortured shape, designed to make it easier for a minority candidate to win the seat. He filed a case claiming racial gerrymandering and nursed it to the Supreme Court, which ruled in his favor in 1996. He began to file similar suits in other states.
That effort culminated in a challenge to the 1965 Voting Rights Act, in particular to the law’s requirement that states and localities with a history of voting discrimination get permission from federal authorities before altering voting laws — so-called preclearance. Mr. Blum began searching the web for localities that had recently come under Justice Department scrutiny, and then cold-called Frank Ellis, the county attorney of Shelby County, Ala.
Mr. Ellis was wary at first of Mr. Blum, but not of his cause. “We vetted him as best we could,” Mr. Ellis said, and ultimately agreed to file a suit.
In 1965, Mr. Ellis said, the county had a reading and writing test devised to keep blacks from voting. “There was no question there was something legitimate” about the federal supervision, he said.
“But in the last 20 years or so before we filed this suit, it became obvious to me that it was no longer justified,” he continued. “We were having to spend pretty large amounts of taxpayer money that could have gone to something like schools on getting preclearance from the Justice Department.”
By a 5-4 vote in 2013, in Shelby County vs. Holder, the court struck down only one of two related provisions, but the outcome was the same — no more preclearance.
Critics say the ruling accelerated a move toward throwing up voting barriers that had begun in reaction to the Obama presidency. Mr. Blum said that while he had concerns about this happening, there were remedies, because such barriers could still be challenged in court, and “all states, counties and cities are now on equal terms.”
Imag
In the Texas affirmative action case, he told a friend that he was looking for a white applicant to the University of Texas at Austin, his own alma mater, to challenge its admissions criteria. The friend passed the word to his daughter, Abigail Fisher. About six months later, the university rejected Ms. Fisher’s application.
“I immediately said, ‘Hey, can we call Edward?’” she recalled in an interview.
The case went to the Supreme Court twice, and though Ms. Fisher was portrayed as a less than stellar student, vilified as supporting a racist agenda, and ultimately lost, she said she still believed in Mr. Blum. “I think we started a conversation,” she said. “Edward obviously is not going to just lie down and play dead.”
Big Donors, Elite Lawyers
For much of the year, Mr. Blum works out of a gray-shingle house in South Thomaston, Me., overlooking Penobscot Bay, in a stark landscape famously painted by Andrew Wyeth. He has a consulting business analyzing esoteric municipal bonds for a handful of wealthy families.
But hiring lawyers for his kind of litigation takes a lot of money, and Mr. Blum has found it.
The DonorsTrust, which distributes money from conservative and libertarian contributors to various causes, and nonprofits related to DonorsTrust gave almost $2.9 million to support Mr. Blum’s work from 2010 to 2015, said Lawson R. Bader, the trust’s president, citing the most recent publicly available figures.
Most of that money came from the Searle Freedom Trust, according to tax records and Kimberly O. Dennis, the president and chief executive of the trust, which was founded by Daniel C. Searle of the Searle pharmaceutical company.
The goals of the Searle trust, as stated on its website, are to create “an environment that promotes individual freedom and economic liberties, while encouraging personal responsibilities and a respect for traditional American values.” The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, another small-government group, gave $100,000 to the DonorsTrust for Mr. Blum’s causes in 2014 and $50,000 in 2012, tax records show. For Mr. Blum’s first suit, the racial gerrymandering case in 1993, he hired a real estate lawyer who agreed to represent him for six months for $7,000, Mr. Blum recalled. But when the case went to the Supreme Court, he knew he needed a Washington lawyer, and found a rising young lawyer willing to take it for nothing at the prestigious Wiley Rein law firm.
Since then, Wiley Rein has been practically his house counsel. Fisher and Shelby were argued by Bert Rein, an antitrust and commercial litigator who was a State Department appointee in the Nixon administration. Mr. Rein described Mr. Blum as a client like any other, but one who believed in legal activism, and said his cases were not done pro bono but for a fee, which may be negotiable. “We are not a ‘cause’ law firm,” Mr. Rein said. (In some cases Mr. Blum has won, his side has been able to recoup legal fees from the losing side.)
The Harvard case is being argued by William Consovoy, a younger partner who recently split away. He clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas, whom he has called “my hero.”
Some civil rights activists think that in suing Harvard, Mr. Blum is picking the wrong fight. Armand Derfner, a civil rights lawyer and constitutional law scholar in residence at the Charleston School of Law in South Carolina, said that admission to the Ivy League was arbitrary for reasons that had little to do with race.
Mr. Derfner said he had sensed discrimination against him as a Jew when he applied for jobs at Wall Street firms or socially when he was in college, and could sympathize with the arguments that Asians should not be held back. But he said he doubted that was what was motivating Mr. Blum. “The lesson he’s spreading is that the problem in our society is that blacks have it too good and whites are getting screwed, and that’s a heck of a lesson in this society,” he said.
Harvard denies using quotas. But Robert Iuliano, the university’s general counsel, said that a diverse student body was essential to teaching students how to function in “an increasingly interconnected world.”
Mr. Blum scored a significant victory when a federal judge required Harvard to release six years of admissions data to experts who submitted their analysis, under seal, to the court last month. He is also trying to get similar data from Princeton University released. Ultimately, he expects the judge to open the Harvard data to the public.
“These Ivy League schools will go to the trenches to prevent disclosure of what they are doing,” Mr. Blum said.
==
wiki mult flags
| Edward Blum | Edward Blum |
|---|---|
| Born | Benton Harbor, Michigan |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | University of Texas (1973) |
Edward Blum is a politically conservative legal strategist known for his activism against laws involving race and ethnicity.[1] Blum is not an attorney. He connects potential plaintiffs with attorneys who are willing to represent them in "test cases" which he tries to use to set legal precedents. He is the director and sole member of the Project on Fair Representation, which he founded in 2005. According to its website, the Project focuses specifically on voting rights, education, government contracting, and employment.[2] Since the 1990s, Blum has been heavily involved in bringing six cases to the United States Supreme Court, and the Court has partially or fully ruled in his favor in four of those cases.[3]
- :{1:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{Early life:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
- :{2:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{Political interest:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
- :{3:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{Activism:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
- :{4:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{Works:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
- :{5:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{See also:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
- :{6:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{References:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
- :{7:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{Further reading:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
- :{8:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{External links:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
Early life
Edward Blum was born into a Jewish family in Benton Harbor, Michigan, where his parents owned and operated the local shoe store.[4] Counter to his later political leanings, he describes his parents as generally left-wingliberals who supported Democratic presidents like Franklin Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman and that he was eventually "the first Republican my mother ever met".[5]
He attended the University of Texas and the State University of New York, where he briefly studied African literature.
[FLAG]
Following this, to connect with his Jewish roots he spent a summer in Israel living on a kibbutz which he says caused him to reevaluate some of the liberal positions he had been raised with.[5]
Political interest
While living as astock broker in Houston, Texas in the early 80s, he became involved in the neoconservatism movement. In 1990, he realized that the Democratic incumbent in his congressional district, Craig Anthony Washington, was running unopposed, so decided to run against him for the Republican Party. During that campaign, Blum and his wife Lark went door-knocking and realized that the boundaries of their district erratically divided streets based on ethnicity, with the suspected purpose to gerrymander a majority African-American district. Blum eventually lost the congressional race. But he and others filed a lawsuit against the state of Texas, claiming that the racially gerrymandered districts violated theFourteenth Amendment. The case, Bush v. Vera, went to the Supreme Court, which ruled in Blum's favor.[4]
Activism
Blum holds a fellowship at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). His areas of research at AEI include civil rights policy, affirmative action, multiculturalism, and redistricting. He has also written the book, The Unintended Consequences of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act (2007).
His litigation includes United States Supreme Court cases Bush v. Vera (1996), Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 v. Holder (2009), Fisher v. University of Texas (2013), Shelby County v. Holder (2013), and Evenwel v. Abbott (2016).[4]
In Shelby County, the Supreme Court struck down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which subjected certain states and parts of states to federal scrutiny when they tried to modify voting procedures.[6] This scrutiny, known as "preclearance", was intended to prevent states from enacting voting procedures that disproportionately burden racial minorities. After unsuccessfully lobbying Congress to modify the preclearance rules in the Act's 2006 reauthorization, Blum set out to challenge the Act's constitutionality in court. He wanted to change or eliminate the law because it had indirectly led to the racial gerrymandering which he encountered in the 1990s when he ran for Congress.[7] He eventually persuaded officials in Shelby County, Alabama to sue the federal government. The Supreme Court's ruling was a major victory for Blum.
In Evenwel, Blum recruited Texas voters to sue Texas in a constitutional test case. Texas, like other states, divides its state legislative districts in a way that equalizes the total population of each district. However, some districts have more eligible voters than others because they have fewer minors, non-citizen immigrants, and convicted felons. Blum and his recruited plaintiffs contended that this discriminates against voters in districts with high numbers of eligible voters, since each person's vote has less power.[8] They wanted the Supreme Court to mandate that districts be drawn based on voter-eligible population rather than total population. In an April 2016 ruling, the Supreme Court upheld Texas's district scheme.[9] This was a defeat for Blum.
The Fisher case, which challenged the University of Texas's consideration of race in its undergraduate admissions process, was decided at the Supreme Court in 2013 and again in 2016. The first time, the Court bolstered the legal standard that universities must satisfy if they wish to consider race, emphasizing that the use of race is only permissible if race-neutral alternatives would be ineffective at producing campus diversity.[10] The second time, the Court applied the heightened legal standard to UT's admission policy, concluding that it passes muster and upholding it.[11] This was a defeat for Edward Blum.
Edward Blum is also challenging race-conscious admissions policies at other selective universities, claiming that they do not comply with the strict legal standard set forth in Fisher.[12] To that end, he has founded Students for Fair Admissions, an offshoot of the Project on Fair Representation. This organization seeks to recruit students who have been rejected by selective universities and file lawsuits on their behalf.[13] Specifically, Blum is targeting Harvard University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He set up websites called harvardnotfair.org,[14] uncnotfair.org,[15] and uwnotfair.org[16] to attract plaintiffs. Students for Fair Admissions, led by Blum, filed federal lawsuits against Harvard and UNC-Chapel Hill in November 2014. (SFFA has not sued UW-Madison thus far). Those cases are still pending in federal district court. Unlike the Fisher case, in which the plaintiff, Abigail Fisher, made herself public,[17] the students rejected by Harvard and UNC have not revealed their identities because they want to shield themselves from potential retaliation.[citation needed] Rather, the named plaintiff is simply "Students for Fair Admissions", and that organization is prepared to assure the courts that it does in fact have members who were injured by the universities' use of race.[citation needed]
Works
- Blum, Edward (2007). The Unintended Consequences of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. AEI Press. ISBN 9780844742571.
See also
conservative-leaning nonprofit based in Virginia, has filed similar suits against the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Texas
bs
https://www.weeklystandard.com/terry-eastland/students-for-fair-admissions-is-this-the-lawsuit-that-finally-kills-affirmative-action
Students for Fair Admissions is at it again.
The non-profit organization opposes racial preferences in admissions on grounds that they violate equal protection principles. More than two years ago SFFA, which claims 21,000 students and parents as members, filed lawsuits challenging preferences in admissions at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill—both of which cases are ongoing. This summer SFFA has initiated another lawsuit against preferences in admissions, and the defendant is the University of Texas at Austin.
UT Austin has been in this position before. In Fisher v. Texas, it defended its use of race in admissions in lengthy litigation, finally prevailing in the Supreme Court last year with Justice Kennedy writing the majority opinion. SFFA takes on basically the same admissions policy that the Court upheld in Fisher. But it doesn’t challenge Kennedy’s opinion for the Court, as it would be doing if it had filed its case in federal court under federal law. Instead SFFA filed in statecourt under state law, having decided it makes no sense to be in federal courts re-arguing the federal law of racial preferences when it has a better option—the state option.
In 1972 Texans passed a state constitutional amendment that says: “Equality under the law shall not be denied or abridged because of sex, race, color creed, or national origin.” The measure was intended to establish more expansive protection against discrimination than was then available under the equal protection clauses of the federal and Texas constitutions. SFFA is betting that the Texas Supreme Court, which is more conservative than the U.S. Supreme Court, will not be inclined to read into the state constitution what is clearly not there—legal doctrine that supports preferences in admissions. The case will be a state case, and it could have implications for other schools in Texas that have preferential policies.
How many such schools there are is unknown. But as the case goes forward, it may help answer that question, even as it advances principles of non-discrimination and equal protection. The case deserves close watching, even by non-Texans.
Terry Eastland is a contributing editor at The Weekly Standard.
==
http://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/document.php?id=cqresrre2017111700
long, good bkgd
...When teaching law classes, “I did not find the discussions to be different based on the race and ethnicity of the students involved,” says Roger Clegg, president of the conservative Center for Equal Opportunity, a think tank in Northern Virginiathat promotes a “colorblind society.” Restriction of campus speech “shows the Left is not really interested in diversity when it comes to hearing ideas,” he says.
...
"Especially at selective schools, it's essentially an arms race among students to gather the right SAT score and courses and extracurricular activities and internships,” says Jennifer Glynn, research director at the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation in Lansdowne, Va., which supports low-income students from elementary school through postgraduate studies. “Wealthy students can afford to pay for summer experiences and take an unpaid internship. Poor students can't afford to have these additions to their track record.”
Clegg, however, argued that past discrimination does not justify affirmative action in admissions because its role in causing white versus minority disparities “is greatly diminished for [college applicants] who were, after all, born late in the Clinton administration — not in slavery or the Jim Crow era.” Discrimination “in just about any public transaction, and this includes education, has been illegal for decades,” he said. And, he noted, while both Asian-Americans and Latinos have been discriminated against, their educational preparation now is “quite different.”27
Others counter that discrimination is not in the past — it continues. Douglas Massey, a professor of sociology at Princeton University, said one-third of all African-American city dwellers were living in highly or hypersegregated neighborhoods as of 2010, when the last census took place.28
Clegg says that regardless of whether discrimination is responsible for current disparities, discrimination — including against whites and Asian-Americans — is always wrong.
Edward Blum, president of Students for Fair Admissions,which has filed key lawsuits against affirmative-action programs, agrees. “The founding principle of the civil rights movement and the principle that most Americans embrace today is that your race and your ethnicity should not be something that harms your life's endeavors or in the alterative helps you in your life's endeavors,” Blum says.
Should affirmative action be based on income rather than race or ethnicity?
For the Century Foundation's Kahlenberg, race-conscious affirmative action has a drawback: It does not give enough consideration to prospective students from economically disadvantaged families, including minorities. “It seems to me that having a multiracial aristocracy is better than an all-white aristocracy, but it's still an aristocracy,” he said of the effects of race- and ethnic-conscious admissions at elite colleges and universities.29...
==
boston globe
Blum, the man behind the lawsuit alleging that Harvard University discriminates against Asian-American applicants, has encouraged or personally filed some of the most influential affirmative-action cases in recent decades.
Blum has become the face of the effort to end racial considerations in education admissions. A self-described former college liberal, according to media reports, Blum says that over time he came to believe that race-based policies violate the very principles of equality they were created to uphold.
He is president of Students for Fair Admissions, the activist group suing Harvard in a case that is likely to go to trial this fall and may ultimately be decided by the US Supreme Court. Hundreds of pages of legal documents were unsealed Friday about the college’s admissions process.
Blum, 66, is linked to another landmark case, Fisher v. University of Texas, which he lost in 2016 when the US Supreme Court upheld the school’s method for considering race in admissions.
Despite his various legal projects, Blum is not a lawyer, but a financial analyst by trade. He lives in Maine and has been enlisting plaintiffs or suing with Students for Fair Admissions, an offshoot of the Project on Fair Representation, to end affirmative action and other practices he sees as racially biased.
RELATED LINKS
Harvard goes on the attack to defend its admissions policies
The university is preparing for what is likely to be the fiercest attack yet on its use of race in drawing up each freshman class.
The Project on Fair Representation, of which Blum is also director, is a legal activism group whose website calls for an end to race-based affirmative action in college admissions and K-12 school assignments.
“Most Americans don’t want race to be part of your application to college,” he said told The New York Times. “They don’t want the police to use race as a profiling tool to prevent crime. They don’t want prosecutors to use race in the makeup of a jury. Your race and your ethnicity should not be something used to help you or harm you in your life’s endeavors.”
Blum and his projects received almost $2.9 million from DonorsTrust— which gives money from conservative donors to a number of causes — and affiliated nonprofits between 2010 and 2015, according to the Times.
In addition to his crusade against affirmative action, Blum has also worked to overturn gerrymandered districts that favor racial minority candidates. This arose out of his own failed bid for Congress in Houston in 1992, when he eventually successfully sued Texas in Bush v. Vera for racially gerrymandering districts.
Blum eventually went on to challenge the 1965 Voting Rights Act in the 2013 Supreme Court case Shelby County v. Holder, which struck down a provision that required cities with a history of voter discrimination to get federal approval to change voting laws.
Edward Blum (litigant) - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Blum_(litigant)
2.
Early life · Political interest · Activism
About | Students for Fair Admissions
https://studentsforfairadmissions.org/about/
2.
Lawsuit Updates | Students for Fair Admissions
https://studentsforfairadmissions.org/updates/
2.
Meet the man behind the Harvard admissions lawsuit - The Boston ...
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2018/06/15/meet-man-behind...admissions.../story.html
Jun 15, 2018 - Edward Blum is president of Students for Fair Admissions. Edward Blum, the man behind the lawsuit alleging that Harvard University discriminates against Asian-American applicants, has encouraged or personally filed some of the most influential affirmative-action cases in recent decades.
The true mission of the lawsuit against Harvard - The Boston Globe
https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2018/06/25/the-true-mission.../story.html
Jun 25, 2018 - Edward Blum, pictured here in 2012, is president of Students for Fair Admissions, which has filed a lawsuit challening Harvard's student admission policy as discriminating against Asian-Americans.
Students for Fair Admissions and Harvard Both Got It Wrong | Opinion ...
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/7/18/chung-zhang-sffa-harvard-wrong/
1.
A Room Full of Mirrors: Harvard Without Affirmative Action | Opinion ...
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/.../hyppolite-harvard-without-affirmative-action/
1.
Edward Blum - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/19/us/affirmative-action-lawsuits.html
Nov 19, 2017 - Edward Blum, who is challenging affirmative action at Harvard and other ... in August in his local newspaper with this headline: “A gun to my head.” ... to have 22,000 members in his groupStudents for Fair Admissions, the ...