Inside Higher Ed
May 6, 2008
To listen to Ward Connerly last year, 2008 was going to be a crucial year in his fight against affirmative action. While the U.S. Supreme Court in 2003 upheld the legality of some forms of affirmative action in college admissions, the justices didn’t make it mandatory. And so Connerly set out to replicate the successes he had with state ballot measures in California, Washington State and Michigan. He identified five new target states and vowed to get affirmative action banned in each one, calling Election Day 2008 the Super Tuesday of his movement.
Connerly may have had reason to be confident. Once his proposed bans on affirmative action have made it onto ballots, they have never lost. And he managed to defeat affirmative action in states that are, on the red-blue continuum, very much blue. This year’s targets were a mix of red and purple.
So far this year, however, defenders of affirmative action are the ones winning. First last month in Oklahoma and then on Sunday in Missouri, proponents of affirmative action bans failed to submit enough signatures to get on the state ballots this fall by required deadlines. In one state, Colorado, the measure has qualified for the ballot and campaigns are still going on in Arizona and Nebraska. In both of those states — each with early July deadlines for submitting petitions — organizers said Monday that they would qualify, but they also acknowledged not yet being close. Nebraska’s push has only about 20 percent of the required signatures.
So what’s going on? Has the tide turned, as some defenders of affirmative action hope? Or has the movement against affirmative action simply run into administrative hurdles it didn’t count on and may not have been prepared to face in five states at once?
While both sides in the debate have their own analyses, one thing that they agree on is that defenders of affirmative action may have their greatest advantage before items reach the ballot. When the movement to use state referendums to ban affirmative action started, many educators hoped they would prevail to defend the practice in actual elections. That view is no longer much expressed — and even people who strongly believe in affirmative action are less likely these days to predict that the public will reject ballot proposals as written by Connerly.
But qualifying for state ballots is tricky, with requirements that vary from state to state. Defenders of affirmative action have made it clear that they will scrutinize as many signatures as possible and file suits if necessary to challenge signatures. As a result, proponents of the ballot measures have set goals much higher than the totals needed to qualify — as they expect some signatures to be successfully challenged. And legal maneuvering has also become effective.
Take Missouri, for example. Opponents of affirmative action said that they had more than 20,000 signatures on top of the required 150,000 or so that would be needed to place the measure on the ballot. But they said that they expected enough successful challenges that they didn’t want to submit the petitions with relatively little margin for error, as would have been the case at this late date. Instead, they will start again, hoping for 2010 elections.
Tim Asher, who led the Missouri effort for the ballot item, blamed the inability to collect enough signatures on Robin Carnahan, Missouri’s secretary of state, who rewrote the ballot language submitted by Asher and his allies. A state judge later rejected Carnahan’s language, but the petition drive didn’t begin until after that dispute had been resolved. Signatures could have been collected earlier, but only using Carnahan’s language, and the opponents of affirmative action didn’t want to start again if — as they predicted — they eventually won the language fight.
“We lost months in court that we could have used to get the petitions,” said Asher.
He predicted that the measure would be back and would win in 2010. Asher, formerly director of admissions at North Central Missouri College, said he was inspired to help the movement in part because he saw scholarships at the community college that favored some groups over others. “I was concerned over whether this is something I should be involved in,” he said.
But defenders of affirmative action see other lessons in the Missouri experience. “I believe that failing to obtain enough signatures to support the petition is a clear message from the citizens of Missouri,” said ReNee Dunman, director of equal opportunity and affirmative action at Old Dominion University and president of the American Association for Affirmative Action.
Dunman said that Missouri officials were correct to challenge the language proposed in the petition drive. She noted that by including phrases like “civil rights” in the names of the measures, opponents of affirmative action adopt language that has been used by advocates for minority students over the years. She also noted that Missouri’s secretary of state had been trying to draw attention to the reality that certain programs would be eliminated under the measure.
“It has always struck me as strange,” Dunman said, that critics of affirmative action like general statements on ballots rather than saying exactly what programs they would like to end. She said it was important for defenders of affirmative action to “fight for transparency” because “when people have all the information, they are supportive.”
Should the measure be on ballots in Arizona, Colorado and Nebraska, the debates could be different from those that played out in California and Michigan. In those two states, admission to the flagship public universities is extremely competitive and there was considerable focus on who was getting in and why. While admissions are competitive at places like the University of Colorado at Boulder, these institutions are not the same and some are quite different. Arizona State University, for example, expands enrollment to admit all qualified undergraduate applicants, so the image of rejected white applicants — an image successfully used in past campaigns against affirmative action — may be less powerful.
Where the impact is more apparent, however, may be in professional school admissions. Officials in all three states predicted that the immediate aftermath of a vote to end of affirmative action could be most visible there. [To read the entire story, go to: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/05/06/affirm ]
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Monday, May 5, 2008
Asian Higher Education Leaders Offer Advice to Break the Bamboo Ceiling
Diverse Issues in Higher Education
by Samantha Cleaver
May 5, 2008, 22:21
When Dr. Ratna Naik was offered the job of dean of physics at Wayne State University, she was reluctant to accept. Coming from a culture that valued silence and the voices of men over women, Naik was afraid of speaking to large groups and wondered if anyone in a department with two women among 30 faculty members would listen to her anyway. After a year, she took the position.
“We have to learn the ways of American culture; it’s OK to speak up in a gentle way,” she said last week at a panel discussion about boosting the number of Asians in administrative ranks, “Breaking Through the Bamboo Ceiling: Asian Americans in Higher Education,” held at WSU.
The bamboo ceiling is a real concern that “does exist for Asian Americans,” said Dr. Yuan Zheng, professor and former chairman of the department of electrical and chemical engineering at The Ohio State University, but in the 30 years that he’s been in the United States, that ceiling “is getting thinner.” For all the Asian American graduate students, there are comparatively few faculty, department chairs or administrators. Part of the reason: Asian Americans are often focused on research, and staying at the top of their fields, rather than advancing into administration.
Still, Dr. Subrata Sengupta, the dean of the College of Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, has seen the number of Asian American deans increase in the 18 years since he became a dean. He has also seen Asian Americans fill the ranks of some disciplines, like engineering, faster than others.
“Some fields will break the bamboo ceiling earlier than others,” said Sengupta. “But there is a danger of perception being the root of stereotypes,” like the idea that Asians are good at math and science, but not administration or politics.
Now, the key to advancing is to engage with American culture. “As Asian immigrants,” said Zheng, “we must integrate ourselves into the American culture of higher education to break the [bamboo] ceiling.” [To read the entire article, go to: http://diverseeducation.com/artman/publish/article_11108.shtml ]
by Samantha Cleaver
May 5, 2008, 22:21
When Dr. Ratna Naik was offered the job of dean of physics at Wayne State University, she was reluctant to accept. Coming from a culture that valued silence and the voices of men over women, Naik was afraid of speaking to large groups and wondered if anyone in a department with two women among 30 faculty members would listen to her anyway. After a year, she took the position.
“We have to learn the ways of American culture; it’s OK to speak up in a gentle way,” she said last week at a panel discussion about boosting the number of Asians in administrative ranks, “Breaking Through the Bamboo Ceiling: Asian Americans in Higher Education,” held at WSU.
The bamboo ceiling is a real concern that “does exist for Asian Americans,” said Dr. Yuan Zheng, professor and former chairman of the department of electrical and chemical engineering at The Ohio State University, but in the 30 years that he’s been in the United States, that ceiling “is getting thinner.” For all the Asian American graduate students, there are comparatively few faculty, department chairs or administrators. Part of the reason: Asian Americans are often focused on research, and staying at the top of their fields, rather than advancing into administration.
Still, Dr. Subrata Sengupta, the dean of the College of Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, has seen the number of Asian American deans increase in the 18 years since he became a dean. He has also seen Asian Americans fill the ranks of some disciplines, like engineering, faster than others.
“Some fields will break the bamboo ceiling earlier than others,” said Sengupta. “But there is a danger of perception being the root of stereotypes,” like the idea that Asians are good at math and science, but not administration or politics.
Now, the key to advancing is to engage with American culture. “As Asian immigrants,” said Zheng, “we must integrate ourselves into the American culture of higher education to break the [bamboo] ceiling.” [To read the entire article, go to: http://diverseeducation.com/artman/publish/article_11108.shtml ]
The backward plight of the working woman
The Boston Globe
By Ellen Goodman May 2, 2008
BY NOW the Tale of Lilly Ledbetter is starting to sound like the Perils of Pauline or the Pre-Feminist Follies. At 70, she's the star of a long-running drama about how hard we have to run to keep from slipping backward.
The Alabama woman was just 26 when Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed to enforce equality in the workplace. The old stalwart - equal pay for equal work - is so universally accepted that we choose to believe it's not just a law but a fact of life.
Our gal Ledbetter, however, worked for two decades in the not-so-female-friendly ranks of Goodyear. Only when she neared retirement did an anonymous tipster slip her a reality check about her paycheck. It turned out that as a female supervisor, she was earning less than her male counterparts. She was paid on average 79 cents for every male dollar, a figure suspiciously close to the national wage gap.
Ledbetter sued and won her case. But Goodyear appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, where Samuel Alito had just replaced Sandra Day O'Connor. Last year, in one of the backward flips that characterize the court, a 5-to-4 majority went against Ledbetter on the grounds that she hadn't sued in time. The justices read the law through their retro lens and decided a worker has to sue within six months after her first unequal pay. It doesn't matter whether she knows she's being treated unfairly and it doesn't matter if she keeps getting underpaid.
In essence, as Marcia Greenberger of the National Women's Law Center said, if a company could pull the wool over an employee's eyes for the first six months, it's free.
An outraged Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg called the decision "totally at odds with the robust protection against workplace discrimination." She concluded her ringing dissent with an appeal to Congress to "correct this court's parsimonious reading of Title VII."
Well, the House of Representatives did just that, and pretty promptly. It passed a bill to restore the rules to allow an employee to sue up to 180 days after the latest unequal paycheck. But when the bill bearing Lilly Ledbetter's name got to the Senate, the Republicans balked. There weren't enough Republican defectors to overcome a filibuster and get the bill on the Senate floor.
Not only did Bush threaten to veto the restoration act, his would-be successor didn't even take time off the campaign trail to vote. John McCain let it be known that he opposed the Ledbetter legislation because it "opens us up to lawsuits for all kinds of problems." This is a little like saying we shouldn't have any laws because they only clog up the courts.
So Lilly lost again. Welcome to 2008. Or is it 1964?
If you've been listening lately, the reasons for the tenacious wage gap between men and women in the 21st century have been dropped on the lap of working women. Women aren't paid equally because they have this nasty habit of giving birth. Or they "opt out." Or they choose jobs that let them get home before the kids' bedtimes. Or they don't know how to negotiate. The fault is not in our workplaces but in ourselves.
The idea that the wage gap might be because of, um, sex discrimination seems soooo 20th century. In fact, the Supreme Court implied that Lilly Ledbetter's lower paycheck was her own fault because she didn't start investigating her employer for sex discrimination as soon as she started her job. [To read the entire story, go to: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/05/02/the_backward_plight_of_the_working_woman/ ]
By Ellen Goodman May 2, 2008
BY NOW the Tale of Lilly Ledbetter is starting to sound like the Perils of Pauline or the Pre-Feminist Follies. At 70, she's the star of a long-running drama about how hard we have to run to keep from slipping backward.
The Alabama woman was just 26 when Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed to enforce equality in the workplace. The old stalwart - equal pay for equal work - is so universally accepted that we choose to believe it's not just a law but a fact of life.
Our gal Ledbetter, however, worked for two decades in the not-so-female-friendly ranks of Goodyear. Only when she neared retirement did an anonymous tipster slip her a reality check about her paycheck. It turned out that as a female supervisor, she was earning less than her male counterparts. She was paid on average 79 cents for every male dollar, a figure suspiciously close to the national wage gap.
Ledbetter sued and won her case. But Goodyear appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, where Samuel Alito had just replaced Sandra Day O'Connor. Last year, in one of the backward flips that characterize the court, a 5-to-4 majority went against Ledbetter on the grounds that she hadn't sued in time. The justices read the law through their retro lens and decided a worker has to sue within six months after her first unequal pay. It doesn't matter whether she knows she's being treated unfairly and it doesn't matter if she keeps getting underpaid.
In essence, as Marcia Greenberger of the National Women's Law Center said, if a company could pull the wool over an employee's eyes for the first six months, it's free.
An outraged Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg called the decision "totally at odds with the robust protection against workplace discrimination." She concluded her ringing dissent with an appeal to Congress to "correct this court's parsimonious reading of Title VII."
Well, the House of Representatives did just that, and pretty promptly. It passed a bill to restore the rules to allow an employee to sue up to 180 days after the latest unequal paycheck. But when the bill bearing Lilly Ledbetter's name got to the Senate, the Republicans balked. There weren't enough Republican defectors to overcome a filibuster and get the bill on the Senate floor.
Not only did Bush threaten to veto the restoration act, his would-be successor didn't even take time off the campaign trail to vote. John McCain let it be known that he opposed the Ledbetter legislation because it "opens us up to lawsuits for all kinds of problems." This is a little like saying we shouldn't have any laws because they only clog up the courts.
So Lilly lost again. Welcome to 2008. Or is it 1964?
If you've been listening lately, the reasons for the tenacious wage gap between men and women in the 21st century have been dropped on the lap of working women. Women aren't paid equally because they have this nasty habit of giving birth. Or they "opt out." Or they choose jobs that let them get home before the kids' bedtimes. Or they don't know how to negotiate. The fault is not in our workplaces but in ourselves.
The idea that the wage gap might be because of, um, sex discrimination seems soooo 20th century. In fact, the Supreme Court implied that Lilly Ledbetter's lower paycheck was her own fault because she didn't start investigating her employer for sex discrimination as soon as she started her job. [To read the entire story, go to: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/05/02/the_backward_plight_of_the_working_woman/ ]
58 women join EEOC suit against Bloomberg
chicagotribune.com
May 2, 2008
The number of women accusing Bloomberg LP, the financial data and news service firm founded by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, of discrimination has risen from three to 58, with more likely to be added, a judge was told Thursday.The mayor is not a defendant in the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission lawsuit claiming discrimination against women who take maternity leave. He resigned as chief executive to run for mayor in 2001. He retains a 68 percent stake in the company.An EEOC attorney told a judge presiding over the case the agency continues to interview 478 women at the Bloomberg agency who have gone on maternity leave since 2002. The EEOC said the New York-based company with 9,000 employees engaged in a pattern of demoting women, diminishing their duties and excluding them from job opportunities after they disclosed they were pregnant.The firm has said the allegations are without merit.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-fri-brf4-bloomberg-discriminmay02,0,3202475.story
May 2, 2008
The number of women accusing Bloomberg LP, the financial data and news service firm founded by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, of discrimination has risen from three to 58, with more likely to be added, a judge was told Thursday.The mayor is not a defendant in the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission lawsuit claiming discrimination against women who take maternity leave. He resigned as chief executive to run for mayor in 2001. He retains a 68 percent stake in the company.An EEOC attorney told a judge presiding over the case the agency continues to interview 478 women at the Bloomberg agency who have gone on maternity leave since 2002. The EEOC said the New York-based company with 9,000 employees engaged in a pattern of demoting women, diminishing their duties and excluding them from job opportunities after they disclosed they were pregnant.The firm has said the allegations are without merit.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-fri-brf4-bloomberg-discriminmay02,0,3202475.story
Group fails to get enough signatures for anti-affirmative action amendment
Kansascity.com
By CHRIS BLANK
The Associated Press
JEFFERSON CITY
May 4, 2008
A group seeking to bar many state affirmative action programs missed a Sunday deadline to submit its initiative petition.
Missouri had been one of five states California businessman Ward Connerly and his supporters had targeted for an effort to strike down affirmative action laws.
The Missouri effort for a constitutional amendment was led by Tim Asher, a former admissions director at North Central Missouri College in Trenton. Asher said it became obvious on Saturday that there were not enough signatures to qualify the proposed constitutional amendment for the ballot, and he pledged to try again in 2010.
Asher estimated supporters gathered 170,000 signatures — which is enough to make the ballot. But he said it wasn’t high enough because many signatures are later disqualified.
It takes between 86,000 and 95,000 signatures for a petition that creates a new law, and from 140,000 to 150,000 for those that change the state constitution.
Connerly predicted Sunday that supporters would have collected enough signatures if they had another two weeks.
“This is a marathon and not a sprint, and it’s far from over,” Connerly said. “There is a lot of support in the state of Missouri.”
Supporters from four groups angling to get their initiative petitions on the November ballot did hit the Sunday deadline. They wheeled in dollies stacked with boxes that were filled with petitions and tens of thousands of signatures.
As many as six groups had been expected to submit petitions, but only four had done so by the deadline.
Arriving within 15 minutes of each other Sunday were groups pushing petitions to change the state constitution to restrict the use of eminent domain and to require the use of more renewable energy.
Earlier in the week, petitions to allow home health-care providers to unionize and to repeal the state’s cap on gambling losses while barring the construction of new casinos were submitted.
The affirmative action petition had been among the most controversial, triggering lawsuits from Asher and critics challenging the fairness of a ballot summary authored by the secretary of state’s office. A state judge later rewrote the passage that would have appeared before voters at the polls.
Asher and Connerly attributed the difficulty in collecting signatures to the court battle. They both called for changes in how initiative petitions are handled in Missouri.
“We effectively lost our right to bring to the voters of Missouri whether they felt race-preference policies were positive to the state or something that needed to be eliminated,” Asher said.
Connerly said cold, rainy weather and “blockers” who trailed signature-gatherers also made it difficult to get enough Missourians to sign.
A spokesman for Secretary of State Robin Carnahan said the office stands behind the ballot summary it wrote. Spokesman Ryan Hobart said Asher had as much opportunity as everyone else to submit his petition by Sunday’s deadline.
WeCAN, a coalition of community, religious, labor, business and education leaders that was created to oppose the affirmative action petition, said not filing any petition was the best outcome.
The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now’s chief organizer in Missouri, Jeff Ordower, said the inability to get enough signatures also was “a movement for equality” in Missouri.
“We thought it would be close,” Ordower said. “We thought they would submit and not have enough of a margin. We didn’t imagine they wouldn’t submit at all.” [To see the entire article, go to: http://www.kansascity.com/115/story/605671.html ]
By CHRIS BLANK
The Associated Press
JEFFERSON CITY
May 4, 2008
A group seeking to bar many state affirmative action programs missed a Sunday deadline to submit its initiative petition.
Missouri had been one of five states California businessman Ward Connerly and his supporters had targeted for an effort to strike down affirmative action laws.
The Missouri effort for a constitutional amendment was led by Tim Asher, a former admissions director at North Central Missouri College in Trenton. Asher said it became obvious on Saturday that there were not enough signatures to qualify the proposed constitutional amendment for the ballot, and he pledged to try again in 2010.
Asher estimated supporters gathered 170,000 signatures — which is enough to make the ballot. But he said it wasn’t high enough because many signatures are later disqualified.
It takes between 86,000 and 95,000 signatures for a petition that creates a new law, and from 140,000 to 150,000 for those that change the state constitution.
Connerly predicted Sunday that supporters would have collected enough signatures if they had another two weeks.
“This is a marathon and not a sprint, and it’s far from over,” Connerly said. “There is a lot of support in the state of Missouri.”
Supporters from four groups angling to get their initiative petitions on the November ballot did hit the Sunday deadline. They wheeled in dollies stacked with boxes that were filled with petitions and tens of thousands of signatures.
As many as six groups had been expected to submit petitions, but only four had done so by the deadline.
Arriving within 15 minutes of each other Sunday were groups pushing petitions to change the state constitution to restrict the use of eminent domain and to require the use of more renewable energy.
Earlier in the week, petitions to allow home health-care providers to unionize and to repeal the state’s cap on gambling losses while barring the construction of new casinos were submitted.
The affirmative action petition had been among the most controversial, triggering lawsuits from Asher and critics challenging the fairness of a ballot summary authored by the secretary of state’s office. A state judge later rewrote the passage that would have appeared before voters at the polls.
Asher and Connerly attributed the difficulty in collecting signatures to the court battle. They both called for changes in how initiative petitions are handled in Missouri.
“We effectively lost our right to bring to the voters of Missouri whether they felt race-preference policies were positive to the state or something that needed to be eliminated,” Asher said.
Connerly said cold, rainy weather and “blockers” who trailed signature-gatherers also made it difficult to get enough Missourians to sign.
A spokesman for Secretary of State Robin Carnahan said the office stands behind the ballot summary it wrote. Spokesman Ryan Hobart said Asher had as much opportunity as everyone else to submit his petition by Sunday’s deadline.
WeCAN, a coalition of community, religious, labor, business and education leaders that was created to oppose the affirmative action petition, said not filing any petition was the best outcome.
The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now’s chief organizer in Missouri, Jeff Ordower, said the inability to get enough signatures also was “a movement for equality” in Missouri.
“We thought it would be close,” Ordower said. “We thought they would submit and not have enough of a margin. We didn’t imagine they wouldn’t submit at all.” [To see the entire article, go to: http://www.kansascity.com/115/story/605671.html ]
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