Roger Clegg on Academic Impact of Ricci
Earlier this month we blogged about the Ricci v. DeStefano in the context of higher education. Some assert that Ricci applies only to standardized employment tests and won’t impact overall efforts to achieve diversity in higher education. Peter Wood of the National Scholars Association states the matter this way:
“If Ricci turns out to mean that employers can now administer skills tests for hiring and promotion with much less fear of disparate impact lawsuits, perhaps we will see some relief from the pressure on high school graduates to go to college to ‘get the credential.’ History, of course, cannot just be shoved into reverse. The cultural pattern in America of sending on to college higher and still higher percentages of high school graduates has momentum of its own, and is bolstered by the need of colleges and universities to keep the tuition flowing.”
The Center for Equal Opportunity’s (CEO) Roger Clegg, writing for the Pope Center, discusses the impact Ricci will have on academia:
“If university officials breathed a sigh of relief after the Supreme Court handed down its recent decision in Ricci v. DeStefano, the New Haven firefighters case, they made a mistake. Many seem to believe that the case won’t have any impact on their use of racial preferences in faculty decisions…A gulp would be more appropriate than a sign of relief. Ricci should and will apply to common college and university racial preference policies in hiring. Officials ignore it at their peril.”
Clegg recalls a similar case, Rudin v. Lincoln Land Community College. The school selected a candidate pool that didn’t include a black person. A black man named Paul Hudson was added. Although he ranked second from the bottom of the pool, he got the job. Janine Rudin, who ranked second from the top, sued on racial and sexual discrimination grounds. The trail court dismissed her case, but the 7th Circuit reversed and remanded. Although the case was settled, it’s an example of shifting court sentiment on disparate impact, a judicial interpretation of the Civil Rights Act.
“The Rudin and Ricci cases together show that the courts won’t take a blasé attitude toward hiring practices in higher education where some people are given advantages simply because of their race,” Clegg writes.
Read the full article here.
