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Post by sader1970 on Apr 25, 2023 8:46:25 GMT -5
Interesting and while I have lost count (and too lazy to it look up), I believe the majority, maybe even 6 on SCOTUS are allegedly Roman Catholics. I say "allegedly" because I have no idea how closely they live church teachings. For all I know, they are daily communicants or have abandoned their religion like so many others and Catholic in name only. There is supposed to be a separation of church and state, as Jack Kennedy tried to explain, so it'd be interesting to know (which we'll never find out), what, if any, influence these colleges have on their thinking.
Two, of course, have connections with Holy Cross, Chief Justice Roberts' wife is an HC alum, though she's been under close scrutiny for her work and Clarence, who has been controversial since before his first days on the job with his hearings has had little let up now.
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Post by Pakachoag Phreek on Apr 25, 2023 12:43:00 GMT -5
Interesting and while I have lost count (and too lazy to it look up), I believe the majority, maybe even 6 on SCOTUS are allegedly Roman Catholics. I say "allegedly" because I have no idea how closely they live church teachings. For all I know, they are daily communicants or have abandoned their religion like so many others and Catholic in name only. There is supposed to be a separation of church and state, as Jack Kennedy tried to explain, so it'd be interesting to know (which we'll never find out), what, if any, influence these colleges have on their thinking. Two, of course, have connections with Holy Cross, Chief Justice Roberts' wife is an HC alum, though she's been under close scrutiny for her work and Clarence, who has been controversial since before his first days on the job with his hearings has had little let up now. Six Catholics on the present court. Kagan is Jewish. Two Protestants, although Justice Jackson is apparently non-denominational.
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Post by mm67 on Apr 25, 2023 14:24:36 GMT -5
One of the posters indicated affirmative action is illegal. Guess it's gone & FR. Brooks would have been hauled off to prison for his affirmative action with Thomas, Jones & others. One's personal religious beliefs or lack thereof may inform one's outlook but should not be determinative in one's interpretation of secular law. Peace.
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Post by DFW HOYA on Apr 25, 2023 19:22:18 GMT -5
Whether the justices are Catholic isn't going to play into the decision. The Court has been increasingly resistant of racial preferences and these cases have been narrowly tailored to pass scrutiny: one for public schools (SFFA vs.University of North Carolina) and one for private schools (SFFA vs. Harvard University).
The prevailing winds suggest that the Court will rule with the plaintiffs. While the direct impact to public schools will likely be fewer black applicants, private schools can still use secondary means of improving racial diversity without asking applicants to self-define themselves.
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Post by Pakachoag Phreek on May 27, 2023 19:12:27 GMT -5
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Post by Ray on May 29, 2023 13:26:48 GMT -5
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Post by newfieguy74 on May 29, 2023 13:41:50 GMT -5
A very well-written piece by PVR. He is a gifted communicator.
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Post by sader1970 on May 29, 2023 14:12:49 GMT -5
I'll leave it to the legal eagles on board Crossports as to whether or not Fr. Brooks' actions qualify under the affirmative action definition. To this layman, it did.
I certainly understand the concern that Clarence would have that what Fr. Brooks did might give some the perception that the men he brought in were not as qualified as other students. Someone like Eddie Jenkins was likely coming on a football scholarship regardless. I never doubted that the others were as qualified as most of the then HC students. My two African-American classmates were before Fr. Brooks' search but they were both more than qualified to be admitted to Holy Cross. One was a co-creator of the Black Student Union. The other told me at our recent reunion that he was, in his words, "a de facto member of the BSU" but that he had white roommates his entire 4 years. He left a very clear impression he was not an active member of the BSU.
It's been awhile since I read "Fraternity" but I don't believe that Clarence would have ever come to Holy Cross had it not been for Fr. Brooks seeking out black students. My "de facto BSU" classmate was from Georgia and believe that he was instrumental in Clarence even being aware of Holy Cross.
I recognize that I am skirting on the political arena prohibition here but some apparently think affirmative action means admitting non-qualified students and that seems to have raised Clarence's defenses on the subject.
I do wonder if he and Vince Rougeau have spoken/met, not on this subject but just in general.
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Post by KY Crusader 75 on May 29, 2023 14:56:45 GMT -5
I think there’s a meaningful difference between affirmative action as we know it and an effort to seek out and recruit students from a particular demographic group. For example if you wanted more Belgian students there’s a difference between (A) letting in “C students” from Belgium and (2) visiting high schools in Brussels to sell highly qualified Belgian HS students on applying to your school.
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Post by mm67 on May 29, 2023 16:47:14 GMT -5
A very well-written piece by PVR. He is a gifted communicator. Pay Wall.
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Post by hcpride on May 29, 2023 17:00:46 GMT -5
I think there’s a meaningful difference between affirmative action as we know it and an effort to seek out and recruit students from a particular demographic group. For example if you wanted more Belgian students there’s a difference between (A) letting in “C students” from Belgium and (2) visiting high schools in Brussels to sell highly qualified Belgian HS students on applying to your school. It appears our school president makes the assumption Justice Thomas was in the “A” group. That ‘A’ practice is in the crosshairs of the Supreme Court. I’ve seen this argument (sort of a Justice Thomas ‘gotcha’) before. Accurate or not, I don't find it relevant to the decision at hand. (If Prez R is suggesting that Justice Thomas was in the (2) group, that has nothing to do with the case at hand.)
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Post by Crucis#1 on May 29, 2023 17:21:23 GMT -5
The same could be said for recruiting athletes or legacy admissions. Both recruited cohorts have been at the core in the marketing of American colleges and universities. Where would Notre Dame be without its football team regarding recognition. The same can be said for Duke regarding marketing recognition regarding basketball. Harvard, Yale and Princeton have benefited for over 200 years regarding legacy admissions. The world has changed regarding the cohorts that make the educational experience viable.
The action by the colleges is an affirmation to their sustainability.
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Post by hcpride on May 29, 2023 17:32:36 GMT -5
The same could be said for recruiting athletes or legacy admissions. Both recruited cohorts have been at the core in the marketing of American colleges and universities. Where would Notre Dame be without its football team regarding recognition. The same can be said for Duke regarding marketing recognition regarding basketball. Harvard, Yale and Princeton have benefited for over 200 years regarding legacy admissions. The world has changed regarding the cohorts that make the educational experience viable. The action by the colleges is an affirmation to their sustainability. I don’t doubt (nor does anyone) there are numerous inequities (perceived or otherwise) in college admissions. College race-based admissions actions that discriminate directly against Asian applicants are the matter at hand.
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Post by DFW HOYA on May 29, 2023 19:24:59 GMT -5
The same could be said for recruiting athletes or legacy admissions. Both recruited cohorts have been at the core in the marketing of American colleges and universities. Where would Notre Dame be without its football team regarding recognition. The same can be said for Duke regarding marketing recognition regarding basketball. Harvard, Yale and Princeton have benefited for over 200 years regarding legacy admissions. The world has changed regarding the cohorts that make the educational experience viable. The action by the colleges is an affirmation to their sustainability. Legacy admissions were a big part of these schools because, for many years, that's what filled the universities. Until the jet age, most universities did not enjoy what are now referred to as competitive admissions. Harvard accepted over 90 percent of applicants as late as 1941 (which makes the admission of John Kennedy despite his C and D grades more realistic than today). As late as 1956, Harvard and Yale accepted 50 percent of the applicant pool. But let's consider who the applicant pool was, or more specifically, wasn't: it was white, largely regional to the Northeast, all-male (women went to sister schools), and Protestant --single digit quotas on Jewish students were tacitly understood at some Ivy schools until the early 1960s. By and large, Catholic students didn't go to these schools and their (Catholic) high school counselors would not sign off on it. Another advantage to legacy admits was loyalty: a son (or two) applying to HC in 1960 when his father was class of 1935 or 1940 assured the College a young man from a good Catholic family that would do the same when his sons applied to college. Duke doesn't get that much of a boost on basketball. It was a fairly good school (and basketball) program before the 1980's, too.
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Post by princetoncrusader on Jun 26, 2023 13:59:02 GMT -5
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Post by alum on Jun 27, 2023 9:50:25 GMT -5
I don't currently subscribe to the WSJ (I get it occasionally when they offer a really good price for a limited time) but VR tweeted approvingly of the article.
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Post by Chu Chu on Jun 27, 2023 10:14:39 GMT -5
I would love to read this. Can anybody post?
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Post by princetoncrusader on Jun 27, 2023 18:26:22 GMT -5
PM me and I will send you the article. For some reason, I can't get the cut and paste tools to work on this article.
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Post by newfieguy74 on Jun 27, 2023 19:00:37 GMT -5
U.S. Justices Who Benefited From Affirmative Action May Decide Its Fate Supreme Court’s Thomas and Sotomayor were aided by such programs and look back on them very differently By Jess Bravin Follow June 26, 2023 at 5:30 am ET
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There is little doubt that Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Sonia Sotomayor will end up on opposite ends of a decision on race-conscious college admissions. PHOTO: J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE/ASSOCIATED PRESS WASHINGTON—Two Supreme Court justices who will decide the fate of race-conscious college admissions are themselves among the first products of affirmative action—and carry away very different views about both the legality and the value of higher education’s efforts to promote student diversity.
Clarence Thomas and Sonia Sotomayor both were pulled from underprivileged backgrounds into selective colleges and then Yale Law School, graduating in the 1970s from elite institutions that following the civil-rights movement had begun aggressive recruitment of minority students.
Any day now the Supreme Court will rule on the latest challenges to affirmative action in admissions, which the court first approved in 1978.
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Subscribe Current precedents recognize higher education’s First Amendment right to promote diversity as an educational goal, so long as they use race as a nonspecific plus factor, typically for Black and Hispanic applicants, rather than employ quotas or award automatic point bonuses for minority status.
Challengers have asked the court to overrule those cases in lawsuits alleging that race-conscious admissions at Harvard College, which receives federal funding, and the state-run University of North Carolina violate constitutional equal-protection principles. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who joined the court last year, has written no opinions on affirmative action and sat out the Harvard case, because she once served on the university’s Board of Overseers.
Although the court’s conservative tilt offers little hope for affirmative action as currently practiced, the ruling’s scope, including the legality of alternate methods to pursue racial diversity, remains unknown. Based on their previous remarks, both in court opinions and in personal recollections, there is little doubt that Thomas and Sotomayor will end up on opposite ends.
“Colleges and universities must be free to prioritize the goal of diversity,” Sotomayor said in 2014, dissenting from the court’s decision that Michigan was entitled to end racial preferences by voter initiative. A multiracial campus “fosters frequent and meaningful interactions with students of other races, and thereby pushes such students to transcend any assumptions they may hold on the basis of skin color,” she wrote.
Future justice of the Supreme Court Clarence Thomas in the 1980s, during his time with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. PHOTO: AFRO AMERICAN NEWSPAPERS/GADO/GETTY IMAGES A 2013 Thomas opinion rejected that view. “Attaining diversity for its own sake is a nonstarter,” he wrote, dissenting from a case retaining race-conscious admissions at the University of Texas. “There can be no doubt that the University’s discrimination injures white and Asian applicants who are denied admission because of their race.”
In 1968, Father John Brooks, a professor and future president of the College of the Holy Cross, undertook a mission to recruit Black students for a Jesuit institution that had been nearly all white. Thomas was one of some 20 Black men Brooks helped bring to the Worcester, Mass., campus.
Many of those students went on to notable careers, their story documented in a 2012 book by Diane Brady, “Fraternity.” Thomas, accepting an honorary doctorate from Holy Cross in 2012, spoke of his “eternal debt” to the college and Brooks’s influence on the students he drew to campus: “Had there been no Father Brooks we would not be where we are.”
But Thomas came to believe that the success of his cohort and those that immediately followed couldn’t be replicated through institutionalized racial preferences.
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“It [worked] up to a point in the early years,” Thomas said in an interview published in a 2022 book, “Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words.” But as affirmative action took hold throughout higher education, he said, diversity for its own sake took precedence over the individualized attention he had received.
After graduating from Holy Cross in 1971, Thomas was admitted to what he called his “reach school,” Yale.
“On the surface, Yale Law School was everything I’d hoped it would be,“ Thomas wrote in his 2007 memoir, “My Grandfather’s Son.” But he began to suspect that others assumed his presence on campus was because of social engineering rather than individual merit.
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It was bad enough to be told he had done well “despite my race. It was far worse to feel that I was now at Yale because of it,” Thomas wrote.
Sotomayor, too, ran into suspicions that she hadn’t earned her place in the Ivy League, ones that hung over her “while I lived the day-to-day reality of affirmative action,” she wrote in her 2013 memoir, “My Beloved World.”
Entering Princeton in 1972, she would pick up the student newspaper to read “letters to the editor lamenting the presence on campus of ‘affirmative action students,’ each one of whom had presumably displaced a far more deserving affluent white male,” she wrote.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor ran into suspicions during her university years that she hadn’t earned her place in the Ivy League, she wrote in a 2013 memoir. PHOTO: WHITE HOUSE/ASSOCIATED PRESS “But when the anger, the upset, and the agitation had passed, a certainty remained: I had no need to apologize,” she wrote. At Princeton and Yale Law School, where she graduated in 1979, affirmative action created “the conditions where students from disadvantaged backgrounds could be brought to the starting line of a race many were unaware was even being run.”
In a 2014 ABC News interview, Sotomayor said that race was no less legitimate than other factors that admissions officers weigh.
“Look, we have legacy admissions. If your parents or your grandparents have been to that school, they’re going to give you an advantage in getting into the school again,” she said.
Besides, “a place like Princeton could fill their entire beginning freshman class with students who have scored perfectly on undergraduate metrics,” she said. “They don’t do it because it would not make for a diverse class on the metrics that they think are important for success in life.”
Holy Cross, Princeton and Yale all have signed briefs urging the court to leave intact higher education’s right to consider race.
“Certain elite institutions—let’s just use the term for simplicity—offer a huge advantage to their students when it comes to entering into networks that can provide them with great job opportunities,” Vincent Rougeau, the first Black president of Holy Cross, said in an interview. Affirmative action allows schools to “address longstanding barriers to higher education” that particularly harmed Black Americans, he said.
How then that Thomas, his college’s most famous graduate, so vehemently disagrees with his alma mater?
Holy Cross strives to offer students “the best possible, the broadest possible education we can provide them,” Rougeau said. “With that comes a degree of intellectual freedom.”
Write to Jess Bravin at Jess.Bravin@wsj.com
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Post by sader1970 on Jun 28, 2023 11:55:56 GMT -5
Objection, your honor! Clarence Thomas is NOT the most famous HC grad. Would bet 90% of Americans couldn’t name 4 Supreme Court justices and that includes Clarence,
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Post by nycrusader2010 on Jun 28, 2023 13:26:08 GMT -5
Objection, your honor! Clarence Thomas is NOT the most famous HC grad. Would bet 90% of Americans couldn’t name 4 Supreme Court justices and that includes Clarence, After last year's Roe v. Wade ruling, I think he is the most famous now. For better or for worse, given the publics opinion of him is highly polarized for obvious reasons.
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Post by hchoops on Jun 28, 2023 14:09:50 GMT -5
Objection, your honor! Clarence Thomas is NOT the most famous HC grad. Would bet 90% of Americans couldn’t name 4 Supreme Court justices and that includes Clarence, Then who is ? The Cooz is ancient history for most O, the Fauch ?
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Post by newfieguy74 on Jun 28, 2023 14:15:43 GMT -5
Objection, your honor! Clarence Thomas is NOT the most famous HC grad. Would bet 90% of Americans couldn’t name 4 Supreme Court justices and that includes Clarence, "Mr. Gambini, that is a lucid, intelligent, and well thought out objection. Overruled!" (Sorry, couldn't avoid the movie reference).
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Post by hchoops on Jun 28, 2023 14:21:37 GMT -5
My cousin, Vinny Fred Gwynne of Car 54, Where are you ?
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Post by Sons of Vaval on Jun 28, 2023 14:26:30 GMT -5
Fauci definitely more famous these days than Thomas. Prior to March, 2020, it'd have been Thomas.
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