Press Center CEO Testifies against Racial Preferences and the Ten Percent Plan | CEO Testifies against Racial Preferences and the Ten Percent Plan |
|
|
|
| Tuesday, 22 June 2004 | |
|
Contact: David Gersten
(Sterling, Virginia) In written testimony submitted to the Texas Senate Subcommittee on Higher Education, for its Thursday hearings on the state’s Ten Percent Plan, the Center for Equal Opportunity criticizes the Plan as racially discriminatory and bad educational policy. It adds, however, that the Plan is better than the use of overt racial and ethnic preferences, which it attacks as illegal and unfair. The testimony recommends that preferences be banned by the legislature before the University of Texas starts to use them again. Wednesday marked the one-year anniversary of the Supreme Court decisions in the Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger cases regarding the use of racial and ethnic preferences at the University of Michigan.
CEO president Linda Chavez said, “The Texas legislature has the opportunity to pass landmark legislation that guarantees every Texan the right to be judged by the content of his character and not the color of his skin.” She went on, “The University of Texas for some reason seems to have a problem understanding this principle. So it’s up to the legislature to spell it out.”
The Center’s testimony explains why the circumstances of the passage of the Ten Percent Plan make clear that it is designed to discriminate on the basis of race, and why the Plan is educationally unsound. It then points out that, nonetheless, its success in achieving greater racial and ethnic diversity makes the University of Texas’s promised return to the use of racial and ethnic preferences illegal under last year’s Supreme Court decisions in the University of Michigan cases.
CEO concludes by recommending that the legislature pass a law banning the use of preferences based on race, ethnicity, or sex by state institutions, including public universities. As an alternative, CEO suggests that the state at least require state universities to report annually whether they are discriminating on the basis of race or ethnicity and, if so, document how that discrimination is used and how it meets the limitations set on it by the Supreme Court.
The testimony, presented by CEO general counsel Roger Clegg, is posted on CEO’s website, www. ceousa.org.
The Center for Equal Opportunity is a nonprofit research and educational organization that studies public policy issues involving race and ethnicity. |
L-R: New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Manhattan D.A. Robert Morganthau , Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel, Wade Henderson, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, New Haven Firefighters Frank Ricci and Lt. Ben Vargas, attorney Peter N. Kirsanow, and Linda Chavez, chairman of the Center for Equal Opportunity are sworn in before testifying on July 16, 2009 on the fourth day of confirmation hearings for US Supreme Court Nominee Sonia Sotomayor before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC.
7700 LEESBURG PIKE | Suite 231 | Falls Church, VA 22043.
Tel: 703-442-0066 Fax: 703-442-0449 | ©2010 Center for Equal Opportunity |
