Perhaps you remember the case of Ricci v. DiStefano, so much discussed during Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation process?   To recap briefly: The city of New Haven had used a written test to determine which of its local firefighters would be considered for promotions. When the tests came back, it turned out that the high scorers were overwhelmingly Caucasian, and so the city—fearing a lawsuit from black and Latino firefighters who hadn’t made the cut—scrapped the results. Not, mind you, because the test was in any way discriminatory on its face, but because federal law frowns on any test that has a “disparate impact” on minority groups unless it can be shown to be both closely related to the requirements of the job and less uneven in its effects than comparable alternatives. A number of the white firefighters then sued, claiming that it was discriminatory to discard the test after the fact just because the high scorers were too pale.  Bracket the question of how Sotomayor, as a circuit court judge, should have ruled.  Clearly as a policy question, most conservatives seemed disposed to side with the firefighters, and in general conservatives have been highly skeptical of “disparate impact” standards.  If the standards are facially neutral, and were not chosen with any pernicious intent (the argument runs), we should let the chips fall where they may. Sounds fairly compelling to me.

So it’s a little odd to see folks like Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol casually talk about Elena Kagan’s “discrimination against the military” during her tenure as dean of Harvard Law School. All Kagan did, after all, was enforce Harvard’s preexisting rule requiring firms wishing to recruit through the school’s Office of Career Services to certify that they did not discriminate by sexual orientation. (This is not the same, incidentally, as “banning recruiters from campus”—the military did continue to recruit on campus via a student group.) It was a neutral rule that applied to any company that wished to avail itself of the Office of Career Service’s assistance, from which the military would have required a special exemption.  Kristol clearly didn’t think much of the logic of “disparate impact” in the Ricci case, so why is he so quick to adopt it here? There are many good reasons to be worried about Kagan, not least her apparent fondness for an expansive conception of executive power, but a commitment to even-handed application of the rules is not among them.

Did Kagan Have a “Disparate Impact” on Military Recruiters? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

William F. Buckley famously said that he’d ”rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.” That was, of course, a swipe at the practical wisdom of those people who spend their lives teaching in ivory towers, and a deserved one. But score one for the egg heads when it comes to identifying the practical reality of modern higher education.

According to a new report from Public Agenda, while college presidents blather on about their impoverished schools and what a tremendous public good higher education is, the professors (at least those that Public Agenda interviewed) are pretty darn realistic about the real problems in academia. This quote, echoed in professorial statements throughout the report, captures exactly what a lot of us libertarian types have been saying for years:

I think a big problem facing higher education is the idea that everybody should get into college. I don’t think everybody is designed to go to college. Not everybody needs to go to college. I know that’s shooting ourselves in the foot, because that’s where our jobs are. The more people show up at our schools, the more jobs we get. Not everybody needs to go to college. Not everybody should. Not everybody’s prepared.

Public Agenda doesn’t identify who the speakers are in its report, but whoever said the bit above – or any of the similar statements about too many people going to college or being pushed to go to college — actually deserves to get tenure.

Not Everyone Needs to Go to College is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

On April 3, Cato hosted a special blogger briefing with Glenn Greenwald, who was here to speak about his new paper on the success of drug decriminalization in Portugal.

Here are a few highlights from bloggers who wrote about it:

• Dan Bernath from the Marijuana Policy Project

• Scott Morgan of StopTheDrugWar.org

• Jesse Singal, associate editor of Campus Progress, a project of the Center for American Progress

Also, a few links to bloggers who are writing about Cato:

• Citing new research that shows that the DC school choice pilot program was highly successful, Betsy Newmark linked to Andrew J. Coulson’s commentary on the study results.

• Ilya Somin discussed Patri Friedman’s new essay at Cato Unbound about the Seasteading Institute and the history of libertarian activism.

• Blogger Connie Carr wrote about William Niskanen’s essay in the new Cato Policy Report, “How to turn a Recession into a Depression.”

If you are blogging about Cato, let us know by emailing cmoody@cato.org or catch us on Twitter @catoinstitute.

Who’s Blogging about Cato is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Neal McCluskey’s classic Cato Policy Analysis, “Why We Fight: How Public Schools Cause Social Conflict,” is vindicated once again by the tiff over whether a porn film will be screened on the University of Maryland campus.

At this writing, students intend to go ahead with a showing of “Pirates II: Stagnetti’s Revenge” despite threats from a state senator to withhold funding for the university if the film is screened.

Many people object to porn for legitimate reasons. The question is whether the state should weigh in on the subject, pitting the moral views of some against the speech rights of others.

Says McCluskey:

Throughout American history, public schooling has produced political disputes, animosity, and sometimes even bloodshed between diverse people. Such clashes are inevitable in government-run schooling because all Americans are required to support the public schools, but only those with the most political power control them.

Hopefully, the students are learning the relevant free-speech lesson from this episode: Government funds always come with strings, including strings that threaten free speech.

Why We Fight is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog