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Writer's pictureJoanne Jacobs

Disadvantaged? Really???

Vice President Kamala Harris, the daughter of two university professors, was admitted to Hastings law school via a program for applicants who'd overcome "educational disadvantage, economic hardship or disability," according to a 2018 article in UC Law SF Magazine, reports Elizabeth Troutman Mitchell in The Daily Signal.


Kamala Harris was graduated from Hastings Law School in 1989.

In addition to grades and test scores, the Legal Education Opportunity Program "also considers students’ overall potential and the obstacles they’ve overcome,” the magazine reports. Most are students of color. Once admitted, they receive extra help, including "academic counseling, practice exams and help preparing for the bar exam and job interviews, among other resources and services.”


Harris grew up in an upper-middle-class neighborhood in Montreal, where she attended a private school. Her mother, who came from a high-caste Brahmin family in India, was a medical professor and researcher. Her father, who came from a middle-class Jamaican family, was an economics professor. She earned a political science and economics degree (without honors) at Howard University.


Harris failed the California bar exam on her first try, but passed on her second attempt.


Many people who oppose racial preferences are fine with preferences and programs for students who've overcome hardships. But they also suspect these programs will be gamed to produce racial diversity above all else.


A New York Times columnist, Lydia Polgreen, thinks J.D. Vance, who earned a summa cum laude degree in political science and philosophy at Ohio State, got into Yale Law School because the admissions staff thought a poor boy made good would add socioeconomic diversity. "If Harris is a D.E.I. candidate, so is Vance," she writes.


Maybe. But in a very different way.


The University of Wyoming's Diversity, Equity and Inclusion bureaucracy is "shape-shifting," writes Scott Yenor on City Journal. UW is losing students and needs to cut the budget.


Republican legislators cut $1.7 million in DEI funding in March. UW trustees closed the DEI office, reassigned the staff and banned requiring potential faculty members to submit DEI statements, he writes. The Office of Multicultural Affairs closed.


But many DEI efforts have simply been rebranded, and staff given new titles, writes Yenor, a Boise State politicial science professor who's senior director at the Claremont Institute's Center for the American Way of Life. Multicultural Affairs was replaced by the Pokes Center for Community Resources, which announced on social media: “We are still here!!!”


Wyoming is a very white (85 percent) and Hispanic (11 percent) state with small numbers of Native American (2 percent), Asian (1 percent) and black (1 percent) residents.

4 Comments


Malcolm Kirkpatrick
Malcolm Kirkpatrick
Oct 26

Credit by exam would bust the $500 billion per year post-secondary credential racket.

Government agencies should not discriminate on the basis of race or sex. Non-State actors should be free to discriminate on the basis of any silly reason whatsoever.

My neighborhood supermarket does not discriminate on the basis of culinary ability. You're free to buy and ruin a pot roast.

The K-PhD credential racket is a huge waste of students' time and taxpayers' money.

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superdestroyer
Oct 25

Does anyone believe that the Trump children's admission to Georgetown, Penn, and NYU was ever based upon their high school grades or their outstanding SAT test. There was a recent story about Barron Trump never participating in any non-classroom activity while attending a private school in West Palm Beach.


https://www.miamiherald.com/miami-com/miami-com-news/article290571789.html

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superdestroyer
Oct 24

As anyone can learn from Harris's wiki page, her parents divorced when she was seven and graduate from a public high school in Montréal.


This seems to fall into the paradigm that Harris must be flawless while Trump can be lawless.


One should think that Trump's refusal to read anything handed to him and his inability to be briefed by experts is much more important than Harris's resume.

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Bruce Smith
Bruce Smith
Oct 25
Replying to

I advocate for voting for neither the felon nor the race grifter, the living embodiment of where affirmative action has gone wrong, but for your favourite third-party candidate instead, and am prepared to go into the opposition beginning with the afternoon of 2025 January 20th, unless something truly unexpected happens.

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