Higher education in the United States is the foremost outpost of "diversity, equity, and inclusion," a bundle of institutions and “woke” ideas and practices that run counter to important American constitutional principles. This panel explores how civil rights law has contributed to this development.
The American civil rights movement was a necessary reaction to longstanding injustices, but the legal revolution that it unleashed to address them has expanded in unforeseen and unpredictable and sometimes unsettling ways. Without anybody clearly intending it, some aspects of civil rights law have come to challenge many pillars of our constitutional order—to include freedom of speech, due process, freedom of association, the public-private divide, federalism, and the separation of powers. Focusing on higher education, this panel will address how anti-discrimination laws (especially Title IX and employment discrimination law) contribute to our new situation and what is being done, especially by state governments, to defend constitutional ideals in a time of immense pressure upon them.
This event features R. Shep Melnick, the Tip O’Neill Professor of American Politics at Boston College and co-chair of the Harvard Program on Constitutional Government, and his most recent books are The Transformation of Title IX: Regulating Gender Equality in Education (Brookings, 2018) and The Crucible of Desegregation: The Uncertain Search for Equal Educational Opportunity (Chicago, 2023); Thomas Powers, Professor of Political Science at Carthage College, and author of American Multiculturalism and the Anti-Discrimination Regime (St. Augustine's Press); Amy Wax, the Robert Mundheim Professor Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and accomplished author and legal scholar; and Scott Yenor, Professor of Political Science at Boise State University, and Washington Fellow at The Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life.
Photo by Michael Flippo on Adobe Stock
