“The commission’s majority simply took everything that Richard Sander said as blind faith and dismissed everything that all the other credible social scientists and statisticians had to say,” Yaki says. “Sander is not a statistician. And there was serious criticism from people who are professional statisticians over the methodology used by Sander in his study, such that there is no independent third-party statistician support for the methodology and findings Sander made.”
Melendez says Republicans have “really stacked the commission 6 to 2” with Republicans and formerly Republican independents, who came to the commission on a mission to overturn affirmative action in all its forms.
“This current administration and the people that are on the commission, they’re basically going against what the civil rights commission has really stood for all these years,” Melendez says.
“I think this briefing report tried to do too much with too little. To get a couple of hours of peoples’ testimony and try to come up with something that overturns affirmative action is a real stretch,” he adds.
Established by Congress in 1957, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is an independent, bipartisan agency in charge of monitoring federal civil rights enforcement. The USCCR also investigates allegations of discrimination and advises the president and Congress on public policy matters. For more information and a copy of the new USCCR report, visit www.usccr.gov.
--David Pluviose
© Copyright 2005 by DiverseEducation.com
