text:
Featured News - Current News - Archived News - News Categories
Congressman Chris Collins, NY-27, is announcing the dredging of three Lake Ontario harbors is on track to happen next year. Collins said the Army Corp of Engineers now has the funding it needs to perform maintenance dredging in Oak Orchard, Olcott and Wilson harbors. Dredging removes built-up sediment that, over time, narrows a harbor's channel dimensions and creates unsafe navigation conditions for both commercial and recreational boating.
"The dredging of these three local harbors is long overdue," Collins said. "Local residents and government leaders have been pushing the federal government to prioritize the work in order to maintain and maximize the harbors' economic and recreational importance. These waterways are not only used for summer boating and recreation, but play a critical role in supporting the regional economy through the charter fishing industry. As a new member of Congress, I will push to make sure this long-delayed work finally happens in the summer of 2014."
According to the US Army Corps of Engineers:
•Oak Orchard Harbor (Town of Carlton, Orleans County) was last dredged in 2004 when 10,700 cubic yards of material was removed. This harbor should be dredged every three to five years. In order to maintain adequate channel depth, 18,000 CY of dredging will be required. The total sediment backlog is estimated at approximately 35,000 CY.
•Olcott Harbor (Village of Olcott, Niagara County) was last dredged in 1997 when 9,900 cubic yards of material was removed. This harbor should be dredged every five to 10 years. The current sediment backlog is estimated at approximately 55,000 CY.
•Wilson Harbor (Town of Wilson, Niagara County) was last dredged in 2000 when 5,100 cubic yards of material was removed. This harbor should be dredged every three to five years. The current sediment backlog is estimated at approximately 55,000 CY.
Collins is co-sponsoring the Realize America's Maritime Promise Act, or RAMP Act (H.R. 335), which would help ensure the funding is in place for routine maintenance dredging. This bipartisan legislation guarantees that the funds collected on imports at ports in the U.S. is used solely for its intended purposed of dredging and maintaining the nation's waterways.
Collins is also supporting continued funding for the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative. The inter-agency program helps to protect and preserve the Great Lakes ecosystem. The Great Lakes are the source of drinking water for 30 million Americans, and hold 95 percent of the nation's supply of fresh water.
Collins' congressional district is bordered by Lake Erie to the west and Lake Ontario to the north.


text:
New Grips for 2012, Butch Harmon recommends Winn Grips March 14 2012
World renown golf instructor and golf coach for PGA TOUR stars, Butch Harmon, has for some time now been recommending the use of Winn grips. He is not just a spokesperson for Winn, Butch has been using them himself since they first came on the scene. He also passes on this information to his pupils at his golf training academy, http://www.butchharmon.com/the-golf-tips/putting/scoring.html Apart from possessing natural skills Butch is a great believer in enjoying what your doing, you must have fun playing golf. Natalie Gulbis from the Ladies Tour is also a fan the these grips, you can hear what they both have to say at this link; http://www.winngrips.com/our-company/tour-staff We here at White Dragon Golf use Winn grips on our new putter, which has just recently been confirmed by the Royal and Ancient as conforming to the rules of golf. So we will soon be offering this new equipment on the worldwide web. Not sure if we can get Butch to trial one of these putters, but we will be asking him to take a look. I will keep you informed of our progress. http://au.askmen.com butchharmon.net

subset: commoncrawl


text:
JAR (file format)
This article may require copy editing for grammar, style, cohesion, tone, or spelling. (September 2015)
|KDE JAR file icon
|Filename extension
|Internet media type
|Uniform Type Identifier (UTI)
|Developed by
|Netscape, Sun Microsystems, Oracle Corporation
|Type of format
|File archive, data compression
|Extended from
In software, JAR (Java Archive) is a package file format typically used to aggregate many Java class files and associated metadata and resources (text, images, etc.) into one file to distribute application software or libraries on the Java platform.[3]
JAR files are fundamentally archive files, built on the ZIP file format and have the
.jar file extension. Computer users can create or extract JAR files using the
jar command that comes with a JDK. They can also use
zip tools to do so; however, the order of entries in the zip file headers is important when compressing, as the manifest often needs to be first. Inside a JAR, file names are unicode text.[4]
- 1 Design
- 2 Manifest
- 3 Apache Ant Zip/JAR support
- 4 Related formats
- 5 See also
- 6 References
- 7 External links
A JAR file allows Java runtimes to efficiently deploy a set of classes and their associated resources. The elements in a JAR file can be compressed, which, together with the ability to download an entire application in a single request, makes downloading a JAR file much more convenient than separately downloading the many uncompressed files which would form a single Java Application. The package
java.util.zip contains classes that read and write JAR files.
A JAR file has an optional manifest file located in the path
META-INF/MANIFEST.MF. The entries in the manifest file determine how one can use the JAR file. For instance, a Classpath entry can be used to specify other JAR files for loading with the JAR. This entry consists of a list of absolute or relative paths to other JAR files. Although intended to simplify JAR use, in practice it turns out to be notoriously brittle, as it depends on all the relevant JARs being in the exact locations specified when the entry-point JAR was built. To change versions or locations of libraries, a new manifest is needed.
To extract the contents of a JAR file users can use any standard unzip software, or the
jar command that comes with every Java Virtual Machine: "
jar -xf foo.jar".
Developers can digitally sign JAR files. In that case, the signature information becomes part of the embedded manifest file. The JAR itself is not signed, but instead every file inside the archive is listed along with its checksum; it is these checksums that are signed. Multiple entities may sign the JAR file, changing the JAR file itself with each signing, although the signed files themselves remain valid. When the Java runtime loads signed JAR files, it can validate the signatures and refuse to load classes that do not match the signature. It can also support 'sealed' packages, in which the Classloader will only permit Java classes to be loaded into the same package if they are all signed by the same entities. This prevents malicious code from being inserted into an existing package, and so gaining access to package-scoped classes and data.
Developers can obfuscate JAR files so that a user of the JAR file doesn't get much information regarding the code it contains, or to reduce its size, which is useful in Embedded system development, where space may be limited.
Executable JAR files
An executable Java program can be packaged in a JAR file, along with any libraries the program uses. Executable JAR files have the manifest specifying the entry point class with
Main-Class: myPrograms.MyClass and an explicit Class-Path (and the -cp argument is ignored). Some operating systems can run these directly when clicked. The typical invocation is "
java -jar foo.jar" from a command line.
Native launchers can be created on most platforms. For instance Microsoft Windows users who prefer having Windows EXE files can use tools such as JSmooth, Launch4J, WinRun4J or Nullsoft Scriptable Install System to wrap single JAR files into executables.
On the Java platform, a Manifest file is a specific file contained within a JAR file.[5][6] It is used to define extension and package-related data. It is a metadata file that contains name-value pairs organized in different sections. If a JAR file is intended to be used as an executable file, the manifest file specifies the main class of the application. The manifest file is named
It is not uncommon to find a computer file described as a manifest in situations unrelated to Java.
A JAR file includes a manifest at the canonical location
META-INF/MANIFEST.MF.[7] There can be only one manifest file in an archive, and it must be in the
META-INF directory.
The content of the Manifest file in a JAR file created with version 1.0 of the Java Development Kit is the following.
Manifest-Version: 1.0
All the entries are as name-value pairs. The name of a header is separated from its value by a colon. The default manifest shows that it conforms to version 1.0 of the manifest specification.
The manifest can also contain information about the other files that are packaged in the archive. Exactly what file information is recorded in the manifest will depend on the intended use for the JAR file. The default manifest file makes no assumptions about what information it should record about other files, so its single line contains data only about itself.
Special-Purpose Manifest Headers
Depending on the intended role of the JAR file, the default manifest may have to be modified. If the JAR file is created only for the purpose of archival, then the
MANIFEST.MF file is of no purpose.
Most uses of JAR files go beyond simple archiving and compression and require special information to be in the manifest file. Summarized below are brief descriptions of the headers that are required for some special-purpose JAR-file functions
Applications Bundled as JAR Files
If an application is bundled in a JAR file, the Java Virtual Machine needs to be told what the entry point to the application is. An entry point is any class with a
public static void main(String[] args) method. This information is provided in the Main-Class header, which has the general form:
Main-Class: com.example.MyClassName
In this example,
com.example.MyClassName.main() will be executed.
Package Sealing
A package within a JAR file can be optionally sealed, which means that all classes defined in that package must be archived in the same JAR file. A package might be sealed to ensure version consistency among the classes in the software or as a security measure.
To seal a package, a Name header needs to be added for the package, followed by a Sealed header, similar to this:
Name: myCompany/myPackage/ Sealed: true
The Name header's value is the package's relative pathname. Note that it ends with a '/' to distinguish it from a filename. Any headers following a Name header, without any intervening blank lines, apply to the file or package specified in the Name header. In the above example, because the Sealed header occurs after the Name: myCompany/myPackage header, with no blank lines between, the Sealed header will be interpreted as applying (only) to the package myCompany/myPackage.
Package Versioning
The Package Versioning specification defines several manifest headers to hold versioning information. One set of such headers can be assigned to each package. The versioning headers should appear directly beneath the Name header for the package. This example shows all the versioning headers:
Name: java/util/ Specification-Title: "Java Utility Classes"
Specification-Version: "1.2"
Specification-Vendor: "Sun Microsystems, Inc.".
Implementation-Title: "java.util"
Implementation-Version: "build57"
Implementation-Vendor: "Sun Microsystems, Inc."
Specify Dependencies
MANIFEST.MF file can be used to specify all the classes that must be loaded for an application to be able to run. Source: the sun servlet specification, page 72 (servlet-2_4-fr-spec.pdf). See also the Java Tech Notes.
Note that Class-Path entries are delimited with spaces, not with the system path delimiter:
Class-Path: . pkg1.jar path/to/pkg2.jar
Apache Ant Zip/JAR support
The Apache Ant build tool has its own package to read and write Zip and JAR archives, including support for the Unix filesystem extensions. The org.apache.tools.zip package is released under the Apache Software Foundation license and is designed to be usable outside Ant.
Related formats
Several related file formats build on the JAR format:
- WAR (Web application archive) files, also Java archives, store XML files, Java classes, JavaServer Pages and other objects for Web Applications.
- RAR (resource adapter archive) files (not to be confused with the RAR file format), also Java archives, store XML files, Java classes and other objects for J2EE Connector Architecture (JCA) applications.
- EAR (enterprise archive) files provide composite Java archives which combine XML files, Java classes and other objects including JAR, WAR and RAR Java archive files for Enterprise Applications.
- SAR (service archive) is similar to EAR. It provides a service.xml file and accompanying JAR files.
- APK (Android Application Package), a variant of the Java archive format, is used for Android applications.[8]
See also
- ↑ "File Extension .JAR Details". Retrieved 29 November 2012.<templatestyles src="Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css"></templatestyles>
- ↑ "MIME : Java Glossary". Retrieved 29 November 2012.<templatestyles src="Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css"></templatestyles>
- ↑ Java Archive (JAR) Files
- ↑ http://download.java.net/jdk8/docs/technotes/guides/jar/jar.html#JAR_Index
- ↑ "Understanding the Manifest". Java.sun.com. 2003-03-21. Retrieved 2012-07-31.<templatestyles src="Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css"></templatestyles>
- ↑ "JAR File Specification". Download.oracle.com. Retrieved 2012-07-31.<templatestyles src="Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css"></templatestyles>
- ↑ "JAR File Specification". Download.oracle.com. Retrieved 2012-07-31.<templatestyles src="Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css"></templatestyles>
- ↑ Android Developer's Guide


text:
Shredding in 12 knots at #TPbeach #Oaklandkiteboarding #KGBKiteboarding! Come freestyle with us!
Toll Plaza Shredding!
Post general kiteboarding discussion topics here!
Moderator: BayAreaKite
6 posts • Page 1 of 1
Toll Plaza Shredding!
Shredding in 12 knots at #TPbeach #Oaklandkiteboarding #KGBKiteboarding! Come freestyle with us!
Royce V
Re: Toll Plaza Shredding!
12 knots.. thats raceboard weather
My Photography ==> www.Loscocco.com
Kites:Ocean Rodeo: Flites and Razors
Boards:Ocean Rodeo: Duke and Spotz Hydrofoil
Eyewear:Kurtis Surf Goggles www.KurtisUSA.com
Re: Toll Plaza Shredding!
Cool vid though! I'm sure it's much windier there now at 4pm...
Re: Toll Plaza Shredding!
Nice mobe! Looks like you got a lot out of those 12 knots.
Re: Toll Plaza Shredding!
Toll Plaza was awesome this week. Tuesday was one of those days where I had to stop to give my tired body a rest, not because the wind died.
But we need to do another cleanup. I started riding the TP last year post-cleanup and I really notice the difference. It's gnarly after a winter of junk-collecting.
Anybody on board for this?
Re: Toll Plaza Shredding!
Realistically, it was about 14-16 knots that day, although it probably felt like 12 on the beach. my big ass was able to have some fun on a 13m.
Sabo is a ripper and a super nice guy. Was fun having him at TP.
6 posts • Page 1 of 1
Return to General Kiteboarding Discussion
Who is online
Users browsing this forum: Google [Bot] and 13 guests


text:
Copyright © Helen Chierego
This image is protected by copyright law and is not to be used without express written permission from the copyright holder.
Images may not be copied, reproduced, altered or used for any advertising, displays, any other web sites or for any business or promotional purpose or any other way (whole or in part) without prior written approval of the copyright holder.
All Rights Reserved


text:
This should be JLo's inspiration
Here are Sam Taylor-Wood and Aaron Johnson enjoying the winter sun on a walk in Primrose Hill today. Photo Assumption says they're hopelessly in love, totally into it, and happily expecting the birth of their second child, her fourth. And he's still just 21. And I am still obsessed!
Also I can't wait to see him as Vronsky in Joe Wright's adaptation of Anna Karenina opposite Keira Knightley and Jude Law. Great casting, non? But see how life f-cks you up? On paper it should be Aaron and Keira right? Like, I'm imagining them making out and it's making me hot. And still... this is not how it is. What it is is Aaron and Sam. Aaron devoted to Sam. Aaron not interested in Keira. Aaron, for now, only for Sam.
And... Aaron is not Casper Smart.
THIS is what I'm talking about, JLo. What is the problem???


text:
Meeting of February 28, 2007, Washington D.C. to Launch E-Race Initiative
Thank you, Commissioners, for the opportunity to testify this morning before the EEOC.
My name is Roger Clegg, and I am president and general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity, a nonprofit research and educational organization that is based in Sterling, Virginia. Our chairman is Linda Chavez, and our focus is on public policy issues that involve race and ethnicity, such as civil rights, bilingual education, and immigration and assimilation. I should also note that I was a deputy in the U.S. Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division for four years, from 1987 to 1991, and that from 1993-1997 I was vice president and general counsel of the National Legal Center for the Public Interest, which is a corporate-oriented legal organization.
The point of my testimony today is that, too often, the corporate "celebration of diversity" becomes the opposite of true "equal employment opportunity"--that it is, instead, a form of "affirmative action" that is really, to use Nathan Glazer's phrase, nothing more than "affirmative discrimination." These kinds of diversity policies lack logical, empirical, legal, or moral justification. What I hope is that we finally have arrived at the point where companies will be hiring and promoting simply on the basis of individual merit. And I hope the Commission will agree with me--and enforce the law.
Before I go any further, however, it is important to define the kinds of diversity policies at issue today. No one is suggesting that there is anything wrong with having a diverse workforce. No one is suggesting that companies ought to discriminate against women or minorities, or that they should be anything less than vigilant, aggressive, and proactive in eliminating and preventing such discrimination (the original meaning of "affirmative action"). Nor is anyone suggesting that companies ought not to "cast a wide net" in their recruiting, making it clear to one and all, near and far, that they are welcome to apply for employment. (There are, however, some problems that result when the net is cast deliberately at this or that racial or ethnic group; I discuss some of those problems in the first appendix to this testimony.) And, finally, there is also nothing wrong with a company making sure that it does not have entrenched policies that, for one reason or another, discourage or retard the hiring or advancement of some people when those policies have no justification and penalize, rather than reward, productivity.
The issue, rather, is the narrow but critical one of whether companies ought to be hiring and promoting with an eye on applicants' and employees' race, ethnicity, and sex in order to achieve a predetermined and enforced diversity. It is clear that many do, unfortunately, and it is clear that they should not.
It is always useful, when considering the legality of a practice, to put the shoe on the other foot—that is, to ask what the reaction would be if a measure being proposed to advance "diversity" were, instead, being used in a way to tilt the scales in favor of whites and men. I'm not assuming that the two will always be morally equivalent--although I think they usually will be--but it is a helpful way to determine whether or not what's going on is discrimination. That, after all, is the issue for civil rights law-enforcers, because discrimination is almost always illegal.
Thus, for example, we can dismiss the common suggestion that, so long as the beneficiary of a preference is "qualified," then there is no problem. The question is whether the person hired or promoted is the best qualified; no one would allow a company to defend a pro-white or a pro-male preference by saying that it was afforded only to "qualified" white men. Nor does it matter that race, ethnicity, or sex is "just one factor" (would it be all right if being a white man was "just one factor" that weighed in an applicant's favor?); nor that "no quotas are used" (would a "goal" to hire only white men be acceptable?).
America is becoming an increasingly multiracial and multiethnic society. The only way to enforce the antidiscrimination laws in such a society is by playing no favorites. We cannot say that Latinos are more protected than whites, but less than blacks, and the same as Asians, unless the Latino is Mexican (but not Cuban) and the Asian is Saudi (but not Filipino). And the way that Title VII is written plays no favorites.
In the beginning, companies discriminated against minorities and women, often quite blatantly. That became illegal in the 1960s, except that it almost immediately became a requirement that companies have "affirmative action" plans that discriminated in favor of minorities and women. In 1990, R. Roosevelt Thomas, Jr. wrote an article in the Harvard Business Review titled "From Affirmative Action to Affirming Diversity," the thesis of which was that affirmative action had gotten a bad name—people had figured out that it was discriminatory and unproductive—and needed to be replaced with "diversity" management. Rereading this article 17 years later, one is impressed by how influential and prescient it was in the course it set for Corporate America. On the other hand, whenever the article stops talking about the problems with affirmative action and starts talking about the need to celebrate diversity, it is either platitudinous, or gibberish, or both. Suffice it to say that "diversity" did not replace "affirmative action"; it just added some verbose window-dressing to it.
What is really depressing is that there has apparently never been a time in American history where the widespread, accepted practice was not to discriminate against anyone with regard to race, ethnicity, or sex.
The blame for the current proliferation of hiring and promoting with an eye on—and preferences according to—the race, ethnicity, and sex of applicants and employees can be widely shared, among the courts, bureaucrats, the civil rights establishment, and, of course, the companies themselves. So when a front-page article in the Washington Post reported in 2003 that "several dozen Fortune 500 companies" would join briefs that support the University of Michigan's use of racial and ethnic preferences in student admissions, in the cases then pending before the Supreme Court, it came as no surprise.
Supporting the University of Michigan—and, more broadly, the civil rights establishment and the whole "diversity" agenda—is like paying protection money to the mob. Companies that don't fall into the politically correct line believe they are more likely to be sued or boycotted by the grievance industry (that is, the Jesse Jacksons and Al Sharptons and their Johnnie Cochran-wannabe legal allies), and indeed even the Post article acknowledged that "the desire to avoid civil rights lawsuits and boycotts" is part of the companies' "mix of motives." Of course, companies may be deluding themselves, and indeed "diversity" is no guarantee against getting mau-maued and sued. But the point is that companies believe they are purchasing insurance. As the Post put it, "business has always been content to buy social peace at the cheapest possible price."
It goes deeper than that, however. Most large companies now have "human relations" departments and experts. Those in these positions are institutionally driven to extol the importance of diversity, and "diversity" may even be part of their job title. Their current jobs, in any event, depend on the concept (and frequently they are beneficiaries themselves of preferences based on race, ethnicity, and sex).
Yale Law School professor Peter Schuck has observed that affirmative action "programs also tend to advantage large companies by imposing onerous reporting, staffing, and other compliance costs on smaller competitors who cannot bear them as easily."
So if I were a lawyer for a university or for the civil rights establishment, and I wanted to persuade a company to file a brief supporting me—or do anything else I wanted—I would start out with a call to the vice president for diversity or whatever. He or she would be easily persuaded that such a brief would be a good idea, and his or her recommendation to the general counsel (and the president) to file such a brief would put them on the spot. It certainly would be awkward if it ever leaked out that they had turned down this recommendation. And, besides, why should they? As noted above, it's good insurance.
The presence in most large companies of diversity departments and experts suggests another reason why these corporations were likely not only to file a brief supporting racial and ethnic preferences, but even to hope that the University of Michigan would win. For years now, large companies have done their hiring and promoting with a close eye on race, ethnicity, and sex. That's what their human relations experts tell them to do, and indeed they've been hired to tell the company how best to do it.
Part of this is purely public relations, but part of it is a fear that, if the company doesn't look like America, it will get into legal trouble. While, as discussed later, the legal vulnerabilities when preferences are used ought to be much greater, it cannot be denied that a company is also vulnerable if it doesn't have "good numbers." No matter how nondiscriminatory a company is, it's easy to lose a civil rights lawsuit if its numbers aren't right. Moreover, if it does any federal contracting—and large companies frequently do—then the Labor Department's Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs will insist that it implement goals and timetables to correct any shortages of women and minorities. These regulations are themselves unconstitutional and inconsistent with Title VII, ironically, but no company appears to be willing to challenge them. (And the Department of Labor, to its shame, is unwilling to bring them into line with the law.)
There are, moreover, plenty of judicial decisions, from the Supreme Court on down, that have pushed companies into hiring and promoting with an eye on race, ethnicity, and sex—and that suggest courts will look the other way when they do. In 1971, the Court ruled in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. that a company can be held liable for illegal discrimination if it does not hire and promote proportionate numbers of minorities and women, even if the reason for this is selection criteria that are nondiscriminatory on their face, nondiscriminatorily chosen, and nondiscriminatorily applied. Eight years later, in the Weber case, when the legality of racial preferences under Title VII was at issue, companies argued that, because of Griggs, it was essential that the Court allow hiring preferences—and the Court so ruled. Companies feared that they would be in a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't dilemma: If they don't get their numbers right, they get sued; and if they keep on eye on their numbers, they get sued, too.
Thus, the companies feared in the Michigan cases that if the Supreme Court had rejected the proposition that a desire for "diversity" justifies discrimination, they would have to change the way that they've gotten used to operating, or face a significantly heightened risk that they'll be sued by someone who lost out on a job because he or she was the wrong race, ethnicity, or sex.
It's also handy if the top schools do the "race norming" for the company, choosing the top students from each racial group, rather than the top students, period. Under the current system, a large company can send its recruiters to only the most selective schools, and know that it will be able to meet its quotas there, with handy, one-stop shopping. If those schools stop using preferences, then it will be necessary for the company to send recruiters to a number of other schools, too, if it is to keep its hiring numbers right. Those additional trips are a nuisance and added expense.
So, on the one hand, there is the fear of boycotts, lawsuits, and bad publicity, as well as the companies' own internal pressures. And on the other side? It is true that racial and ethnic preferences are unpopular with the overwhelming majority of Americans, but how likely is it that these Americans will boycott General Motors because the company files a politically correct brief? As the Post article acknowledged, "there is little cost in terms of public image for companies that side with Michigan—and potentially large costs for those perceived as indifferent to the interests of minorities." The same calculus has helped drive companies to support more generally the civil rights establishment's agenda and, in particular, its insistence on diversity-through-preferences.
There is a significant amount of discrimination taking place now in the name of diversity. Eight out of ten business executives said that affirmative-action programs had resulted in them giving jobs and promotions to applicants who were less qualified than others, according to a 1997 survey conducted by Yankelovich Partners and commissioned by the PBS show "Nightly Business Report." Consistent with Peter Schuck's observation in the last section, the survey also found that, the larger the company, the more likely the executive was to voice support for affirmative action (59 percent for large companies, 35 for medium, and 33 for small), and the less likely to support its abolition (47 percent versus 64 percent versus 68 percent, respectively); those numbers make it appear that some executives support affirmative action and its abolition, doublethinking which somehow is unsurprising in this arena. HR Magazine reported in 1998 that "Executive recruiters confirm that more and more companies are placing orders specifically for females and ethnic minorities." The Center for Equal Opportunity, too, has found that frequently recruiters brag about their ability to find diversity hires for companies.
It is not difficult to find evidence of corporate preferential treatment. The New York Times' favoritism of Jayson Blair is a sensational example, but it is not at all atypical. Just visit some corporate websites or look at their own brochures. The trumpeting of minority numbers is deafening, and it is implausible that this bean-counting does not reflect and encourage the use of quotas and preferences.
Consider Wal-Mart. It is frequently accused of being politically incorrect in a variety of ways, but you wouldn't know it when it comes to "diversity." The company has told its managers that they have "diversity goals," and that they should avoid discrepancies between the percentage of qualified minorities/females who apply and the percentage actually chosen--or risk losing at least part of their annual bonuses. Thus, if a manager is faced with hiring the most qualified candidate or meeting his diversity goal--and we suspect that this choice will come up frequently--then the company has provided him with conflicting guidance. As a result, there will be frequent situations in which Title VII's ban on racial, ethnic, and gender preferences will be violated.
Wal-Mart has also imposed affirmative discrimination requirements on its outside counsel, demanding that they "submit a slate of at least three, but no more than five, attorneys from your firm to be considered for appointment as the relationship attorney. The slate of attorneys to should include at least one female and one minority attorney." The June 13, 2005 letter sent to prospective outside counsel includes a demand for other bean-counting "diversity results," and the company's general counsel was quoted last summer as already crowing, "We are terminating a firm right now strictly because of their [sic] inability to grasp our diversity expectations." (In the nonemployment context, Wal-Mart last October likewise set up a fund to help its suppliers who have inadequate access to capital--but only if the companies are not owned by white males. Supplier diversity abuses are very widespread, but this is a topic for another day and, probably, another commisson.)
Wal-Mart is not the only company to use affirmative discrimination in hiring its outside counsel, by the way. The same article that discussed Wal-Mart (Meredith Hobbs, "Wal-Mart Demands Diversity in Law Firms/Outside counsel must comply or lose business, says GC at nation's biggest retailer," Fulton County Daily Report, July 6, 2005) also reported that Visa International, Del Monte, Pitney Bowes, and Cox Communications are making similar demands. More than 60 law firms had earlier signed a pact in which they agree to report to their corporate clients the composition by race, sex, ethnicity, and sexual preference of the legal teams doing the clients' work. Thomas Adcock, "Law Firms Agree to Give Clients Diversity Data on Legal Teams," New York Law Journal, May 13, 2005, available at http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1115888713745. The idea, of course, is to force law firms to meet quotas in each category. And prior to that pact, many companies--notably Shell Oil--had already been unilaterally insisting that this be done. For a discussion of why this is illegal--if such a discussion in necessary--see Appendix B. Not that law firms need a lot of encouragement in this regard; see Association of the Bar of the City of New York's "Statement of Diversity Principles" ("the opportunity to increase diversity should be one important consideration in the decision-making process"; one goal is "To hire entry-level classes that substantially reflect the diversity of graduating law students. … We also will take diversity goals into consideration within our lateral hiring.") and "Diversity Practices" ("including minority internships/summer associate positions; participation in minority job fairs").
Another large company published a brochure that bragged, "Each year, management … have [sic] a specific written set of performance goals established to measure their diversity performance. A set of specific written performance goals have [sic] also been implemented for all corporate management staff for annual measurement of their diversity performance. Diversity Performance measurements are attached to annual bonus calculations for … management." The company lists and brags about its percentages of women and minorities in its workforce generally and management in particular, and asserts, "We've achieved and maintained a diverse workforce by having separate affirmative action plans" that "ensure[] that our workforce reflects the diversity of our [clients] and the communities we serve." Can you say "quota"? (When the Center for Equal Opportunity complained about this, the company agreed to append the following: "It is [the company's] policy not to use unlawful preferences or quotas or engage in unlawful discrimination with respect to the business and employment opportunities that are offered.")
Here's another example. Recently we received an e-mail, apparently from one of Intel Corporation's employees, forwarding a description by Intel of its "Diversity Employee Referral Program." The gist of it is that Intel will pay a $6,000 bonus to employees who make successful hiring referrals of "women, African Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans," but only a $2,000 for successful hiring referrals of anyone else (i.e., men who are of European, Asian, or Middle Eastern background). Of course, as you know, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 bans employment-related discrimination, and specifically makes it illegal, for instance, to "classify … applicants for employment" in a discriminatory way (42 U.S.C. section 2000e-2(a)) or "to print or cause to be printed or published any notice … relating to employment … indicating any preference … based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin" (42 U.S.C. section 2000e-3(b)). You can imagine the outcry if the shoe were on the other foot and a company told its employees that it was three times as interested in white male referrals than referrals of minorities and women. But, when we complained Intel, we were rebuffed. (Intel also offers race- and gender-exclusive scholarships to high school students; gives a preference to "applicants from underrepresented minority groups, including women" in its Ph.D. fellowship program; and in other ways indicates on its website that some of its employees and applicants are more equal than others.)
Here are some other examples:
Finally, I should point out that university faculties are in a class by themselves when it comes to employment discrimination. I discussed this in the May 19, 2006 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education, which I would like to have included in the record. (In addition, I've included here Appendix C and Appendix D, legal analyses of two issues that frequently arise in the academic context: ads indicating a preference for applications from certain minorities and/or women, and "minority job fairs.") I've also written in The Legal Times and Engage magazine about affirmative discrimination in federal employment.
This—very brief—discussion has been limited to politically correct hiring and promotion policies. Many large companies also make large donations to organizations like the NAACP (e.g., Wal-Mart, Shell Oil, General Motors, and American Airlines each contributed from $100,000 to $250,000, and Wachovia donated a cool million) or Jesse Jackson's Wall Street Project (AOL Time Warner, Citigroup, Coca-Cola, AT&T, General Motors (again), as well as Ford, Daimler Chrysler, Kodak, IBM, and Boeing), and, as noted above, many deliberately favor minority-owned companies in their contracting as well. "Diversity training" is common, too (see Frederick R. Lynch's 1997 classic The Diversity Machine), as are racially exclusive scholarship programs (for example, Xerox's "Technical Minority Scholarships" and KPMG's "PhD Project").
Companies argue that "cross-cultural competence" is very important for their employees. To sell a Pepsi to a black person, you see, you have to be a black person, or at least to have learned how to think like one. This is why Jews, for example, have proved to be so inept in the retail trades, where they have to sell to gentiles. And the Phoenicians never could figure out how to trade with non-Phoenicians, nor the folks in Hong Kong with Westerners, right? Wrong.
Thus, the companies argue as follows: (1) that people tend to be quite different from one another depending on their melanin content and national origin, and that therefore the way one sells a product to, say, a black person is very different from the way one sells a product to a white person; (2) that these differences cannot be learned or taught on the job; and so (3) it is essential that companies that have a diverse consumer base also have a diverse workforce.
This argument has so many holes in it that one hardly knows where to begin. For starters, of course, it would justify preferences only in some parts of only some companies, namely those that do significant retailing with a broad consumer base. It would not justify special efforts to achieve diversity among truck drivers, for instance, or clerical staff, or R&D people, or the in-house accountants or lawyers, or any other employee who wasn't involved in marketing the product.
But let's be charitable and take the most plausible scenario for the diversity argument. Let's suppose that a company was going to be launching a big push to improve sales of its product to Mexican Americans in the Southwest and elsewhere in the United States, and that therefore it was going to use preferences to try to increase the number of Latinos in its marketing department. I stress that this is the most plausible kind of scenario for diversity-based hiring.
But wait, not all Latinos are Mexican Americans. A Cuban American or Puerto Rican might have no particular knowledge of how to market to Mexican Americans or any particular knowledge of Mexican American culture. He might speak Spanish—but he might not, and the Mexican American customer might or might not speak Spanish, and if speaking Spanish is important, that can be hired for directly, and there would be no reason not to consider an Anglo or Asian or African American who spoke Spanish. In his 2002 book American Skin, Leon E. Wynter—who created and wrote the "Business and Race" column for the Wall Street Journal for ten years—concludes that ethnic marketing is on its way out because it makes less and less sense (except in the obvious and narrow instance of advertising in a particular foreign language).
Even among Mexican Americans, the prospective employee might or might not know something about Mexican American culture. There are plenty of Mexican Americans whose parents, and they, are fully assimilated. And what is it about Mexican American culture that is so mysterious that it cannot be fathomed by someone who happens not to have a Spanish surname? Again, traders have been trading with people different from themselves for thousands of years.
Of course, the typical scenario is not even this plausible. We frequently hear the breathtaking non sequitur that, because we live in an era of globalization, therefore American companies must hire more African Americans. So, in order to understand how to market to foreigners, companies must hire more African Americans, the quintessential Americans. And would we allow companies that do little business in, say, Asia to limit the number of Asians they hire?
Typical of this lack of logical justification for diversity programs was the Business–Higher Education Forum's Diversity Initiative Task Force report in 2002, Investing in People: Developing All of America's Talent on Campus and in the Workplace [link: http://www.bhef.com/]. The report asserts that diversity is essential for businesses "to adapt their services and products, as well as their marketing strategies, to appeal to customers from a wide range of cultural backgrounds."
Another doozy from the BHEF report: "There is some evidence suggesting that companies that invest in diversity are rewarded by their investors," because when they received awards from the Department of Labor for exemplary affirmative action programs, their stock prices went up, and when they agreed to settle discrimination cases, their stock prices went down. You see, investors know that diversity is good business, so they reward it when they see it and punish companies that don't have it. But isn't the more plausible explanation—assuming there is anything more than coincidence at work here—that investors get skittish when they learn a company has run afoul of the law and has to pay out millions of dollars, and are comforted when they learn that a company is in the good graces of the feds?
There is an even more ludicrous defense of diversity hiring in the report: that, marketing aside, a diverse workplace produces "better critical thinkers" and people with superior "problem-solving skills" and more "openness to new ideas." Such talents are significantly less likely to exist, we are supposed to believe, among blacks who have not spent enough time with whites, and vice versa. Pity the poor ancient Greeks. What a struggle they must have had to become critical thinkers, to hone their problem-solving skills, to be open to new ideas, when they could talk only with other ancient Greeks (I suspect women were underrepresented at the Lyceum, to boot).
While at the Center for Equal Opportunity, Edward Blum created a (fantasy) diversity fund out of the companies that signed an amicus brief supporting the University of Michigan's race-based admissions policy, and found that the group was badly underperforming all the major stock-market benchmarks. And, he and I pointed out in an article for Investor's Business Daily, that's no surprise. Economics Nobel Laureate Gary Becker pointed out years ago in his seminal 1957 book The Economics of Discrimination that those who indulge a "taste for discrimination" and refuse to hire and promote on the basis of merit will have to pay for it. When you hire and promote on the basis--in whole or in part--of characteristics other than productivity, then your workers will be less productive. Duh.
The BHEF report presents survey data that purport to show how pro-diversity America is. But there is all the difference in the world between a general agreement with the proposition that "diversity is nice" and the proposition that, in order to achieve it, it is okay to favor some and disfavor others on the basis of skin color and ancestry. In fact, such preferences are decidedly unpopular, among individuals of all races. A recent survey—conducted by the Washington Post, Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, and Harvard University, no less—found that 84 percent of Asians, 88 percent of Hispanics, 86 percent of African Americans, and 94 percent of whites thought hiring, promotion, and college admission "Should be based strictly on merit and qualifications other than race/ethnicity," explicitly rejecting the answer "Race or ethnicity should be a factor."
Of course, just because we can't think of why a particular business practice would improve a company doesn't mean that it won't. So, even though there is no reason to think that using preferences based on race, ethnicity, and sex would improve the corporate bottom line, maybe it turns out that they do. Only it turns out that, no, there is no such evidence.
In fact, a 2003 study concludes that there is no correlation between diversity and improved company performance. Professor Thomas A. Kochan of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management published "The Effects of Diversity on Business Performance: Report of the Diversity Research Network" in the Human Resource Management Journal.
The study was discussed in the business journal Workforce, and Kochan observes there that "there is virtually no evidence to support the simple assertion that diversity is inevitably good or bad for business." He concludes, "The diversity industry is built on sand. The business case rhetoric for diversity is simply naďve and overdone. There are no strong positive or negative effects of gender or racial diversity on business performance."
Peter Wood--author of a terrific book, Diversity: The Invention of a Concept, with a great chapter on corporate diversity programs--notes in his discussion of the Kochan study on FrontPageMag.com that "it appears that aggregate increased commitment to diversity by companies does correlate powerfully with a couple of things—namely increased charges of racial harassment and lawsuits." The Workforce article noted that "empirical studies indicate that racial and ethnic diversity may, in fact, have a negative impact on business performance unless specific forms of analysis, training, and monitoring are in place. If left unattended or mismanaged, diversity is likely to produce miscommunication, unresolved conflict, higher turnover, and lower performance."
Professor Kochan's findings are echoed by psychologist Helen Hemphill, whose book on diversity training said it "has created even more divisiveness and disruption than existed before." And an article 14 years ago in Forbes calculated the cost of preferences to the economy at well over $225 billion in 1991, or 4 percent of the GNP.
For another paper questioning the empirical case for "diversity," see Peter Arcidiacono & Jacob L. Vigdor, "Does the River Spill Over? Estimating the Economic Returns to Attending a Racially Diverse College" (March 10, 2003) (discussed by George Leef on the "Phi Beta Cons" website of National Review Online, April 26, 2006).
In this regard, I should note that I am disturbed that your new race-and-color compliance manual (at page 15-31, footnote omitted) states, uncritically, that "Many employers have concluded that a diverse workforce makes a company stronger, more profitable, and a better place to work …." Some employers may have concluded this but, as discussed above, it is by no means certain that there is any logical or empirical reason for this to be so. What is more to the point, however, is that even if employers think that a workforce with a particular racial-ethnic-sex mix will make them more money, as a matter of law they are not allowed to try to achieve that predetermined mix. Again, put the shoe on the other foot. Suppose an employer concluded that there would be better morale and productivity if there were no minorities or no women--would that employer be allowed to "implement diversity initiatives for competitive reasons" (to quote the manual again)? Of course not. And it is to the lack of legal justification for discrimination in the name of diversity that I now turn.
If a business is caught awarding preferences on the basis of race, ethnicity, or sex, some managers might defend the practice as part of a celebration of "diversity." Companies may assume that the diversity rationale in hiring and promotions will shield them from legal challenge since the Supreme Court has accepted it for university admissions, but this is not true. The fact is that the legal justifications for employment discrimination are much weaker. Current statutory and case law are strongly against them, and for a number of reasons employers that employ such preferences are asking for legal trouble.
The primary reason for companies' heightened vulnerability is that the legality of racial and ethnic preferences in student admission decisions is, for the most part, governed by Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, while hiring and promotion decisions are more directly addressed by Title VII of that 1964 act. The courts have interpreted the two statutes differently, so that what is permissible under Title VI is not necessarily permissible under Title VII.
Title VI prohibits "discrimination" on the basis of "race, color, or national origin" in "any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance." While the statute's text admits to no exceptions, the Supreme Court has interpreted it as coextensive with the ban on discrimination under the less sharply worded Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution's Fourteenth Amendment.
Title VII also contains a categorical ban, forbidding any employer to "discriminate" on the basis of "race, color, religion, sex, or national origin" in hiring, firing, or "otherwise … with respect to [an employee's] compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment." But the Court has not conflated Title VII with the Equal Protection Clause, and accordingly the Court's recent ruling in the University of Michigan cases that the latter permits discrimination in the name of "diversity" is inapplicable.
Will the courts nonetheless create a "diversity" exception to Title VII's prohibition of racial and ethnic discrimination? That is very unlikely.
The statute, again, admits to no exceptions. To be sure, the Court did allow racial preferences in United Steelworkers v. Weber, handed down in 1979, and preferences on the basis of sex in Johnson v. Santa Clara Transportation Agency, a 1987 decision. But the rationale the Court approved in these two cases was not based on "diversity" but on "remedying" or "redressing" past employment practices that resulted in a "manifest imbalance" of the discriminated against groups "in traditionally segregated job categories"--and in 2007, and with every tick of the clock, it is becoming less and less likely that a company can plausibly assert that any imbalance, manifest or not, is traceable to "traditional[] segregat[ion]."
It is, after all, one thing to say that an antidiscrimination statute allows preferences in order to remedy discrimination; it is very different to say that such a statute allows discrimination so long as the employer and the courts think there is a good reason for it. There is simply no way to reconcile the latter "interpretation" with the words of the statute. (This point—and others regarding why there is no "diversity" exception to Title VII—are made by Professor Kingsley R. Browne in "Nonremedial Justifications for Affirmative Action in Employment: A Critique of the Justice Department Position," 21 Labor Lawyer 451, 461-472 (1997). In addition, Professor Nelson Lund has argued that Congress, in enacting the Civil Rights Act of 1991, implicitly rejected even the remedial justification for an exception to Title VII. Nelson Lund, "The Law of Affirmative Action in and after the Civil Rights Act of 1991: Congress Invites Judicial Reform," 6 Geo. Mason L. Rev. 87 (1997).)
Note also that the Court in Johnson stressed that preferences could be used only to "attain" and not to "maintain" greater balance; this would make no sense in the "diversity" context, since its rationale is not about remediation and would never end. The diversity rationale also is premised on a belief in racial, ethnic, and gender differences that is quite at odds with the insistence in Title VII that people be judged individually and without regard to stereotypes.
If a "diversity" exception is created, it is hard to see why other exceptions might not also be put forward. Yet Congress explicitly declined to create even a "bona fide occupational qualification" exception to the statute for race, even as it did so for sex, religion, and national origin. Furthermore, the diversity rationale could be—and frequently is—used to support discrimination against members of racial, religious, and ethnic minority groups and women. If a company's aim is greater "diversity" and less "underrepresentation" in its workforce, this means that any group that is "overrepresented" will be on the short end of any preferential hiring or promotion. That means that, depending on the company, racial and ethnic minorities and women could all lose out. It seems very unlikely that Title VII was written to allow such antiminority and antifemale discrimination so long as an employer could adduce a business reason for it.
Xerox recently lost an employment discrimination case before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. At issue was the company's "Balanced Workforce Initiative," begun "in the 1990's for the stated purpose of insuring that all racial and gender groups were proportionately balanced at all levels of the company." The Houston office detected a racial imbalance, and so its general manager took steps "to remedy the disproportionate racial representation" there, "set[ting] specific racial goals for each job and grade level …." The Fifth Circuit found that "the existence of the [Balanced Workforce Initiative] is sufficient to constitute direct evidence of a form or practice of discrimination." After all, "Xerox candidly identified explicit racial goals for each job and grade level," and the evidence "indicate[d] that managers were evaluated on how well they complied with" the initiative's objectives.
An appalling company policy and an excellent judicial decision. And here's the kicker: The plaintiffs were African Americans and the company had concluded that "blacks were over-represented and whites were under-represented." I was glad to see that the Commission cited this case in its new race-and-color compliance manual (footnote 117).
It is not surprising that the two federal courts of appeals to be presented with the diversity rationale in Title VII cases have refused to accept it. In Taxman v. Piscataway Township Board of Education (1996), the en banc U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled in favor of a white schoolteacher who was laid off because of her race and the desire of a high school to have a more "diverse" business-education department. (This case was also cited in footnote 117 of your new manual.) In Messer v. Meno (1997), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled against the Texas Education Agency, which "aspired to 'balance' its workforce according to the gender and racial balance of the state." The court stated that diversity programs are not permissible "absent a specific showing of prior discrimination."
The Supreme Court itself has not yet ruled on the issue, but it is unlikely to carve out a "diversity" exception to Title VII. Such an exception would be inconsistent with the approach and language in the Court's Weber and Johnson decisions, as Professor Kingsley Brown discussed in a 1997 article in Labor Lawyer. A majority of the Court takes statutory text very seriously; the same majority is especially unlikely to bend the words of a law in order to facilitate the use of racial and ethnic preferences, which it remains very wary of. Conservatives are not alone in this prediction. In 1997, when the Court had granted review in the Piscataway case, the civil rights establishment was so afraid of losing on this issue that it raised enough money to pay off the claims of the plaintiff and the fees of her lawyer.
Finally, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit—the most relevant circuit for the federal government as employer—has rejected the diversity justification as insufficiently compelling as a constitutional matter in the employment context. This decision, Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod v. FCC (1998), noted that "goals" based on race triggered strict scrutiny, and was then followed by a D.C. federal trial court that struck down the Army's affirmative-action promotion policy. And remember that Justice Powell's opinion recognizing diversity in Bakke as a compelling interest hinged on the medical school's First Amendment claims to academic freedom, so that it was asserting a "countervailing constitutional interest" of its own against the white applicant's. But that countervailing interest is unavailable in the private employment context. (On the other hand, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit did apply Gratz and Grutter to recognize diversity as a compelling interest in an employment case involving police hires--but this decision involved only a constitutional claim, not one under Title VII.)
I will not argue that, so long as the corporation complies with the law, it has a moral obligation to do anything more than make money for its shareholders. But a company should not tell its shareholders that the reason it is using preferences based on race, ethnicity, or sex is because there are morally compelling reasons for doing, because the opposite is true: It is wrong to hire, promote, and fire on the basis of employees' skin color, what countries their ancestors came from, or what kind of physical plumbing they have. And such discrimination is discrimination whether race, ethnicity, or sex is an absolute requirement or "just one factor," and whether they are considered pursuant to hard quota or a "goal" or "timetable."
Frequently those favoring this discrimination will assert that it is justified because of America's sad history of discrimination against various groups, and that this discrimination has resulted in economic disadvantages still felt by many in these groups. But if the idea is to help applicants from low-income families, there is no reason to assume that no white male could possibly be poor, and that everyone who is not a white male must be from the ghetto. Moreover, preference programs frequently end up discriminating not only against white males, but also against some minorities and women in favor of other minorities and women.
Another frequent claim is that, if you oppose preferences for minorities and women, it must be because you deny that discrimination against these groups any longer exists. While I certainly think it is delusional to maintain that discrimination against minorities and women has not dramatically diminished over the past forty years, I of course do not suggest that it no longer exists. But fighting the discrimination that still exists against minorities and women does not require that there be instead preferences in their favor. Rather, we should energetically enforce the laws on the books that have transformed the American workforce, encourage the kinds of affirmative action programs that I discussed before that do not involve affirmative discrimination--and protect members of all races and ethnicities, and both sexes, from discrimination.
All of the above should persuade any company that, if it is using preferences based on race, ethnicity, or sex in its hiring and promoting, it should stop. But, just in case some additional prodding would be helpful, the Center for Equal Opportunity will try to provide some incentives.
CEO will be identifying particularly egregious practices at various companies and bringing them to the attention of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Labor Department's Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, the two federal agencies with principal responsibility for ensuring that the private sector complies with the civil rights laws regarding employment discrimination. The EEOC and OFCCP then have the discretion to bring enforcement actions; if they decline to do so, then we will help individuals who have been discriminated against bring actions in federal court. And, of course, at every step of the way we will publicize the companies' discrimination.
For too long, corporations have assumed that the public wouldn't learn or wouldn't care that the "celebration of diversity" generally means that some employees are treated as more equal than others. That needs to change.
In the last paragraph of his book American Skin, Leon E. Wynter concluded that, as he wrote that text, his "unspoken prayer and meditation was" the following: "One race, human, one culture, American." There is no good reason for companies to consider race, ethnicity, or sex in hiring and promotion, and we will all be winners when that practice ends and employees are considered on their own merits, as individuals. The natural diversity that will result is fine, but artificial diversity achieved through discrimination is not.
If the Commission agrees that all races, all ethnicities, and both sexes are protected from corporate discrimination by Title VII, I hope that it will ensure that its regional offices follow this policy, and that the Commission itself brings a few high-profile lawsuits against some of the practices and some of the companies that I have discussed today.
Thank you very much.
Frequently it is suggested that, while preferences based on race, ethnicity, and sex when people are actually hired, promoted, or fired is objectionable, seeking to increase the number of applicants from "underrepresented" groups might not be. Cf. EEOC Compliance Manual, at 15-31 ("For example, if an employer notices that African Americans are not applying for jobs in the numbers that would be expected given their availability in the labor force, the employer could adopt strategies to expand the applicant pool of qualified African Americans such as recruiting at schools with high African American enrollment.") (footnote omitted). While I would agree that it is certainly a step in the right direction to limit race-, ethnic-, and gender-conscious efforts in this way, I am not convinced that even this limited use of preferential classifications is a good idea.
It is always useful when considering the desirability of preferences to put the shoe on the other foot—that is, to ask what the reaction would be if a measure being proposed to help minorities and women were, instead, being used in a way to tilt the scales in favor of whites and men. That helps us to determine whether or not what's going on is discrimination, and that, after all, is the issue for civil rights law-enforcers--because discrimination is almost always illegal, even if people disagree about whether all discrimination is morally equivalent.
So, I begin by asking, when would it be acceptable to try to increase the number of white male applicants? I think the only situation—outside of a judicial order against an extremely recalcitrant discriminator against white males—would be if an employer determined that, for some reason, white males were applying at a rate much lower than there available numbers would predict. This leads to several additional points.
The first point is that targeted recruitment should never be undertaken as a result of an imbalance among incumbents. It can be undertaken, if ever, only because of an imbalance among applicants. This is true as a theoretical matter; it's also true as a practical matter, if we really hope to limit the use of preferences to the recruitment stage.
Second, one must be careful in concluding that there is an imbalance among applicants. For a variety of reasons, there may be fewer members of some racial or ethnic groups who are qualified for particular jobs, and fewer women than men who are interested in particular jobs, and—perhaps to a lesser extent—vice versa. Members of some groups (especially women) may be less interested in jobs with long hours and travel, and more interested in jobs with flextime; some groups (Asians, whites) are more likely to have college degrees than others (blacks, Latinos); some groups, for who knows what reasons, are more interested in working for the government, or not working for the government, or sales, or not sales, etc. than other groups. If I were looking to hire and train parachuting forest-firefighters, I wouldn't expect a lot of female applicants, even if women are as likely as men to meet the job's objective requirements.
Third, one must be alert to the possibility that a racial imbalance in applicants is better explained by some factor other than race per se, and thus better addressed by means other than racially targeted recruitment. For instance, suppose that a company gets fewer than expected black applicants, and it turns out that this is because it is not recruiting in the southeast part of the state, which is heavily black. It would make sense, then, to send recruiters to the southeast part of the state; it would not make sense to send recruiters to a historically black college in the northwest part of the state.
Fourth, even if you were persuaded that, for instance, women qua women were applying in too-low numbers, the aim should never be to favor additional applications from women over additional applications from others.
On this point, consider the following hypothetical: You are in charge of recruiting for a company, and there are two job fairs scheduled at the same time, so you can go to only one. You have concluded that, as a general matter, your company receives many fewer applications from women than from men, and this is a problem because there's no reason to think that, for this particular job, there should be much difference, given the job and the demographics of the local pool. The first job fair is being held at a women's college, and will certainly increase the percentage of qualified women in your applicant pool. The second job fair is held at a coed college, and so it will probably not change the mix you've been getting. But—and this is the key point—the job fair at the coed college is much bigger, so you are going to get more applicants there than at the women's college. (I think it is also fair to assume that, the more applicants you have, the better the employees you will end up hiring.) Under these circumstances, it would be wrong to go to the smaller job fair at the women's college.
Thus, one can look at the profile of one's applicants to determine whether there are gaps in the recruitment "net." It is permissible to look at race, ethnicity, and sex in doing so, though no more so than other demographic characteristics, like geography, age, whatever. The ultimate aim can never be to increase applicants from a particular group per se; it can only be to increase the number of applicants, period.
Finally, I would point out that, even if one can conceive of some situations where targeting a particular group for recruitment makes sense, doing so will almost inevitably result in giving that group an edge at the hiring stage, too. If a company sends the word out that it wants to get more black applicants, that will ineluctably be translated by the personnel bureaucracy as wanting more black hires, too.
Accordingly, I think it is a mistake to say that recruitment targeted on the basis of race, ethnicity, or sex is acceptable. It is better simply to encourage employers to cast as wide a net as possible. If they do that, I think there are going to be very few—if any—situations where there will be significant disparities in their applicant pools. The need to make exceptions to the colorblind principle is very tenuous, and once you start making exceptions to it, you will have a hard time limiting and policing them.
More than 60 law firms have signed a pact in which they agree to report to their corporate clients the composition by race, sex, ethnicity, and sexual preference of the legal teams doing the clients' work. [link: http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1115888713745] The corporate clients' idea, of course, is to force law firms to meet quotas in each category. Many companies--notably Shell Oil--have already been unilaterally insisting that this be done. Quota quotes from the news story:
It is illegal "to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin" (Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act), and it is illegal to discriminate on the basis of race in the "making, performance, modification, and termination of contracts, and the enjoyment of all benefits, privileges, terms, and conditions of the contractual relationship" (Title 42, Section 1981 of the U.S. Code).
Yet the violation of these laws appears to be widespread--and at the behest and with the cheerful cooperation of lawyers, no less. There is no denying that corporate general counsel are urging their outside counsel to assign lawyers to the company's cases with an eye on the lawyers' race, ethnicity, and sex. Lawyers who are the wrong skin color, whose ancestors came from the wrong countries, or who have the wrong plumbing will not get the work.
There is also no denying that being able to work for prestigious clients in big cases is certainly one of the "terms, conditions, or privileges of employment." Thus, a law firm that gives in to the company's threats is violating Title VII. Or, if a law firm refuses to bend to this coercion and is therefore not retained, it has lost the "benefits, privileges, terms, and conditions of the contractual relationship," and the company has violated Section 1981. It is also inevitable that clients' preferences will translate not only into assignment discrimination but also into hiring and partnership discrimination, which violates both statutes.
Suppose Shell were to tell Kelley, Drye & Warren--one of the first large Manhattan firms to sign the recent pact--"We would prefer it if you would not assign any Negroes, Puerto Ricans, or girls to our cases"--and suppose that the law firm meekly complied. If this were exposed, would anyone bother to argue that neither Title VII nor Section 1981 had been violated? Of course not.
There is no credible claim that clients want these statistics in order to ensure that the law firms are not discriminating against minorities and women. Law firms compete frantically today for well-qualified women and, especially, minorities, and everyone knows it.
No, today it's all about "diversity" and equal results, rather than "nondiscrimination" and equal opportunity. Frequently the claim is made that diversity of backgrounds and viewpoints is essential for a successful legal team. But white males do not all think alike; nor do all Latinas, many of whom probably think like white males, whatever that means. Nor can one deduce a person's background and experiences simply by looking at her. There is no reason to use melanin content and genitalia as a proxy for true diversity of thought and experience.
The only plausible argument for diversity is jury appeal--the need to play to a multiracial jury by having a multiracial legal team. Of course, if attorneys are being selected partly on the basis of race rather than purely on the basis of merit, the competence of the team will suffer, but let's pretend for the sake of argument that the diminution in quality is offset by much greater jury appeal. The legal response is that the drafters of Title VII allowed no exception for this kind of "customer preference"; the moral response is to ask, So would it be okay to exclude members of unpopular minority groups from a legal team if they might rub a bigoted jury the wrong way?
One article about Shell ended by noting, "Not long ago, clients wanted their attorneys to look a certain way"--and, apparently, they still do.
Frequently job ads placed by universities will single out minorities and women as being "encouraged to apply" or "strongly encouraged" or even "especially encouraged," or will say, "Applications from women and minorities particularly sought." One school's ad read, "The College intends to increase its diversity and encourages women, persons with disabilities and minorities from underrepresented groups to apply."
Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act not only prohibits the consideration of race, ethnicity, or sex in hiring and promotion decisions, but explicitly makes it illegal "to print or cause to be printed or published any notice or advertisement relating to employment … indicating any preference, limitation, specification, or discrimination" based on race, ethnicity, or sex (42 U.S.C. sec. 2000e-3(b)). Specifying particular groups from whom applications are sought, and not listing others, would seem clearly to violate this provision. Suppose, for instance, the shoe were on the other foot, and an ad specified that "White males are encouraged to apply," let alone "especially" encouraged to apply? We think that the EEOC would, quite rightly, take a dim view of this.
To be sure, the Supreme Court has of course upheld the use of limited preferences based on race, ethnicity, and sex--see United Steelworkers v. Weber, 443 U.S. 193 (1979), and Johnson v. Transportation Agency, 480 U.S. 616 (1987)--but only when there is a "manifest imbalance" in a "traditionally segregated job category." It would seem to us very unlikely that most institutions of higher education in 2007 would be able to meet this standard, especially the necessary showing that they have a history in recent times of having "traditionally segregated" a job position.
The analysis below was written in the specific context of minority job fairs held at law schools, but the same analysis would generally apply to minority job fairs held elsewhere.
Title VII provides that it is unlawful for employers "to fail or refuse to hire … because of an individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin." 42 U.S.C. section 2000e-2(a)(1). Title VII further provides that it is unlawful for employers "to limit, segregate, or classify his employees or applicants for employment in any way which would deprive or tend to deprive any individual of employment opportunities … because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin." 42 U.S.C. section 2000e-2(a)(2). Minority job fairs segregate applicants by race and by doing so tend to deprive applicants, who are not members of the specified racial or ethnic group, of employment opportunities. See also 42 U.S.C. section 2000e-2(m) (race may not be a "motivating factor for any employment practice").
Entities involved in minority job fairs also violate 42 U.S.C. section 2000e-3(b) by publicizing and advertising them. This provision of Title VII makes it unlawful for employers and employment agencies "to print or publish or cause to be printed or published any notice or advertisement relating to employment … indicating any preference, limitation, specification, or discrimination, based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin."
Minority job fairs take on various forms. Some are hosted by law schools, others by employers, and still others by bar associations or other similar organizations. Regardless of which entity is identified as host of such an event, law schools and employers are usually involved integrally in minority job fairs. Law schools, through their career services offices, supply applicants through advertising, résumé forwarding, and other means. Employers review résumés, select applicants to interview at the job fairs, and make job offers based upon those interviews. By participating in minority job fairs, law schools, employers, and other entities involved violate Title VII.
Employers participating in job fairs are typically law firms or corporations. Government agencies and offices are also potential participants.
As private employers, law firms and corporations are subject to Title VII. Specifically, law firm partnerships are employers for the purposes of Title VII. See Hishon v. King & Spalding, 467 U.S. 69 (1984). To use racial preferences in hiring, a private employer must demonstrate the "existence of a 'manifest imbalance' … in 'traditionally segregated job categories." Johnson v. Transportation Agency, 480 U.S. 616 (1987). The "traditionally segregated" element of this test requires the employer to trace the imbalance to relatively recent past discrimination, which will be difficult for law firms to do, since they have been banned from such employment discrimination for nearly forty years now. Furthermore, the "manifest imbalance" part of the test requires that "the comparison should be with those in the labor force who possess the relevant qualifications." Id. It is unlikely that private legal employers could meet this burden either. (Incidentally, I think that the EEOC's new race-and-color compliance manual (at page 15-32), while it correctly notes the need for employers to tailor carefully any affirmative discrimination plans--along the lines discussed in the next paragraph--fails to stress adequately that it cannot adopt such plans in the first place unless the elements of traditional segregation and manifest imbalance are carefully demonstrated, too.)
Even if private legal employers could demonstrate the "existence of a 'manifest imbalance' … in 'traditionally segregated job categories,'" minority job fairs would violate Title VII because they categorically exclude non-minority law students. In approving an affirmative action plan by a private employer in Steelworkers v. Weber, 443 U.S. 193 (1979), the Supreme Court took note that the plan did "not unnecessarily trammel the interests of the white employees." It also noted the plan was "a temporary measure." Id. Similarly, in Johnson, the Court approved a plan which did not "create 'an absolute bar to the advancement of white employees.'" 480 U.S. at 616. Because minority job fairs categorically exclude non-minority students, they do "unnecessarily trammel the interests" of non-minority applicants and present an "absolute bar" to taking advantage of this interview opportunity.
Government employers must meet an even higher standard. In addition to complying with Title VII, they must comply with the Equal Protection Clause. The entities involved cannot claim a remedial justification unless they are willing to admit that they themselves have discriminated against minority groups in the recent past. The Supreme Court "never has held that societal discrimination alone is sufficient to justify a racial classification." Wygant v. Jackson Bd. of Educ., 476 U.S. 267 (1986). If government employers were to claim a diversity justification, which has never been accepted in the realm of employment, id.—two courts of appeals have rejected it in the Title VII context—the Supreme Court's recent decisions in Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger have made it clear that "individualized consideration" would be necessary to satisfy the "narrow tailoring" prong of strict scrutiny. A job fair which excludes certain applicants because of the color of their skin does not provide "individualized consideration." (It also appears that even private entities must now meet this higher standard, since the Court's Grutter and Gratz decisions say that the prohibitions against intentional discrimination in the Fourteenth Amendment, Title VI, and 42 U.S.C. section 1981—which applies to public and private employment-related matters—are coextensive.)
Law schools that host, participate in, or in any way assist minority job fairs are violating Title VII. Law schools, specifically the career services office within law schools, act as employment agencies and, therefore, are subject to Title VII. Title VII defines an employment agency as "any person regularly undertaking with or without compensation to procure employees for an employer or to procure for employees opportunities to work for an employer." 42 U.S.C. section 2000e(c). The career services office within any law school satisfies this definition because its purpose is to assist law students in finding jobs both while they are in school and after they graduate. Career services offices post job opportunities, collect résumés for employers, and host on-campus interviews. 42 U.S.C. section 2000e-2(b) makes clear that they may not do so in a way that discriminates on the basis of race or ethnicity. Moreover, minority job fairs are made possible by the advertising conducted by career services offices, and such advertisement also directly violates 42 U.S.C. section 2000e-3(b).
Law schools cannot rely upon the "existence of a 'manifest imbalance'" in "traditionally segregated job categories." Nothing in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 indicates that the law school could rely upon a showing that the employers for whom they are recruiting have discriminated in the past. Even if they could do this, the law school would need to demonstrate that they screened each legal employer and determined that each employer had a recent history of discrimination. Considering legal employers tend to be well-versed in the law, it is unlikely that forty years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act such a showing could be made.
By violating Title VII, law schools also violate Title VI as federal funding recipients. Because universities receive federal money, law schools must satisfy the Equal Protection Clause and Title VI. Title VI provides that "[n]o person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance." 42 U.S.C. section 2000d. By participating in minority job fairs, law schools, which receive federal financial assistance, discriminate. For law schools to justify this violation of Title VI, they must meet the higher standard of showing that they themselves have discriminated in assisting their minority students with finding jobs.
The law school could not rely on Grutter v. Bollinger to claim a diversity justification. Grutter addresses diversity in the classroom setting only. To the extent that a law school presented a diversity justification, which again has never been accepted in the realm of employment—see Wygant, supra—they would still need to provide "individualized consideration." See Grutter v. Bollinger. A job fair which excludes certain applicants due to race or ethnicity does not provide "individualized consideration."
Many minority job fairs are hosted by bar associations. As with the law schools, bar associations and other hosts of minority job fairs are acting as employment agencies. They are undertaking "to procure employees for an employer or to procure for employees opportunities to work for an employer." 42 U.S.C. section 2000e(c). As stated above, there is nothing in Title VII which suggests that an entity acting as an employment agency can rely on the past discrimination of the employer for which they are providing employees. Even if they could, the bar association would have to screen each employer to ensure that the employer had a history of discrimination. Once again, such a showing would be highly unlikely in regard to legal employers.
By excluding participants on the basis of race and ethnicity, minority job fairs violate Title VII. Some organizers of minority job fairs may claim that their "minority job fair" is merely called that, but is actually open to all students. Even if this were true, such a practice would be equivalent to posting a sign stating, "No blacks need apply," and then claiming blacks would be considered if they did apply. This latter practice would not be tolerated and neither should the former. The practice of advertising a job fair as a "minority job fair" would also violate 42 U.S.C. section 2000e-3(b) by publishing a discriminatory "preference," "limitation," or "specification."
Because minority job fairs violate Title VII, they should be opened to all students and it should be clearly advertised that they are now open to all students regardless of race or ethnicity. Until this occurs, law schools, participating employers, hosting bar associations, and other entities involved with minority job fairs are violating Title VII.
This page was last modified on April 10, 2007.
Return to Home Page


text:
Dec 18, 2012 | 256 Pages
"The nuptials blogger Abby Larson, who has blogged about more than 5,000 'real weddings' on her website, has drawn hundreds of images and ideas from her vast reportage into a sourcebook intended to help couples celebrate with élan."
—The New York Times
"Abby Larson…has penned a gorgeous new book, and you're going to want a copy. Trust us…Filled to the brim with beautiful wedding inspiration and DIY projects…A coffee table must-have for anyone who loves a good love story…." –Brides.com
"The popular Style Me Pretty blog has graduated to hardcover with this must-have guide to planning and pulling off your own stylish wedding. Full of advice, DIY projects, and pictures, plus info on all those little touches that make a wedding your own." –Real Weddings
The Anatomy of a Bespoke Wedding
Real Weddings
Al Fresco
Do It Yourself Projects
A Blessing for Style-Obsessed Brides Everywhere
Credits · Thank-Yous · Index


text:
Going Viral: Rambo, But Gay
"Rambo, But Gay," is the retelling of a classic manly flick with a twist/swish, starring L.A. nightlife luminary Mario Diaz, created by Michael Serrato and Mark Byers.
From the video's YouTube description:
Sure there's blood in guts in this Rambo from Michael Serrato and Mark Byers, but in this musical version the audience is asked to reexamine what it is to be a man and what it is to be manly. This post DOMA tinkering of war veteran, John Rambo is hopefully just the first exploration of "Manly, But Gay" that Serrato and Byers get to tell.
Extra points if you can identify other gaydored personalities starring in the flick!
What do you think of the idea and the finished product, Instincters?
Mario has always been more than easy on the eyes and obviously this is no exception. A really sweet guy too. And great to see Willam (RuPaul's Drag Race) in on the action. He is hilarious on so many levels. Seems like I have known him forever and he still knows how to crack me up beyond belief! =D


text:
Queens Nails is Dead at Queens Nails Gallery
When confronted with endings, we mourn and ultimately accept. We feel some mix of disappointment and satisfaction that we were there before it ended, excitement that it happened, and sometimes relief that it is over. Queens Nails is Dead is the last exhibition for Queens Nails Gallery, an artist-run nonprofit gallery that opened in San Francisco's Mission District in 2004. Featuring the work of Daniel[…..]


text: For control pots, output jacks and tuning machine bushings.No more fumbling through your socket set for the right wrench! These sturdy steel deep-socket hex drivers are the right size for common guitar repair jobs. The large comfortable T-handles give you plenty of grip. 6-1/2" (165.10mm) long. #5890 is 10mm, to fit Schaller, Gotoh or Grover tuning machine bushings.#5891 is 7/16", to fit many control pots.#5892 is 1/2", for control pots, output jacks, and rotary switches. WARNING: Cancer and Reproductive Harm - www.P65Warnings.ca.gov.


text:
Each year, in May, windsurf world champions gather on Mondello beach to take part in this festival, organized by the prestigious Albaria sailing club. The beach is an ideal stage for this event, which combines top-level sporting events and concerts with the natural environment of the province of Palermo. Music, notably jazz concerts are a historical part of Windsurf World Festival.
There will be a step back in time with fencing, and seaplanes, this is the second time that a fencing match will take place, fencing took place in Mondello as far back as the early 1900's. The weekend will be dedicated to the classical tall ship race from Palermo to Mondello. There will also be the sailing/golf combination again this year, with a skin game contest on the green and a spectacular Driving Contest.
Mondello lies along the arch of a picturesque bay, between Mount Pellegrino and Mount Gallo, and is the most important seaside resort near Palermo.


text:
With a tough league season in the rearview mirror and another challenge looming on Thanksgiving, the Toll Gate football team didn't want to waste its chance on Saturday morning.
The Titans made sure they didn't.
Hosting cross-town rival Pilgrim in a non-league crossover game, the Titans capitalized on offensive chances in a way they hadn't all year and came up big in key moments on defense en route to a 28-20 victory, their first of the season. Pilgrim remained winless at 0-10.
"I actually thought we played better in some of our losses than we did today, but I'm glad we got something positive before we go into Thanksgiving," said Toll Gate head coach Matt Mancuso. "We made some good stops and we finished today. We still gave up some big plays, but when you're 0-for-7, as long as you get that win, it doesn't matter how."
The Titans and Pats knew for a while that they might get matched up against each other. For the first time in several years, they were slotted in different sub-divisions of D-II, so they only met in the preseason Injury Fund. But in D-II, with the playoffs starting before Thanksgiving, non-playoff teams always add a crossover game to their schedule.
The Pilgrim-Toll Gate match-up was a good fit, with both teams getting a chance to play a comparable opponent and jump into the win column.
After a scoreless first quarter, the Titans jumped ahead 14-0. Pilgrim made several pushes, but Toll Gate ultimately never trailed. A fourth-quarter touchdown run by Zach Mitchell put the game on ice.
"We were struggling with execution," Pilgrim coach Tom O'Connor said. "We had a gameplan and when we executed it, we got 6 or 8 yards a play and moved the ball really well. But if you can't stop the turnovers and the silly penalties, you hurt yourself."
The Titans struck first midway through the second quarter, after they stopped Pilgrim on a fourth-and-1 at the 11-yard line. An 86-yard touchdown run by Jose Javier on the first play was wiped away because of a block-in-the-back, but the Titans marched down the field undeterred. A 24-yard run by Aaron Travers pushed the Titans into the red zone, and Javier scored from 10 yards out.
The Titans failed on the two-point try but led 6-0.
"Our joke all week long was that we've been allergic to the end zone," Mancuso said. "We've gotten into the red zone against good teams. Against Mt. Hope we moved the ball inside the 20 all game long and we kept making mistakes. Our goal today was to finish."
On the first play of Pilgrim's next possession, Joe Brosnahan intercepted a Rob Quaine pass and took off down the sideline, racing 50 yards to the end zone for another touchdown. The Titans converted the two-point try for the 14-0 lead.
With the Titans breaking out, Pilgrim quickly got in on the act. Mike Kelly returned the ensuing kickoff 83 yards for a touchdown, and Quaine found Kevin Blanchette for the two points, making it 14-8.
The Pats then recovered an onside kick but went three-and-out. Still, they then threatened to jump in front just before halftime. Quaine completed two passes to Steven Medeiros and another to Blanchette to move the Pats deep into Toll Gate territory and he scrambled for 14 yards to put them in the red zone. With under a minute on the clock, Quaine misfired on his next two attempts but connected with Kelly for 8 yards on third down. The Pats quickly lined up for a fourth-and-2 at the 5-yard line, but Mitchell intercepted a pass in the middle of the field to keep Pilgrim out of the end zone.
"We had that stop before halftime and that was huge," Mancuso said. "Zach came up with a big play."
In the second half, the Toll Gate defense quickly asserted itself, with Javier sacking Quaine on a third-and-9 to force a punt. The Titans took over at the Pilgrim 40, converted a fourth-and-1 on a run by Javier and then scored two plays later when Travers found Malique Woods in the end zone for a 25-yard touchdown. Travers then hit Mitchell to convert the two, making it 22-8.
The Pats weren't done, though, and Kelly once again provided the answer. On a second-and-1 at the Toll Gate 49, Kelly followed his blocks on a toss to the left, found daylight and sprinted all the way to the end zone. Mike Turchetta carried the ball on the two-point try, and Pilgrim thought he got in when the pile was pushed forward, but the officials ruled that the whistle had blown first. That kept it 22-14.
From there, the Pats gave themselves a chance, forcing a pair of Toll Gate punts. But they couldn't seize their opportunities, in large part because of a push by the Titans' defense. After Pilgrim took over at the Toll Gate 43, Javier hit Kelly for a loss then rushed Quaine into a bad throw on fourth down.
The Pats got the ball again after another Toll Gate punt and Quaine got them out of bad field position with a 40-yard scramble to the Titans' 42. But after two solid gains, Chris Durand sacked Quaine on first down for an 8-yard loss. Kelly was then stuffed for a 2-yard loss, before Jackson Burgos and Durand flushed Quaine out of the pocket and limited him to 2 yards on third down. On fourth down, Burgos, Javier and Colby Connell forced another quick throw and it fell incomplete for a turnover on downs.
"We saw in shotgun, they really only threw the ball," Mancuso said. "So we decided to blitz it and try to play man. If they beat us, they beat us. I think early in the season, we were trying to stop everything. The last couple of weeks, we've focused on some key things other teams do and tried to stop those."
For the Pats, it was a frustrating turn of events. Quaine was sacked five times and pressured many more.
"That was our strength all year before this game," O'Connor said. "The best thing we could do was pass block. I can't explain it. I'd like to but I can't."
The Pats still had life and forced Toll Gate into a fourth-and-3 with four minutes left in the fourth quarter. But on the fourth-down play, Travers drew the Pilgrim defense offside to give the Titans a first down. Javier followed with runs of 7 and 3 yards, before Mitchell broke loose for a 43-yard touchdown with 2:50 left. The conversion was no good, but the Titans led 28-14.
The Pats gave the comeback one more try and made the Titans sweat again, with Quaine finding Davien Brown for two big gains. He then hit Medeiros for a 26-yard touchdown with 25 seconds left. The Pats went for two but Quaine was stopped for no gain. Still, it was a one-possession game at 28-20.
With no timeouts, Pilgrim's only chance was to recover an onside kick, but Mitchell pounced on it for the Titans, and they took a knee to end the game.
The Titans could celebrate. Though it wasn't a perfect performance, the final score was a nice reward for a team that has been taking strides.
"We're young," Mancuso said. "It's nice to see them getting better. In a bad season, there are a lot of positives you can look at. I thought they played well."
Javier led the Titans with 71 yards rushing on 18 carries, while Mitchell had 51 yards. Travers completed two of six passes for 33 yards and a score.
Pilgrim out-gained the Titans 218-172, with Kelly leading the charge. The senior added to his late-season surge with 89 yards and the two touchdowns.
"Mike Kelly is settling in nicely," O'Connor said. "He's making first people miss, which is huge."
Quaine rushed for 44 yards on 13 carries and completed seven of 18 passes for 83 yards and a touchdown.
Both the Titans and Pats will now turn their attention to Thanksgiving. Toll Gate will face a tough challenge against Hendricken, while the Pats will be trying to spring an upset against Vets, just as Vets did to them last year.
"It's the most important game for our season this year," O'Connor said. "We're going to look to do more of what we did right today and less of what we did wrong."