“5 Women Accuse the Architect Richard Meier of Sexual Harassment” (nytimes) contains an interesting nugget:
Richard Meier, the celebrated architect and Pritzker Prize winner who designed the Getty Center in Los Angeles, established a graduate scholarship in January at his alma mater, Cornell University’s architecture school. Intended to honor the 55th anniversary of his practice, the scholarship was designed to “recruit and retain the most talented women applicants.”
How are universities able to do this? Let’s leave aside the question of fluid gender and what it would mean to be among the “women applicants.” We’ll assume that there is some definitive way for a university to decide which applicants are “women.”
How is this legal for a university that gets a river of taxpayer funds? Women are a majority of college students, roughly 56 percent (see Atlantic), so the argument can’t be that this is for a favored minority group and therefore discrimination is virtuous.
Separately, I wonder if we could get university bureaucrats excited about the idea of funding for a luxurious social club limited to undocumented immigrants (we can’t fund their tuition because they shouldn’t have to pay any; see Free college education for anyone willing to identify as “undocumented”?).
In Canada a deceased heterosexual male doctor left an endowment to fund scholarships at public universities for heterosexual white men to study science. It was [ruled “contrary to public policy”](http://dailycaller.com/2016/02/23/judge-strikes-down-scholarship-for-straight-white-men/) Once the executors take their share, leftovers will presumably be spent on scholarships for non-white sexual minorities studying non-science (the article cites existing scholarships for these exact groups).
Is it more advantageous to identify as a woman or transgender ?
As it was explained to me in high school civics class, a minority is not necessarily defined by numbers but as a group that is disadvantaged. It matters not that 56% of college students are women.