Headless OCR
Is fighting discrimination against Arab-Americans a priority, or not?.

By John J. Miller & Ramesh Ponnuru
November 27, 2001 12:40 p.m.

Saudi Arabian student attending the University of North Dakota was assaulted in a bar last week, apparently because of his ethnicity. It's the sort of incident the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights might want to investigate — except that OCR currently has nobody at its helm, because Senate Democrats won't give a hearing to Gerald Reynolds, President Bush's nominee for the post.

Although OCR currently monitors reports of discrimination and tries to carry out its mandate, no organization can work at maximum effectiveness when it lacks a leader. Reports about anti-Arab discrimination in the United States are often overblown, but it's impossible to deny that many innocent Arab-Americans now face difficulties they did not encounter prior to September 11. OCR has a clear role to play in cases where genuine discrimination exists, and where federal laws covering K-12 schools and college campuses have been violated. Yet it won't perform its job as well as possible while Reynolds languishes.

When Bush announced his intention to nominate Reynolds, civil-rights groups raised objections to him because they can't tolerate the idea of someone who has criticized racial preferences occupying one of the federal government's most important civil-rights jobs. They also have gone after Reynolds on Title IX grounds, even though Reynolds seems never to have written a world on the subject. (For more on this, read our Washington Bulletin from last July.)

Almost the entire political class has declared that combatting discrimination against Arabs is a national priority. As long as Senate Democrats delay consideration of Reynolds, their words to that effect will ring hollow.