Unlikely Group Charges Bias at University

For more than 35 years, the City University of New York, one of the nation’s most diverse higher education systems, has quietly struggled with a minority group that says it has been passed over for jobs. {snip}

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Of all the universities and colleges that offer protections for minorities, CUNY appears to be the only one that has declared Italian-Americans an official affirmative action category in employment, promising special efforts to recruit, hire and promote them, according to national higher-education groups.

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Still, for some who work in higher education, the notion of protections for Italian-Americans–at a university where 70 percent of the 262,000 full-time students are black, Latino or Asian–has prompted some head-scratching.

{snip} “After all, in New York we had an Italian-American governor, and we may have another one coming up” [said Ada Meloy, general counsel of the American Council on Education].

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