More Law Office Sociology –

More Law Office Sociology – All sorts of mischief has been emanating from the sociologists, who recently gathered in convention. For one thing, they “presented data that they hope will bolster the legal defense of affirmative action.” The data, they claimed, supported the charge

that leading undergraduate institutions create a hostile environment for minority students, resulting in their earning lower grades. This phenomenon, they argued, requires that selective law schools and other graduate programs maintain or expand affirmative-action programs in admissions.

A panel of three researchers (link requires subscription) argued that

it is legitimate for the law school to admit minority students with relatively low grade-point averages, because minority students’ GPA’s tend to be reduced by various forms of discrimination and psychological stress.

….

The three researchers interviewed minority students at four colleges that send many students to Michigan’s law school — Harvard University, the University of California at Berkeley, Michigan State University, and the University of Michigan’s undergraduate college — and found that minority students at each of these institutions tend to suffer cumulative insults that impede their academic performance.

“Racial microaggressions,” one panelist said, “are one form of everyday racism used to keep those at the racial margins in their place.”

Another panelist stated:

I truly believe that mundane everyday racial stress is part of the formula for the lower achievement scores, and in some cases the lower achievement, for students in these settings.

“Such pervasive discomfort,” she concluded, “warrants remedies such as the law school’s affirmative-action policies in admissions.”

The only example of these “microaggressions” cited in the Chronicle of Higher Education summary l’m relying on here were “statements such as ‘I don’t think of you as Mexican — you speak such good English.'” This statement may not be tactful or tasteful, but I wonder if it is really so destructive. Mexicans, after all, do speak Spanish. Would French/German/Egyptian/Chinese/etc. students be as offended by such a statement as these researchers assume Mexican students were?

In any event, I suspect that the argument that minorities are so stressed out by the “microaggressions” of everyday life they must endure that their grades and test scores suffer is not the best argument in favor of affirmative action.

Also coming out of the sociologists’ convention was a statement (link requires subscription) from the American Sociological Association opposing Ward Connerly’s Racial Privacy Initiative in California, even though the statement “takes pains to to define race as a fluid social concept, not as a biological phenomenon with meaningful roots in human physiology.”

Barbara F. Reskin, the association’s departing president and a professor of sociology at the University of Washington at Seattle, said at a news conference that she worries that policy makers will forbid universities to gather information about their students’ race. “Universities would no longer be in a position to know the ramifications of [changes in admissions policy]. Even though the existing measures of race are crude, and ignore nuance and variability, without them we wouldn’t have any handle on public policy. We’d have no reliable way of knowing what’s going on.”

Some cynics might suspect that a number of sociologists have trouble “knowing what’s going on” even with the current free flow of racial data.

Update – Actually, this is an afterthought rather than an update. I’ve been thinking about this more, and I can’t help wondering why more minorities are not offended by a justification of affirmative action that regards them as damaged goods. I also wonder whether this justification itself doesn’t inflict the very sort of damage that it purports to find.

In addition, if Harvard, Berkeley, and Michigan inflict all this damage, as the study claims, why should the Michigan Law School be any different? That is, why use the damage inflicted at Harvard et. al. as a justification for preferential admission to another institution that in all likelihood will inflict more of the same damage? And if it does, won’t the minority graduates of Michigan (assuming they do graduate) be even more damaged when they get out? Moreover, if such havens of racial sensitivity as these elite schools inflict such extensive psychic damage, how will the graduates fare when they have to face the much less solicitous no-holds-barred rough and tumble competition of real life, not to mention litigation? If Harvard et. al’s treatment traumatizes them into lower grades and test scores, what will life after Harvard, and Michigan Law School, do?

Actually, I wouldn’t worry about it because I suspect the study is pure “law office sociology,” i.e., hokum dressed up to support a conclusion, in this case affirmative action. Based on the admittedly limited sample of minority students, law students, graduate students, lawyers, etc., that I know, it seems to me that most are made stronger, not weaker, by what they have endured to get where they are.