I recently discussed the new admissions procedures rolled out by the University of Michigan to replace the point system invalidated by the recent Gratz decision. (The 20 points awarded for minority status is the difference between what applicants would receive for a 3.0 and a 4.0 GPA.) Today the Chronicle of Higher Education has more (Link requires subscription).
One of the criticisms of the Gratz/Grutter combo is that they would ensure that litigation would continue. That seems like a good bet. In replacing its point system with its new diversity essay, UM president Mary Sue Coleman announced that “[o]ur fundamental values haven’t changed.” In addition,
University officials said they plan to monitor enrollments carefully to make sure that minority representation on the campus does not decline.
Terry Pell, president of the Center for Individual Rights, which represented the plaintiffs, replied that
if, under any new system, race ends up trumping most other admissions factors, then the new system will be just as illegal as the systems the court struck down.
Sounds like they’ll be seeing each other in court again soon. Meanwhile, and more interesting, the Chronicle reported that some Michigan students feared the new diversity essay would not work well enough to ensure the admission of enough minorities.
At a news conference held soon after Michigan’s announcement, several leaders of student groups on the campus said they feared that young applicants might have difficulty writing essays that adequately reflected the impact of their race or ethnicity on their lives, and that minority enrollments would decline as a result.
Ricardo Valle, a senior who is a spokesman for a student group called La Voz Latina, said that, before college, “I did not know what diversity was or how to interpret my experiences as a Latino youth.”
Mr. Valle thus provided no “diversity” to anyone when he was admitted and during at least some of his undergraduate career. By the time he was a senior, however, he had become a full-fledged self-conscious Hispanic. Or Latino.
Michigan, it seems, creates its minorities rather than admits them.
UPDATE – WELCOME all you newcomers from the mighty InstaPundit! I hope you enjoy your stay, that you will take a look at some other posts while you’re here, and visit again.
While you’re here you (and you scraggly band of regulars as well) should be sure to take a look at the Comment below from Kelli, who seems to be at the Univ. of Michigan. She’s absolutely right that the “creating minorities” phenomenon is not limited to Michigan, though it may be well advanced there.
In an excellent book review of Victor Hanson’s Mexifornia in this month’s Commentary, James Q. Wilson, relying on Peter Skerry’s excellent Mexican-Americans: The Ambivalent Minority (1993)., notes that
on the issue of ethnic identity, there does seem little doubt that politicized universities can make matters worse. Skerry reminds us of the “Diversity Project” at the University of California at Berkeley, which studied how undergraduates experience “ethnic and racial diversity on campus.” What it found was “racialization,” a process through which human connections once defined in personal terms are transformed into racial ones. You may graduate from high school as a young American, but college teaches you to be a Chicano instead.
“Diversity” programs, in short, manufacture their own audience and that audience’s demand for “diversity.”
UPDATE II – The Michigan Daily weighed in today with more student responses to the diversity essays, many of them echoing the doubts expressed by La Vox Latina spokesman Ricardo Valle, quoted in my original post, that students might have trouble expressing the influence of race and ethnicity on their lives.
“One of my primary concerns is that a high school student of color will not be able to accurately assess how their race and ethnicity has affected their experiences,” said Tania Brown, vice president of LSA Student Government. “This process is essentially asking a student to relay 17 years of the way in which they have experienced their identity in a 250-word essay.”
LSA senior Adrian Reynolds said he wonders whether students would feel nervous about writing on a subject they are unfamiliar with.
“I think they could, but the question is whether they would actually want to,” Reynolds said.
Give me preference points an advantage over other applicants because my race/ethnicity will contribute to the “diversity” other students experience, but I don’t know what it is and I don’t want to talk about it.
Hmm.
Sometimes the truth is incredibly sobering when it comes unguarded from the unexpected source.
Man, that’s too bad…a fully assimilated non-white is now an identity-conscious statistic. I don’t think that’s much in line with MLK’s dream.
Students are now required to submit brief essays emphasizing their membership in selected minorities (Jews and Asians presumptively do not coount) or on “What Diversity Means to Me.”
One guesses that a student who writes that he won’t add much diversity and doesn’t agree that the university’s prime goal should be diversity is going to fare well in the admissions process.
After all, the last thing U of M wants is diversity of ideas.
How’s this for a coincidence? The International Solidarity Movement–the “peaceful” resistance movement that sent the unbalanced Rachel Corrie into the occupied territories last spring–was cofounded by a Palestinian American alumna of UMich who claims to have similarly “discovered” her vital ethnic identity at Ann Arbor.
I forget her name but remember poking around the student paper archives last spring and shaking my head at the story.
Naturally, this is not unique to UM, but I think they have raised this “diversity consciousness” movement to an art form.
Okay, I found the article in the archives of the Michigan Daily (April 16, 2002) about the activities of Huwaida Arraf (class of 98). Here are the key grafs:
Despite being a Palestinian whose parents were born in Israel and the West Bank and immigrated to the United States, Arraf said she was raised in an apolitical household.
But during her time at the University – where she studied political science, Judaic studies and Arabic – she was involved in protests against U.S. sanctions on Iraq and other political campaigns.
“It was only after I went to school at (the University) and the different cultural views I was exposed to that I really became in touch with my Palestinian identity,” she said. “At college, I was really awakened.”
The race consciousness comes to many of these kids because they can’t find their own identity. Further, their personal failings or mediocrity can be blamed on racism or descrimination rather than self. Left thinking teaches that personal failings are the fault of society. So instead of helping generations of minorities improve themselves, things like affirmative action are destroying their ability to buckle down and work hard. I would venture to say that successful, intelligent minorities aren’t hung up on race. They don’t have to be. They don’t need excuses. Yes, these are generalizations, but they are broadly descriptive.
John – Apt comment. It’s mind-boggling that student groups can worry about the fact that minority youth might not be able to write passable essays, and yet consider AA to be the solution to that problem. AA in college admissions allows high schools to continue to shortchange minority youth.
Heck, if Michigan at least set high standards for their “diversity” essay, then I’d have some respect for its use in admissions decisions. But those stated student fears suggest that, when it comes to the essays, ideology will most likely trump grammar, logic, and spelling.
Catharine MacKinnon in her landmark study of Sexual Harassment–which the EEOC and SCOTUS made the law of the land in 1986–made the double-edged observation that sexual harassment has “always” existed, it just had not been named yet. The semiotically inclined among us might point out that in cases of human creations–such as human “relations” of which SH is one–if you can’t speak it, i.e., if your language contains no lexeme in its semantic lexicon for this reality, then it doesn’t exist. The purpose of her book was to call SH into existence, and she succeeded with the help of the federal government.
Similarly, other forms of class concepts (i.e., logical entities) such as racial identities come into existence when enough people say they do. The real point in all this is the psychological need displayed in suddenly discovering one day you’re an “hispanic” (like the guy in the Moliere play was discovered that he had been speaking “prose” all his life), or feminists who hear a notorious “click” in their heads when they discover that they’ve been victimized in every which way by all males all their lives. If someone hadn’t told them they’d been sexually harasssed, they wouldn’t have known it.
The psychological need I’m referring to is that which discloses after the fact of discovering some time in your life a “reality” that wasn’t “real” until someone told you it was real, belongs to people who in effect have no true centered identity of their own. They have no identity until someone gives them a class concept to inhabit, as which point, not only do they finally becomes “real,” they become someone. Needless to say, becoming “real” in this way is dialectical: the question that such answers answer is “If I’m an XYZ, then whom am I an XYZ against?” IOW, it’s finally all about the the fact that these types can only “be somebody” or do “something” if it’s somehow in opposition to someone or something else. Tell me who you hate and I’ll tell you who you are enslaved to for your own identity.