Discriminations

The University of Michigan is launching a new financial aid program to aid low-income students. Race, apparently, will not be one of the factors considered in determining recipients.

I don't know whether I'm more struck by the goodness of this news or the sadness that a non-discriminatory policy from a major university is news.

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Gov. Rod Blagojevich of Illinois has signed a gay rights bill.

The new law adds sexual orientation to the classes of people protected by the state's Human Rights Act. It defines sexual orientation as actual or perceived heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality, or gender-related identity, whether or not traditionally associated with the person's designated sex at birth. The definition specifically excludes a physical or sexual attraction to a minor by an adult. In deference to conservative objections, the Act states that it must not be construed as requiring any employer, employment agency, or labor organization to give preferential treatment or special rights based on sexual orientation or to implement affirmative action policies or programs based on sexual orientation.

I have long believed, and argued here more than once, that a good deal of the opposition to equal rights for gays comes from a belief, grounded in experience, that those who say today that all they want is equal rights will say tomorrow that they deserve special preferences.

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"Female students have gone from being a minority to a majority of undergraduate enrollments in the United States over the last generation," the Chronicle of Higher Education reports today.

The report, which draws on data from government agencies and several continuing studies of high-school and college students, also says that the trends are more apparent among some racial and socioeconomic groups than others. For example, while women made up 56 percent of all undergraduates in 2001 (up from 42 percent in 1970), women accounted for 63 percent of black students, 62 percent of students over the age of 39, and 70 percent of single-parent students.

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Vontilla Steven, a student at the University of Miami, is

tired of hearing people write about how affirmative action is an unfair endeavor maintained to accept unqualified black people while leaving white people out in the cold, leading to "reverse discrimination." This argument would be valid if we lived in an equal society.

Steven goes on to defend affirmative action by pointing to items and citing statistics that will be familiar to Discriminations readers. Among them:

• Job applicants with black-sounding names fare worse than those without black-sounding names;

• blacks pay more for mortgages and car loans;

• blacks receive "inadequate healthcare, housing, education and possess less wealth than whites";

• "black student (sic) are more likely to attend a majority black school because of white flight to suburban areas and subsequent enrollment in private schools";

• "Blacks still find it hard to break away from Jim Crow laws of the South";

• "Some believe the government's War on Drugs is a new version of Jim Crow because of the crackdowns in inner city neighborhoods."

• Etc.
  

Do not tell me that this is a fair and just nation because I know that it is not. Many choose issues that involve them directly and take that individual issue out of context. Just because it is not socially acceptable for someone to hurl racial slurs in my direction does not mean this nation is that far from its tragic past. Affirmative action is used to right obvious wrongs. To those of you who quote Dr. King's speech for your purpose I would like to tell you this: It has barely started.

Second, and more important, I think this angry essay is, sadly, rather typical, and I believe its defense of affirmative action is fueled much more by a generalized anger and resentment than by any belief that racial preferences in college admissions will do anything much to attenuate the identified problems. Mr. Steven is angry at America, and that anger places a very visible and nasty chip on his shoulder, a chip that will, unfortunately but predictably, serve as an anchor limiting his future mobility.

UPDATE [ 28 Feb.]

I frequently (though certainly not always) disagree with Washington Post columnist William Raspberry, but, as reader of all things Fred Ray correctly points out, Raspberry's recent column is right on target.

Raspberry admits his frustration with poor black students in D.C. who fail to seize the opportunity for a heavily subsidized college education that recent legislation provides them.

The program doesn't make college free, but it does make it affordable....

Thousands of young people have taken advantage of the break, with the result that the college enrollment rate here has increased significantly since the program was established in 1999.

But thousands of others don't even see the opportunity that seems so obvious to us. Surely their numbers include the "knuckleheads" of Bill Cosby's impatient description, kids who won't try to speak or dress or behave in ways that might encourage someone to give them a break. The comedian has been particularly harsh regarding parents who won't take these youngsters to the woodshed and make them understand that they are blowing their life chances.

As I have said before, Cos is right about the blown chances -- right also that it is past pointless to blame the resultant failure on racism....

I think the present generation of black leadership has to bear some responsibility for the fact that we have so many young (and not-so-young) people who are expert at spotting inequity but virtually blind to opportunity. The leadership's purpose, I'm sure, was to keep pressure on "the system" to broaden opportunity for those who have too little of it. But one of the unintended consequences is that too many youngsters have concluded that they don't have a chance, and that there's nothing they can do about it.

The opposite is true, of course. For the first time in black American history, what we do is a greater determinant of our future than what is done to us. We need to teach that and preach that and shout that -- to our young people and to ourselves. We need to take note of the immigrants, including those from Africa and the Caribbean, who see opportunity where too many born here see only disparity.

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Here are a few highlights (or lowlights) from another example of how affirmative action is understood and portrayed across America, this one from a recent "Black Bag Lecturer series, attended by a 24-person crowd comprised of students, faculty and staff," at the University of Toledo.

Racism still exists, and in some cases, even flourishes in our society, said Brenda McGadney-Douglass, associate professor of social work.

She said affirmative action helps reduce the effects of racism, but it gives a leg up to minorities of all kinds, including women and disabled people, not just racial minorities.

Granting minorities access to school and jobs is the main role of affirmative action, said Carter Wilson, professor of political science.

UT needs to be more active with affirmative action, Wilson said, starting by making recruitment of minorities a higher priority.

Michael Jones, a freshman majoring in sociology, said he'd rather have a "blind faith" policy where race wouldn't be a question on college applications.

"The fact that I'm black shouldn't count more than my [grade point average]," he said.

With the limited progress toward equality, it could be thousands of years before the need for affirmative action or similar programs cease, said Morris Jenkins, assistant professor of criminal justice.

"The need for affirmative action will continue until we have economic, gender and racial harmony," he said.

"Without diversity it can become a deadly, volatile situation that gives a chance for classism and racism to surface and take hold of society," said Greg Braylock, a junior majoring in middle-childhood education and president of the Black Student Union.

"After hundred of years of discrimination, there is no fair policy - somebody is going to get hurt. The current affirmative action is the best of both worlds," McGadney-Douglass said.

I also wonder how many of these professors were affirmative action hires. What I don't wonder is which of the two students quoted here is going to be more successful.

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Critics of racial preference often assert that it stigmatizes minorities, an assertion that preferentialists dispute ... except, on occasion, when it is not being debated. Thus an article in the (Berkeley) Daily Californian on the plight of black faculty at Berkeley contains the following:

Professor Percy Hintzen joined the UC Berkeley African American Studies department in 1979, when there was a sense of urgency and necessity for increased ethnic diversity in higher education, he says.

“The presence of minorities was justified politically rather than on intellect,” Hintzen says. “This created the understanding that minorities were here not because of their qualifications, but because of politics. This led to a sense amongst minorities that they were never welcomed in the institution.”

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Maybe I've been reading this stuff too long, but I find this report of a Central Michigan University conference fascinating, revealing, and depressing.

The most noteworthy thing about it is ... that it's so un-noteworthy, commonplace, even banal. It's just like hundreds, maybe thousands, of similar meetings that are now, alas, a part of contemporary life. And the vested interest of all of the "affirmative action officers" and Associations of Affirmative Officers and umbrella groups of various associations of affirmative action officers underscores how difficult, or even impossible, it will be to rid ourselves of them, Justice O'Connor's fig-leaf of a 25 year life-span for affirmative action notwithstanding.

I was also struck by two other items in this report. First, the "building bridges" talk was presented to "the Black Caucus Foundation of Michigan’s fourth annual Diversity Conference." I find the idea of a "black caucus" inside a "diversity" conference itself interesting (are there any whites or Asians or Hispanics in the Black Caucus; if not, what of "diversity"?), but I'm sure that's just me.

And then there was this:

“It was an excellent opportunity to interact with young people on how diversity impacts their environment, the challenges they face, their issues and possible solutions,” said [CMU Affirmative Action Officer Phyllis] Powell. “The emphasis was that each individual is unique and should feel comfortable talking about and sharing that uniqueness with those around them.”

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One of the many problems with Grutter is that, far from putting racial preference behind us, or even putting it on the road to being behind us, it simply added many items to the to-do lists of professional diversifiers.

One of them is Jonathan Alger, now vice president and general counsel at Rutgers but who, as assistant general counsel at the University of Michigan, coordinated Michigan's legal efforts in Gratz and Grutter. In an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, "Putting Grutter Into Practice," Alger discusses a long list of issues he and his colleagues are working on in the wake of Grutter. Here, for example, is one of them:

When might it be appropriate to subdivide large racial categories like "Asian-Americans" into smaller groups that have different backgrounds and circumstances? How should colleges consider individuals of mixed race? Educators and lawyers are working together to define and answer such questions.

In the Supreme Court case, discussed below, dealing with racial classification in the California prison system, prison officials were quoted on the perils of assuming that common ethnicity assures affinity:

"You cannot house a Japanese inmate with a Chinese inmate. They will kill each other," an associate warden testified in a passage cited by the court. "The same with Laotians, Vietnamese, Cambodians and Filipinos."

Margot Bach, a spokeswoman for the California Department of Corrections in Sacramento, said prison officials sometimes separated inmates of the same race or ethnicity.

"Southern California Hispanics and Northern California Hispanics don't get along, and you can't put them in a cell together," she said.

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More Deanly Diatribes

Unfortunately I have have had numerous occasions to point to racially abusive and abrasive language from the University of Virginia's Dean of All Things Black (my title), M. Rick Turner -- most recently here and here.

I noted in an earlier post that he labeled everyone who criticized Charlottesville school superintendent Scottie Griffin a "racist and sexist," and, true to his predictable form, in a recent open meeting of the school board he attacked parents, teachers, and administrators in true blue Charlottesville as "ku klux klan members." According to a report from a participant in that meeting (content of web site changes with each weekly issue of C-Ville),

For 20 minutes, white parents were subjected to some of the most hateful language I have ever heard. In rapid succession, we were called a modern-day lynch mob by Rev. William Johnson, self-interested sinners by Rev. R.A. Johnson, and Ku Klux Klan members by Dr. Rick Turner—all because we dared question Griffin’s actions.

It wasn’t just parents who were slandered. Principals, School Board members, City Council members—in fact, anyone who is white and in disagreement with Griffin—all were cited as co-conspirators.

But Wait! There's More [Feb. 26]

The same issue of C-Ville linked above, under "News in Review" for Feb. 18 (click on "News in Review" on the home page, if this issue is still available), also reports the following:

Declaring “African-American children in Charlottesville are dying” because of a school system that fails them, M. Rick Turner, the flame-throwing dean of African-American Affairs at UVA and recently elected president of the local NAACP, exhorted black parents to rise up to their responsibilities as “the primary educators” of their children. “White folks are not going to educate your children,” Turner said to a gathering of about 140 people at Pilgrim Baptist Church called by the NAACP. Turner, who has regularly used School Board meetings to cast allegations of racism, even comparing white parents and teachers to Klansmen as recently as Tuesday evening, said tonight, “I know full well that every white citizen in the Charlottesville community is not racist.”

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Unfortunately, the Supremes have proved themselves incapable of, among other things, following the common sense advice, "When you're in a hole, stop digging."

By a 5–3 vote in Johnson v. California they stopped just shy of ruling unconstitutional California's policy, approved by the 9th Circuit, of segregating new prisoners by race in order to prevent violence. In so doing they did what some of us thought was impossible, i.e., digging their racial jurisprudence into an even deeper hole of incoherence.

I expect to have something further to say once I have had time to digest the opinions, but a quick skimming of them and several articles (the New York Times analysis by Linda Greenhouse here; the Los Angeles Times here) leaves me struck (dumbstruck would be overstating it, I guess) that Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who wrote the majority opinion and who could not have been more deferential to deans and generals and corporate moguls and their stated need to classify by race in order to produce the intangible goods of "diversity," had no use whatsoever for the assertions of California prison officials that their policy was absolutely essential in order to prevent violence. It may be worth adding here that the racial classification involved in preferential admissions is permanent -- some students are rejected for admission because of their race -- while the prison segregation policy is temporary, for new prisoners only.

And on the other side, Justices Thomas, who wrote a long dissent joined by Justice Scalia, who opposed deference to college administrators, was scathing in his criticism of the Court's refusal to defer to prison officials. I'm sure I'll have more to say about Thomas after reading his dissent more carefully.

Meanwhile, Justice Ginsburg joined O'Connor's opinion but wrote separately (joined by Breyer and Souter) to affirm that although California's racial classification policy was bad, not all racial classification is invidious; the racial classifications of which she approves are just fine.

What a mess.

UPDATE [26 Feb. 12:45AM]

Now that I've had a bit of time to reflect on these opinions, and sleep on them, it has now become clear that they are indeed a mess. Here are some additional thoughts.

First, it should be noted that, strictly speaking, O'Connor's majority opinion decided only that the California prison policy was subject to "strict scrutiny," and it remanded the case to the Ninth Circuit rather than flatly declaring the policy unconstitutional (a result advocated by Justice Stevens in his dissent). Justice Thomas's dissent, in turn, was animated by his long-standing belief, articulated in many cases, that constitutional protections are severely restricted, where they apply at all, inside prison walls. His belief in deference to prison officials (and in the long line of precedent supporting deference to prison officials) was the focus of his concern, not that the issue in question involved racial classifications. His opinion would doubtless have been the same if the issue had instead concerned, say, First Amendment issues of speech or religion.

Indeed, a likely outcome of this case is that prison officials, who have now been put on notice that must make a compelling interest argument, will successfully do so. But if this should be the result, Justice O'Connor will have, once again, significantly weakened civil rights protections by weakening the protection to civil rights offered by "strict scrutiny."

To see why, note once again Yale law professor Peter Schuck's devastating critique of O'Connor's Grutter opinion, especially this, which I quoted earlier here:

Strict scrutiny is supposed to be, well, strict. Its raison d’etre is to be rigorous, skeptical, and demanding enough to challenge the government’s premises, flush out its true motives, and ensure a very tight congruence of evidence, legal categories, and policy justifications. Strict scrutiny is employed, of course, when there are especially good reasons to think that, as with racial classifications, the government may be playing with fire around highly combustible materials....

Justice O’Connor’s strict scrutiny has all the strictness of an indulgent mother who gives her affable son the keys to the family car without questioning him about his drinking. When the father warns that the youth has gotten drunk before and harmed some bystanders, she replies, “Oh, he’s a good boy, and anyway he says he’s only going to the library.” In this spirit, O’Connor accepts the Michigan law school’s assurances that she needn’t worry, while shrugging off the hard questions posed by the dissenters — a kind of good-natured “Oh, don’t mind dad; he’s just being crabby” response.

Yale law professor Jack Balkin is also struck by the inconsistency of the opinions, but, for an interesting reason we'll see in just a moment, he comes down hardest on Thomas and Scalia:

I am mystified about why Thomas and Scalia are dissenting in this case. I had thought that they had strongly principled objections to racial classifications because these classifications fail to respect individual dignity, because they fail to treat individuals as individuals, and because they stigmatize and stereotype people according to their race, even when the classification is made from the purest of motives. I don't happen to agree with their views in the affirmative action cases, but at least I respect a principled stand when I see one. But there is nothing of that principled objection in this case. Instead, it appears that their rhetoric only applies when they are opposing affirmative action policies designed to assist racial minorities.

Balkin would have been harder on O'Connor's inconsistency, but he never expects her to be consistent.

In saying that Thomas and Scalia aren't being consistent, I do not mean to suggest that O'Connor is. As Thomas correctly points out, her refusal to defer to prison administrators in Johnson is in tension with her deference to university administrators in Grutter. And there are passages in today's opinion that are, frankly, laughable given what she wrote in Grutter. The point is that I don't really expect doctrinal consistency from O'Connor-- I expect pragmatic case manipulation designed to hit the precise center of current public opinion.

Balkin does, however, find principle here in the position taken by Justice Ginsburg:

Speaking of liberals, at least Justices Ginsburg, Breyer and Souter have a principle that distinguishes this case from Grutter. It is the antisubordination principle-- racial classifications are suspect because they help perpetuate the subordination of racial groups. Where the majority acts to undo the effects of past subordination, courts can apply somewhat less scrutiny (although not minimal scrutiny) because what the state is doing is not inconsistent with the goal of antisubordination. That explains the Court's deferential attitude toward admissions committees in Grutter. However, when the state uses racial classifications for mere administrative convenience, as in this case, its goals are orthogonal to alleviating social subordination, and the usual rule of strict scrutiny should apply.

I hesitate to be dismissive of an eminent Yale law professor, but this "antisubordination principle" is a bit too malleable for me. It approves good discrimination, and bars bad discrimination. But entirely aside from the principle's appeal (or lack of it), does it have any authority other than the support of a few Supreme Court justices and law professors? The Constitution requires "equal protection"; on what basis can that requirement be construed to allow unequal treatment if the goal is to promote "anti-subordination"?

Here's how Justice Ginsburg herself states this principle in her concurrence (citations omitted):

I write separately to express again my conviction that the same standard of review ought not control judicial inspection of every official race classification. As I stated most recently in Gratz v. Bollinger ... : “Actions designed to burden groups long denied full citizenship stature are not sensibly ranked with measures taken to hasten the day when entrenched discrimination and its aftereffects have been extirpated.”

Of course that discrimination itself creates aftereffects, but never mind.

Balkinian/Ginsburgian liberals are uncomfortable with clear rules based on firm principles. Thus they look at the principle (and the 1964 Civil Rights Act derived from it, legislation they heartily supported at the time) that every individual should be treated without regard to race; they note, correctly, that that principle and its legislative progeny derive in large part from a recognition racial discrimination was intended to and did in fact harm minorities; and they conclude therefore that racial discrimination that is intended to benefit minorities -- or that they believe will benefit minorities, whatever the intent -- isn't really racial discrimination. With the advantage of their hindsight and incontestable (to themselves) high moral values, they, now, would have articulated the principle and written the legislation in a different manner. But since that opportunity is no longer available, they prevail upon judges to rule as though the principle and the legislation had been written the way they now prefer. And if, like Justice Ginsburg, they are a judge, they do attempt to rule that way.

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Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum writes today that both Larry Summers and his critics are "missing the point."

And what is the point? Why, it's what interests her, not what interests them. What matters to her

is that we shift this passionate debate from the fate of a few women at Harvard to the real needs of millions of women across the country. I'd feel a lot more sympathy for Summers's current plight if he'd said how ridiculous it is to require academics, male or female, to work 80 hours a week to get tenure. I'd feel a lot more sympathy for Summers's feminist opponents if they spent less time worrying about their academic peers, and more time worrying about the agonizing trade-offs between work and family, and how they can be better managed in the interests of women, children and co-workers.

But somehow or other, that subject -- the one that matters to most people, but the one feminists and employers find hardest to discuss -- never quite becomes the center of debate.

Shame on them! So, listen up all you panel organizers and meeting planners! (And, yes, that includes You even if you are planning meetings for mathematicians, physicists, engineers, Ivy League faculties, whatever.) Don't plan your next meeting without checking with Anne first.

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Bill Clinton famously said of affirmative action, "Mend it; don't end it." He certainly didn't end it, but then neither did he mend it in any ways that are noticeable today.

Harold Meyerson, the "editor at large" of The American Prospect and regular Democratic columnist for the Washington Post, appears to think that Clinton took the Democrats out of the preference business. In his column today, Meyerson writes that because of "Bill Clinton's repositioning of the party," ... [n]o longer were the Democrats the party of racial preferences that they had been in the 1970s and '80s."

Really? This will come as a rude awakening to all those Democrats who have yet to meet a racial preference they don't defend, to all those Democrats who made Sen. Lieberman abandon his past skepticism about preferences and kowtow to Maxine Waters et. al. before they would support him as Gore's VP, to Clinton-appointed judges who continue to support things like 20 point admission bonuses based on race (Ginsburg and Breyer in Gratz), and to all those Democratic senators who oppose President Bush's judicial nominees in large part out of fear that those nominees oppose racial preferences.

Perhaps Mr. Meyerson has been "at large" too long.

CORRECTION [24 Feb.]

I received the following correction from Kirk Kolbo, who allowed me to quote it here. For those of you who don't recall, Mr. Kolbo was the plaintiffs' lead attorney in both the Gratz and Grutter cases, and he did an outstanding job.

Actually, Breyer joined in the judgment (though not the Court's opinion) striking down the 20-point system in Gratz, which made it 6-3. Only Bush 41's Souter joined Ginsburg in voting on the merits to uphold the system in Gratz, with Steven dissenting and opining on procedural (standing) grounds only.

As to why Breyer did not sign the majority opinion in Gratz, I can only guess that he had reasons for voting to strike down the system that were somewhat different or narrower than expressed by the majority opinion. It could be, for example, (I speculate) that he thought a point system was okay--even an automatic one--but that 20 points were too many. But the preferences in Grutter (which he of course voted to uphold) were also large, so his vote in Gratz is something of a mystery.

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The Chronicle of Education today reports on two studies (still unpublished) that were presented this week at a meeting of American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Douglas S. Massey, a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton, and Mary J. Fischer, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut,

examined longitudinal student data from 28 selective colleges in an attempt to determine whether any evidence supported two of the most common criticisms of race-conscious admissions policies. Those are the "mismatch hypothesis," which holds that such policies result in the admission of students who find themselves in over their heads academically, and the "stereotype-threat hypothesis," which holds that such policies stigmatize all minority students as academically subpar, thereby placing them under a form of psychological pressure that undermines their academic performance.

The two researchers sought to gauge how much weight each college gave to applicants' race or ethnicity by examining the difference between the average SAT scores of all students that they enrolled as freshmen in the fall of 1999 and the average SAT scores of the black and Hispanic members of that entering class. To try to measure how much of a role a particular student's race or ethnicity played in his or her admission, the researchers looked at the difference between that person's SAT score and the average for the entering class. (On average, black students' SAT scores were 131 points below the average for all students at the 28 colleges, while Hispanic students' SAT scores were 76 points below.)

The study found that those black and Hispanic students who had seemed to get the biggest break in admission actually tended to have slightly higher grade-point averages than other students, and were much less likely than other students to leave college. Their level of satisfaction with college was about the same as that of other students....

When all black and Hispanic students at an institution were examined collectively, however, evidence of "stereotype threat" emerged. The more a college used affirmative action, the lower were the grade-point averages of its minority students, and the more likely such students were to leave college and express dissatisfaction with their college experience. The negative correlation between a college's commitment to affirmative action and the grade-point averages of its black and Hispanic students grew stronger the longer the students were in college, suggesting that the effects of "stereotype threat" mounted as the students became more accustomed to the campus culture.

"Affirmative-action programs don't set minority students up to fail," Mr. Massey said on Monday in an interview....

Mr. Massey said that, on balance, the positive effects of affirmative action on minority students outweighed the negative. Moreover, he said, colleges have found ways to counter the effects of "stereotype threat," by, for example, hiring more minority faculty members.

First, as I've had occasion to observe here before, comparing "the average SAT scores of all students that ... enrolled as freshmen in the fall of 1999 and the average SAT scores of the black and Hispanic members of that entering class" minimizes the degree of preference awarded because the blacks and Hispanics were themselves members of the entering class. The more revealing comparison would have been between the scores of the blacks and Hispanics and the scores of those students (whites, Asians, others) not awarded any preference.

Second, if the grades of individual preferees increased with the amount of preference they received, why would the composite grades of all preferees go down as the amount of preference the school extended went up?

Third, how does Prof. Massey know that the explanation for the lower grades is "stereotype threat"?

Finally, on what evidence does Prof. Massey rely when he concludes "that, on balance, the positive effects of affirmative action on minority students outweighed the negative"? Did he find these "positive effects" in his study, or is it a conclusion not based on his survey results? Does he count the cost of compromising, or undermining, the principle that people should be treated without regard to race as a negative effect?

The second study, by Marta Tienda, a professor of sociology and public policy at Princeton, and Sunny Niu, a research associate in Princeton's Office of Population Research, found that black and Hispanic students who attended integrated high schools in Texas were less likely to graduate in the top 10% of their class than those who attended minority-dominated schools, and that they were less likely to attend a selective college.

The researchers found, however, that the differences between high schools disappeared when the economic conditions of the students were taken into account, suggesting that it is the effects of high concentrations of poverty in minority high schools, rather than racism, that keeps many of their top graduates from enrolling in selective colleges.

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Responding to the critics of the critics of Harvard president Larry Summers, i.e., those who claim that political correctness has silenced debate at Harvard and elsewhere, a father and his two daughters, all of whom have math-related advanced degrees from Harvard, attempt to explain "How Summers Offended" in today's Washington Post.

Did the media treat Summers's critics fairly? We are Harvard-educated mathematical scientists and university educators -- a father and two daughters -- and we think not.

Academic freedom does not protect any professor from having his or her ideas scrutinized. And in this case Summers's comments, while provocative, sorely misrepresented the research. Girls' scores on standardized tests have consistently improved with strides against discrimination and social bias. This fact alone counters the notion that the differences are "innate." Standardized educational tests such as the SAT were, in fact, not designed to measure innate differences, and overwhelming research points to social phenomena as underlying the differences in scores between the sexes. If innate differences play a role in SAT scores, how do we explain the mathematics scores in countries such as Iceland, where girls outshine boys on standardized international and national exams?

The real reason Summers's comments offended ... is because they were made in the context of a history of discrimination that has hurt scientific and mathematical progress immeasurably. And unfortunately, Harvard is a part of this history....

Summers's remarks offended because they echoed the sex biases with which we grew up -- and whose psychological consequences we strive daily to counter in our educational work. These were biases that Harvard helped to perpetuate....

In short, what the father and daughters team has done here is to confirm and highlight what we Summers critics critics have been saying all along: that in the view of many Summers critics any discussion of comparative math abilities is illegitimate and beyond the pale because it (inevitably) occurs "in the context of a history of discrimination."

_______________

Now, since so much of their essay was personal and anecdotal, let me conclude with a personal anecdote (or two). (And, for once, this will not involve my math-and-science-talented daughter.) A number of years ago, when I still had many feminist friends, one of them sent me a draft of an essay criticizing Carol Gilligan's influential book, In A Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (Harvard, 1982). Her essay was cogent and well-written, but I was disturbed, as I told her, that the substance of her critique was not that Gilligan's argument (that women and men follow different paths of moral development) was wrong because it was wrong, but that it was wrong because its acceptance might place an obstacle in my friend's preferred path to women's equality. Pointing out the potentially negative effects of an interpretation, I argued (to no avail), was not the same as arguing that the interpretation was wrong.

I didn't realize it at the time of this correspondence with my friend, but because of my long involvement in the EEOC v. Sears case (discussed at length here) I soon came to realize, in spades, that politically engaged scholarship, or political commentary about scholarship, often (but certainly not always) substitutes instrumental for scholarly standards: in this mode, it asks not whether a particular argument or interpretation is true or persuasive but rather whether or not it is Good For the Jews or Blacks or Women or .... In Sears, for example, politically engaged historians worked up a froth arguing that even if it were true (even if?!) that very, very few female job applicants were qualified, available, and interested in, say, installing home heating and cooling systems, no historian should say so in public.

For me, the Summers debate is déjà vu all over again.

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I have had far too many occasions to call attention to the racially abrasive rhetoric and behavior of M. Rick Turner, the Dean Of All Things Black at the University of Virginia (most recently, here, when he lambasted a black fraternity for withdrawing from the Black Fraternity Council to join the Inter-Fraternity Council).

Over the past several days two UVa students, one a fourth year (UVa doesn't have freshmen, sophomores, etc.; it has first years, second years ... , just as it has Grounds instead of a campus) and one a law student, have called my attention to a remarkable letter recently published in the Cavalier Daily. Here's an excerpt:

It is virtually unknown that in a meeting with the members of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc. to resolve rumors and disagreements surrounding their move to the Inter-Fraternity Council, Turner reportedly called the young black students names such as "Uncle Toms," and in a later incident without Alphas present referred to them as "house niggers."

Racism and terror towards minorities of all kinds are sadly a part of this country and the University's distressing history. Regrettably, as members within the University community act to mend the injuries sustained to our psyches and our spirits, there still exist a few who continue to weaken these deeds, even if inadvertently. Turner's approach does not effectively brace his aim of creating a bettered racial climate. This is not to say that a stalwart approach is always wrong. However, constant hostility in concert with substandard behavior, such as insulting or excluding students based upon race, is simply unprofessional.

UPDATE [26 Feb. 3:30PM]

Eric Wang, who has been quite critical of Dean Turner, has sent an email pointing out that Turner has stated that he "would never disrespect" students (or at least black students) by referring to them with racial epithets. That is a constraint that the good dean apparently does not feel with regard to whites, or at least to whites at UVa and in Charlottesville, whom he has recently called Ku Klux Klan members.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 11:49 AM | Permalink | Say What? (44) | TrackBacks (0)

Dodd Harris asks a better question on Ipse Dixit:

Howard Dean is already doing everything in his power to prove that his Chairmanship of the DNC will be an even greater gift to the Republican Party than the tenure of Terry "GOP Mole" McAuliffe's was:

"You think the Republican National Committee could get this many people of color in a single room? Only if they had the hotel staff in here." - Howard Dean, speaking to the Congressional Black Caucus, 11 February 2004

Here's a better question: Do you think a Republican could suggest in any public forum, much less in front of the Congressional Black Caucus, that the "hired help" tend to be black and get away with it?

Posted by John Rosenberg at 7:38 PM | Permalink | Say What? (14) | TrackBacks (0)

A reader has alerted me to a recent article by Tom Elliott, an editor of the New York Sun editorial page, that has perceptive things to say contrasting the comedy (black comedy?) of current black leadership with the seriousness of some current black comedy.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 3:20 PM | Permalink | Say What? (4) | TrackBacks (0)

As everyone knows, the Richard Sander article (now published, here) has gotten lots of attention, including by me here (with links to my earlier comments). Now comes Curtis Crawford, proprietor of debatingracialpreferences.org and, like Sander, a generally liberal Democrat who opposes racial preferences, who has posted two interesting criticisms of Sander on a National Association of Scholars forum.

Most criticisms of Sander come from critics who are hell-bent to defend preferences. Not so with Crawford, which adds to the interest of his critique.

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One of the more humorous fictions in our current racial debates is the claim of the preferentialists that they oppose quotas. A not insignificant problem with this claim is that examples of liberals actually opposing quotas are so hard to find.

I suppose reasonable people can debate whether, say, the University of Michigan law school's unerring ability to form entering classes that contain around 12% minorities reflects a quota or not, but minority set-aside programs don't contain even this much ambiguity.

And here's another one, sent to me by a friendly reader in Iowa. House File 363 is a bill being considered by the Iowa General Assembly. If I made this up I'd be accused of conjuring up a reductio ad absurdum straw man:

An Act providing for the appointment of minorities to appointive boards, commissions, committees and councils.

BE IT ENACTED BY THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE STATE OF IOWA:

Section 1. NEW SECTION. 69.16B MINORITY REPRESENTATION. All appointive boards, commissions, committees, and councils of the state established by the Code if not otherwise provided by law shall, in the aggregate, provide for minority representation. A person shall not be appointed or reappointed to any board, commission, committee, or council established by the Code if that appointment or reappointment would cause the percentage of total members of all boards, commissions, committees, and councils subject to this section, of a particular minority, to be less than the percentage of that minority of the total population of the state based upon the most recent federal decennial census. All appointing authorities of boards, commissions, committees, and councils subject to this section shall consult with one another to avoid a violation of this section.....

EXPLANATION
This bill provides that all appointive boards, commissions,
committees, and councils established by the Code shall provide
for minority representation. The bill provides that no person
shall be appointed to any board, commission, committee, or
council if that appointment would cause the percentage of
total members of all boards, commissions, committees, and
councils to be less than the percentage of that particular
minority of the population of the state based upon the last
census. A minority person means an individual who is a Black,
Hispanic, Asian or Pacific Islander, American Indian, or
Alaskan native American.

This proposal is such a slow, fat pitch that whacking it wouldn't be any fun. Besides, you don't need me to make the obvious 14th Amendment argument (Yes, Iowa, there still is a 14th Amendment, despite the fact that some Supreme Court justices frequently ignore it), or to ask whether a blond Argentinean is "Hispanic" even if both his father's and mother's families are Italian. I won't even ask why Arabs (not to mention Muslims) are not regarded as a minority in Iowa.

But there is something I can't avoid asking, and that is: what, precisely, would this bill require? Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to say that no one can be appointed to any state board, etc., if doing so would result in the representation of any official minority group on the total of all such boards would be reduced to a level below its representation in the population of the state. Right?

Let's assume, then, as the authors of this legislation obviously do, that the proper, natural state of things is that each official minority group is proportionately represented among the totality of all board, etc., members. Now imagine that a Filipino-American resigns from, say, the Board of Corn Quality. That person could not be replaced with a black, for doing so would leave the "Asian or Pacific Islander" minority group illegally underrepresented. Every Hispanic vacancy would have to filled by another Hispanic. Etc.

And, although we all know government never grows, what if some crisis led to the creation of a new board or commission? No problem ... so long as the new board consists of 5 members (or 6, if there is to be a white member) ... and all were appointed at the same time.

Finally, if proportional representation is so important, why should it be limited to appointed members of state boards, commissions, etc.? Why not all state employees (college faculty, state general assembly and senate staffs, etc., etc.), and even the employees of all organizations that receive any state aid or subsidy?

My first thought was that this proposal can't be serious, but my last is that, after all, this is Iowa ... the state that gave us John Kerry.

UPDATE [19 Feb. 9:30AM]

Here's another problem. The 2000 census reported a total of 8,989 American Indians or Alaska natives in Iowa, 0.3% of the population. I don't know how members there are on all the official boards, commissions, etc., in Iowa, but let's assume there are a thousand. To comply with this the requirements of this bill, 30 3 American Indians or Alaska Natives would have to be appointed to (and remain on) these boards. [Actually, as an astute commenter observed, that number should be 3, not 30. Now everyone can see why I didn't pursue a career in math or science.]

No problem, you may think. That number shouldn't be too hard to find, you tell yourself. But wait; not so fast! [Warning! All you grammarphobes: stop reading now.] Go back and read the bill quoted above and prepare for a quiz.

Quiz: How many minority groups have a right to representation on state boards?

You're right: Five. That's because of the power of the serial comma, discussed at length here. "American Indian" is one of those five groups, and "Alaska native American" is another. Whether or not this last group includes white people born in Alaska may be open to question, but in the spirit of this bill let's assume that it does not (or at least was not intended to; room for lawyerly maneuvering remains).

So, how many American Indians must be on the boards, and how many Alaskan Indians, Aleuts, or whatever? I can't tell from the census numbers in the site I've linked. Do Iowa legislators know of other, more precise numbers? In fact, I wonder if there are any Aleuts in Iowa. Before voting on this bill, Iowa legislators should wonder as well.

But suppose the prairie preferentialists in the Iowa legislature say "oops" and take out the comma after "American Indian," thus lumping American Indian and "Alaskan native American" into one group. That solves the problem, right? I'm not so sure. Let's say there are some Aleuts in Iowa, but all 30 3 appointees are American Indians. Don't you think the NAACA (National Association for the Advancement of Aleuts) would complain, and wouldn't many preferentialists regard their complaint as just?

Somewhat more realistically, what if all 30 3 American Indian appointees were selected from the same tribe? That wouldn't seem to violate the letter of the bill, but you can bet there would be hell to pay. Just as there would be if all "Asian" appointees were Japanese, or Korean, or Chinese, or even if they were only "disproportionately" so.

Pass this bill, Iowa, and have fun. The rest of us certainly will as we watch.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 1:13 AM | Permalink | Say What? (15) | TrackBacks (0)

All-seeing reader Fred Ray sends word of a down and dirty food fight at Rutgers over what Fred has termed "homophobic hoagies." (Fred's links: here and here.) As it happens, another loyal and perceptive reader who is quite familiar with Rutgers sent the same word (with links to here, here, and here) at about the same time, with the following on the scene comments:

Rutgers is famed far and wide for an assortment of so-called “grease trucks” on campus—several food purveyors open at all hours dishing out food that is very bad for your health, but beloved of the college crowd, especially when drunk at 3 AM. Several years back a guy named Darrell wanted a sandwich with as many bad things possible on it—mozzarella sticks, french fries, chicken fingers, all on a sandwich. The Fat Darrell was born, and the high cholesterol treat was recently named #1 sandwich by the high-testosterone Maxim magazine, beloved of post-adolescent males.

The grease trucks thought they were on to a good thing, so they kept up the trend. A Filipino kid would ask for a sandwich with his own set of greasy ingredients, and the Fat Filipino would be born. And on to the Fat Bitch, the Fat Dyke, and so forth.

This proceeded just fine till recently, when the LGB&T group complained to the university. The trucks are on university land and the university employed language in the lease (requiring that students be treated with respect) to require a number of the Fat designations to be covered over with tape, under penalty of termination of lease. Of course, it is the big discussion on campus at the moment.

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Martin Peretz, the editor in chief of The New Republic, has added to the growing volume of incisive criticism of liberalism by liberals in a thoughtful TNR essay, Not Much Left. His main point, not surprisingly, is that liberalism has run out of idea, that it is "bookless," in the snooty term John Kenneth Galbraith used to describe conservatism in the early 1960s.

Along the way Peretz has some interesting things to say about race, such as his complaint that among liberals "the usual hustlers are still cheered."

Jesse Jackson is still paid off, mostly not to make trouble. The biggest insult to our black fellow citizens was the deference paid to Al Sharpton during the campaign....

This patronizing attitude is proof positive that, as deep as the social and economic gains have been among African Americans, many liberals prefer to maintain their own time-honored patronizing position vis-à-vis "the other," the needy. This is, frankly, in sharp contrast to President Bush, who seems not to be impeded by race difference (and gender difference) in his appointments and among his friends. Maybe it is just a generational thing, and, if it is that, it is also a good thing. But he may be the first president who apparently does not see individual people in racial categories or sex categories. White or black, woman or man, just as long as you're a conservative. That is also an expression of liberation from bias.

And yet it seems to me that Peretz himself avoids the central weakness of contemporary liberalism's approach to race: its internal conflicts and confusion about the very meaning of racial equality. Does equality require "parity," so that "disparity" is proof of discrimination? Thus I think Peretz is not only avoiding the question but actually wrong when he writes:

You can easily rouse a crowd when you get it to sing, "We Shall Overcome." One of the tropes that trips off the tongues of American liberals is the civil rights theme of the '60s....

One of the legacies of the '60s is liberal idealism about race. But that discussion has grown particularly outmoded in the Democratic Party.

It's not that the "civil rights theme of the '60s" is a trope that trips off the tongues of liberals but rather that liberal troops trip over the theme of colorblind racial equality, a theme whose absence from their rhetoric has left a gaping hole in the contemporary liberal vision.

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It's almost (but not quite) enough to make you feel sorry for college admissions officers. They thought Grutter gave them a free hand to continue discriminating only to find that they must continue to take care to disguise the weight they assign to race. And now, adding insult to injury, comes news, in the form of a report from the American Council on Education, that the racial group that has experienced the most dramatic gains in college attendance over the past decade is ... the group that refuses to identify its race on application forms! From 1991 to 2001 the number of such students increased over 100%, to 938,000, making them the third largest. They now outnumber Asians (937,000).

Many students, especially student leaders, seem perplexed. At the University of Virginia, for example, Student Council President Noah Sullivan said, "It's hard to say whether that's a good thing or a bad thing." Some think minimizing race is a Good Thing; others worry that it would erode the racial and ethnic identity that is so central to today's student life. Often the same student thinks both things:

"Maybe just they just want to get credit for what they've done and not who they are," Latino Student Union President Angie Ferrero said.

Ferrero also suggested that students may be afraid of discrimination in admissions decisions.

But wait. Preferentialists also justify preferences by arguing that America remains a thoroughly racist society, permeated with still-rampant discrimination. If that is really the case, why would you want to make it easier to discriminate against you by identifying yourself by race?

Or how about this: wouldn't it be reasonable to require everyone who wants to receive racial preference to prove racial identity? I mean, we wouldn't give a veterans preference to someone without evidence that he or she really is a veteran. Requiring black arm bands may be going too far, but it does seem to be in the same race-is-central spirit.

Looked at in that light, maybe all those students who are voting against racialism by refusing to identify themselves by race are our modern equivalent of the King of Denmark: when the Nazis ordered all Jews in Denmark to wear yellow arm bands, the King wore one himself, as did vast numbers of non-Jewish Danes in protest.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 5:04 PM | Permalink | Say What? (24) | TrackBacks (0)

"One of the dirty little secrets of racial preferences, now beginning to leak out," I wrote last June,

is not only that most of the beneficiaries are middle class or actually rich -- that has been known if not advertised for a good while -- but that most are not even American, or if they are American they are of very recent origin.

Researchers at Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania who have been studying the achievement of minority students at 28 selective colleges and universities (including theirs, as well as Yale, Columbia, Duke and the University of California at Berkeley), found that 41 percent of the black students identified themselves as immigrants, as children of immigrants or as mixed race.

Darity and the rest of the panelists agreed ethnic diversity of blacks should probably not be ignored, as it is very problematic to lump various ethnicities into one category.

Junior Wintta Woldemariam expressed annoyance at the fact that many universities—including Duke—do not allow black applicants to convey their heritage to the same extent as other races. “Duke doesn’t care what kind of black you are—there is only one box to check,” she said.

On the other hand, perhaps these critics are missing the point. Although it is certainly true that not all blacks are the same (just as Japanese and Chinese and Koreans are not the same and Cherokees and Apaches are not the same), they actually are all the same in their ability to provide "diversity" to others, which is the current, Sandra-sanctioned justification for racial and ethnic preferences.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 5:56 PM | Permalink | Say What? (10) | TrackBacks (1)

Paul Campos, a law professor at the University of Colorado, supports affirmative action "in principle." (Hat Tip to InstaPundit) His parents immigrated from Mexico; he spoke no English when he began school; and he is "someone of generally liberal political inclinations."

Nevertheless, he recognizes that Ward Churchill represents something far more serious than a case of an individual scam artist engaging in academic fraud.

The University of Colorado hired Churchill onto its faculty because he claimed to be an American Indian. Anyone who has the slightest familiarity with research universities can glance at his résumé and state this with something close to complete confidence.

Churchill thus represents the reductio ad absurdum of the contemporary university's willingness to subordinate all other values to affirmative action. When such a grotesque fraud - a white man pretending to be an Indian, an intellectual charlatan spewing polemical garbage festooned with phony footnotes, a shameless demagogue fabricating imaginary historical incidents to justify his pathological hatreds, an apparent plagiarist who steals and distorts the work of real scholars - manages to scam his way into a full professorship at what is still a serious research university, we know the practice of affirmative action has hit rock bottom. Or at least we can hope so.

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I had intended to write something about eminent Yale law professor Bruce Ackerman's recent attempt to shoot down future Bush Supreme Court nominees, but Stuart Buck beat me to it.

At the heart of Ackerman's screed is his distinction between Good Conservatives (the traditional kind, the ones who frequently vote with liberals) and the new Bad Conservatives, who are "revolutionary."

There are two very different kinds of conservative. The worldly statesman, distrustful of large visions and focused on the prudent management of concrete problems has long been familiar. But Bush has more often relied on neo-conservatives with a very different temperament. They throw caution to the winds, assault the accumulated wisdom of the age, and insist on sweeping changes despite resistant facts. Law is a conservative profession, but it is not immune to the neo-con temptation. The question raised by the coming vacancies to the Supreme Court is whether American law will remain in conservative hands, or whether it will be captured by a neo-con vision of revolutionary change. The issue is not liberalism v. conservatism, but conservatism v. neo-conservatism.

By contrast, the Bad Conservatives are "extreme" -- "remarkably destructive" "radical rightists" who are attempting to promote a "[s]weeping constitutional revolution." They are in favor of "striking down laws protecting workers and the environment" and they support "the destruction of basic civil liberties...."

I don't think he likes them very much.

Ackerman is obviously correct to note that the Rehnquist/Scalia/Thomas strand of judicial conservatism is different from that of Justices Frankfurter or Harlan (the second) or O'Connor (if she, in fact, ever was a conservative in any meaningful sense). It is certainly his prerogative to disapprove of it, and even to urge Democrats to filibuster the nomination of any such conservatives in the future, even though his opposition seems to be grounded much more in policy than principle. For example:

The court has recently and most notably reaffirmed the use of well-crafted affirmative action programmes by a vote of five to four, and upheld new statutory restrictions on large political contributions by the same margin. These results will change with a further shift to the right: there will be no affirmative action, and there will be a dramatic cut-back on permissible controls over campaign slush-funds.

In my opinion there has been no more radical, revolutionary, or dramatic reversal in our intellectual or legal history than the liberals' rejection of their traditional commitment to the formerly core principle that everyone has a right to be treated without regard to race, religion, or ethnicity.

Classifications and distinctions based on race or color have no moral or legal validity in our society. They are contrary to our constitution and laws.

"There is no understandable factual basis for classification by race...."

• racial criteria are irrational, irrelevant, odious to our way of life and specifically proscribed under the Fourteenth Amendment (McLaurin v. Oklahoma, 1950)

• you cannot use race as a basis of classification (Oral argument, Briggs v. Elliott, 1952)

• you cannot use race as a basis of classification.... the Fourteenth Amendment compels the states to be color blind in exercising their power and authority.... race is an irrational basis for governmental action under our Constitution (Brown v. Board of Education)
  

There is no superior person by constitutional standards. A DeFunis who is white is entitled to no advantage by reason of that fact; nor is he subject to any disability, no matter what his race or color. Whatever his race, he had a constitutional right to have his application considered on its individual merits in a racially neutral manner. .... The key to the problem is consideration of such applications in a racially neutral way. .... The Equal Protection Clause commands the elimination of racial barriers, not their creation in order to satisfy our theory as to how society ought to be organized.

We cannot agree with the proposition that deprivation based upon race is subject to a less demanding standard of review under the Fourteenth Amendment if the race discriminated against is the majority rather than a minority ... and we do not hesitate to reject the notion that racial discrimination may be more easily justified against one race than another....

Regardless of its historical origin, the equal protection clause by its literal terms applies to "any person," and its lofty purpose, to secure equality of treatment to all, is incompatible with the premise that some races may be afforded a higher degree of protection against unequal treatment than others....

The divisive effect of such preferences needs no explication and raises serious doubts whether the advantages obtained by the few preferred are worth the inevitable cost to racial harmony. The overemphasis upon race as a criterion will undoubtedly be counterproductive: rewards and penalties, achievements and failures, are likely to be considered in a racial context through the school years and beyond. Pragmatic problems are certain to arise in identifying groups which should be preferred or in specifying their numbers, and preferences once established will be difficult to alter or abolish; human nature suggests a preferred minority will be no more willing than others to relinquish an advantage once it is bestowed. Perhaps most important, the principle that the Constitution sanctions racial discrimination against a race -- any race -- is a dangerous concept fraught with potential for misuse in situations which involve far less laudable objectives than are manifest in the present case....

To uphold the University would call for the sacrifice of principle for the sake of dubious expediency and would represent a retreat in the struggle to assure that each man and woman shall be judged on the basis of individual merit alone, a struggle which has only lately achieved success in removing legal barriers to racial equality. The safest course, the one most consistent with the fundamental interests of all races and with the design of the Constitution, is to hold, as we do, that the special admission program is unconstitutional because it violates the rights guaranteed to the majority by the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution.

The California Bakke ruling was as notable for who wrote it as for what it said. The author was Justice Stanley Mosk, "the last of the New Deal liberals in California public life," as Chronicle reporter Bob Egelko wrote when Mosk died two years ago at age 88. Named to the state Supreme Court in 1964 by Gov. Edmund G. (Pat) Brown, Mosk had been a leader in California Democratic politics and won nationwide renown on the court for rulings protecting the environment, consumers and tenants.

He proved that a stalwart liberal -- at least one who is true to his professed principles -- can oppose racial preferences without apology. "One of the central themes of Stanley's most important opinions -- and I think it can also be seen in his controversial opinion in the Bakke case -- is the transcendent importance he attached to simple fairness," said California appellate Justice Anthony Kline.

Arguably, no jurist in American history has been a stronger champion of civil rights.

ADDENDUM [Feb. 15]

As he promised, President Bush has announced that he is renominating 12 nominees for federal appeals courts who were blocked by Democrats last term, and the Democrats seem determined to continue their obstructionist tactis, as recommended by Professor Ackerman.

Sen. Harry Reid, the new Democratic Senate leader, complained that

We should not divert attention from other pressing issues facing this nation to re-debate the merits of nominees already found too extreme by this chamber.

Now, once again, the Democrats "have vowed to thwart Bush's nominees, whom they consider too conservative."

"Too conservative" for whom? For what? If judicial qualifications are to be reduced to how conservative or liberal the nominees are, perhaps we should just drop the charade of qualifications altogether and elect the judges.

The Democrats believe the views of all of these nominees on civil rights are "too conservative." Let's see, those would be the same views that the NAACP, all other civil rights activists, and all liberal Democrats themselves proclaimed until they abandoned racial neutrality for racial preferences in the 1970s. Who knew that all those civil rights supporters were so conservative back then....

Posted by John Rosenberg at 8:14 PM | Permalink | Say What? (24) | TrackBacks (1)

I have written earlier that Ward Churchill may have committed academic fraud in claiming that he was an American Indian.

Now comes Dave Kopel, in his column in the Rocky Mountain News, who reports that in 1994 Judith Albino, then president of Colorado University, stated that

CU lawyers were investigating the charges that Churchill had obtained his Indian Studies job by making a false claim about his ethnicity: "From our end, we need to determine if the position was designated for a Native American. And I can't answer that right now." [Hat Tip to InstaPundit]

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College Republicans at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte are sponsoring their third annual affirmative action bake sale.

It's actually a mock bake sale since the students don't really sell anything. Instead, they will be "pretending to sell cookies and brownies priced according to the buyer's race or gender."

Minority student organizations "say the mock sale is racist," and they are "angered that the university has refused to stop the event...."

Meanwhile, at the University of Mississippi, black law students are offered an education that costs 73% less than what other students must pay.

Currently, a 73 percent tuition scholarship exists for black resident students admitted to the school....

As a result of this scholarship, a resident black student paid about $2,044.04 last year, instead of the normal tuition rate of $7,570.50 a year other residents paid in tuition.

This is not a mock bake sale, but I suspect it does have some students steaming.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 2:13 AM | Permalink | Say What? (57) | TrackBacks (0)

College Republicans at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte are sponsoring their third annual affirmative action bake sale.

It's actually a mock bake sale since the students don't really sell anything. Instead, they will be "pretending to sell cookies and brownies priced according to the buyer's race or gender."

The outrage, however, is real. Minority student organizations "say the mock sale is racist," and they are "angered that the university has refused to stop the event...."

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It's late, and I'm having trouble figuring out whether this is funny or sad.

With Arctic-like winds whipping across campus, nearly 200 Eastern Michigan University students and their backers marched in support of affirmative action Thursday afternoon....

While EMU doesn't have an affirmative action policy - its total minority enrollment is 22.5 percent without one - it's important for the campus and its students to support the practice and back the University of Michigan, said Brandon Jessup, president of the NAACP student chapter at Eastern who organized the march.

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It's hard to "move on" as long as sleaze continues to churn in the Clintonian wake. The latest was discussed yesterday by the New York Times, but I believe the article completely missed the point.

The problem is that a large, glitzy, Hollywood fundraiser for Hillary Clinton in August 2000 was organized by an unsavory character with a criminal record. The NYT's take on this is revealed in the article's title, "Lesson of Clinton Fund-Raiser: Double-Check That Donor List." But the problem was not the donors; it was the organizer. In addition, the article emphasizes the recent indictment of Hillary's finance advisor for underreporting the proceeds from that event, but in the scheme (or rather, scheming) of things that question does not strike me as very interesting.

What is interesting is the tawdry picture of the Clintons as sleaze magnets rather inadvertently drawn by the article. First, the organizer and sponsor of the star-studded event was one Peter Paul, whose criminal record would have been readily revealed by a background check. What was Paul's interest in spending two mil on an event for the Clinton's? Guess.

Mr. Paul said he spent nearly $2 million of his own on the fund-raiser as a way to curry favor with Mr. Clinton, and photographs show him chatting with Mr. Clinton at a dinner table, having a discussion with Mrs. Clinton and striking poses for the camera with both of them.
....
Mr. Paul's past is certainly colorful. Two decades ago, he served 42 months in federal prison and his law license was suspended after he pleaded guilty to cocaine possession and trying to defraud the Cuban government out of $8.7 million in a complicated scheme involving coffee sales to the Soviet Union from Cuba.

[Paul] got involved in Democratic politics afterward, donating money at the suggestion of Aaron Tonken, also a fund-raiser, who told him that that would be a good way to raise the profile of his company, according to Mr. Paul and his legal representatives at Judicial Watch, a conservative legal group that has dogged the Clintons for years and has been representing Mr. Paul. (Among the ideas Mr. Paul had was trying to get Mr. Clinton to serve on the board of his company, he said.)

It was then that Mr. Paul claims he began having discussions with Democratic operatives close to the Clintons, including Mr. Rosen, about how to get Mr. Clinton to help bolster the image of Stan Lee Media after he left office.

Mr. Paul claims that he was eventually told by Mr. Rosen and Jim Levin, a former Chicago strip club owner who was a major Clinton donor, that the best way to win favor with Mr. Clinton was to raise money for Mrs. Clinton's Senate campaign in New York. The idea for the fund-raiser was subsequently born.

"My motivation had nothing to do with getting Hillary elected senator," Mr. Paul said the other day in an interview from his home in North Carolina, where he is under house arrest in a separate case. "I could care less about that. My motivation was to do this as a favor to Bill to demonstrate my good faith."

"It was the most spectacular event that I organized in my life," Mr. Tonken recalled in a telephone interview from federal prison, where he is serving a sentence for defrauding donors of charity events he organized. "I thought if I could pull this event off, it would be the highlight of my career."

Perhaps Paul and Tonken and Rosen, if he's convicted, can look forward (at least after additional contributions) to a pardon from Hillary some time after 2008.

Grammatical Addendum

Those of you who are allergic to discussions of the serial comma should read no further.

The NYT article discussed above notes that

The guest list reflected the glitter of the occasion: Cher, Diana Ross, Brad Pitt and Patti LaBelle, to name just a few

Rules are so much fun when you have to think about them upon each application. But maybe NYT editors have nothing better to do.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 2:38 PM | Permalink | Say What? (2) | TrackBacks (1)

In his column yesterday Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne criticized Republicans for hypocritically playing the race card.

His evidence? Republican criticism of Democrats for voting against minority nominees such as Clarence Thomas, Miguel Estrada, and most recently Alberto Gonzales.

"Every Hispanic in America is watching," Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch declared ominously as most Senate Democrats voted last week to oppose the nomination of Alberto Gonzales as attorney general.

What was the senator from Utah implying? Hatch and everyone else knew perfectly well that Democrats voted against the new attorney general not because of his ethnicity but because they wanted to hold Gonzales and the White House he served accountable for appalling policies that led to the mistreatment of prisoners. But playing ethnic politics is more profitable for Republicans than arguing about torture, so Hatch let it rip.

For example, Dionne quotes House Democratic Caucus Chairman Bob Menendez replying to Republican criticism of Democratic opposition to Miguel Estrada:

"Republicans and Senator Hatch in particular can't have it both ways," Menendez said at the time. "They can't blatantly call for the end of affirmative action by characterizing it as a quota system while, at the same time, demanding that we support all Hispanic nominees simply because they are Hispanic."

There is also a serious omission from Dionne's discussion of the debate over the nomination of Miguel Estrada. He writes that

Just a couple of years ago, Democrats who opposed the nomination of Miguel Estrada to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit were accused of being anti-Hispanic in almost exactly the same terms invoked last week in the Gonzales battle.

To reject Estrada, said Sen. Charles Grassley, the normally mild-spoken Iowa Republican, "would be to shut the door on the American dream of Hispanic Americans everywhere." Estrada, of course, was one of several of President Bush's judicial nominees opposed by Democrats largely on philosophical (or, if you prefer, ideological) grounds.

The content of the Democratic memos is, indeed, offensive. In memos to Sens. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) and Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), staffers announce that nominee Miguel Estrada is "especially dangerous because he has a minimal paper trail, he is Latino, and the White House seems to be grooming him for a Supreme Court appointment." [Emphasis added]

Posted by John Rosenberg at 1:30 AM | Permalink | Say What? (17) | TrackBacks (0)

On numerous occasions here I have discussed M. Rick Turner, the University of Virginia's Dean of all Things Black (and Only Black -- as Cavalier Daily columnist Eric Wang pointed out here, he once kicked a Hispanic student out of a meeting dubbed "A Conversation with Black Men." Also discussed here. Turner apologized -- not for kicking the student out, but for not making the exclusionary policy clearer.) I can't cite of these references here (just search the site for "Turner), but here he was using a university list server to urge all black students to vote for a black candidate for a student government office. Here (I cite another Eric Wang column), at the annual "Fall Fling," a university recruiting effort limited to blacks, Turner ominously warned parents that "You cannot leave your children at a predominantly white college [without programs like the Office of African American Affairs], otherwise you'll see results you don't want to see." Here, responding to a study showing white males are more likely to be binge drinkers, the good dean observed that "African-American students do not have to drink in order to have a good time." Presumably whites do.

That's enough cites; you get the idea. And true to form DOATB (Dean of All Things Black) Turner is still at it. Last week, during his second "State of African American Affairs" speech at the UVa Rotunda, Turner attributed all criticism of Charlottesville school superintendent Scottie Griffin to "racism and sexism."

“I don’t think white people in Charlottesville will do anything for black folks,” Turner said, although he qualified the remark later, saying that some whites do care about the racial academic achievement gap.

In Turner's view, Mr. Jefferson's university is awash in discrimination.

Turner drew attention to classified staff, particularly those who work for the UVa Medical Center, facilities management, housing and dining services.

“Blatant discrimination” is being practiced in those departments, Turner said....

Today's Cavalier Daily reports that Turner has taken to condemning the recent decision by U.Va.'s chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha, an African-American fraternity, to leave the "Black Fraternity Council" and join the non-racial "Inter-Fraternity Council."

Turner's latest conduct further confirms what the U.Va. community has known all along: Turner wants segregation now, segregation forever.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 4:53 PM | Permalink | Say What? (34) | TrackBacks (0)

Those of you who are grammar freaks (my condolences to you) may want to take a look at the UPDATE I've just added to my post on the serial comma.

(If anyone feels moved to comment, please comment on the main post below, not this one.)

Posted by John Rosenberg at 3:39 PM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The editors of the Washington Post are shocked! Yes, shocked! that right there in River City that the Minority Business Enterprise officer of the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission (WSSC), i.e., the person whose job is to promote minority contracting, is awarding contracts on the basis of race! Would you believe it!

Last week WSSC moved to fire its chief minority business officer, Shaaron W. Phillips, who has held her position since 2000. In one instance, a contract to procure a crucial chemical additive was delayed because Ms. Phillips was pushing for the inclusion of black-owned subcontractors; as the deal was structured, however, they would do no work. In another, the utility is facing a $1.5 million expenditure to catch up on routine maintenance because Ms. Phillips held up a contract for a white-owned firm that was unable to find a minority-owned subcontractor....

By the account of her superiors, Ms. Phillips is a divisive influence, but the lessons that arise from her advocacy on behalf of minority-owned businesses are broader. Procurement officials should be prodded to seek out qualified, competent firms that may have been excluded from insiders' networks on the basis of race. But Ms. Phillips's activities suggest that she was operating in the absence of rules requiring businesslike operations by WSSC's minority business office

Maybe the same substance as the managers of the WSSC, who describe their minority business enterprise program as

designed to ensure that small, local, and minority firms are afforded the opportunity to participate in contracting opportunities....

We strongly encourage small and minority firms to participate in construction contracting opportunities. We also encourage prime contractors in our Construction area, to consider using small and minority firms when subcontracting.

The utility does not have a specific goal, but minority participation between 20 and 28 percent is required for many types of contracts.

Some WSSC managers also have blamed Phillips's office for obstructing maintenance of an aging water and sewer system. In 2002, when a white-owned company that provided regular pipe maintenance was unable to find a qualified minority firm for subcontracting, as required by contract, the minority business office refused to waive the requirement. No contract has been awarded, records show. It will cost an additional $1.5 million for the utility to catch up on that maintenance, officials estimate.

In February, according to agency managers, the minority business office delayed the purchase of a key chemical additive, putting public safety at risk. For several years, WSSC obtained the chemical from the same low bidder, Delta Chemical Co., a woman-owned firm in Baltimore.

Delta had been unable to find qualified minority truckers in the past, but had been excused from the requirement....

Posted by John Rosenberg at 9:36 PM | Permalink | Say What? (11) | TrackBacks (1)

I'm referring, of course, to the newly notorious University of Colorado professor,Ward Churchill, who has compared American 9/11 victims to "little Eichmanns." Today Drudge points to a fascinating article in the Rocky Mountain News presenting evidence that, contrary to his claim to be a member of the United Keetoowah Band Cherokee tribe of Oklahoma, Churchill in fact has no Indian background.

"He's not in the database at all and is not a member of the Keetoowah," said Georgia Mauldin, the tribal clerk in Tahlequah, Okla.

In his books and articles, Churchill has described himself as a member of the Keetoowah Cherokee tribe in Oklahoma. In past interviews, he's claimed to be one-sixteenth Cherokee.

But the Keetoowah say that's not true.
....

"For so long it was whispered on campus that he really isn't an Indian," said Jodi Rave, who studied journalism at CU. "Here you had the director of the Indian studies program and he's not an Indian."

Rave is a Mandan-Hidatsa Indian originally from North Dakota. Today, she is a reporter and columnist with the Missoulian newspaper in Missoula, Mont. She was recently a fellow in the prestigious Nieman program for journalists at Harvard University.

In one of her journalism classes at CU, Rave was assigned to write a profile, and she decided to profile Churchill.

"To have somebody of that stature masquerading as an Indian was intriguing to me," Rave said. "On two separate days I asked him questions. I was up-front in asking him questions (about his background)."

Rave says she discovered that Churchill had enrolled in the Keetoowah tribe under a program initiated by a former tribal chairman that let almost anyone sign up. She says the Keetoowah later discontinued that program and disenrolled the people who had joined under it.

When her article came out, Rave says Churchill was furious and insisted that he did have American Indian lineage.

"He called me and said, 'Jodi Rave, this is your professor and I need to talk to you right away.' He was surprised I had a story published that called into question his identity."

He also defended his American Indian background and said her story was unfair.

Rave said she was enrolled in one of Churchill's classes when the article came out, and her grade went from an A to a C-minus.

Apparently there is an effort underway in Colorado to fire Churchill because of his outrageous comments, and there is a corresponding movement to defend him on academic freedom grounds. (See InstaPundit's take here, with some links.) I'm sympathetic to the academic freedom arguments, but what if Churchill has in fact lied about himself to and in the university, and punished students who pointed that out?

Moreover, what if part of Churchill's success at CU has been based on the rage for "diversity," that is, on Churchill's assertion that he was an ethnic minority? Is this sort of ethnic fraud (if the accusations are true) any less punishable than companies falsely claiming they are minority-owned when they are not? Indeed, shouldn't advocates of "diversity" be among the most outraged by impersonation of this sort?

Since "diversity" trumps the 14th Amendment's equal protection, perhaps "faux diversity" trumps academic freedom protections.

UPDATE

Churchill's Cherokee-ness is the same as ... Bill Clinton's.

The former chairman of the Keetoowah band of Cherokee Indians says University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill was given an honorary membership that required no proof of Cherokee heritage.

John Ross led the tribe for several years in the 1990s. He says the Keetoowah established an "associate member" program to recognize friends of the tribe.

"If somebody helped out in a certain way, to honor them they'd give them an associate membership," Ross said Thursday. "There were 300 or 400 associate members."

Former President Clinton also was given an honorary membership in the tribe.
....

Many non-Indians are now claiming Cherokee ancestry, said Richard Allen, a policy analyst with the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma. The Keetoowah are a small offshoot of the much larger Cherokee Nation.

Allen has worked for the Cherokee Nation for more than 20 years. He said he has followed Churchill's career for much of that time.

"When it comes to Churchill, I've always thought he was a wannabe Indian," Allen said. "His history is a little bit like Forrest Gump."

Posted by John Rosenberg at 7:07 PM | Permalink | Say What? (39) | TrackBacks (1)

Most of the post-election angst about problems in voting has been concerned with a few Democratic counties in Ohio that had problems supplying ballots to presumably Democratic voters. The problems in Wisconsin, however, seem more serious.

First, there was the unfortunate tire-slashing: five Democratic activists who were on the Kerry campaign payroll, including the sons of a Congressman and a former acting mayor of Milwaukee, have been indicted for slashing the tires of 25 cars the Republicans had rented to take people to the polls.

In addition, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, which has published a series of articles on voting problems in Milwaukee [here's an example], uncovered some 8300 more votes were counted in Milwaukee than there were voters on the rolls. (Kerry won the state by about 11,000 votes.)

Record-keeping surrounding the Nov. 2 presidential election in Milwaukee is so flawed that in 17 wards there were at least 100 more votes recorded than people listed by the city as voting there. Some sites show huge vote gaps 17 wards have at least 100 more votes than voters; In two wards, one on the south side and one on the north side, the gap is more than 500, with fewer than half the votes cast in each ward accounted for in the city's computer system, a Journal Sentinel review has found.

Such gaps were present at different levels in nearly all of the city wards
and could hamper the investigation launched last week by federal and local
authorities into possible voter fraud by giving an incomplete or inaccurate
picture of who actually voted.

"The way to prevent fraud is more and better poll workers," said Larry Marx, co-executive director of Wisconsin Citizen Action. "We want to make it easier to vote and harder to cheat. The photo ID bill makes it harder to vote and harder to cheat."

The University of Wisconsin, for example, requires all undergraduate applicants to take tests that in turn require the presentation of a photo ID (the SAT requirement is here, ACT here). Many departments there require graduate applicants to take the Graduate Record Exam, which, as I discussed here, requires a government-issued photo ID (drivers license, state ID card, passport, whatever). Virginia, as I noted by contrast, did not require any ID, photo or otherwise, when my daughter registered to vote (though she did have to sign a form giving her address, age, etc.)

Do Democrats in Wisconsin (and elsewhere) really believe that voting fraud is a less serious matter than freshman fraud?

Posted by John Rosenberg at 10:18 AM | Permalink | Say What? (55) | TrackBacks (1)

One of the mixed race South African yachtsmen described in the New York Times article I discussed in the post immediately below

hung with gangs and watched men die on the streets. When he was 8 a classmate stabbed him. When he was 14 he was arrested for beating a high-school teacher.

Today, 19-year-old Marcello Burricks helps trim the mainsail on a 25meter racing yacht in this city's stunning Table Bay. The only people he wants to beat are Larry Ellison, Ernesto Bertarelli and a host of other billionaires in the next America's Cup.

In Chapter One of their indispensable little book, THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE, Strunk and White thought the serial comma so important that it was Rule No. 2 of their "elementary rules of usage," stated in their customary succinct style:

In a series of three or more terms with a single conjunction, use a comma after each term except the last.

When you are writing about a series of things, the serial comma is necessary before the final "and": I'm bringing favors, gifts, cake, and ice cream to the party. Newspapers are the worst offenders in the serial comma department; back in the mists of prehistory (meaning about forty years ago), leaving off that final comma saved a tiny bit of space, work, and resources (those little lead slugs they used to use), and every bit of saving is a good bit of savings, newspapermen figured. However, leaving out that last comma FREQUENTLY leads to confusion; you'll frequently see idiocies in the newspaper like Bids were submitted by John Brown, Jane Smith, Laird, Vickers and Harland and Wolff or The smoothness of the satin, the silky texture of the mink and the rugged burlap. Only one exception is allowable: many businesses don't bother with the last comma (as in the law firm Dewey, Cheatem & Howe). Call that business whatever its founders want(ed) it to be called.

Some people approach rules, principles, propositions the same way they approach punctuation: they grab a handful of commas, for example, and throw them at the page, perhaps arranging them a bit afterward in an artful pattern. Others see punctuation exclusively as an aid to clarity, and if clarity is assured they believe proper punctuation really isn't very important. Still others think grammatical rules are sacrosanct even where clarity is not an issue. They are likely to attribute the decline of western civilization to the increasing tendency to ignore the serial comma rule. That's the rule that says in a series of three or more items -- a, b, and c -- the "and" must be preceded by a comma. (This theory has the added virtue of laying a good deal of blame for our problems at the feet of newspapers, whose narrow columns led editors to drop the serial comma to save space.)

Consider his example,

In the following year he will specialize in gynecology, immunology, orthopedics or diseases of the bone.

[The] Presidential “imperatives” for the year were defense reorganization, extension of reciprocal trade and foreign aid.

You could tell who was from which school by the colors of their uniforms: orange and blue, red and black, purple and gold and green and red and blue.

In examples such as the one immediately above, and also for series where the items contain internal punctuation, semi-colons are used to separate the items. Consider this example :

The medal winners were Tom, Gold; Dick, Silver; and Harry, Bronze.

True, THE NEW YORK TIMES MANUAL OF STYLE AND USAGE almost has a rule, but it is one of the oddest I've seen (quoted here):

In general, do not use a comma before and in a series unless the other elements of the series are separated by semicolons.

The only explanation for this quite weird rule that I can think of is a desire for a strange kind of symmetry: since the NYT drops the final comma in a series (the one before the conjunction), it appears to feel a need to demote what should be a final semicolon in a series to a comma. An example from the yachting article:

They raced off Mozambique; from Cape Town to Rio; in Newport, R.I., and elsewhere.

For the Clinton administration, the deadly details involved the method of getting to universal coverage: the requirement that employers provide insurance; the creation of quasi-governmental structures to administer the system; and the changes it would impose on Americans, even those who were perfectly happy with their medical care as it was.

The new federal office would coordinate research into new detection technologies, improve training on how to use them and help decide where to place them, administration officials said....

The program would include representatives from the Department of Energy, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the State Department and the Department of Defense. [No comma before and in either sentence]

The designers of women's clothes receive most of the attention, yet it is squandered on third-rate talents, clichés of femininity, and actresses frightened into submission by silly television frock pundits. [Serial comma before and]

Chambers broke with the Communist Party in 1938, testified against Alger Hiss in 1948, and then emerged as a melancholy but profound champion of freedom. [Serial comma before and]

O.K., I'm sure some of you are asking, what does the serial comma have to do with discrimination? I could be cute and say it reflects discriminating taste, but I won't. I could say that the anarchy of the NYT's punctuation reveals what happens when "rules" are so flexible they aren't rules at all, or if they are they are too confusing to apply consistently, and that, though a bit overblown, would be getting closer to what one's attitude toward the serial comma reveals about other (some would say more important) issues.

Many, perhaps most, critics of rules (or "strict rules," if you prefer) misunderstand them. They see them as the command of Orthodoxy, or at least Authority, and hence believe that freedom demands defiance. They see them as Absolutes, and hence out of time and place in our modern (or, worse, postmodern) pragmatic, relativistic culture. What these critics of rules (and, in fact, of formalism in general) miss is the fact that one of the strongest rationales for having them is, perhaps ironically, purely pragmatic and instrumental: they increase efficiency.

Using the serial comma can never cause confusion. Omitting it, as we have seen, often can. Thus if your "rule" is to omit it, you have to stop and consider whether every series you write is clear. The serial comma rule takes that decision off the table; if you use it for every series, you don't have to consider the clarity question on every one of them. Grammatical rules, in short, are very much like principles: the stronger they are, the more pauses and potential confusions they take off the table.

So, show me someone who generally (but, of course, not always) omits the serial comma, and there's a good chance I can show you someone who also believes in a "living" Constitution whose meaning, if it has one, is whatever the latest judge says.

UPDATE [7 Feb.]

First, I would like to make a point here that I made so far down in the comments below that you may not have seen (I'm not sure I would wish sinking that far on anyone.) Most of the defenses of grammatical rules emphasize their contribution to clarity, which is a benefit to readers, but rules also provide an enormous benefit to writers. Like a constitution, they take some matters off the table and eliminate the necessity of many decisions that would otherwise have to be made. Writers who favor the rule-less, ad hoc approach to serial commas -- that is, who use a serial comma only when they think it is needed for clarity -- must pause every time they write a sentence that includes a series and decide whether it is clear without the serial comma. Those of us who adhere to the rule, however, never need to suffer such thought- and flow-interrupting pauses. We've already decided: if it's a series, use the comma. (Similarly, those of us who believe the Constitution and civil rights laws bar, or should bar, discrimination on the basis of race never have to decide if this or that example of racial discrimination is justified.)

There's another, and unsung, benefit of following the serial comma rule: doing so can signal when several items really are NOT a series. Consider this sentence: Kerry's campaign was disastrous, disorganized and ultimately self-defeating. If you were confident the writer adheres to the serial comma rule, you will know that he is asserting that Kerry's campaign was one thing, disastrous, not three things -- a) disastrous, b) disorganized, and c) self-defeating. This sentence really means, Kerry's campaign was disastrous, by which I mean disorganized and self-defeating, or perhaps better: Kerry's campaign was disastrous -- disorganized and self-defeating. This dog-that-didn't-bark distinction is not available to the writer who does not use the serial comma ... except when he does.

Finally, I did not mean to imply that the New York Times is alone in demonstrating the punctuation anarchy produced by disdaining the serial comma rule. Most newspapers are equally guilty, if not equally influential. And, as luck would have it, in his column today the Washington Post's media critic, Howard Kurtz, demonstrated this confusion in spades in the space of one paragraph:

[1] The commentariat is increasingly populated by political refugees. [2] From Bush 41's White House and campaign, Tony Snow joined Fox, Mary Matalin went to CNN and Bill Kristol, who happily advises the current administration, launched the Weekly Standard. [3] From the Hill, Newt Gingrich became a Fox commentator, his spokesman Tony Blankley took over the Washington Times editorial page, and former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough became an MSNBC talk show host. [4] From the Clinton White House, George Stephanopoulos became host of ABC's "This Week," Dee Dee Myers signed with NBC and Vanity Fair, and Carville and Begala joined CNN.

1. This one doesn't count since there is no series.

2. No serial comma, which should appear after "CNN."

3. Same structure as No. 2, except there is a serial comma (after "editorial page").

4. This one is fabulous! First, there is a serial comma (after "Vanity Fair").

WaPo, it appears, is like the NYT: it omits the serial comma ... except when it doesn't.

Now look at No. 4 without the serial comma: From the Clinton White House, George Stephanopoulos became host of ABC's "This Week," Dee Dee Myers signed with NBC and Vanity Fair and Carville and Begala joined CNN. First, you have to pause to realize that Dee Dee didn't really sign with NBC and Vanity Fair and Carville. You can do that only because you know that "Carville" is a person and not a magazine about town cars, but you can't be sure that everyone will know that. Moreover, what if you weren't so well-informed, and the sentence were the following: From the Clinton White House, George Stephanopoulos became host of ABC's "This Week," Dee Dee Myers signed with NBC and Forbes and Begala joined CNN? Does this construction say that Dee Dee signed with NBC and Forbes and Begala joined CNN, or did Forbes (no, not the Republican Forbes) and Begala join CNN? No way to know from this sentence.

Rules, in short, are Good not because they are the Voice of Authority but because they make sense.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 12:28 AM | Permalink | Say What? (36) | TrackBacks (5)

The front page of today's New York Times prominently features a touching sports story about underdogs doing well, "In South Africa, Yachting Erases a Racial Barrier." It chronicles the unlikely story of a group of black and mixed race kids (7 out of the 24 crew members) who have been having remarkable success in the generally lily-white sport of yachting. Their boat has a financial backer, shipping company magnate Salvatore Sarno, and they are headed for the next America's Cup race in Valencia in 2007.

Sports is a mighty engine of inspirational tales. Here's another: an iconoclastic shipping tycoon mounts Africa's first challenge in the 153-year-old America's Cup series. Lacking deep-pocketed sponsors, he buys a secondhand yacht that finished out of the money two Cups ago.

He recruits a motley crew capped, improbably, by a group of black and mixed-race young men, some of them from South Africa's toughest townships, some of whom were hardly shaving when they climbed into their first boats. The pros write off the South Africans' outmoded tub and their diverse crew.

And then, more improbably still, they begin to finish races ahead of some of the best yachtsmen on earth.

Mr. Sarno, a Durbanite with a melodious Italian accent, is the first to say that Team Shosholoza is giving its nonwhite crewmen a chance, and nothing more. Like the whites on the crew, each sailor must prove himself worthy of contesting an America's Cup or be bumped aside by someone better.

"Sometimes people ask me, 'You're taking black crew on for political reasons?' " he said. "Ridiculous. Not true."

For once the NYT itself seems to agree. Michael Wines, the article's author, quotes a (white) veteran sailor and team strategist who stated that "the black crewmen had earned their stripes."

"I think a lot of people on the team were completely skeptical and said that we can try them for a while and they won't make the cut," he said. "And obviously that hasn't happened. They've risen to the occasion."

True, but is any skill related so skin color? If not, why is individualistic, merit-based colorblindness good enough for South African yachting but not good enough for American colleges or fire departments?

Posted by John Rosenberg at 12:23 PM | Permalink | Say What? (54) | TrackBacks (0)