Most of you will recall Ward Connerly’s ill-fated (and some — even, yes, some on the right — would argue ill-conceived) Racial Privacy Initiative in California. It was handily defeated, in part because of the furious arguments of “University faculty and public policy researchers” who were “up in arms” over it, arguing “that without racial data it would be impossible to determine whether or not public agencies were engaging in discrimination.”
“If [the Racial Privacy Initiative] is implemented,” they claimed,
it would become impossible to evaluate the effectiveness of policies intended to eliminate discrimination against any group. “Then the policy has to go away, no matter how effective it is,” because it can’t be proved that it’s making a difference, said economist Roger Noll, director of Stanford’s Public Policy program.
I thought (and still think) that, in theory, this is a strong argument. In practice, however, it seems to lack something: the public agencies who collect the data necessary to determine whether or not they are discriminating often, perhaps even usually, refuse to release the data.
This is the season, for example, when university officials across the land point with pride to the impressive credentials of their recently admitted freshman class for next year. For a typical example, see “Admitted Students Raise Standards” in today’s Cavalier Daily from the University of Virginia. And in this typical article is a typical quote, from UVa’s Dean of Admissions John Blackburn:
While the admissions competition is intense, Blackburn said students consistently are able to meet the high expectations.
“It’s simply a matter of offering admission to the best qualified applicants,” Blackburn said. “Of the people who applied, we tried to pick the students who seemed best qualified.”
UVa takes two thirds of its entering class from inside Virginia, “[b]ut,” said Blackburn,
you should see the quality of the Virginians. Students who qualify this year, for the most part, were up in the top 5 percent of their class.
But does UVa really offer admissions “to the best qualified applicants,” or does it engage in de facto “race norming,” offering admission to the best qualified white students and the best qualified minority students? It’s impossible to tell, because UVa doesn’t release the racial data that it has collected. Blackburn says that “for the most part” entering Virginians were in the top 5% of their classes, but is that true across the board? For students from all racial and ethnic groups? No way to tell.
If John Blackburn were Dean of Admissions at, say, Ole Miss or the University of Alabama and there were widespread suspicions, supported by some evidence that had been pried loose, that institution regularly accepted white students with test scores some 200 points below that of minority students, would the “University faculty and public policy researchers” who demanded that states be able to collect racial data for the purpose of monitoring discrimination tolerate that information being withheld from the public?
Indeed, I wonder how many of those who opposed the Racial Privacy Initiative would have opposed it if they knew that all the data collected must be made public.
John,
I’ve always supported a sort of inverse of Connerly’s RPI – a Racial Data Openness Act, precisely because so much data is collected and used secretly. This would be a stronger version of FOIA, one without loopholes, stalls, or money pits that the public body can use to prevent or delay disclosure. Of course, I’ve personally been through the FOIA battle with regard to the data used by Dr. Gurin that I wrote about in the Wall St. Journal, so this is the logical policy position I would take.
On the other hand, I sympathize with what Ward was trying to do with RPI. He was trying to essentially dismantle the entire government-subsidized racial bean-counting business (which survived even in post-209 California), a noble effort but doomed by the broader constituency supporting it. If we can’t have racial privacy, we must have racial data openness (with regard to privacy for personally-identifiable material, which is a simple matter).
They don’t release the data because it isn’t any good becasue so many students don’t self-report their race.