The Matchless “Mismatch” Match Continues…

I have written a number of times about the controversy provoked by UCLA law prof Richard Sander’s controversial Stanford Law Review article arguing that racial preferences in law school admissions has produced a “mismatch” between many of the better of those schools and the underqualified minority students they admit, resulting in the minority students having shockingly low grades, high dropout rates, and low rates of bar passage. (See here, here, here, here, here, and here, which is not even all).

As the Stanford Law Review prepares to publish a volume of critiques, with a reply by Sander, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports today that the ferocity of the criticism and the decibel level of the debate has increased, proving if nothing else how divisive affirmative action has become.

Sander tried to persuade his critics, to no avail, not to distribute copies of their articles to the press before publication, “explaining to a Chronicle reporter that there’s ‘an emerging meeting of minds’ on several issues, and that a public airing of their views could lock people into adversarial positions.” Well, locked they are, because the Chronicle has received copies of the articles, and some of them are not nice.

Michele Landis Dauber, an associate professor at Stanford Law School, argues that the staff of her law school’s student-run law review does not have the expertise to realize that Mr. Sander’s study was filled with errors and unsubstantiated conclusions.

“Stanford’s name is being tied up with a piece of crap that never should have been published and has no merit of any sort,” she said in an interview….

In her article, Ms. Dauber observes that Mr. Sander’s article “created unjustified doubt in the minds of black law students about their abilities” and “doubt in the minds of politicians about whether what they are doing is really harming those they wanted to help.” The November article also raised doubts, she adds, among legal educators about whether they should support affirmative action.

Even the less unhinged critiques apparently share Prof. Dauber’s view that raising “doubts” about the goodness of racial preference is irresponsible, or worse.

“By focusing only on the most negative aspects of the current reality — i.e., that many black students receive low grades and have difficulty passing the bar — without giving at least equal time to the positive news that most black lawyers are leading successful and productive careers,” [writes Harvard law prof. David Wilkins], “Sander’s proposed disclosure is destined to exacerbate the extent to which black law students currently feel alienated and disengaged.”

We’ll have to wait for publication to assess these and other critiques and Sander’s response. For now, all Sander would say to the Chronicle about his critics

is that their complaints are “surprisingly toothless.” Furthermore, he says, none of the authors have offered a better explanation for the achievement gaps, and none have offered a solution.

Still, enough has now come out to observe a striking similarity between much of the response to Sander and the response to Harvard president Larry Summers’s ill-fated remarks on women in math and science: there are some topics that simply can’t be discussed in academia these days because of the “doubts” that will be created in and about the academy’s preferred and protected classes, and the policies that prefer them.