“Racial Terrorism” … At UVa?

It is an old, familiar, but still true truism that if you subsidize something, you get more of it. The University of Virginia subsidizes an extreme — though, unfortunately, not so unusual — version of racial awareness, creating a virtual hothouse of racial “sensitivity” and, I’m increasingly convinced, virtually inviting sporadic acts of racial “insensitivity” as a form of dissent from official orthodoxy.

And just as one has come to expect, “racial incidents” are already dominating the new academic year.

Just a few weeks into the school year, U-Va. has had at least nine racist incidents — slurs shouted from cars, ugly words written on message boards, a racist threat scrawled on a bathroom wall. And students, parents and alumni are demanding change.

And, equally true to form, M. Rick Turner, the Dean of All Things Black (my title) at UVa who has been discussed often here, has stepped forward with his own unique brand of soothing rhetoric: “”I call it racial terrorism….” Turner’s concern, not surprisingly, is “that the incidents will make it harder to recruit black students….”

Despite the black arm bands and speeches by University president John Casteen —

“I’ve come to express solidarity, a sense of oneness, with those who have been abused,” Casteen said. “These acts threaten the core freedoms that make university life what it is.”

— not everyone is convinced that the racial climate is as bad as it is portrayed.

Some students said privately that the incidents had been overblown, that they were probably the work of a drunk townie, not someone on campus, and that it was better to ignore it than to give the perpetrators attention.

Some pointed to other things that were written, anti-Christian and anti-gay, and said it wasn’t only a race issue….

Officials asked the FBI to investigate graffiti on a campus bridge. This week, investigators concluded that the writing was not racially motivated, but some students were skeptical. Someone painted over it almost immediately, in all black with white letters, “Reject Hatred.”

But in an environment where race is the center of attention, of course, every issue is a racial issue.

It is a situation where the solutions seem increasingly like part of the problem. Thus:

Administrators said they are committed to change. On Tuesday, Casteen named the first vice president and chief officer for diversity and equity at U-Va., William B. Harvey, president of the Center for Advancement of Racial and Ethnic Equity at the American Council on Education. The appointment was the result of a commission that has been working on such issues for more than a year.

And what does the Center for Advancement of Racial and Ethnic Equity at the American Council on Education advocate? Among other things, “Equality as a Fact, Equality as a Result: A Matter of Institutional Accountability”

The good news regarding the enrollment of students of color in American colleges and universities is that the number is at an all-time high. Indeed, the enrollment trajectory has been trending steadily upward over the past decade for African Americans, Hispanics, Asian Americans, and American Indians. These numbers are cause for celebration, but the elation is muted, when one analyzes the completion rates of these students.

It is disturbing that degree attainment rates are significantly lower for African-American and Hispanic students than they are for whites. In considering why students from the nation’s two largest minority groups have lower completion rates, it is always useful to identify factors that are connected to students’ backgrounds. In this publication, the author takes the analyses a step further. The question is asked and answered whether in our quest to achieve diversity on our college campuses, we have placed all of the expectations for adjustment on students of color, and none on the institutions that enroll them. The author suggests that a higher education institution has a responsibility to modify its environment so that students of color have as much opportunity for success as their white counterparts.

The SAT average for entering black first year students at UVa is about 200 points lower than the class average, and thus it is not surprising that the black graduation rate is also lower than for whites. As I discussed in greater detail here and here, there are two things to say about the black graduation rate at UVa, things that are seemingly inconsistent but nevertheless both true: UVa has the highest black graduation rate of any public university; and the rate at which blacks at UVa fail to graduate in six years is over twice the rate for whites and Asians.

If UVa must “modify its environment so that students of color have as much opportunity for success as their white counterparts,” then presumably it will have to lower its standards for graduation to match its lower standards of admission. And this makes a certain amount of (perverse) sense: if colorblind admission standards are racist, as many of those who favor racial preferences claim, then colorblind grading and graduation standards are equally racist.