Attempting To Prevent Diversity in Debate Over “Diversity”
Most readers are familiar with the pioneering work UCLA law professor Richard Sander has produced on the effects (they are not good) of “diversity” in law school admissions, especially his “mismatch” theory that preferences have actually reduced the number of minority lawyers. (Not familiar? Become so quickly by looking here, here, here, here, and here.)
Even though Sander has no ideological or partisan ax to grind, his studies have gotten under the skins of diversiphiles, some of whose reactions to his work have resembled tantrums more than scholarship. Now comes Gail Heriot, a law professor at the University of San Diego and a new member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, with a powerful, and powerfully depressing, OpEd today in the Wall Street Journal with disturbing evidence of various attempts to block Sander’s continuing investigation of how preferences actually operate.
Some of the same people who argue Mr. Sander’s data are inconclusive are now actively trying to prevent him from conducting follow-up research that might yield definitive answers. If racial preferences really are causing more harm than good, they apparently don’t want you -- or anyone else -- to know.If the policy of racial preference worked even remotely as well as its supporters argue you’d think they would be begging serious scholars like Prof. Sander to examine all the available data. Instead, they act like those prissy librarians who live in constant fear that some child will actually touch a book in their care.Take William Kidder, a University of California staff advisor and co-author of a frequently cited attack of Sander’s study. When Mr. Sander and his co-investigators sought bar passage data from the State Bar of California that would allow analysis by race, Mr. Kidder passionately argued that access should be denied, because disclosure “risks stigmatizing African American attorneys.” At the same time, the Society of American Law Teachers, which leans so heavily to the left it risks falling over sideways, gleefully warned that the state bar would be sued if it cooperated with Mr. Sander.
Sadly, the State Bar’s Committee of Bar Examiners caved under the pressure. The committee members didn’t formally explain their decision to deny Mr. Sander’s request for this data (in which no names would be disclosed), but the root cause is clear: Over the last 40 years, many distinguished citizens — university presidents, judges, philanthropists and other leaders — have built their reputations on their support for race-based admissions. Ordinary citizens have found secure jobs as part of the resulting diversity bureaucracy.
If the policy is not working, they, too, don't want anyone to know.
UPDATE: Kidder Must Be Kidding
As Prof. Heriot indicated, one of Sander’s most vociferous critics is William Kidder, who is also a leader in the effort to block Sander’s access to bar association data that he needs to pursue his research. As she noted, “Mr. Kidder passionately argued that access should be denied, because disclosure ‘risks stigmatizing African American attorneys.’”
But what Prof. Heriot doesn’t say, perhaps because she is too polite, is that Kidder’s position not only violates any reasonable notion of honest and open scholarly debate; it is also blatantly hypocritical.
Kidder is identified, accurately, as “a University of California staff advisor.” For a number of years, however, he was closely associated with the Equal Justice Society, a pro-preferences organization. Most of the articles he wrote criticizing Prof. Sander, and others, identified him as a researcher with the Equal Justice Society. (See, for examples, here, here, here, here, and here .)
So what? you ask. Why, you ask, do I bring up Kidder’s long association with the Equal Justice Society? For a very good reason: to support my charge of rank hypocrisy. Since Kidder is so concerned now that release of data such as bar passage rates by race “risks stigmatizing African American attorneys,” even though no names would be released, perhaps he can point to examples that show when and where he disagreed with his former colleagues and employers who led the fight to defeat Ward Connerly’s Racial Privacy Initiative (Proposition 54) in 2003 and jumped with joy when it was defeated.
Equal Justice Society Cheers OverwhelmingEven aside from the hypocrisy of supporting the collection of racial data so that it can be used to “challenge discrimination,” etc., but opposing access to it by scholars they deem unfriendly, Kidder and friends’ objection to Prof. Sander’s access to state bar data makes little sense since, as a commenter to this post has pointed out, the California State Bar has already released a good deal of racial data on bar passage rates.
Defeat of Proposition 54Organization Played Key Role in Coalition that Downed Divisive Measure
SAN FRANCISCO (October 8, 2003) — The Equal Justice Society played a pivotal role in the broad coalition that decisively defeated Ward Connerly’s Proposition 54 on October 7, 2003. The dangerous, divisive measure would have banned the collection of racial and ethnic data by any state agency, thus making it virtually impossible to track and document race discrimination or to bring civil rights suits to court.
....
EJS Executive Director Eva Paterson was a leading spokesperson for the No on 54 Campaign. More than two years prior to the election, Paterson was part of the core group that launched the Coalition for an Informed California, the official opposition campaign organization. The coalition was an extraordinarily broad and diverse network of supporters including health professionals, classroom teachers, law enforcement, trade unionists, civil rights activists, lawyers, academics and students.“Connerly’s Proposition 54 was about burying information about race that could be used to track racial profiling, challenge discrimination in housing, target effective programs to keep kids in school, and — most importantly, perhaps — provide vital health research and treatment,” said Paterson, who debated Connerly numerous times during the campaign, including on National Public Radio.
But wait. It gets even better. In trying, without success, to find other examples of Kidder’s opposition to the use of personally anonymous racial data in research, I found that he himself has used the very sort of data that he now wishes to deny to Prof. Sander.
The following is from the trial transcript of Grutter v. Bollinger in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan. Miranda Massie, an attorney for and one of the leaders of By Any Means Necessary (BAMN), the group that has instigated high school students to riot in favor of preferences, among other offenses (see here, here, here, and here), was examining a testing expert, David White, the founder of a group in Berkeley called Testing For the Public (“Strategies For Standardized Tests In A Diverse World”) that believes standardized tests are racist in their effect and that offers LSAT test preparation courses. After White discussed earlier studies by Joseph Gannon finding racial gaps in LSAT scores, the following exchange occurs (Trial Transcript, pp. 146—147):
Q Have you — has Testing for the Public recently undertaken to update this research?This data was personally anonymous, but it was less anonymous than the data Prof. Sander has requested from the State Bar of California because it identifies the undergraduate colleges of the otherwise anonymous applicants to Boalt Hall.A ... So it so happened that one of my students, William Kidder, who I was happy he took my LSAT course, then I was happy that he decided he was going to teach the LSAT course for me, I was happy for him that he got into Boalt Hall. I was flattered that he read all my old law review articles, and I was amazed that he took on the burden of actually trying to reproduce Dr. Gannon's study. [Emphasis added]
He asked Boalt Hall to give him anonymous data from their applicant pool and he reproduced the study that Dr. Joseph Gannon had done twenty years ago. He did the very same matching process, and this time we had the identities of the school available to us, and you can see, Your Honor, they are very famous schools, it's the top five feeder schools to Boalt Hall, UCLA, Berkeley, Stanford, Harvard and Yale.
Obviously Kidder and friends want racial data collected, but apparently they want it released only to those they can trust to cook it so that it supports their own devotion to racial preferences.
UPDATE II
Hypocrisy and intellectual thuggery are not, of course, limited to diversiphiles trying to prevent Prof. Sander from writing future articles that undermine their arguments. As Chetly Zarko points out in this comment below, diversiphiles at the University of Michigan are no slouches at trying to keep racial data out of the wrong hands.
Say What?
THE FACTS FROM THE CALIFORNIA BAR EXAM RESULTS ACCORDING TO RACE AND ETHNIC GROUP.
http://calbar.ca.gov/calbar/pdfs/admissions/Statistics/JULY2005STATS.pdf
JULY 2005 CALIFORNIA BAR EXAMINATION
NUMBER OF TAKERS AND PERCENT PASSING BY RACIAL/ETHNIC GROUP
GENERAL BAR EXAMINATION FIRST-TIME TAKERS ONLY*
White Black Hispanic Asian Other Minority
Pass Rates:
Whites- 69.1%
Blacks- 33.8%
Hispanics- 48.8%
Asians- 61.7%
Other Minorities- 53.3%
=================================
NUMBER OF TAKERS AND PERCENT PASSING BY RACIAL/ETHNIC GROUP: REPEATERS*
White Black Hispanic Asian Other Minority
Pass Rates:
Whites- 13.6%
Blacks- 6.3%
Hispanics- 13.1%
Asians- 15.5%
Other Minorities- 11.5%
Posted by: E | August 25, 2007 1:11 AM
This goes along with other questions that the government does not want to ask.
The Department of Education absolutely refuses to study how being in a black majority school or Hispanic majority school affects white or Asian students. There is a ton of studies on how being in a white majority school affects minorities but no one in the government wants to know what happens to white students in majority/minority school even though that is the future in the U.S. Even the effects of majority Asian schools on whites is something that the government cannot let itself comtemplate.
If there were no negative affects, the government would study it and prmote the results. When the government does not even want to ask the question, everyone else is left to conclude that there are huge negative effects on white students in majority/minority schools.
Posted by: superdestroyer![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.discriminations.us/nav-commenters.gif)
|
August 25, 2007 4:42 PM
THE FOLLOWING IS A VERY REVEALING REPORT, ESPECIALLY REGARDING THE BLACK-WHITE/ASIAN RACIAL GAP IN LSAT SCORING
http://www.lsacnet.org/Research/LSAT-Performance-with-Regional-Gender-and-Racial-Ethnic-Breakdowns-1997%E2%80%931998-Through-2003%E2%80%932004-Testing-Years.pdf
LSAT Performance with Regional, Gender, and
Racial/Ethnic Breakdowns: 1997–1998 Through
2003–2004 Testing Years
Please note:
The better performance by Asian Americans over whites is more apparent at the highest levels of scoring of the LSAT (over 170), which is where it matters most in admissions to the top tier of American law schools. Of course, this also true with the Ivies/Elites with the SAT I test at the highest levels of scoring, above 700 in the Math as well as the Verbal sections, where Asian Americans outperform the other groups on average.
On the LSAT (Law School Admissions Test) whites have a higher average (152.47; 8.71), but Asian Americans have a higher standard deviation ( 152.02; 9.84). A greater percentage of Asians scored 170+ (3.39% of Asians vs. 2.2% of whites), 172+ (2.1% of Asians vs. 1.24% of whites), and 175+ (0.97% of Asians vs. 0.48% of whites) in 2003-2004. Also, "No response" in answer to the question on the race of the elite law school applicant has the greatest score--it would make sense that a greater percentage of Asians would choose this option since they have the most to lose by indicating their race on their applications to elite law schools. Asians are OVERREPRESENTED in LSAT scores over 170, mainly in the elite law schools, therefore are subject to de facto quotas against them because of racial preferences.
Posted by: E | August 25, 2007 11:51 PM
John,
This is rather like bombing the rubble of Dresden into smaller pebbles, but your point (which I touched on my blog entry on EqualityTalk.com about Kidder's irony and RPI, but didn't follow through with the specifics on Kidder) about "data control" is right on. And I believe in bombing rubble when it comes to investigative reporting, because it shows a pattern and reinforces other work. Your update is superb documentation.
Back in 2003, one of the quotes I didn't have the space to put in the Wall St. Journal piece was, I believe the U-M Academic Affairs Minority Office Director telling someone in a memo (click on the link in my name field -- or paste this: http://www.chetlyzarko.com/FOIA-peer-review.html ), exactly what your conclusion is. 'We need to control' the data.
From my May 1, 2003 self-published piece:
The newly discovered document, in a file with the Executive Summary reported on last week, is dated June 20, 1994 (one month after the MSS Executive Summary). It is addressed from John Matlock (Assistant to Vice Provost for Academic and Multicultural Affairs) to Lester Monts (the Vice Provost for Academic and Multicultural Affairs). Matlock outlines his plan of action for the Michigan Study. In order, the three of the first four points are to "...copyright all survey instruments," (ironically, this harms the FOIA officer's current justification for withholding the data, see below), "revamp the first year report," and "formalize a process for ... others use of the Michigan Study data. This will generally involve Gerry [Gurin] and I reviewing the requests and checking with others to ensure that the proposals don't clash with anything that they are doing." It is scientifically offensive that two of the original researchers would be able to control their own "peer review" process, especially to "ensure that the proposals don't clash" with anything the Multicultural Office was doing.
Posted by: Chetly Zarko | August 26, 2007 2:50 AM
I don't understand this business of keeping the data out of Professor Sander's hands. It is simply unrealistic to expect any program, for any non-transitory period of time, to be exempt from a cost benefit analysis. Of course, I suspect the Kidder's of the world know all too well what sort of conclusions the data will generate, and that these conclusions will call into serious question just what purpose is being served by the implementation of race preferences, particularly at elite law schools.
My own experience with this at a Tier 1 law school was frankly heartbreaking. We of course had a few of black students in the top 1/3 of the class - two of three which were from the Caribbean - something the other black students made a big deal about for reasons I did not understand at the time - but the vast majority of the class did poorly academically and had a very difficult time passing the bar - and this at a school where virtually everyone passed the bar on the first try. I was bothered then in drawing conclusions (this was 20 years ago), because I did not have hard data, only anecdotal information, including that of dismal class participation. A Washington Post article a few years later (due to a student that acted in my view improperly in disclosing admit statistics) only confirmed, unfortunately, my anecdotal experiences.
And let's be blunt here - at the elite law school level, unless one is fortunate enough to live in Michigan or Virginia, and pay in-state tuition (Cal Boalt Hall supposedly doesn't count in this analysis because of Prop 209), Tier 1 law schools are by any measure insanely expensive. Admitting people with substantially lesser qualifications makes no sense. Playing catch-up with the rabid wolves that one's law school classmates at this level is almost impossible, and worse yet, it is bound to make even the most diligent preferentially admitted student feel like the deck, and the "system", is stacked against "them", furthering the perception of racism. And that perception only gets worse as the law school debt piles up, the bar pass rates are sketchy, and one's employment prospects at the bottom of the class are far less than what one would think they would be.
On the whole, I came away wit a sad impression of the race preference program in law school - save for a few individuals, it couldn't have helped the students in the way in which it was intended, and if anything, only drove the very stigmas Kidder worries about even deeper.
Again, this reflects my own anecdotal views...but let Sander let the data and his work speak for themselves. If the benefits of diversity are so overwhelming, who needs to fear Richard Sander, right?
Posted by: willowglen![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.discriminations.us/nav-commenters.gif)
|
August 27, 2007 2:18 PM
Willow, take a look at my Michigan Bar Journal analysis ( http://www.chetlyzarko.com/michbar.html ), which covers different archival documents from U-M's internal archives (different than the Wall St. Journal angle on Gurin's work only).
In there, an LSAC member and Law School Prof lambastes the "numbers" and trends in an e-mail to U-M president James Duderstadt circa 1989. The quote is savaging to U-M's cause - even though I suspect the prof would support preferences anyway.
I agree with you - if the benefits are so overwhelming, why withhold data?
Another irony strikes me on Kidder - he opposes release of data on grounds of stigmatization - first, that's one of our criticisms of preferences. He now favors color-blindness in data (only when against his side though, no doubt) - which not only conflicts with RPI but more generally, the theory of stigmatization favors our side (U-M doesn't hesitate to use contradictory arguments like saying that socio-economic preferences would stigmatize recipients, although it would be harder to know or see those admissions to cause the stigma, so this type of contradiction is not new to their side).
Posted by: Chetly Zarko | August 28, 2007 9:18 AM