Bader Late Than Never

Some readers may have noticed (and even cheered) the drop in my blog posting (blog output? blogput?) for the past ten days or so. We’re in California for a while, house-sitting in San Francisco, traveling around the greater (and lesser) Bay Area, heading for Pasadena and Southern California in a week or so. (Don’t worry; Mosby The Dog is in good hands.)

Anyway, I’ve gotten behind in my posting and thus am late in informing you that reader and frequent commenter Hans Bader has a terrific letter in USA Today criticizing an editorial that I should have criticized here several days ago. Bader expands on the points made in his letter here.

Roger Clegg of the Center for Equal Opportunity, another reader/commenter, also made some excellent points about the weird editorial, here.

The editorial acknowledged that “high-scoring Asian students face higher admissions hurdles” than others. It mentioned the study by two Princeton scholars (discussed here, here, and here) who found that

if students were admitted on grades and test scores alone, the acceptance rate for African American and Latino students would plummet while the rate for Asians would rise sharply.

But to USA Today the fact that Asian Americans face higher hurdles in college admission than others and that if preferences to blacks and Hispanic were eliminated the numbers of Asians admitted would increase substantially “can feel like discrimination” but “it does not necessarily prove discrimination.”

Yes, it necessarily does.

Say What? (1)

  1. Emeritus Professor John Furedy July 15, 2008 at 12:20 am | | Reply

    For a Canadian version of sex- and race-preferential evaluation of faculty in terms of so-called “equity” (which university administrators equate with merit), see http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/users/furedy/equity.htm.

    American practitioners of velvet totalitairan discriminatory practices in universities can probabbly take lessons from Canaidnn high-level campus administrtors in the arts of doublespaekand social engineering.

    All the best, John

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