Discriminations

The invaluable Center for Equal Opportunity has recently released studies documenting the degree of preference given to minority applicants to law schools in Arizona and Nebraska. As I’ve written to my friend Roger Clegg, CEO’s president and general counsel, he publishes important reports faster than I can read them.

Defenders of preferential treatment usually begin their defense by denying that they practice it. Thus nearly a year ago I quoted Doug MacEachern, an editorial writer at the Arizona Republic, who predicted that the Arizona Civil Rights Initiative would fail because Arizona is “different” from California, Washington, and Michigan.

... Arizona is different from those states in one key respect. And it's not something that necessarily reflects well on this state: College admissions programs are the primary battleground of the racial-preference wars, and the fact is Arizona colleges are not terribly selective about who gets to attend.

Actually, it failed because thugs from ACORN and other groups succeeded in preventing the gathering of the required number of signatures, but that’s another story.

Back to this story, the degree of racial preference in admissions to the law schools at the University of Arizona, Arizona State University, and the University of Nebraska, Clegg and CEO Chairman Linda Chavez noted (in the press releases accompanying the reports, which can be found on the CEO sites linked above):

CEO chairman Linda Chavez said: “Racial discrimination in university admissions is always appalling. But the degree of discrimination we have found here, at both schools but especially at Arizona State, is off the charts.” She noted that the odds ratio favoring African Americans over whites was 250 to 1 at the University of Arizona and 1115 to 1 at Arizona State. “As a result, nearly a thousand white students during the years we studied were denied admission even though they had higher undergraduate GPAs and LSATs than the average African American student who was admitted--and over a hundred Asian and Latino students were in the same boat with them.”

CEO president Roger Clegg agreed, and stressed that, not only was race weighed, but it was weighed much more heavily that residency status. “For instance, a white Arizonan in 2007 was about eight times less likely to be admitted to the University of Arizona than a black out-of-state applicant, and at Arizona State he would be twelve times less likely to be admitted.”

Arizona, it turns out, is not so “different” after all. And Nebraska is no better. At the University of Nebraska law school, Chavez noted,

the odds ratio favoring African Americans over whites was 442 to 1. She pointed out, “During the two years studied (the entering classes of 2006 and 2007), 389 whites were rejected by the law school despite higher LSATs and undergraduate GPAs than the average black admittee. Racial discrimination in university admissions is always appalling. But the extremely heavy weight given to race by the University of Nebraska College of Law is off the charts.”

At the state-supported law school in Nebraska, as in Arizona, race was also weighted much more heavily than residence. As Clegg noted,

a white resident of Nebraska in 2007 was more than twenty times less likely to be admitted than an African American applicant from out of state.”

I urge you to read both studies, as I intend to do. Meanwhile, as an appetizer, you should take a look at the graphs from them presented on TaxProfBlog. These graphs reveal that for most of the years studied at all three schools the 75th percentile score on the LSAT for entering black students was lower than the 25th percentile score for entering whites.

Also about a year ago I quoted the Dean of the University of Arizona law school, Toni Massaro, who proudly defended her school’s use of race preferences because of the “diversity” the preferentially admitted provided to the non-“diverse” students.

Consider, she suggested, teaching constitutional law to a class which includes a Native American student from a reservation with different cultural and legal traditions.

“It’s a positive value that informs the class discussion,’’ she said.

As I pointed out at the time, one problem here is that diversity, even pigmentary “diversity,” can be provided by means that do not require pervasive racial discrimination in admissions. It could also be achieved, for example, by something as unthreatening to the “without regard” principle as inviting guest speakers to the campus.

Let me conclude now the same way I concluded then (what’s the point of having your own blog if you can’t quote yourself at will?):

Actually, inviting guests to articulate “different cultural and legal traditions” would also have the virtue of lifting from the admissions committees the obligation they no doubt now feel to admit some CEOs to enliven and inform discussions of corporate law, old people for their essential views on trusts and estates, fishermen and ship captains for their angle on law of the sea, a boatload of foreigners from all over to provide international perspectives on international law, and tax cheats and felons for their unique and essential points of view on tax and criminal law