Discriminations

[NOTE: November 30. An important UPDATE has been added to this post!]

The University of Nebraska-Lincoln is seeking nominations for its 2010 “Fulfilling the Dream” award, an annual honor bestowed upon those who personify and promote “the ideals of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.” One of the 2009 winners was “Students United for Nebraska, the student coalition that fought a constitutional ban on race- and gender-based affirmative action (the ban passed).”

Giving an award honoring Martin Luther King’s goals to a group that opposed a measure prohibiting the state from discriminating on the basis of race suggests several other awards in the same spirit that could be given:

• A George Wallace “Stand in the Schoolhouse Door” Award from the University of Alabama to the individual or group that has done the most to promote the racial integration of Alabama schools and colleges;

• A “Scientific Integrity and Transparency” Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science to the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit for its demonstrated devotion to protecting the openness and integrity of scientific research;

• A “Promoting Racial Equality” Award from DISCRIMINATIONS to BAMN for all its work defending the ideal of colorblindness....
  

UPDATE [30 November]

Thanks to Robert VerBruggen for his kind words this morning on National Review Online’s Phi Beta Cons, and welcome to those who followed his link here. Please make yourself at home.

VerBruggen’s post is so good that I even agree with his disagreement with me ... or would if I believed what he attributes to me. Let me explain.

He writes “I’m a huge fan of Rosenberg and his blog, but I’m afraid I’m not convinced.” What he’s not convinced of, in effect, is that those of us opposed to racial preferences should put King on a pedestal.

No doubt, King was a great leader who helped urge the country to redress a serious wrong. He rightfully occupies a position of great respect in American history. But participants in our current racial debates often see him not just as worthy of respect but as infallible — they feel the need to claim he would have supported them, and see this support as crucial. The idea, so far as I can tell, is that King is the antithesis of racism — if you agree with King, you’re definitely not racist, and if you disagree, you might just be a racist. So whatever you believe, it really helps if you can argue plausibly that King believed the same thing.

Regarding affirmative action, the problem for modern conservatives is that their arguments aren’t all that plausible. If you not only respect and consult but defer to King on racial matters, you probably need to support something very close to racial preferences.

Now, let’s put all this evidence together in context: (A) King supported what he called “compensatory or preferential treatment” for blacks and saw fit to use another country’s preference policy as a loose example of what America should do; (B) what King actually proposed was, in effect, a giant wealth transfer from whites to blacks for the purpose of atoning for slavery; (C) modern-style race-based preferences weren’t politically feasible back then, and King was a very astute politician. How likely is it really that King would oppose preferences if he were alive today?

not only the appeal but even the actual meaning of that principle is not dependent on what King may have thought when he uttered it, and certainly not on what he may have come to think 45 years later if he had lived....

The fact (if it is a fact) that had King lived he might have abandoned his long-standing commitment to colorblind equality, as the NAACP et. al. did, neither changes the meaning of the principle he articulated in 1963 nor compels anyone else to join his ghost in abandoning it.

In a recent post discussing some of the fallout from Martin Luther King’s birthday, I asked “What Do We Honor When We Honor Doctor King? (And Who Are ‘We?’).” There had been many protests of President Bush laying a wreath on King’s grave, nearly all of them criticizing him for betraying King by his opposition to racial preferences. Indeed, nothing seems to send preferentialists around the bend and over the top faster than critics of preferences quoting King’s “I Have A Dream” speech, as we always do.

And they always respond with one version or another off “if King were alive today” he would be a strong advocate of racial preferences. I have some reservations about this assertion, but on balance I suspect it is true. After all, all King’s followers, the NAACP (which had advocated a strong version of colorblindness in court for decade after decade), and virtually the entire Democratic party did an about face on colorblindness starting in the late 1960s, and there is no compelling reason to suppose that King himself would have stood against this trend.

Taking a page from the original meaning book, however, we can see that the proper response to the posthumous King’s probable position is, So what? King’s specific intent does not determine the meaning of the principle he evoked, either for his contemporaries or for subsequent generations. [P.S. It is also worth noting, however, ... that when we play the “if X were alive today...” game, we are not talking about actual intent but predicted intent, which is far different.] Of course in this case the text in question is not so dense and opaque, like “due process” or even “equal protection.” What part of wanting people to be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin is so difficult to understand?

Now, King’s speech is not a part of the Constitution (at least not of its text), but it has achieved a well-deserved iconic stature. It gave voice to an understanding of equality that traces it roots back at least to some of the abolitionists, that achieved partial but limited success in the Reconstruction Amendments, and that, finally, was embedded in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in the year following King’s delivery on the Mall.

Thus I beg to differ with a commenter on my King’’s birthday post linked above. Begrudgingly, “[f]or arguments sake,” she was willing “to admit the possibility that one can disagree with another's ideals while still honoring the person.” I believe those of us who continue to resent benefits or burdens being based on skin color are honoring the meaning of Martin Luther King’s ideals much more fully than preferentialists who argue that if he were alive today he would agree with them.

Writing, as I am, about fifteen minutes from Monticello, it seems all too obvious to me that there are some ideals that are not discredited simply because their authors fail to live up to them.

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From the first page of the Metro Section in today’s Washington Post:

Alexandria rethinks gifted education
MORE DIVERSITY SOUGHT IN CLASSES

When Alexandria Superintendent Morton Sherman walks the halls of the city’s schools and peers into classrooms, he can often guess whether the class he’s watching is gifted.

“Standing at the door, looking through the glass, you can tell what kind of class it is” by looking at the colors of the students, he said. “It shouldn’t be that way.”

Alexandria is a majority-minority school system, except in its gifted program. White students, 25 percent of the total enrollment, are 58 percent of those labeled “gifted.” Hispanics and African Americans, 25 and 40 percent of enrollment, respectively, account for about 10 and 20 percent of those in gifted classes.

“Latino and African American students are not having their intellectual gifts nurtured and not being given the same opportunities to excel,” said Arthur Almore, education chairman for the Chesterfield County NAACP.

Children living in poverty are often at a disadvantage when it comes to traditional measures of intelligence or aptitude. They are less likely to have college-educated parents, books in their bedrooms or dinner table discussions that expand on what they learn at school.

Students learning English, including about one in five Alexandria students, can struggle to articulate higher-order thinking. And educators might have stereotypical ideas about what a gifted child looks like. [Emphasis added]

About 12 percent of children in Alexandria’s schools qualify for gifted services. Students must score a superior rating on four out of five evaluations, including an aptitude test, an achievement test, teachers’ observations of their learning style, samples of class work and grades.

The Alexandria School Board has approved changes to the screening process for gifted services in recent years. In February, all second-graders will sit for an aptitude test that will determine whether they should be screened. In the past, children had to be referred for screening.

Alexandria also rolled out a nonverbal test in 2006 to reach more children who might encounter language barriers or other cultural biases....

Finally, in another recent post about another article by this same Washington Post reporter, Michael Allison Chandler, about gifted education in Virginia, Are There Really No Asians In Virginia?, I asked:

Are there no Asian-Americans in Virginia’s gifted programs, or in the alternative are they greatly “over-represented”? Is there any reliable evidence in the scholarly literature that giftedness manifests itself in equal proportions in all racial, ethnic, religious, gender, and cultural groups? In the absence of such evidence does it make any sense at all to be concerned with under- or over-representation?

Are gifted classes, in short, supposed to be representative of anything other than giftedness, some combination of aptitude and attitude?

In an article on “diversity” (or not) and gifted education, discriminating readers (or at least DISCRIMINATIONS readers) would like to know what per cent of Alexandria’s gifted students are Asian (there are some, aren’t there?). But that’s not all. We’d also like to know how many of those gifted Asian students are “living in poverty”; how many of them do not have “college educated parents”; for how many of them is English not their native language.

Most mainstream media articles on gifted education, including these two by Chandler, assume that giftedness consists entirely of aptitude, but the scholarly literature (especially the work of Julian Stanley at Johns Hopkins, father of the Center for Talented Youth program) emphasizes attitude nearly as much. Data on academic attitude is elusive, but not impossible to find, such as, for example, the demographics of students who enroll in AP classes. In their invaluable No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning, Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom cite a wealth of other data (summarized here by Peter Kirsanow):

The Thernstroms note that National Assessment of Educational Progress (“NAEP”) data reveal Asian-American students spend more time on homework than black, Hispanic, or white students. Interestingly, the amount of time spent each day on homework by the latter three groups is roughly the same. But, an NAEP study of TV watching habits shows that almost half of black fourth graders spend five hours or more watching TV on a typical school day. Nearly a third of black twelfth graders watch five hours or more of TV a day. That’s five times the proportion among whites and more than twice that for Hispanics. This vast amount of TV watching by black students might explain another finding noted by the Thernstroms: Harvard economist Ronald F. Ferguson’s survey of students in 15 affluent school districts shows that black students “were 20% less likely to complete their homework each night.” Ferguson also reports that nearly half of all black students state that most of the time they don’t understand their reading assignments very well — nearly twice the rate of non-comprehension for white students.

The Thernstroms also cite Laurence Steinberg’s analysis regarding the “trouble threshold” — the lowest grade students can receive before getting in trouble with their parents. For Asian-American students, that point is an A-; for whites, a B-; and for blacks and Hispanics, a C-. It stands to reason that students who get in trouble for getting a B+ will work a bit harder than students who can skate until they bring home a D+. The former are more likely to turn off the TV and concentrate on their studies. They’ll make sure they not only finish their homework, but understand it.

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[NOTE: This post has a new ADDENDUM]

Rasmussen reports today that President Obama “earns approval from 97% of African-American voters and disapproval from 61% of white voters.”

Looking at those with intense feelings, Rasmussen reports that “Seventy-four percent (74%) of African-Americans Strongly Approve along with just 19% of white voters.”

Barack Obama made his debut appearance on the national stage with his stirring keynote address at the 2004 Democratic Convention. The most memorable lines of that speech were his emphatic assertions that

there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America.

There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America....

We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.

Now, less than a year into his presidency, we are more racially divided than ever. The erstwhile post-racial president has elevated to the Supreme Court someone whose primacy claim to fame is her “wise Latina” identity politics. His Attorney General calls Americans cowards for not engaging in the sort of racial dialog he prefers. Racial preferences are more, not less, entrenched in government. Racial demagogues are more, not less, emboldened, so that just last week Jesse Jackson, attacking Rep. Artur Davis (D, Ala), proclaimed that “You can’t vote against health care and call yourself a black man.”

Perhaps our post-racial president distanced himself from Jackson’s remark, but if so I missed it.

ADDENDUM [26 November]

National Review Online’s The Agenda discusses the increasing racial divide in views of Obama, based on two other thorough discussions: one by Jeffrey Jones of Gallup, the other by Ronald Brownstein in National Journal. Brownstein concludes that the dramatic black-white divide suggests a more ominous color:

In the long term, it’s difficult to overstate the challenge either party would face in governing a country where the white majority and burgeoning nonwhite minority are moving in such diametrical directions. Red, as in “danger ahead,” is the color that should be flashing from these results.

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Yesterday U.S. District Court Judge Janet Bond Arterton, who threw out the case brought by New Haven firefighter Frank Ricci et. al., “entered a judgment finding that the city violated the civil rights of a group of white firefighters when it threw out two promotional exams in 2004, and ordered the city to promote 14 of them.”

Yet to be resolved is the motion to intervene filed earlier this month. The seven black firefighters claim their rights would be violated if the lists are certified, and attempted to pre-empt any final action by Arterton until they could be heard....

What remains unclear from the city and from Arterton’s order is the status of other firefighters in line from promotion when the lists are approved. If the lists are retroactively certified to 2004, there would have been 24 vacancies in the two ranks over the two-year life of the list. Fourteen promotions are being compelled by the court and the city, in a filing last week, indicated it “would have the discretion to promote (the 10) non-plaintiffs.”

Asked Tuesday if the city would promote those 10, the city gave no definitive answer....

cheryl-oh happy day wrote on Nov 25, 2009 7:01 AM:

Last night I was a little down after watching dancing with stars and Mya didnt win. but when I heard the news that Mr Ricci and them got there jobs, which they should of been had. I jumped for joy. everyone on my job was asking me why I was so happy. everyone on this blog know I been following this case from day 1, and everyone know I said I was a black female, and I believe in right is right in wrong is wrong. and everyone knows how I feel about no brainer dumb so call firefighter Tinney. I always said I cant go in stop & shop and get a discount because I’m black. Mr Ricci and them should of never had to go through this. then all these other jim jones followers of No brainer Tinney want to file all these other bogus complaints to keep it going. well what part of SUPREME COURT you dont understand Tinney & Crew, my mother always told me supreme court was the highest. all these other filings just made you black firefighters look stupid. like you want something for nothing. it dont go that way. my brother has a doctorate, he went to hillhouse in the 60’s, work full time after school at seamless rubber yrs ago. he went to post comm clg, the southern, then A&T, then he got his doctorate from Columbia, he did not ask to get a degree because he’s black. he study. anyway Mr Ricci and the other firefighters, may God Bless you and your atty. I was wondering why they was taking so long, after supreme court may there decision. mr dumb brain tinney, you need to let some of the other firefighters pass out the coats, and you should be reading and studying, I will be so happy if they print your test scores, isnt that our right to see your score. I guess if I barely pass on skin of my teeth I wouldnt want mind release neither. oops thats right I forgot. you pass because you was black.

A Black Sister that is not trying to take the easy way out. what will martin luther king say about you Tinney. and probably will tell you to go back and STUDY and lay that bottle down for awhile. I’m so happy for Ricci and the crew nice thanksgiving day present. now will when they give them all there back pay.

oh mr tinney I made some mistakes in my comment above. but see I never said I was and A+ student. but I correct myself and ask for help. I dont say because I’m black. why do you want to make yourself looks stupid like that. your wife or girlfriend should give you a gift certificate to Barnes & Noble. the one close to your fire dept is right on broadway okay. you dont have to go to milford. right there on broadway.

Oh well, maybe not. That would require recognition that blacks are not fungible and that a diversity of views about “diversity” is legitimate.

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This has become a serious, not metaphorical, question, a question seriously considered by serious analysts. Although there is not (yet?) a consensus, more and more analysts are answering in the affirmative.

Thus Jay Cost, one of my favorites, asked a few days ago, Have Democratic Leaders Gone Mad? After noting that proposing cuts in Medicare dearly cost the Republicans back in the 1990s and that the Reid bill, according to the CBO, would cut Medicare $491 billion, Cost concluded, dumfounded:

Why are Obama, Pelosi, and Reid doing this? How could they be so foolish as to repeat the most egregious mistake of the Republicans of the 104th Congress? Why are they forcing their vulnerable members to vote on a bill that would cut Medicare in this fashion? Do they dislike their moderate colleagues? Do they find the chore of being the majority party too burdensome? Have they simply gone mad?

Similarly, Rick Lowry writes today that in insisting on such an unpopular bill the Democrats have

talked themselves into the ludicrously self-delusional notion that what ails them and the president is that they haven't yet passed the hundreds of billions of dollars of tax hikes and Medicare cuts that finance (albeit incompletely) ObamaCare.

This will long be a case study in the annals of abnormal political psychology. Tax hikes undid George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton (Bush lost his presidency, Clinton his congressional majority), and Medicare cuts undid Newt Gingrich (taking the air out of his “Republican revolution”). Obama’s Democrats are prescribing themselves a strong dose of both, in an exercise in self-destructive quackery.

I’m not so sure. Or let me put my point a different way: of course they’re nuts (what else is new?), but I’m not so sure that is the primary explanation of their current bout of masochistic self-destruction. Instead, what I think is lighting the fire under their political funeral pyres is a veritable pandemic of ideological fervor that has spread from the White House and infected virtually the entire Democratic Party. The Democrats are convinced that they know what is better for the people than the people do themselves, and like suicide bombers and other true believers they are willing to sacrifice themselves for that belief.

One example of many:

Sen. Michael Bennet, a junior Democrat who will be seeking his first full term next year in Colorado, where many districts lean conservative, said he would support the health care overhaul even if doing so means losing his seat.

“The thing that our working families need more than anything else is to end these double-digit cost increases that they’re having every single year with health insurance,” Bennet said.

Nuts? Not really. Just a supreme (and supremely undeserved) self-righteousness that characterizes all true believers.

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I studied history for a number of years, but I never could figure out something that Sherrod Brown, the left-wing Democratic Senator from Ohio, expresses with great if unearned confidence: History has “sides,” for and against, and it always supports progressives against their opponents.

Speaking of the four Democratic “moderates” who oppose parts of the Reid health plan on CNN, Brown said

he doesn't believe any of the four senators -- Mary Landrieu (D-La.), Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.), Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) -- will use Senate rules to block a vote on a final bill, despite their opposition to a public option.

“I don’t think they want to be on the wrong side of history,” Brown said. “I don’t think they want to say, ‘On a procedural vote, I killed the most important bill of my career.[’]”

The trouble (or rather, one trouble) with true believers like Brown is that they don’t believe people make their own history but instead play pre-assigned roles in the pre-ordained unfolding of God’s (or Marx’s or whomever’s) vision, of which History is merely the record.

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Inside Higher Ed reported Friday, based on an article in the Lincoln Journal Star, that “the University of Nebraska at Lincoln has agreed to pay $40,000 to a former employee who says she was fired after the university learned that she is a witch.”

The Journal Star reported that the plaintiff, identified only as Jane Doe,

said she took a job with the university in 2007 directing a youth program.

But an associate dean terminated her, despite her satisfactory performance at work, after learning she was a witch and her religion was “Reclaiming Tradition of Witchcraft,” the woman alleged.

Jane Doe — believing UNL had violated her right to free speech and expression and exercise of religion — filed a complaint with the Nebraska Equal Opportunity Commission.

She said the NEOC found reasonable cause to believe religious discrimination had taken place.

That led to the lawsuit, first filed in Lancaster County District Court and later transferred to U.S. District Court. In it, she sought the reinstatement of her job, lost wages and benefits, and punitive damages.

Senior Judge Warren Urbom entered the judgment in the federal court Wednesday.

The university made the offer "solely to compromise the claim ... without admitting the validity of plaintiff's contention or any allegations of wrongdoing by the defendants," attorney David Buntain said...

Readers of DISCRIMINATIONS will recall that officials of the University of Nebraska adamantly opposed the Nebraska Civil Rights Initiative, which passed with 58% of the vote, claiming that it would destroy “diversity.” But if they really value “diversity,” wouldn’t those university officials determine whether or not witches are “underrepresented” there? And if they are either “underrepresented,” wouldn’t they be obligated by their own professed values to take affirmative action to correct the problem? (Of course, if witches turn out to be “overrepresented,” then I’m sure the university officials are clever enough to establish witch-neutral “goals” that would operate as a de facto quota until the optimum balance is reached.)

Oh, wait, you might say. Doesn’t the new law produced by the Nebraska Civil Rights Initiative —

(1) The state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting

I will leave that to the lawyers (Roger, are you there?), but will note in passing that any concern on that front could be diminished, or perhaps even eliminated, if the university engaged in affirmative action for both witches and warlocks.

ADDENDUM

Questions about the rights of witches could, perhaps, be profitably directed to the Witches Protection Project — a “Group spreading word about civil rights of witches” — in Salem, Massachusetts, where they presumably know something about witches.

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George Bernard Shaw On Mary Landrieu ha received an important UPDATE.

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From a CNN poll released yesterday morning:

Thirty-six percent of people questioned said that President Obama’s policies have improved economic conditions, with 28 percent feeling that the president’s programs have made things worse, and 35 percent saying what he’s done has had no effect on the economy.

What I’d like to know is something I’m assuming CNN didn’t ask (haven’t seen the poll questions): what do those 35 percent think of those who spent all that money to “no effect”? Here, for example, is a good follow-up question for those respondents:

In the next Congressional and presidential elections, would you be more likely to support or oppose candidates who voted for all this ineffective spending?

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Narcissist In Chief has been UPDATED.

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[NOTE: This post has been UPDATED]

According to ABC News, Mary Landrieu (D, La) was paid $100 million (in the form of an earmark for Louisiana that Sen. Harry Reid inserted into his health care bill) for her support on health care.

If true, Sen. Landrieu will be cast forevermore as the justly skewed damsel in George Bernard Shaw’s famous observation:

the playwright George Bernard Shaw was overheard at a party to have said that anyone could be bought for a price. When a woman at the party disagreed, he asked her if she’d sleep with him for a million pounds. She replied that for a million pounds she very well might. But when he asked if she’d do it for ten shillings, she replied indignantly, “Certainly not! What do you think I am?” “We’ve already established what you are,” Shaw is reputed to have said. “Now we’re only haggling over price.”

“It’s a $300 million fix”!

This morning the Washington Post confirmed my analogy analysis.

On the eve of Saturday’s showdown in the Senate over health-care reform, Democratic leaders still hadn’t secured the support of Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), one of the 60 votes needed to keep the legislation alive. The wavering lawmaker was offered a sweetener: at least $100 million in extra federal money for her home state.

And so it came to pass that Landrieu walked onto the Senate floor midafternoon Saturday to announce her aye vote -- and to trumpet the financial “fix” she had arranged for Louisiana. “I am not going to be defensive,” she declared. “And it’s not a $100 million fix. It’s a $300 million fix.”

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Prof. John L. Jackson, Jr., whom we have encountered many times here as the Chronicle of Higher Education’s designated BOC (Blogger Of Color [my term, not the Chronicle’s]), is troubled today by the increasingly ineffective (I would say pathetic) defenses of “diversity.”

He writes that we know what critics believe is wrong with diversity.

The naysayers have many answers: that it discriminates against white males; that it rewards mediocrity/incompetence; that it perpetuates minority underachievement; that it threatens the integrity of higher education; that it is undemocratic and unethical; that it runs counter to all of our loftiest ideals of equality. Diversity, they argue, is the euphemism of choice for quotas, which should be considered unfair and unconstitutional.

“We know what the detractors think,” Jackson continues, “but how do diversity proponents counter[?]”

What’s the defense of diversity, not just as an abstract principle, but as translatable into concrete decisions about, say, student admissions and faculty hiring?

Given the extent to which recent Supreme Court decisions have demonstrated growing judicial hostility towards race-inflected admission decisions/formulas (and with the increasing thematization/politicization of academia as ideologically Far-Left), are advocates conceding too much? Are they trying to have it both ways? That is, might academia be falling into a trap when it attempts to ostensibly cloak its programmatic commitments to diversity (one of the criticisms leveled at many academic interventions)? Is it enough to re-name programs that used to be explicitly marked as race-specific initiatives and still deploy them in service to similar goals, walking on egg shells all the while?

Put slightly differently, are academics still fighting for a version of diversity with real institutional teeth? Or has that battle already been lost?

I’m really not sure what Prof. Jackson is trying to say here, but I think what he’s saying is that defenses of “diversity” without openly and robustly defended racial preferences and assertions that quotas are “fair and constitutional” have no teeth.

Clearly some of the early commenters on Jackson’s piece have no hesitation offering a toothsome defense of quotas. “Feldmann” writes that he or she would welcome “equal opportunity” (feldmann’s quotation marks to indicate belief that that concept is no more than conservative myth) ... as soon as everything in life has been equalized — the old “level playing field” metaphor that we’ve encountered many times. So, feldmann concludes, “Yes, I want to see equal results....”

Or take “perplexed,” who asserts in the confident manner of academics ignorant of the evidence supporting arguments they summarily reject,

In a democratic society composed of numerous and somtimes overlapping communities defined in multiple ways (e.g., ethnicity, gender, etc.) everyone’s sense of justice requires that the best and brightest of their communities are able to attain desirable outcomes. Communities so denied will not long contribute productively to society.

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[NOTE: This post has been UPDATED]

Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe begins a recent perceptive, deeply troubling column about our president’s seemingly boundless narcissism by relating how Obama, who couldn’t be bothered to attend the celebrations in Germany marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, nevertheless managed to make his videotaped remarks about the historic event about ... himself.

.... He referred to “tyranny,” but never identified the tyrants -- he never uttered the words “Soviet Union” or “communism,” for example. He said nothing about the men and women who died trying to cross the wall. Nor did he mention Harry Truman or Ronald Reagan -- or even Mikhail Gorbachev.

He did, however, talk about Barack Obama.

“Few would have foreseen,” declared the president, “that a united Germany would be led by a woman from [the former East German state of] Brandenburg or that their American ally would be led by a man of African descent. But human destiny is what human beings make of it.”

As presidential rhetoric goes, this was hardly a match for “Ich bin ein Berliner,” still less another “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” But as a specimen of presidential narcissism, it is hard to beat.

Patrick Gaspard, the campaign’s political director, said that when, in early 2007, he interviewed for a job with Obama and Plouffe, Obama said that he liked being surrounded by people who expressed strong opinions, but he also said, “I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.” After Obama’s first debate with McCain, on September 26th, Gaspard sent him an e-mail. “You are more clutch than Michael Jordan,” he wrote. Obama replied, “Just give me the ball.”

At the start of his presidency, Obama seemed to content himself with the royal “we” -- “We will build the roads and bridges . . . We will restore science to its rightful place . . . We will harness the sun and winds,” he declaimed at his inauguration.

But as the literary theorist Stanley Fish points out, “By the time of the address to the Congress on Feb. 24, the royal we [had] flowered into the naked ‘I’: ‘As soon as I took office, I asked this Congress.’ ‘I called for action.’ ‘I pushed for quick action.’ ‘I have told each of my cabinet.’ ‘I’ve appointed a proven and aggressive inspector general.’ ‘I refuse to let that happen.’ ‘I will not spend a single penny.’ ‘I reject the view that says our problems will simply take care of themselves.’ ‘I held a fiscal summit where I pledged to cut the deficit in half.’” In his speech on the federal takeover of GM, Obama likewise found it necessary to use the first-person singular pronoun 34 times. (“Congress” he mentioned just once.)

At this rate, it won’t be long before the president’s ego is so inflated that it will require a ZIP code of its own.

SEOUL -- After taking his message as the “first Pacific president” through four countries in eight days, President Obama wrapped up his tour of Asia on Thursday with talks with South Korean President Lee Myung-bak and a planned visit to U.S. troops stationed in the shadow of nuclear-armed North Korea....

The Seoul stop was the last on a trip that has notably lacked concrete achievements but has seen Obama’s personal narrative on full display, as he reminisced about the ice cream he ate during a childhood visit to Japan, invoked his “historic ties” to Indonesia and recalled his mother’s work in the villages of Southeast Asia. After more than a week of using his biography to connect to audiences in Asia -- perhaps the last corner of the globe where he had yet to take his story -- Obama appeared as popular as ever among ordinary citizens in the region.

And what did The One have to say to those troops guarding the outposts of freedom? Kornblut, now apparently wise to Obamian ways, reports in another article today:

Obama arrived on the base 3:19 p.m. local time (1 a.m. Eastern Standard Time), and received a rousing welcome from 1,500 troops in camouflage uniforms, many holding cameras or pointing cell phones to snap pictures.

“You guys make a pretty good photo op,” the president said.

Standing on a riser wearing a blue suit and red tie, with a cluster of troops and a large American flag behind him, Obama expressed “the gratitude of the American public” and said his meetings in four countries over eight days in Asia will help deliver a “safer more prosperous world for all of us.”

He got a huge cheer when he told them he was increasing military pay. “That’s what you call an applause line,” he said, before boarding his jet and taking off at 4:11 p.m.

I wonder if any of those Democrats who are being herded into position to sacrifice their seats in 2010 for his extravagance are beginning have second (or even first) thoughts.

UPDATE [20 Nov.]

Thanks to Jeff Jacoby for this tweet, and welcome to all of you who followed his link to this post.

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According to latest data from the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2008 Asians were 4.9% of Virginia’s population, slightly higher than the 4.5% for the nation as a whole. But to Virginia Governor Timothy Kaine and a Washington Post staff writer, they apparently don’t exist.

In an article yesterday Michael Allison Chandler reported:

Gov. Timothy M. Kaine announced Tuesday that the Virginia Education Department has launched a study of minority students’ low participation in gifted education programs statewide.

African Americans represent 26 percent of the state’s 1.2 million students but 12 percent of those in gifted education programs. Hispanics are 9 percent of the state’s schoolchildren, but 5 percent of gifted students.

Are gifted classes, in short, supposed to be representative of anything other than giftedness, some combination of aptitude and attitude. As I wrote here:

Prof. Julian Stanley of Johns Hopkins was perhaps the leading student of, and advocate for, gifted children in this country. See the fascinating article, “Nerd Camp,” New Yorker, July 26, 2004, about the Hopkins Center for Talented Youth summer programs (daughter Jessie attended three of them) ... for a discussion of Stanley and his work. I mention him here because he famously observed that what set gifted children apart was more attitude than aptitude.

“Virginia is proud of both the high standards of our educational system and the wealth of diversity in our communities,” Governor Kaine said. “As we continue to improve on our gifted education programs in particular, it’s critical we assess any disproportionate barriers to enrollment so we can ensure students of all backgrounds have the opportunity to participate.

All students of whatever race or ethnicity currently have an equal opportunity to be evaluated for admission to Virginia’s gifted classes. What Kaine obviously finds lacking is not the “opportunity to participate” but the politically correct result of all racial and ethnic groups participating proportionately, something which is quite different.

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Something dramatic appeared on Inside Higher Ed today, but it was not the Q & A interview with Notre Dame philosophy professor James P. Sterba about this new book, Affirmative Action For the Future.

Indeed, Sterba’s answers to Inside Higher Ed’s pedestrian questions were so vapid that — even though I argue about this stuff daily as an avocation — I couldn’t work myself up to criticize it. It just didn’t seem worth the trouble. Here, for example, was the first exchange:

Q: How do you define affirmative action?

A: Affirmative action is a policy of favoring qualified women, minority, or economically disadvantaged candidates over qualified men, nonminority or economically advantaged candidates respectively with the immediate goals of outreach, remedying discrimination, or achieving diversity, and the ultimate goals of attaining a colorblind (racially just), a gender-free (sexually just) and equal opportunity (economically just) society.

Here’s one more example (I promise I’ll stop after this one), where the only interesting question is who sounds more conventionally vapid, the interviewer (Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed’s editor) or the interviewee?

Q: Do you think opponents of affirmative action can be convinced to change their views?

A: Most opponents of affirmative action can be convinced to change their minds because they have formed their opinion about affirmative action knowing no more than half the facts and half the arguments that are relevant to an assessment of the practice. Once they get a fuller picture of what is relevant to an assessment of the affirmative action, they are confronted with good reasons to change their view. For example, once opponents do a comparative evaluation of diversity affirmative action against two other preference programs in higher education – legacy preference and athletic preference – each of which is twice the usual size of the college or university affirmative action program, it is difficult for them not to see the superior moral and educational justification of diversity affirmative action.

Don’t hold your breath.

Regular readers of this blog already know that I hold Roger Clegg, president and general counsel of the invaluable Center for Equal Opportunity, in high regard, not only for his knowledge but also for his style and wit — and, after today, I must add his unflappability when confronted with dead fish arguments. Unlike yours truly, he was not deterred by their smug vapidity, and thus (at 7:00 A.M.!) he posted a four-point comment that utterly devastated Sterba’s argument, and he did so without a trace of the snarkiness that I (as you see) couldn’t avoid even as I avoided taking Sterba seriously enough to argue with him. Read Clegg’s comment, and others, here.

Clegg’s comment (also published this morning on National Review Online) was so effective that something noteworthy happened: a stream of comments actually agreeing with him followed (see them at above link), which may be a first for a publication read mainly by higher ed wonks. An unusually impressive one deserves to be quoted in full here, and so is:

I would like to thank Roger Clegg for his cogent thoughts on affirmative action, many of which are shared even by political liberals. At one point in my career I was general counsel to a state agency that, among other things, oversaw a minority- and woman-owned business certification process, part of an affirmative action program to increase the number of state contractors from certain racial and ethnic groups. Administering this process involved such activities as having to get the opinion of a professor of geography as to whether Afghanistan is part of “South Asia,” as South Asians were a statutorily-designated affirmative action minority and an Afghani applicant claimed Afghanistan is part of South Asia. The case that caused me to wake up at night shaking with anxiety involved an applicant with Hispanic first and middle names who had been born and raised in Cuba as a Cuban citizen, was a native Spanish speaker, escaped from the Castro regime without a penny to his name, became a professional engineer and started his own successful business. But his Jewish parents had escaped from Nazi Europe, having been sent alone as young teenagers by their families to Cuba, where they built their lives from scratch by hard work while the rest of their families perished in Nazi concentration camps. The “bloodline analysis” on this applicant indicated he did not have ”Hispanic blood,” and he was denied minority certification, a decision upheld by an administrative law judge. I had a hard time distinguishing between the process used by the state agency and that used by the Nazis. This kind of analysis is utterly distasteful no matter what the ultimate purpose, and, in my opinion, is fraught with moral problems. I am glad Roger Clegg continues to articulate these concerns.

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“Take a flyer”

Idiom Meaning – To Take a chance or a risk

In discussions with dozens of health-care leaders and economists, I find near unanimity of opinion that, whatever its shape, the final legislation that will emerge from Congress will markedly accelerate national health-care spending rather than restrain it. Likewise, nearly all agree that the legislation would do little or nothing to improve quality or change health-care's dysfunctional delivery system....

Worse, currently proposed federal legislation would undermine any potential for real innovation in insurance and the provision of care. It would do so by overregulating the health-care system in the service of special interests such as insurance companies, hospitals, professional organizations and pharmaceutical companies, rather than the patients who should be our primary concern.

In effect, while the legislation would enhance access to insurance, the trade-off would be an accelerated crisis of health-care costs and perpetuation of the current dysfunctional system—now with many more participants. This will make an eventual solution even more difficult. Ultimately, our capacity to innovate and develop new therapies would suffer most of all....

Capitation means that newly created organizations of physicians and other health-care providers will be given limited dollars per patient for all of their care, allowing for shared savings if spending is below the targets. Unfortunately, the details of this massive change—necessitated by skyrocketing costs and a desire to improve quality—are completely unspecified by the commission, although a new Massachusetts state bureaucracy clearly will be required.

Yet it's entirely unclear how such unspecified changes would impact physician practices and compensation, hospital organizations and their capacity to invest, and the ability of patients to receive the kind and quality of care they desire. Similar challenges would eventually confront the entire country on a more explosive scale if the current legislation becomes law.

It is easier to assert, confidently but disingenuously, that decreased costs and enhanced quality would result from the current legislation.

So the majority of our representatives may congratulate themselves on reducing the number of uninsured, while quietly understanding this can only be the first step of a multiyear process to more drastically change the organization and funding of health care in America. I have met many people for whom this strategy is conscious and explicit.

We should not be making public policy in such a crucial area by keeping the electorate ignorant of the actual road ahead.

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Freshman Democratic Rep. Tom Perriello of Virginia’s 5th Congressional district defeated a veteran incumbent in 2008 by about 700 votes. The district went narrowly for McCain but heavily for Republican Governor-elect Bob McDonnell and his running mates two weeks ago, which, along with his votes for the stimulus, cap and trade, and the House health care bill, places Perriello at or near the top of the list of endangered Democrats in the House.

A letter to the Charlottesville Daily Progress last Saturday that I rather like reads as follows:

Thirty-nine Democrats in the House of Representatives voted against the massive Medicare-cutting, tax-increasing, income-redistributing scheme known as health care reform, but our congressman, Tom Perriello, was not among them.

Rather than representing the views of 5th District voters in Washington, Perriello’s vote reveals that his fealty is not to his constituents but to a different sovereign, Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic Party. He has chosen to be their ambassador to us rather than what we elected him to be, our representative to them.

Fortunately, in about a year we can make other arrangements. By then many of his jilted voters will have worked hard to ensure that Ambassador Perriello will have become former Ambassador Perriello.

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LANSING, Mich. (AP)- A federal appeals court is set to consider a lawsuit challenging Michigan's ban against racial preferences in public university admissions and government hiring.

Nineteen University of Michigan students, faculty and applicants say the 2006 anti-affirmative action ballot measure approved by voters is unconstitutional.

Critics say the constitutional amendment has created an unfair process where universities give weight to geographical diversity and legacy status but not racial identity.

This argument might be worthy of respect — or at least of being taken seriously — if it’s proponents had the honesty to call for the repeal of civil rights laws, which make discriminating on the basis of race illegal.

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On Friday Homeland Security Security Janet Napolitano announced that “[t]he Obama administration will insist on measures to give legal status to an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants as it pushes early next year for legislation to overhaul the immigration system.”

Yesterday Mickey Kaus discussed four reasons that might not have been such a good idea (with one caveat: “maybe Obama has concluded that health care reform gets more unpopular when voters think about it, so he’s changing the subject...). He asked, for example, “Doesn’t it potentially make 2010 midterm voters more uneasy about Dem overreach?”

Secretary Napolitano addressed this concern in her Friday comments:

In her first major speech on the overhaul, Ms. Napolitano dispelled any suggestion that the administration — with health care, energy and other major issues crowding its agenda — would postpone the most contentious piece of immigration legislation until after midterm elections next November.

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Inside Higher Ed has an article today by Prof. Thomas Espenshade of Princeton and Alexandra Radford, a research associate in postsecondary education with MPR Associates Inc. in Washington, calling for “a new Marshall Plan” to study and address the persistence of large racial achievement gaps.

They note, for starters, that

[c]ompared to white applicants at selective private colleges and universities, black applicants receive an admission boost that is equivalent to 310 SAT points, measured on an all-other-things-equal basis. The boost for Hispanic candidates is equal on average to 130 SAT points. Asian applicants face a 140 point SAT disadvantage.

[d]oing away with racial preferences for underrepresented minority students would substantially reduce the number of such students at selective colleges.

debating the relative merits of affirmative action deflects attention away from something much more fundamental — America’s racial gap in academic achievement. Fixing the achievement gap would obviate the need for affirmative action to create racially diverse campuses.

They propose:

the equivalent of a Manhattan Project for the social and behavioral sciences — a project with the same scale, urgency, and sense of importance as the original Manhattan Project. Its aims should be twofold: (1) to identify the causes and cumulative consequences of racial gaps in academic achievement and (2) to develop concrete steps that can be taken by parents, schools, neighborhoods, and the public sector all working together to close these gaps on a nationwide scale.

You don’t need a new Manhattan Project to see that children who grow up without the benefit of two parents are at an enormous disadvantage. As Roger Clegg has commented on the Espenshade argument,

Earlier this year, the National Center for Health Statistics came out with its latest numbers on illegitimacy (final data for 2006). By population subgroup, the percentage of children born out of wedlock is 70.7 percent for non-Hispanic blacks, 64.6 percent for American Indians/Alaska Natives, 49.9 percent for Hispanics, 26.6 percent for non-Hispanic whites, and 16.5 percent for Asians/Pacific Islanders. Notice any connection between those numbers and how academically competitive the members of the group are likely to be come college admissions time?

The fact is that kids who grow up in two-parent homes are much more likely to get the support and help they need to perform well academically. Conversely, illegitimacy correlates with just about any social problem you can name (poverty, crime, dropping out of school, substance abuse, etc.), and it — not discrimination — is the principal cause of racial disparities in all these areas. See my National Review Online column here.

[Espenshade’s and Walton’s] eagerness to associate academic success or failure with ancestry (Asian kids do very well while black and Hispanic kids do poorly) was striking. That kind of thinking is not useful. Students from families of Asian ancestry don't do well because of their Asian-ness; they do well because of values imparted in the home. (Similarly, Jewish students didn't do exceptionally well because of ancestry or religion, but because of their values.) Nor does ancestry explain the relatively poor educational fortunes of black and Hispanic students....

I don't see how the proposed "Manhattan Project" would tell us much that isn't already obvious: Early family influence is overwhelmingly important to a child's educational path. Nor can I see that there is any solution to the problem of broken homes and bad parenting....

It is widely noted that Asian Americans outperform students from other race- ethnic backgrounds in mathematics and sciences. Asian American students consistently achieve higher scores on standardized tests of mathematics ability, have higher grade point averages, and attend colleges at higher rates than do students of other races.... Even those Asian American students with disadvantaged backgrounds, such as new immigrant students with limited English proficiency and a low socioeconomic status, frequently contradict expectations and have high academic achievement....

Asian American parents are more actively involved in their children’s academic studies. They are also more likely to communicate with teachers and invest more aggressively in their children’s education....

Research has consistently shown that Asian American students spend considerably more time in academic related activities than white American students....

Previous studies (Mau 1997) indicated that Asian American students spent significantly more time on homework than white American students....

Using the base year data of parent interviews (n=15,376) conducted by the U. S. Department of Education for the national Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS-K), this study examined patterns of parenting style of Asian-American parents (n=536) in six domains. Descriptive and ANOVA analyses revealed significant differences between Asian-American parents and parents in European-American, African-American, and Hispanic groups in their expectations of child's education attainment and expression of affection to children. More similarities than differences among the four ethnic groups were found in parental attitudes towards child's areas of development in kindergarten, parental school involvement, parental involvement with child at home, and parent disciplinary style. The Asian-American parents were further divided into three subgroups to examine possible with-in group differences. The three groups were: (1) Two parents, both parents are Asian-American (n=343), (2) Asian-American single parents (n=45), and (3) two parents with one parent being Asian-American (n=31). Results showed that although the three subgroups of parents differ in social economical status and education level, there were very few significant differences in all six domains of parenting across these three subgroups. This finding suggests that Asian parenting style is prominent in families as long as one parent is Asian-American.

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“UW-La Crosse looks to diversity faculty,” reports the La Crosse Tribune.

Why? Well, because “[s]tudents have told Professor Jearold Holland he is the first black teacher they’ve had in high school or college,” and Prof. Holland is “not surprised.”

UW-L has launched two initiatives this year to recruit more diverse faculty and staff, said Carmen Wilson, special assistant to the chancellor and affirmative action officer....

The university is searching for 48 new faculty and staff to start next school year, Wilson said. Of the new faculty hired for this school year, about 67 percent were white, 24 percent Asian, 2.4 percent black and 2.4 percent Hispanic.

Wilson thinks a more diverse faculty will make the campus more supportive of students of color. That's critical at UW-L, where research shows greater percentages of white students completing degrees than students of color.

About 39 percent of the African-American students who started between 1997 and 1999 graduated within six years, compared with 61 percent of the Caucasian students, according to the Equity Scorecard Project, done to assess UW-L's diversity goals.

Is that all? Well, not exactly.

Diverse staff also means a diverse pedagogy and research interest, Wilson said.

“Our students are expected to go out and operate efficiently in a global society, and because of that, they need diverse backgrounds,” said Holland, who is president of the Multicultural Faculty & Staff Organization.

If helping students develop the ability to “operat[e] efficiently in a global society” is to be the new criterion for faculty hiring, why would hiring a few more blacks or Hispanics be more productive than adding more scholars from India, China, Japan, Singapore, Sweden, etc., etc.?

Shouldn’t university officials, of all people, finally be forced to support their vaporous, politically correct assertions with, you know, actual evidence? Especially when what they propose to do is discriminate on the basis of race or ethnicity.

ADDENDUM

A reader points me to the University of Wisconsin – La Crosse Campus Connection for the week of Nov. 9 – 15, noting that “it has transgender stuff and changing Thanksgiving but nothing on the fall of the Berlin Wall or Veterans Day. It is diversity of a very limited sort.”

Indeed. Here are some examples from what may or may not be a typical week at UW-L:

Final Hispanic Heritage Month program moved to Nov. 11

The public lecture "Doing Movies with a Conscience: The New Mexican Social Documentary" by documentary film director Salvador E. Valdez has been moved to 5-6:30 p.m., Wednesday, Nov. 11, in Valhalla B, Cartwright Center-Gunning Addition. Valdez will discuss his work bringing attention to plight of blind, poor, aged and maquiladora workers. The lecture includes the U.S. premier of his short film "Un Día Más" (subtitled). A reception will follow.

Trans shame and pride focus of Nov. 19 presentation

Author and public speaker Eli Clare will present “Trans Shame, Trans Pride: Lessons from the Diversity Rights Movement” at 7 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 19, in the Ward Room, Cartwright Center. Clare, who’s described on his Web site (http://eliclare.com/) as “white, disabled and genderqueer,” has a bachelor’s degree in women’s studies, a master’s in creative writing and “a penchant for rabble-rousing.” Those who plan to attend who need accommodations, and for more information, contact the Pride Center at pridecenter@uwlax.edu. The presentation is sponsored by the Pride Center; the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; and Students Advocating Potential Ability.

Disability as a social justice issue topic of Nov. 20 talk

Often the major disability issues faced by individuals with disabilities are not about health but about disability-based marginalization and discrimination, which in turn impact access to education, employment, housing and social services. This concept is one theme of “Moving Beyond Inspiration and Pity: Disability as a Social Justice Issue,” Eli Clare’s presentation set for 9-11 a.m. Friday, Nov. 20, in Port O’ Call, Cartwright Center-Gunning Addition.

Clare addresses disability as an issue of cultural competency and social justice. The discussion provides tools to create more disability access in work places and communities.

The free event is sponsored by the Pride Center; the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; and Students Advocating Potential Ability.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 11:48 AM | Permalink | Say What? (1) | TrackBacks (0)

This post on the Army’s liability for the Fort Hood massacre has been UPDATED.

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... begets hypersensitivity to race.

From today’s Columbia Spectator (sent by a reader), about new federal requirements for the collection of racial data from educational institutions:

Now, members of some campus groups are dismayed to see their complex ethnic identities boiled down to a simple box, one they say is both demeaning and inaccurate....

The campus Arab students’ organization Turath expressed dismay with this new set of guidelines and Yasmina Raiani CC ’12, the group’s secretary, sent a personal message replying to University survey requests, saying she would not participate in a classification system that she found both insulting and inaccurate.

“It clumps individuals of North African and Middle Eastern descent into ‘white,’ which is not only superficially inaccurate—in that the actual skin tone range of North African and Middle Eastern peoples is more akin to that of Hispanics/Latinos than it is to Caucasians—but also historically insensitive,” Raiani wrote to the University. “To identify Arabs as ‘white’ is to disregard our history as members of the colonized world and to dismiss all acts of racial discrimination against our community.”

What a relief! All these years I’ve thought that the sense of “otherness” imposed on me at Stanford reflected some personal failing. Now I know that it’s because I was deprived of the opportunity — no, right! — to define myself on any application or form as “American/Southern/Jewish.” And, now that I’ve asked her, I learn that my wife has been a long-suffering victim of the same hegemonic oppression, since Penn never allowed her to define herself as Half Jewish/Half Irish.

Jessie, our soon-to-be Ph.D. daughter, is barely aware of the fact that she’s half-Southern, three-quarters Jewish, one-quarter Irish, but I blame that not on her upbringing, such as it was, but on the fact that neither Bryn Mawr nor Caltech ever allowed her to confront and express her true identity.

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[NOTE: This post has been UPDATED]

James Alan Fox and Jack Levin, criminologists at Boston’s Northeastern University, argue in USA Today that the Fort Hood “tragedy” is “typical workplace violence.”

.... In many respects the Fort Hood massacre stands as a textbook case of workplace murder, even though a military base would seem to be an unusual location. Such a crime would seem more likely to occur inside an office building, such as in Friday's shooting spree in Orlando. Despite its unique function, Fort Hood is indeed a workplace, the U.S. Army an employer, and Hasan a disgruntled worker attempting to avenge perceived unfair treatment on the job....

calling the Fort Hood ambush an act of terrorism would only compound the tragedy by reinforcing the kind of intolerance toward American Muslims that appears to have contributed to Hasan’s despair.

Thanks.

Let us not pause here to refute Fox’s and Levin’s view that the evidence for terrorism is superficial and deceptive and instead take seriously their notion that this was simply an example of workplace violence by a disgruntled employee. But if that is the case (and leaving aside the issue of sovereign immunity), can’t a strong argument be made that the Army is liable for the misconduct of its “employee”?

There are several theories under which the liability of Hasan’s “employer” could be established, especially given all the evidence that has come out to date (with more probably in the wings) of the notice it had that Hasan was a threatening risk. Here’s just one:

Employees have been successful in suits that allege that employers were negligent in either hiring or retaining another employee who, subsequent to being hired, commits a violent act....

Negligent retention occurs when an employer becomes aware, or should become aware, of an employee's unsuitability, yet fails to take any action....

J. Robert Smith writes today on Pajamas Media that

while the army brass bears a share of the responsibility for Hasan’s terrorism, having the military bear a disproportionate share of the criticism is both unfair and misguided....

The Constitution makes the military subordinate to civilian command. That’s more than just form, thank goodness. The military obeys the president and follows the laws established by Congress. The Founders wanted the military subordinate to civilian command, for obvious reasons.

Of course, as almost everyone can see (except perhaps the president, a few criminologists, and our moral instructors in the mainstream media), Fort Hood is not a typical “workplace”; the Army is not primarily an “employer,” and Maj. Hasan is not your typical “nut case” employee, as Newsweek’s Evan Thomas seems to think.

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The most perceptive comment about learning (or not) the lessons of history is not George Santayana’s famous observation, “Those
who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” It is from Mark Twain:

The cat, having sat upon a hot stove lid, will not sit upon a hot stove lid again. But he won't sit upon a cold stove lid, either.

McCarthyism can be characterized a number of ways, but one of them is the repression of domestic dissent flowing from an inordinate fear of domestic subversion. It is now well-established that there were indeed Soviet spies in the United States, but there was never an actual threat of domestic violence or revolution. Left-wing teachers or other public employees were often misguided or even foolish in their views and sympathies, but they were never a threat to our domestic security, and many of the measures taken against them were indeed violations of civil liberties.

Now, however, there is a clear, present, and ongoing danger of actual violence against Americans from individuals and groups in the United States — some open, some deeply buried underground — devoted to a militantly anti-American foreign ideology, and our president, our security services, our military leaders, and the representatives of what passes for enlightened are worried once again.

What they are worried about, however, almost incomprehensibly, is not that real domestic threat. What they are worried about is that racist, right-wing teabaggers (usually referred by our elites, when they are on good behavior, as conservatives) will overreact, and say or do something that will cast aspersions on all the innocent, peace-loving Muslims. Here are a couple of good examples, quoted in Newsbusters:

Newsweek’s Evan Thomas regretted the Fort Hood mass murderer, Major Nidal Hasan, is a Muslim because of how that reality will be abused by conservatives. On this weekend’s Inside Washington, Thomas, now Editor at Large with Newsweek after stints as Assistant Managing Editor and Washington bureau chief, rued:

I cringe that he’s a Muslim. I mean, because it inflames all the fears. I think he’s probably just a nut case. But with that label attached to him, it will get the right wing going and it just -- I mean these things are tragic, but that makes it much worse.

NPR’s Nina Totenberg soon chimed in with agreement: “It really is tragic that he was a Muslim.”

One need not say that over-reaction could not be a problem in order to say it is not the main problem we face. We need not deny that the vast preponderance of Muslims are not jihadists, nor should we fail to protect their civil liberties. I do not propose that we return to the mindset or methods of McCarthyism, but I do think it would be a good idea for our political and military leaders and our self-appointed betters in the liberal media (but I repeat myself) to take their heads out of the politically correct sand in which they’re buried.

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Jay Cost of Real Clear Politics gets almost everything right almost all of the time, but I believe he missed a little in his analysis today of What the Voters Told Us Last Night. Here’s what he says they told us:

The following points are what we know for certain:

1. The voters of Virginia declared a preference for Bob McDonnell over Creigh Deeds.

2. The voters of New Jersey declared a preference for Chris Christie over Jon Corzine.

3. The voters of New York’s Twenty-Third Congressional District declared a preference for Bill Owens over Doug Hoffman.

And that’s it. Anything else is reading between the lines, and subject to the haziness that necessarily goes along with such an endeavor.

Yesterday, by contrast, the voters surely did, as Cost says, declare their preference McDonnell over Deeds, but that definitely was not all they (we) did. They (we) also declared our preference for Republican Bolling, re-electing him Lieutenant Governor, and for Republican Ken Cuccinelli, electing him Attorney General, and those preferences were of record-setting proportions.

And that’s not all. Even in the close suburbs of solid blue Charlottesville, the Republicans woke up today to find themselves in the majority on the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors:

A GOP supporter waved a broom Tuesday at Rivals Sports Bar and Grill after Republicans swept the competitive Albemarle County Board of Supervisors races.

Republican Rodney S. Thomas pulled ahead of Democrat David L. Slutzky, the incumbent, taking the Rio District seat. And Duane Snow, a Republican businessman and grandfather of 13, sailed past a Democrat and an independent....

There will be three Republicans, two Democrats and one independent on the Albemarle Board of Supervisors beginning next year. The current board has three Democrats, two independents and only one Republican.

Del. Rob Bell, R-Albemarle County, easily fended off a challenge from Democrat Cynthia Neff on Tuesday in one of the Charlottesville region’s most closely watched House of Delegates races.

Bell, a four-term incumbent and former Orange County prosecutor, won another term representing the 58th District with 67 percent of the vote....

Del. R. Steve Landes, R-Weyers Cave, trounced Democratic challenger Greg Marrow in the 25th District, which includes three precincts in the Crozet area of Albemarle.
Landes, who has served in the House since 1996 and had not faced a Democratic opponent in the previous six elections, took 73 percent of the vote....

A Republican tide swept over Virginia yesterday, and while it is true, as Cost states, that Obama “was not on the ballot,” I think the vote in Virginia was much more than what Cost calls “a cautionary tale for the President.” It reflected profound discontent with, and more than a small amount of anger at, his profligacy with their money and his “plan” for their health care. That tide may well be all washed up by 2010 and especially by 2012, but any President or Blue Dog swimming against it in the near future does so at his peril.

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Feminists almost uniformly support affirmative action, arguing that women benefit from preferential treatment. In the campaigns to require states to treat their citizens “without regard” to race or sex (Prop. 209 in California and the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative being prime examples), they have argued vociferously (I’m tempted to say “shrilly,” which is both accurate and politically incorrect) that official gender blindness would work to the detriment of women. I have discussed this too many times to cite, but here is a good example from the MCRI campaign, quoting a statement issued by eleven Michigan women’s organizations:

“Oftentimes, affirmative action is viewed as a tool that solely benefits people of color. However, it is important to remember that affirmative action benefits women as well — regardless of race or color,” concluded Anita Bowden of the Michigan Council of the YWCA. “In fact, women are the most frequent beneficiaries of and will lose most if affirmative action is lost.”

“We stand in opposition to Ward Connerly’s deceptively titled “Michigan Civil Rights Initiative,” said Diane Neth Covel, Director of Public Policy, Michigan AAUW. “We will continue to support policies that increase the diversity of Michigan’s educational institutions and workplaces.”

Fern Ettinger of the National Council of Jewish Women emphasized the importance of diversity, stating, “The case for diversity in higher education is indeed compelling. Our country cannot afford to ignore equal opportunity and access for women in education. Our future leaders must be educated in a classroom as diverse as the challenges we face.”

would these groups continue to support affirmative action so fervently if men were the primary beneficiaries, as indeed they seem to be in college admissions according to this report in USA Today.

There is one more vexing question about sex-based affirmative action that I’ve never understood. Feminists are generally quick to insist that the proper term to use in discussing women and men is “gender,” not “sex,” because, they also insist, the distinctions and differences are “socially constructed.”

What is the difference between sex and gender?

Sex = male and female

Gender = masculine and feminine

So in essence:

Sex refers to biological differences; chromosomes, hormonal profiles, internal and external sex organs.

Gender describes the characteristics that a society or culture delineates as masculine or feminine.

Moreover, as I have argued a number of times, there is something quite odd about modern feminists reverting to the “difference feminism” that they had long rejected. In Rumblings On An Old Fault Line In The Struggle For Women’s Rights, for example, I noted that

[o]ne of the oldest, and most interesting, conflicts among supporters of civil rights is the struggle between feminists who sought “protective legislation” for women (limiting hours, working conditions, etc., for women) and feminists who sought gender-blind equality. A nice, succinct summary of this conflict can be found here, ironically, at a library at the University of Michigan:

When the Equal Rights Amendment to the United States Constitution was proposed in 1923, it created a rift among suffragists. Women who had fought for protective labor legislation feared that the ERA would undo their efforts to protect women in the workplace, while feminists believed the amendment was necessary to bring about equality for women in American society. The opposition to the amendment by women who otherwise supported women's rights persisted through mid-century, as is illustrated in the records of organizations such as the National Consumers League. In the 1960s and 1970s the women's liberation movement began to produce new views of the ERA and renewed support for the amendment.

Alas, this paragraph is now dated. The equal rights feminists of NOW, etc., who by this and virtually all other accounts had won this debate and banished the “protective legislation” feminists to a quaint footnote in histories of feminism, have now (or NOW) abandoned their victory, backtracked, picked up the tattered principles of their vanquished former foes, and are now giving full-throated, often shrill, voice to the notion that women, poor little shrinking violets, must have special privileges to protect them from competition on equal terms with men.

That was back in 2004, and the problem of preferential treatment based on male “underrepresentation” (if it is a problem) has now grown so severe that according to an article this morning in the Chronicle of Higher Education the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has begun to examine “whether selective colleges are discriminating against women in undergraduate admissions, as the rapidly growing proportion of female applicants threatens gender balance on those campuses.”

The commission’s inquiry, which it calls the “FY 2010 Project on Sex Discrimination in Higher Education Admissions,” expects to determine if selective coeducational institutions, both private and public, are giving undue preference to male applicants to avoid becoming “too female.” For private colleges to do so would be undesirable, according to at least one commissioner, while it would be illegal for public ones.

The project was proposed by Gail Heriot, a commissioner and law professor at the University of San Diego, who has been a vocal critic of racial preferences in admissions....

some college administrators argue that they must discriminate against women or the gender balance at their institutions will become so off-kilter that many of the women they want won’t be willing to attend. Colleges will then be unable to attract the female students they want most — or so they fear. Interestingly, this may be a bit of a collective action problem. Once a few lower-ranked liberal arts schools starting giving preferential treatment to men, others feel they must follow suit, since the failure to do so will cause any hold-out school to have a gender ratio that is seriously off-kilter.

I have not heard a lot of talk about sex-neutral ways to increase male enrollment in these private, selective, coed liberal arts schools, but I suspect that some efforts are being made. For example, if such a school were to add certain fields of study, that might attract relatively more men without the need for admissions preferences.... Other academic or extracurricular activities might be useful in attracting male applicants too. This seems to me to be preferable to flat-out discrimination against women, even if one accepts the notion that some action is “necessary” to maintain gender balance in order to ensure a school's continued attractiveness even to women.

A small but significant part of the problem may lie in the enforcement policies of the Department of Education in connection with Title IX. If a school seeks to make itself more attractive to men by adding more athletic opportunities for men, it must also make more athletic opportunities available to women essentially unless it can affirmatively show that added opportunities for women would not be taken advantage of. This makes it difficult. Since flat-out discrimination is a clear legal alternative, it is possible that what we are witnessing is Title IX “backfire.” A law that was designed to prevent sex discrimination in higher education may be causing sex discrimination on account of the Department of Education's emphasis on athletics in enforcement.

To consider this question, let me direct your attention back to the debates over the “Top 10%” admissions program in Texas, and similar programs in Florida and California. Texas’s program, to remind you, in a transparent and admitted effort to enroll more minorities in Texas flagship campuses that were barred, for a while (by Hopwood v. Texas) from preferential treatment of minorities, offered guaranteed admission to the University of Texas at Austin and several other campuses to all high school graduates in the top 10% of their graduating class, a net which captured many minorities at schools with large numbers of blacks or Hispanics.

A number of anti-preference activists and scholars who are both smarter and know much more about the legal niceties than I (I’m referring to Roger Clegg and Terry Pell, among others) believed, and believe, that since the intent was to attract more minorities that the program was impermissibly discriminatory. Other activists and scholars, also smarter than I who also know more about the legal niceties, disagreed, arguing that such programs do and should pass constitutional muster. At the time I tended to agree with the latter group, arguing that the intent to diversify did not itself disqualify the programs in the absence of either a discriminatory intent or effect. But I was not absolutely convinced then that I was right, and I’m still not sure.

In any event, I don’t see how offering non-discriminatory programs for the purpose of attracting males can be evaluated apart from an evaluation of the Top 10% programs, and thus I encourage you to re-read (!) my earlier discussions of that issue, here, here, here, here, and here.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 8:42 PM | Permalink | Say What? (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Robert Robb, an Arizona Republic columnist writing on RealClearPolitics today, is not quite sure whether Democratic claims that their proposed health care reform will not lead to higher premiums and is not intended to lead to a single-payer system are lies or stupidity, but he leans toward stupidity.

Republicans think the Democrats are engaged in a ruse, that they really want a government takeover of health care.

In their heart of hearts, Democrats do believe that health care should be a public good, provided by government irrespective of ability to pay. But I don’t think they’ve purposely set out to achieve that by misdirection.

Instead, I think they honestly don’t appreciate how fundamentally they are changing health care incentives and what the huge consequences of such changes will be.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 6:46 PM | Permalink | Say What? (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Jonah Goldberg writes:

A lot of conservatives today are too quick to think that because liberals have some affinity for Marxist sentiments that they are actual Marxists. Liberals often make the same mistakes as Marxists, but they’re not Marxists. In the 1960s, the distinctions between Marxists and liberals was much more apparent and it’s worth remembering that the radicals often hated the liberals more than they hated the conservatives.

For all practical (which is to say, political) purposes, there are no Marxists left in the United States today, outside of academia. But there are also almost no traditional liberals either, at least few who still identify themselves as liberals. Today’s liberals believe in regulating political speech through campaign finance laws, regulating wide swaths of speech that is not campaign-related through “hate crime” laws, regulating the racial “market” and playing racial favorites through affirmative action, suppressing advertising and even news they don’t like through litigation or other intimidation, denounce popular assemblies protesting government policy as illegitimately radical, populist gatherings of angry racists, etc.

There are, of course, many traditional liberals still among us, but these days they call themselves conservatives.

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