Discriminations

As any professional (or amateur or former) historian can tell you, causation is a tricky business, often fraught with more moral or political judgment than scientific analysis.

Slavery, for example, is widely thought to be “the” cause of the Civil War, but that view arguably assumes something that shouldn’t be assumed. The desire to protect the institution of slavery was at the core of the decision of the various Southern states to secede, but it was the Northern refusal to allow peaceful secession that precipitated the actual outbreak of hostilities. Slavery may have caused secession, but did secession cause the war, or was the response to secession the cause? These questions cannot be answered by accumulating more facts.

Similarly, the revisionist school of Civil War historians in the mid-20th century frequently blamed the often moralistic abolitionists for making compromise impossible, but there is no objective, scientific way to say their extreme response to evil was the cause of war rather than the extreme evil to which they were responding. To say they were “the” or even “a” cause of war is to say they shouldn’t have acted the way they did, but that is a matter of moral and political judgment, not fact.

I was reminded of the Civil War, as I frequently am, by our current partisan civil war, and specifically by the passage below from the current dean of establishment punditry, David Broder.

Broder cited new polls from Republican pollster Bill McInturff finding “striking” numbers: voters oppose the Democratic health bills by 52% to 40%,

with more than twice as many strongly opposed as are strongly supportive.

By a similar margin, 54 percent to 42 percent, they support the Republican argument for starting over and focusing on smaller pieces of legislation embodying bipartisan agreement, rather than merging the more comprehensive reform bills passed by the House and Senate....

A bit later in the day, during the session at Blair House, Obama cited other polls showing broad support for provisions in the pending bills that would change insurance rules to tear down barriers for those with pre-existing illnesses and remove the caps on benefit payments.

But armed with McInturff’s evidence that those who have been following the debate most closely and those most likely to vote in November are swinging to the Republican side of the argument -- just as they did in 1994 -- the GOP legislators at Obama’s summit resisted his efforts to draw them onto common ground. [Emphasis added]

Easy. They weren’t acting the way Broder would have had them act, just as the abolitionists didn’t respond to the evil of slavery in the calmer manner preferred by the revisionist historians.

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A new survey by Zogby of Hispanics, Asian-Americans, and African-Americans found that substantial and similar majorities of all those groups believed that

• immigration is too high;

• illegal immigration is caused by a lack of enforcement, not by overly strict limits on legal immigration;

• there are plenty of Americans available to fill unskilled jobs; and that

• illegal immigrants should be forced to return home rather than be offered a “pathway to citizenship.”

The survey shows, in short, that the views of minorities on immigration are substantially at odds with the position of the advocacy groups that claim to speak for them.

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BUSINESSES will be forced to employ minimum numbers of females in the workplace under new laws being considered by the Federal Government.

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Now a column in University of California, Irvine, has “generated more tension” on a campus already riled by racial and religious conflict.

Among the most inflammatory assertions by Hanna Guthrie, a sophomore English major who writes for UCI’s New University newspaper who had audacity to question Black History Month:

it is a known fact that things like affirmative action give preferential treatment to American minorities. I would go so far to say that universities and companies seek minority candidates for the sake of calling themselves “diverse.”

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A few days ago, in Utah Democrats Oppose Racial Equality, I wrote of Democratic opposition to the pending effort to revise the Utah constitution to prohibit racial preferences.

Now it appears that without “diversity” white people would be culturally retarded.

Speakers at an educational forum organized Saturday at Salt Lake City’s Horizonte Instructional Center told an audience of about 60 that they must spread the word that affirmative action is not “reverse racism” ... but a tool to foster equality that benefits everyone.

“The people at the greatest risk from not having diversity are white people,” said William Smith, associate professor of educational policy at the University of Utah, who is black. “You’re at risk of being culturally and civilly retarded. ... If you put all of your savings in one area, you’re bankrupt. I’m talking culturally bankrupt.”

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I've been writing about how the mainstream media covers race issues for so long, and so much of that coverage is so bad, that I thought I was long past being shocked by the thoughtless (or worse, premeditated) dumbness that so often appears in publications widely if mistakenly thought to be reliable.

But I was wrong. This article, by Randal C. Archibold in yesterday's New York Times on race-based strife at the University of California, San Diego, proves that I can still be shocked by mindless comment in the mainstream press, at least when it contains "analysis" like this:

... more than a decade after a state ballot proposition barred the use of race and ethnicity in admissions decisions, the University of California continues to struggle to diversify its campuses. Black and Latino undergraduate enrollment systemwide plummeted and, although gains have been made in the numbers of minority students since then, the proportion of white (30.5 percent) and Asian (39.8 percent) students enrolled last year far exceeded that of blacks (3.8 percent) and Latinos (20.4 percent).

Just a few years ago, the Los Angeles campus, one of the system's most prestigious, was shaken with the news that only 103 black freshmen had enrolled, 2.2 percent of the class in a county that is 9.4 percent black. (The numbers have since ticked up to about 4.5 percent of the class.)

I suppose it could be argued that even authors of articles that purport to be news in the New York Times are entitled to reveal their own peculiar assumptions (selective universities should be demographic mirrors of some jurisdiction), but they are not entitled to their own facts, and it is simply not true that after the passage of Prop. 209, prohibiting racial preferences, "Black and Latino undergraduate enrollment systemwide plummeted," a drastic decline that even now has been characterized only by "gains" that are implied to be small, still leaving them woefully underrepresented.

Here are some facts that go unmentioned in the NYT article:

• The sharpest decline of any group in the year after passage of Prop. 209 was experienced by whites, who fell from 40% of system admits to 34%, where they remained through 2005.

• By 2002 the proportion of underrepresented minorities admitted to the university system, 19.1%, exceeded the proportion admitted in 1997, 18.8%, the last year in which preferences were in effect.

• The proportion of admitted URMs rose to 19.8% in 2003 and to 20% in 2004.

• A revealing graph of freshman enrollment by ethnicity, 1997–2005, can be found here, which also provides the numbers for the unmentioned (as though it does not exist) California State University system.

• The more recent numbers are even more dramatic. The proportion underrepresented minority admits was 22.9% in 2007, 25.1% in 2008, and 26.9% in 2009.
  

Perhaps the (former?) "newspaper of record" can no longer expect its writers to perform research, but you'd think that there would be fact checkers or, heaven forbid, editors to catch errors like declaring that minority "undergraduate enrollment systemwide plummeted" when it did not.

ADDENDUM

As if to prove my point about the New York Times often stumbling, or worse, in its coverage of race issues, another article that appeared yesterday, "To Court Blacks, Foes of Abortion Make Racial Case," commits a doozy that makes my case better than my mere assertion.

Read this paragraph, then re-read it:

In 2008, Lila Rose, a college student at U.C.L.A. and the founder of an anti-abortion group called Live Action, released four audio recordings of a man trying to make donations to Planned Parenthood clinics to pay for black women's abortions. In one, the caller, played by James O'Keefe III, the provocateur recently arrested on charges that he tried to tamper with the telephones of Senator Mary L. Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana, said, "You know, we just think, the less black kids out there, the better," to which the Planned Parenthood employee replies, "Understandable, understandable."

The U.S. attorney's office in New Orleans has another month to decide what, if any, charges to bring against the four men arrested at the end of January in Sen. Mary Landrieu's New Orleans office, including conservative activist James O'Keefe.

Louis Moore, the magistrate judge for the federal district court in New Orleans, agreed Wednesday to motions on behalf of the four to extend the time by which the U.S. attorney's office for the Eastern District must seek a felony indictment, press misdemeanor charges or drop the case.

Moore said the extension, which was unopposed by prosecutors, would offer the parties "additional time to conduct informal discussions and discovery and avoid or lessen additional proceedings," suggesting the possibility of a plea deal that would likely spare the four from facing felony charges.

But why imagine it when you can read it (or in this case, not read it) in the New York Times?

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Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between higher education and Sesame Street, and today is one of those days.

A few days ago I had occasion to quote the Cookie Monster’s well-known song:

One of these things is not like the others,
One of these things just doesn't belong,
Can you tell which thing is not like the others
By the time I finish my song?

• Both Inside Higher Ed and the Chronicle of Higher Education report that PLoS Medicine, an open access medical journal, will no longer publish papers where, according to an editorial, “support, in whole or in part, for the study or the researchers comes from a tobacco company.”

• Merced Bans Chancellor-Mocking Art From Exhibit

• NCAA removes controversial ad from website

The promotion for the group, Focus on the Family, features a smiling father holding his young son, next to the words “Celebrate Family. Celebrate Life.” Beneath the photo appears the message: “All I want for my son is for him to grow up knowing how to do the right thing.”

I can’t be sure — one can never be sure about these things — but my guess is that the fierce objection to this ad was fueled more by hate of the sponsor than offense at its content.

Similarly, the PLoS Medicine’s decision to exclude research where the research itself or its authors had been supported “in whole or in part” by the tobacco industry was based on the editors’ objections to the sponsors, not the research. As its editorial stated,

the business of tobacco involves selling a product for which there is no possible health benefit. Tobacco interests in research cannot have a health aim — if they did, tobacco companies would be better off shutting down business — and therefore health research sponsored by tobacco companies is essentially advertising. Publication is part of tobacco company marketing, and we believe it would be irresponsible to act as part of the machinery that enhances the reputation of an industry producing health-harming products.

“Our new policy may be criticized as moralistic, unscientific, and against transparency,” the editors write.

Well, yes, but if universities should not provide a forum for students to mock the chancellor, if those who believe in “diversity” and gay rights should not have to endure an ad urging young men “to do right” because they object to the sponsor, why should research journals publish research (no matter its quality or content) because of the presumed motives of some of the sponsors and tainted associations of the authors?

ADDENDUM

I am reminded of a true story. An old and good friend of mine worked for a while with a public interest group after he graduated from law school (both he and the group will remain nameless here). At one point he was assigned to review a new industry-sponsored research report on, I believe, the effects of a regulation requiring automobile seat belts. He found the report biased but with a few interesting, and he thought valid, findings.

He presented his report to the group spokesman, and was taken aback when the spokesman proceeded to tell a journalist who sought the groups response that, in effect, everything in the report was a lie. The spokesman, seeing the shocked look on my then-young friend’s face, said, “If you give them an inch, they’ll take a mile.”

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A joint resolution (HJR24) seeking to amend the Utah constitution to prohibit racial and ethnic preferences, modeled on California’s Proposition 209 and similar measures in Washington and Michigan, is working its way through the state legislature.

Democrats, of course and as usual, oppose the measure.

While proponents say HJR24 is about fairness and upholding the intent of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, opponents are asking why the measure needs to be engraved in the state’s highest law.

Minority Leader David Litvack said that House Democrats have united against the measure. And, speaking for himself, he questions the need and the rush.

“They have no proof that reverse discrimination even exists,” said the Salt Lake City Democrat. “Yet we’re going to ask citizens to amend the state Constitution.”

“That’s a sacred document,” Litvack added. “It should not be amended based on myth and misperception.”

Someone should ask Leader Litvack if he and his fellow Democrats oppose all the affirmative action policies and programs supported by Democrats in the federal government and other states. If they support those policies, they should be honest enough to admit that they oppose HJR24 in Utah not because it is unnecessary but because they oppose its substance, prohibiting preferential treatment based on race or ethnicity.

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If you want to see “diversity” run amok, look no further than San Francisco, and this enlightening article in the New York Times (even though the author, Jesse McKinley, a San Francisco parent, thinks that a school assignment policy that has resulted many schools where “more than 60 percent of the student body is of a single race” amounts to more “segregation”).

Here’s a sample of how San Francisco assigns students.

Let’s say a 5-year-old ... wants to go to kindergarten. His parents fill out an application and list seven schools they prefer.

The more desirable schools get more applications than they have seats; in some cases that ratio is 20 to 1. That’s where the Diversity Index comes in. Known as “the lottery,” the index uses five factors to determine a child’s profile: poverty level, socio-economic status, English-language proficiency, academic achievement and, for upper grades, the quality of the student’s previous school.

But that “diversity profile” is only the beginning.

Once that profile is built, the child is placed in one of his selected schools, in a class of students whose collective profile is as different from his own profile as possible. As each child is added, the class profile is adjusted, and more “most different” children are placed. Students living near their selected schools are considered first. The district also gives preference to children who have siblings at the same school and apply on time.

One of These Things (Is Not Like The Others)

Words and Music by Joe Raposo and Jon Stone

One of these things is not like the others,
One of these things just doesn't belong,
Can you tell which thing is not like the others
By the time I finish my song?

Did you guess which thing was not like the others?
Did you guess which thing just doesn't belong?
If you guessed this one is not like the others,
Then you're absolutely...right!

Another version:

Three of these things belong together
Three of these things are kind of the same
Can you guess which one of these doesn't belong here?
Now it's time to play our game (time to play our game).

Bonus Version

Three of these kids belong together
Three of these kids are kind of the same
But one of these kids is doing his (her) own thing
Now it's time to play our game
It's time to play our game.

Alas, the raw material of the school system, i.e., the students, unfortunately don’t conform to the design engineered by the city’s social engineers.

For example, school officials say that part of the problem with the assignment system is that parental interest and resources can be inherently unequal. White and Asian parents tend to be very involved in the early stages of the process, while black and Latino ones are less so. The result is that more white and Asian children end up in preferred schools.

‘The applicant pools are not diverse,” said Orla O’Keeffe, the district official charged with redesigning the system.

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CORRECTION from “It’s” to “Its” in Title

How do you know which one to use when?

When is it it’s?
When it is it is.
When is it its?
When it’s not it is.

CORRECTION II: Just to make the point: “Its” changed to “It’s Its”
-------------------------

[NOTE: This post has been UPDATED]

A remarkable essay by Raina Kelley, “Don’t Call It Affirmative Action,” appeared online in Newsweek yesterday. She must be some sort of columnist there, but I can’t say for sure because when I clicked on the sidebar item for the author’s biography the screen that appeared was blank.

My first thought is that I,and other readers, would have learned more if the article were blank and the biography filled in. “But I gotta tell you,” as Ms. Kelley would say, that’s not right. The article does reveal what Newsweek editors think is worth saying about affirmative action.

“As a child,” Ms. Kelley begins,

I was always fascinated by the tortures inflicted in Greek mythology — Sisyphus forced to roll a boulder up a hill every day, only to have it roll back down every evening. Prometheus enduring the eating of his liver by an eagle every day. They’re just so exquisitely punitive. But I gotta tell you, writing a defense of affirmative action would have been a perfect addition to Hades’ arsenal.

Let’s look in some detail at Ms. Kelley’s Hades Defense of Affirmative Action.

• “One of the problems, I think, is branding.”

“Sadly,” she writes, “the phrase ‘affirmative action’ has become code for choosing unqualified minority candidates instead of qualified white people.”

This may well be true for some people, but it is not for me, and it is not for the most trenchant criticism of affirmative action. The point is not that most beneficiaries of affirmative action are not qualified; it is that that because of their race or ethnicity they are admitted or hired or promoted even though they are less qualified than one or more of their rejected competitors who received no preferential treatment based on race or ethnicity.

Nor is it true that those most disadvantaged by affirmative action are “white people.” If Ms. Kelley were aware of the data from post-Prop. 209 California and from a number of recent studies, she would know, as I pointed out here discussing some of those studies, that

Asians benefit much more than whites when racial preference policies are eliminated. In fact, the proportion of whites admitted often decreases when race preferences are curtailed.

“Stanford,” she writes,

has every right to compose a student body based on the qualifications it thinks will maintain its status as an elite university. If one of those qualifications is a diversity of background, so be it.

• She believes affirmative action “works on behalf of all people.”

Literally. That is, not that the entire society benefits from giving racial and ethnic preferences to members of certain preferred groups, but that members of all groups individually benefit from preferential treatment.

A survey done last year by Quinnipiac University found that more than 70 percent of voters think diversity is not a good enough reason to give minorities preferential treatment. And that’s despite the fact that the number of people who fall under the protection of such programs has continued to grow — women, Hispanics, gay men and lesbians, the disabled, even white men have all been the beneficiaries of more inclusive hiring practices.

As long as people remain convinced that affirmative action is about giving minorities preferential treatment, they will also remain ignorant of the fact that affirmative action works on behalf of all people.

Affirmative action wasn’t supposed to be controversial. In 1961 when President Kennedy issued an executive order mandating that beneficiaries of federal monies “take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin,” it was a bold call to arms for the American government to walk the walk of desegregation

• She, like many others, misunderstands President Johnson’s Howard University speech.

It wasn’t until after the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 that Lyndon Johnson expanded the mission of affirmative action: “You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: ‘now, you are free to go where you want, do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please.’ You do not take a man who for years has been hobbled by chains, liberate him, bring him to the starting line of a race, saying, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe you have been completely fair…This is the next and more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity—not just legal equity but human ability—not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact and as a result.”

Back then, with the paint over the “Whites Only” signs still fresh, it made sense that a simple law, no matter how historic, would not be enough to end Jim Crow....

Today we are accustomed to dealing with two very different standards to evaluate discrimination: an “intent” test, which requires finding a discriminatory intent in order to determine that a particular policy is discriminatory, and a “results” test, which does not require a finding of intent to determine that some “disparity” or “underrepresentation” is discriminatory. But that distinction had not emerged in 1965 when Johnson made his speech, and when he called for “equality as a fact and equality as a result” he did not mean proportional representation or an absolute equality of goods, money, assets, jobs, whatever that people mean today by “equality of results.”

What Johnson meant by “equality,” it is quite clear, is non-discriminatory equality of opportunity. The evidence? For starters, the very next sentence in Johnson’s speech, after the oft-quoted passage quoted above, states:

For the task is to give 20 million Negroes the same chance as every other American to learn and grow, to work and share in society, to develop their abilities — physical, mental and spiritual, and to pursue their individual happiness. [Emphasis added]

True, Johnson then says in the next sentence that “equal opportunity is essential, but not enough, not enough,” but in the remainder of the speech he does not really specify what more is needed, other than various forms of assistance there is no reason to assume would be conditioned on skin color as opposed to need.

Next, three months after his Howard speech, Johnson signed Executive Order 11246 which required “affirmative action” of government contractors. But note how “affirmative action” was defined:

The contractor will not discriminate against any employee or applicant for employment because of race, creed, color, or national origin. The contractor will take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin. [Emphasis added]

Affirmative action is not about giving African-Americans now the 40 acres and a mule their enslaved ancestors never got. It is about creating opportunities for the minority that the majority might be tempted to keep for itself.

• She believes racial discrimination (in the form of racial preference) must continue because racial discrimination still exists.

And while there has been a vast improvement in race relations since 1964, I don't think anyone believes all our problems surrounding discrimination and bias have been solved. Hundreds of people have climbed to the top of Mt. Everest, but that doesn't make it accessible.

Your guess about what this means is as good as mine, but here is what Kelley says:

Accessibility in the workplace, in schools, and everywhere else comes out of diversity. Having a diverse workforce or student body does have benefits.

• She is convinced that “diversity” (which “is just a syonym for melting pot”) will dispel prejudicial stereotypes.

It’s hard to think black people are inferior if they’re sitting next to you in freshman English or in a conference room.

[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[,]

• She believes that opposition to affirmative action can be reduced or eliminated by changing its name.

But rather than patiently explaining that the aim of affirmative action is not to toss white men out on the street or proving that I deserve all the opportunities I’ve been given, I propose changing the name to “employment equity,” the phrase they use in Canada. Or at least some kind of wording that says: “This isn’t about demonizing white men, stealing their jobs, and giving them to knuckleheads. This is about fairness.”

Kelley and others can attempt to dress up racial preference with fancy clothes like “equity” and “fairness” all they want to, but “I gotta tell you”: racial preference by any other name is still racial preference.

UPDATE

In a comment on Ms. Kelley’s article (Page 3 of the comments, 19 Feb. at 8:29 AM), Roger Clegg makes similar criticisms, except both better and succincter (sic).

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A Washington Post article today describes the deep hole Rep. Rick Boucher (D, Va), a 14 term incumbent representing Virginia’s coal country, finds himself in because of the unpopularity of Obama in his district (not to mention Boucher’s self-destructive vote in favor of cap and trade, which angered his coal-dependent constituents).

Voters in Virginia’s 9th Congressional District are mad that the government has spent hundreds of billions to fix an economy that seems only to deteriorate around them. They’re fearful of a federal takeover of health care. They’re petrified that proposed emissions limits would destroy the coal industry that provides most of the region’s jobs. And they want no part of a president they view as elitist and unlike them....

Residents talk often of their “pridefulness” and independence. But they feel like criminals when politicians try to take their guns away, like children when they’re told they need health care and like villains when coal is blamed for destroying the environment although it provides most of the region’s jobs and half of the nation’s power. They assume that Obama doesn’t get any of this — or doesn’t care.

“He wants to be a damn dictator,” said Alex Hill, 70, a retired miner, police officer and onetime moonshiner, while getting his hair trimmed at Peoples Barber Shop on Main Street in Wise.

Race is also a factor. Sometimes it’s subtle, such as when Obama is described as un-Christian or un-American. Other times, slurs directed at Obama are part of the normal conversation.

... just because the 9th District is 93 percent white, that doesn’t mean there’s no hope for a black candidate. Doug Wilder did well enough there, taking 48 percent of the vote en route to becoming the nation’s first black governor in 1989.

“It ain’t because he’s black,” Democratic political consultant Dave “Mudcat” Saunders said of the challenge Obama is facing. “If it’s about race, then all Barack Obama has got to do in the 9th District is do as well as Doug Wilder did 20 years ago, and he wins Virginia.”

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The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, and the San Francisco Chronicle all report this morning on a new $16 million gift to the UC Berkeley from the Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund (think Levi Strauss) to (quoting the CHE)

to support diversity initiatives, including five endowed chairs and a new scholarship fund for students who transfer from community colleges....

The five faculty chairs will include one of the nation’s first devoted to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender equity, the university said. The gift will also establish a $1.5-million endowed fund to support scholarships for transfer students from community colleges, who are a more racially and economically diverse group than those who enroll as freshmen.

Berkeley has managed to enroll only a small numbers (sic) of black and Latino undergraduates since California voters banned affirmative action by state agencies, in a 1996 referendum....

African Americans, Latinos and Native Americans in Berkeley’s freshman class dropped from 26.1 percent in 1995 to 11.2 percent in 1999 before rebounding during the last decade. They made up 15.4 percent of the incoming class last fall.

One could (and perhaps one should) quibble about endowing academic chairs devoted, apparently, more to promoting “equity” than discovering and propagating scholarly knowledge. “Equity,” after all, speaks more to a contested political agenda than disinterested academic analysis and study. But I will leave that point to others, or at least to another day.

What I want to address instead is the unctuous, preening, patronizing pomposity that so often accompanies these self-congratulatory efforts at “inclusiveness,” an attitude so often perfectly exemplified by Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birkeneau. Most proportional representation preferentialists believe that selective institutions should “look like” American/California/whatever, i.e., reflect the demography of whatever jurisdiction that concerns them, but Birgeneau goes them one better: as I pointed out here in discussing hie “futuristic preferentialism,” Birgeneau “thinks the University of California at Berkeley should not mirror California society as it is but as it will be.”

Regarding the current gift (quoting from the SF Chronicle):

“We’re turning the challenges of a multicultural society into a major academic endeavor,” said Chancellor Robert Birgenau. The message the university is sending to its students, he said, is that “We no longer can live in our own world surrounded by people who are just like us.”

The “message” here, whether Birgeneau et al. intend it or not, is that they — the black, the Hispanic, the gay, the community college graduate — are different from us, the people who naturally populate places like UC Berkeley. Special efforts must be made (often, as here, paid for by patronizing rich people) at “inclusiveness” to let them into our world, because it short changes us not to be exposed to them.

I much prefer what used to be the animating principle and ideal of equality — that people deserve equality we all are fundamentally the same.

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The San Jose Mercury News has been trying to collect racial data from the biggest firms in Silicon Valley, with some but limited success.

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Google, the company that wants to make the world’s information accessible, says the race and gender of its workforce is a trade secret that cannot be released.

So do Apple, Yahoo, Oracle and Applied Materials. These five companies waged an 18-month Freedom of Information battle with the San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News, convincing federal regulators who collect the data that its release would cause “commercial harm” by potentially revealing the companies’ business strategy to competitors. A sixth company, Hewlett-Packard, fought the release and lost.

Here’s a sample of both arguments:

Experts in the area of equal employment law scoffed at the idea that public disclosure of race and gender data — for example, the number of black men or Asian women in job categories such as “professionals,” “officials and managers” and “service workers” — could really allow competitors to discern a big tech company’s business strategy. A bigger issue, they said, is the social cost of allowing large, influential corporations to hide their race and gender data.

“One of the main ways that we track how society is doing in terms of race relations, in terms of eliminating discrimination, in terms of promoting diversity, is by looking at statistics,” said Richard Ford, a Stanford University law professor who is an expert in civil rights and anti-discrimination law. “But if we can’t get the data, we can’t know if it’s a problem or not.”

John Sims, a law professor at the University of the Pacific and an expert in FOIA law, called the objections of Google, Apple and other companies “absurd.”

“The whole debate on affirmative action is based on the question, ‘Is racial discrimination a thing of the past, or is it still going on?’ “ Sims said. “These companies are very interesting to look at, because they are new and they are not just in the rut of what they were doing 50 years ago, because they didn’t exist 50 years ago.”

Come to think of it, I think there is a strong business necessity to keep such data as secret as possible: so as to avoid endless arguments and litigation with those always see “underrepresentation” as discrimination.

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Every time I hear or read about “reverse discrimination,” I’m reminded of reversible clothing, like this sweater (“Two looks, two colors, one soft finish”), which in turn always calls to mind the observation (mine, I think; no one else would claim it) that all clothing is reversible ... but most of it would be inside-out if worn one way.

Moving back to discrimination after that jarring introduction, my real point, as I’ve argued here too many times to cite (no, that’s not all), is that there’s no such thing as “reverse discrimination.” Treating people better or worse because of their race or ethnicity is discrimination — nothing ever “reverse” about it regardless of the race or ethnicity of the victims or beneficiaries.

My objection to the concept of “reverse discrimination” was prompted this morning by the sad story of “[a] former professor who last week won a reverse race discrimination lawsuit against the University of Oregon....” (HatTip to Inside Higher Ed)

A U.S. District Court jury awarded Paula Rogers more than $164,000 after finding that she suffered adverse treatment and a hostile work environment in the UO’s East Asian Languages and Literatures department because she is only half Japanese....

The jury ordered the UO itself to pay Rogers $132,333 in damages for subjecting her to a hostile work environment because of her race.

It also ordered her Japanese former department supervisor, Noriko Fujii, to pay Rogers $30,002 in damages for subjecting Rogers to race-based disparate treatment, to a hostile work environment and to retaliation for filing a race discrimination grievance.

Rogers was born in Japan to a Japanese mother and American father. She grew up there, first coming to the United States at 18 to attend college.

She called her experience at the UO a “microcosm” of the inequality that mixed-race residents face in Japan.

As an example, Rogers recalled her disparate treatment as a child because her father was not permitted to establish a household registry because he was not Japanese.

“It was like being illegitimate,” she said.

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Amid all the stories of how shocked, surprised, and “stunned” Democratic leaders were over Evan Bayh’s decision not to seek re-election comes this gem-like reminder from Politico that a large reason why they remain clueless is that they are incapable of reading clues.

While Bayh’s retirement stunned Reid and the rest of the leadership, there were some private signs that he might step down. Following the surprise decision last month by Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) to retire, Reid and other top Democrats circled back to members of their caucus up for reelection to get them to firmly commit to run.

Bayh, however, would not make that declaration, although Reid and his top lieutenants remained firmly convinced that he fully intended to run and win.

“Even three weeks ago, [Bayh] would not commit to running again,” said a Senate Democratic insider. “I don’t think anyone thought he was going to retire, but it now seems clear that he was on the fence. I just don’t think anyone was able to interpret what he was signaling there.”

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Once again defenders of racial preferences are marching into federal court to argue that racial equality is unconstitutional. Peter Schmidt of the Chronicle of Higher Education reported this morning that BAMN will challenge California’s Proposition 209 by arguing that

the California measure, adopted by that state's voters in 1996, violates the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution by placing a distinct set of legal hurdles in front of minority groups seeking to increase their representation on the university system's campuses.

would single out specific categories — race, sex, color, ethnicity, and national origin — and place on actions related to those categories greater burdens than exist on government action unrelated to race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin. Such disparate treatment on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin is, and for nearly three decades has been, a textbook violation of Equal Protection principles.

It’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry at this claim. What the ACLU, NAACP, Laurence Tribe, and other worthies assert, with an apparently straight collective face, is that treating discrimination based on race, ethnicity, and gender in a different manner from other forms of discrimination (say, for or against peanut farmers or athletes) is to commit an unconstitutional form of discrimination.
In other words, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 banning racial discrimination — indeed, all civil rights acts that ban discrimination based on race or ethnicity or sex — are unconstitutional because they single out race for special treatment!

To hold that a democratically enacted affirmative action program is constitutionally permissible because the people have demonstrated a compelling state interest is hardly to hold that the program is constitutionally required. The Fourteenth Amendment, lest we lose sight of the forest for the trees, does not require what it barely permits.

A state law that prohibits classifications based on race or gender is a law that addresses in neutral-fashion racerelated and gender-related matters. [Citing an earlier case], “[i]t would be paradoxical to conclude that by adopting the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, the voters of the State thereby had violated it.”

[t]he Senate Judiciary Committee approved President Obama’s nomination of U.S. Magistrate Edward Chen to a federal judgeship in San Francisco on a party-line vote for the second time Thursday, with Republicans criticizing his public statements and background as an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer....

He was an ACLU attorney in San Francisco from 1985 to 2001 and worked on a suit unsuccessfully challenging Proposition 209, the 1996 initiative that outlawed state and local affirmative action programs based on race or gender preferences.

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... For example, Jamaica:

Chairman of the Jamaica Association of Young Professionals, Junior Rose, is calling for the introduction of an “affirmative action” policy which would require companies in the island to have a minimum percentage of their workforce aged 20-29.

... and India:

Presently, there is 13 per cent quota for scheduled castes, three per cent for denotified tribes, eight per cent for nomadic tribes and seven per cent for scheduled tribes, and 19 per cent for OBC [Other Backward Classes] in public employment, leaving just half seats for the general category. Worse, many states don’t even follow that direction of Supreme Court and reserve more than 50 per cent.

In India, by the way, like here, affirmative action was supposed to be temporary, a time-limited provision

for bringing the unequal at par with others and should remain in existence till equality is attained. Unfortunately, our self seeking politicians would never let that happen. They have turned the sensitive issue into a popular political strategy. The political parties tend to appease the minorities and fill up their vote banks by including quota provision in their election manifesto. It has become an extremely handy tool in their hands to sway the gullible electorate....

A few years back, the announcement of 27 per cent OBC quota in higher educational institutions made the students come to streets in two distinct groups — forward and backward. They probably would not have been aware of such distinctions any time before. The pro and anti agitations have divided our youth to the detriment to nation's integrity.

The abusive language and sense of contempt against the reserved category is but a natural fall out, as many of the deserving candidates fail to receive their due just because they are not reserved. We, not very long back, saw Gujjars of Rajasthan lobbying for their inclusion in the reserved category. This brings home the strange race of being declared backward than others because being ‘backward’ eventually ‘pays’ in terms of reservation. Already, there have been numerous cases of obtaining fake certificates of SC/ST identity. What does this bode for global India?

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Inside Higher Ed reports this morning that the Muslim Public Affairs Council defends students and others who disrupt speakers they dislike. At the University of California at Irvine last week, for example, eleven students were arrested for disrupting a speech by Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren.

Oren’s invitation came from UCI’s law school and political science department. UCI, according to a recent column in the San Francisco Examiner,

has an active--some would say, aggressive (others would say, obnoxious)--chapter of the Muslim Student Union. The UCI MSU has a, shall we say, controversial history, ranging from allegedly fundraising for Hamas to hosting virulently anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic speakers.

Enter the double standard. The MSU feels perfectly free to bring to campus speakers that Jews, friends of Israel, and others consider absolutely repulsive. And it has the right to do so (aside from providing material support to terrorists, which is forbidden by federal law). But when the MSU considers a speaker not to be kosher (as it were), it seeks to disrupt his appearance.

No, the letter asks Drake to investigate the arrests, because the hecklers were exercising their First Amendment rights:

These students had the courage and conscience to stand up against aggression, using peaceful means. We cannot allow our educational institutions to be used as a platform to threaten and discourage students who choose to practice their First Amendment right.

If there are American Muslim leaders and organizations who reject this Orwellian view, now would be a good time for them to make their voices heard.

ADDENDUM

See Power Line and National Review Online for more.

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David Broder has been called (among other things) the “Best Reporter,” “Hardest Working,” and “Least Ideological”; “the high priest of political journalism”; and “probably the most respected and influential political journalist in the country” who has “few challengers as the most influential political journalist in the country.”

Despite that reputation (or perhaps because of it), Broder writes in the Washington Post this morning that the “warning signs to both parties” in the recent Washington Post/ABC Poll “should be a help as President Obama tries to spur a rebirth of bipartisanship in Washington.”

Believing that President Obama favors “a rebirth of bipartisanship” is on a par with believing, say, that the citizens of the Soviet Union actually possessed rights to

a. freedom of speech;
b. freedom of the press;
c. freedom of assembly, including the holding of mass meetings;
d. freedom of street processions and demonstrations.

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George Will, in this morning’s Washington Post:

Democrats, in their canine devotion to teachers unions, oppose empowering poor children to escape dependency on even terrible government schools. Unions and their poodles say school choice siphons money from public schools. But federal money funds the D.C. program, so killing it denies education money to the District while increasing the number of pupils the District must support.

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I have criticized the race writing of Newsweek’s Ellis Cose several times, such as here, here, and especially here. A large, hard to miss target in his work is his pooh-poohing of the idea that race preferences brand their intended beneficiaries with a stigma, often inducing anger or self-doubt or both. (I would say that hitting that target is like shooting fish in a barrel, but readers might then think this post is simply another criticism of Stanley Fish.)

Here, for example, I noted that when someone asked Cose how minorities can “combat the idea that they got their jobs, school acceptance letters, etc. through affirmative action and hence aren’t really worth being there?” he replied:

In my experience, people tend to believe what they want to believe. An unfortunate reality of life is that many people of color who have achieved much are suspected by certain other people of having only gotten by on the basis of race. That is, as I said, unfortunate.

Unless I’m missing something here, Cose has acknowledged that “a number of people” get accepted because of affirmative action who would not have been accepted without it, but then for some reason he finds it “unfortunate” that it is “suspected” that “many people of color” have “only gotten by on the basis of race.”

Well, yes. As long as some people get ahead because of their race, there will certainly be others who say, not just “suspect,” they got ahead because of their race. And, sadly, they will also say that about minorities who did not receive any special preferences, or who did not need them.

Before the proposition’s passage, its proponents were fond of arguing that minority students would benefit because they would finally be free of the “stigma” associated with affirmative action. California’s experience seems to say that assumption is not necessarily true - at least not yet. For example, Kimberly Griffin, a black UCLA graduate student in higher education, says she routinely encounters students who assume that she met some lower standard to get in.

Excuse me, but is one graduate student’s comment (dated when?) sufficient evidence for this assertion about “California’s experience.” Does Cose actually believe that lowering the bar for minority admissions does not produce the quite reasonable (because it is accurate) assumption that many minorities were admitted who would not have been admitted without the preferences given them? Or, correspondingly, does he really want to argue that evaluating all applicants based on their qualifications without regard to their race will not make the assumption of undeserved admission of minorities unreasonable, because it will be inaccurate? If he wants to argue either of those propositions he’ll need to produce more evidence than the word of one UCLA graduate student in education.

Prior to its passage, proponents of the proposition [209] were fond of arguing that minority students would benefit because they would finally be free of the “stigma” associated with affirmative action. They would be accepted as equal to their white peers, went the argument, since they had met the same standards. California’s experience seems to say that assumption is not necessarily true — at least not yet. The stigma seems to linger, as any number of students told me and as Evan Caminker discovered. “While I was associate dean [at Michigan] in 2002, maybe it was early 2003,” he said, “I was part of the legal team representing the law school in the Grutter case. My former students at UCLA — who wanted to write an amicus brief in the case — and I had many conversations …about what they wanted to say. And one of the most important, and I thought really poignant, messages that [the students communicated] was …to the extent that they felt there was still a stigma associated with being black or being Hispanic…that feeling [had not gone away]

Does Cose believe that admission preferences stigmatize the preferees or not? Hard to tell from the discussion above, which implies, by the quotes around the initial “stigma,” that it doesn’t exist, but then goes on to cite evidence that it is so pervasive it doesn’t disappear even when its source (racial preference) is removed. In any event, what is the point of Caminker’s observation? Presumably one wouldn’t oppose the abolition of slavery because the effects of slavery on the slave did not disappear as quickly as some abolitionists predicted.

O.K., you say. Fine. But why rehash all this? Because of his article, “Black and Blue at the Times,” about the experience of Gerard Boyd at the New York Times, that appeared online yesterday and will appear in print in the Feb. 22 issue of Newsweek.

In September 2001, Boyd became the Times’s managing editor — the first African-American to have soared to such heights. And then along came a plagiarist named Jayson Blair, whose sins set in motion a series of events that, in summer 2003, left Boyd jobless and disgraced. Three years later, Boyd died of cancer at the age of 56, never having recovered from his very public humiliation....

was a poor boy from St. Louis who lost his mother as a toddler, was abandoned by his father, and was raised by his paternal grandmother. Thanks to an antipoverty program called Upward Bound and a scholarship to the University of Missouri, Boyd escaped the poverty of his childhood and began his journalistic ascent. He became a star at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and was later seduced by the Times, where he became a White House correspondent and held a series of management jobs, culminating with the managing editorship.

Boyd was a symbol—of either racial progress or affirmative action run amok, depending on how one viewed his achievement. Boyd understood that. Writing about Howell Raines, his boss and benefactor, Boyd asks, “Could his decision to name me managing editor be rooted in nothing more than white guilt over four centuries of oppression?”

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In The Dems Prepare To Vote For A Fraud I called ramming through Obamacare by reconciliation a fraud, requiring the House to pass and the president to sign “a fraudulent Potemkin bill.”

Now comes Nancy Pelosi’s chief health care aide, Wendell Primus, who calls it “a trick.”

Fraud, trick, whatever.

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Alan Wolfe thinks Thomas Sowell is no fun, a humorless, repetitive bore. To see why, and presumably to see an example of how Sowell would write if he were a more interesting writer, read Wolfe’s clever, oh so clever, review in the New Republic.

Alan Wolfe is an old friend, or at least acquaintance (we both were related to The Nation years ago, in former lives), though we haven’t stayed in touch. He’s smart, he does write well, and I find his work well worth reading even when (which is most of the time) I don’t agree with him. I have no interest in defending Sowell from his scorn — as the author of 46 books, Sowell can defend himself if he chooses — but I would like to pull out one of his many criticisms to discuss.

Wolfe confesses that he has not read all forty-six of Sowell’s books, but he has

read enough of them to know that Sowell is not one for changing his mind. Although he claims to have been a Marxist in his youth, his published writings never vary: the same themes — the market works, affirmative action does not work, Marxism is wrong, and, yes, intellectuals are never to be trusted—dominate from start to finish....

Perhaps Wolfe phrases his barb in this manner because he himself is a thoroughgoing pragmatist. In any event he makes it clear that he himself changed his own mind on the subject because affirmative action “works” ... for him.

I am not in the conversion business, but I have changed my mind more than a few times in the forty or so years that I have been putting my views before the public. Reality can do that to you. You might think, for example, as I once did, that affirmative action is highly suspect because it gives more weight to group membership than individual achievement. But if you teach at a university and see your classes enriched by the diversity that affirmative action brings to them, and if you then hear remarkable stories of the individual achievements made possible through the magic of the college admissions process, you may begin to change your mind.

I do have doubts about the value of affirmative action-produced “diversity” to a whole host of other classes at Boston College, where Wolfe teaches. But even if “diversity works,” I don’t believe that justifies the racial discrimination on which it is based.

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I think there are two items worth noting about yesterday’s meeting of “civil rights leaders” with President Obama, a meeting whose purpose was “to address the jobless rate in the hardest-hit areas of the nation, particularly in black communities, where the unemployment rate is well above the national average.”

Item 1: Three “civil rights leaders” met with the president: Marc Morial of the National Urban League, the Rev. Al Sharpton of the National Action Network, and Benjamin Jealous of the NAACP. Perhaps a whole host of other “civil rights leaders” were invited and were snowed out, but it nevertheless says quite a lot (and none of it good) about the president and his party that Al Sharpton is regarded as a leader worthy of respect and inclusion in the highest councils of government.

Item 2: Coming out of the meeting, Sharpton said

We’re not looking for a race-based program. We’re looking to make sure everyone is involved.

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Inside Higher Ed reports this morning that Calvin College, a “distinctively Christian” liberal arts college, has become the first institution to run afoul of a new rule adopted by the American Philosophical Association “requiring any college that violates any part of the association's anti-bias policy to have job listings with the association flagged.” The rule was adopted last year because of the opposition of many philosophers to “having their association list jobs from institutions that do not hire gay professors.”

One aim of the policy, proponents said, was to then be able to lobby colleges to change their policies. Some philosophers are now trying to do just that with a petition urging the college to accept gay professors. “One might puzzle over a form of Christianity that is committed to the inequality of people, and in particular of job applicants for positions in philosophy. More disturbing, however, is the stigma Calvin College feels entitled to place upon those who are doubly exposed: as lesbians, gays, bisexuals or transgendered in a society that has yet to accept them, and as people seeking jobs during difficult economic times.

But I do want to address two petition points quoted above, one of which I question as a matter of fact and the other strikes me as just whiningly silly.

First, the questionable fact: I wonder if the “stigma” Calvin College allegedly inflicts on gays by refusing to hire them is actually greater in our society and culture at large (not to mention among the opinion-shaping elites) than the “stigma” suffered, especially in academic circles, by “distinctively Christian” institutions and individuals. Clearly representatives of Calvin College and similar institutions would be no more welcome at meetings of the American Philosophical Society or other assemblies of culture-producing citizens (despite the “diversity” they would provide to such gatherings) than gay professors are at Calvin or than blacks were at Bob Jones University when its tax exemption was revoked.

Now the whiningly silly: I’m sorry philosophers are having trouble finding jobs, but I don’t think their difficulty imposes any additional duty to be nice to them on Calvin College, nor does it make them “doubly exposed.” All those “seeking jobs during difficult economic times” are equally “exposed,” and that exposure is no worse, no different, for philosophy applicants (even gay philosophy applicants) than for anyone else.

Do philosophers really want to argue that since gay philosophy applicants are “doubly exposed” they deserve special, preferential treatment? Oh wait, don’t answer that....

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At the same time that the president was calling for bipartisanship and putting “petty politics” aside,

1. His spokesman, Glib Gibbs, mocked of Sarah Palin for having some notes on her hand (this from the mouthpiece of a man so wedded to the TelePrompTer that he used one to read his remarks to fifth graders ).

2. John Brennan, Obama’s counterterrorism advisor, writes in USA Today that criticisms of the decision to try Christmas Day bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab in a civilian court “serve the goals of al-Qaeda.”

3. Nancy Pelosi “resists Obama outreach efforts.”

4. What Politico describes as a “ferocious barrage” and “The nuking of Dan Coats,” who announced his intention to run against Indiana Senator Evan Bayh, was “a coordinated effort unleashed by a small core of senior Democratic strategists in Washington, top Bayh political hands, and Indiana Democratic Party officials....”

Was the president lying, or does no one in his party pay attention to him any more?

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In a post yesterday (Is Obama “Everything”?) I referred to the sense in which Democrats do seem to regard Obama as The Messiah, as in “the Alpha and the Omega” from Revelation 22:13. (Otherwise how could they argue that Republican opposition to their 2700 page health care bill means they oppose “everything”?)

Now comes a leading acolyte in the Church of Obama, Evan Thomas of Newsweek, to commit what can only be described as sacrilege. Thomas, you will recall (but if not I’m about to remind you) confessed his faith to the world when he commented on MSNBC (where else?) last June, after Obama’s speech in Cairo, that

I mean in a way Obama’s standing above the country, above — above the world, he’s sort of God.

[t]he president needs to tell the truth on taxes, entitlements, and how to really reform health care — before it's too late....

[H]e has flirted with the truth, but then shied away from embracing it....

Obama has some of the qualities of a stern preacher. To his critics he can even seem a bit of a scold, self-involved, and above it all. In his Inaugural Address, he echoed Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians, telling Americans the time had come to “put away childish things.” In his first address to Congress a month later, he inveighed against piling up debt: “We have lived through an era where too often short-term gains were prized over long-term prosperity; where we failed to look beyond the next payment, the next quarter, or the next election…All the while, critical debates and difficult decisions were put off for some other time or some other day. Well, that day of reckoning has arrived, and the time to take charge of our future is here.”

“Bold words,” writes Friar Thomas,

but the speech was notably lacking in specifics. When the time came to tackle the hardest reform — health care — he waffled. He proposed universal, or nearly universal, health care, extending insurance or benefits to as many as another 30 million Americans. At the same time, he told Americans who have insurance and like it that "nothing will change." He promised that health-care reform would not add to the federal deficit.

It's possible to have universal health care, to have high-quality health care, to have the freedom to choose your own doctor, and to save money on health care, but it is not possible to do all those things at once. You don't have to be a policy expert to know that Obama and Congress were not going to be able to deliver on his promise. The public right away sensed that the president wasn't leveling with them...

Regarding rising health care costs, Msgr. Thomas asserts that “the first step is to be honest about it,” but to date God has not taken that step.

America needs to spend a smaller percentage of its health dollars on patients in the last six months of life. This does not mean “death panels” voting to throw Granny in the snow. But it does mean more hospice care at the end of life rather than taking “extraordinary measures” that are routine in so many hospitals. Obama has tried to slide around this uncomfortable truth, talking of “waste and inefficiency” and somewhat vaguely proposing a half-trillion-dollar cut in Medicare spending in future years. But he has not begun to have a frank discussion of what that means or requires.

But wait; there’s more. “He has been similarly dodgy about the economy.” So, what does He need to do? “He needs to be completely honest about the costs” of needed sacrifices and reforms. Voters are fickle, Bishop Thomas allows, but “they just might appreciate a politician who skips the slogans and tells them the truth.”

The Church of Obama and His Democratic disciples, in short, have put in a pretty poor performance so far, and they are now in danger of facing a Reformation every bit as threatening to their dominance as the one led by Martin Luther against an earlier Church. (On this theme, see Glenn Reynolds’s Tea parties are a new Great Awakening.)

Thomas’s Obama-As-God comment was made on Chris Matthew’s Hard Ball. If a true believer like Thomas really is beginning to doubt his faith, how much longer will Matthews keep feeling “this thrill going up my leg” when he hears Obama speak?

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A few days ago I criticized an entry on a Chronicle of Higher Education blog, The Ticker, that found less “opportunities” for women as coaches and athletic directors based only on evidence that women made up a higher proportion of players than of coaches and ADs.

Now “The Ticker” is back with news that Appeals Court Reinstates Title IX Wrestling Case Against UC-Davis filed by three female wrestlers. But hold it! Do NOT follow that link until you take the following quiz.

The alleged discrimination consisted of

A. UC Davis refused to create eliminated women’s wrestling.

B. UC Davis refused to allow the women to join its only wrestling team, consisting to date of men only.

C. UC Davis required the women to compete against male wrestlers and then cut them from the team.

D. UC Davis eliminated its only wrestling team, depriving the women (and men) of the chance to compete.

Those of you with access to The Chronicle: don’t cheat! I’ll post the correct answer in an UPDATE later today.

UPDATE [11:30 P.M.]

The answer is both A, as I have now modified it based on the Associated Press article linked in the Chronicle piece, and C. From the AP:

An appeals court said Monday it appears that the University of California, Davis violated federal law meant to promote gender equity in college athletics when it eliminated its women’s wrestling program.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated a lawsuit filed by three female wrestlers after the school essentially eliminated their sport by making them compete against males of the same weight after the 2000-2001 academic year.

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In my previous post I pointed to an excellent analysis of liberal condescension and gave a couple of examples of it (and discussed a fabulous example of it here). This condescension, as many others have pointed out, is in large part a product of liberals’ faith in their superior morality and their superior knowledge (“if conservatives weren’t evil or stupid they’d be more like us”).

But I’ve become increasingly convinced that liberal hubris comprises more than moral and intellectual condescension, or perhaps it’s just that their condescension knows no limits. It’s not that they believe they have more morality and wisdom than their opponents; they believe they have a monopoly on virtue and knowledge, that those who don’t share their views are not members of what they are fond of calling the “reality-based community.”

Consider this all too typical comment from Rep. Gerry Connolly, a Democrat representing parts of Fairfax County and some surrounding towns in Northern Virginia. Connolly, mind you, is more sensible than many of his fellow caucus members. President of the freshman class of Democrats in the House and widely and with some reason described as a “moderate” (of course, Pelosi et al. can make many liberals look moderate), Connolly recently told ABC News regarding the coming “health care summit”:

At some point, the public is going to demand that Republicans participate like mature adults, and not just say ‘no’ to everything.

The liberal view — what we propose is “everything”; opponents favor nothing — is perfectly consistent with (who knows? May even derive from) the view of Obama as The Messiah.

Revelation 22:13:

I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End.

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A few days ago Gerard Alexander had a fascinating article in the Washington Post that asked Why Are Liberals So Condescending?

On the same day Real Clear Politics linked an article by Jacob Weisberg, editor of SLATE, who involuntarily volunteered to be a case study of what Alexander had in mind with an article whose advice was to Blame the Childish, Ignorant American Public. The content of Weisberg’s article, however, was less nuanced and balanced than its title. Its message was that “the biggest culprit in our current predicament” is “the childishness, ignorance, and growing incoherence of the public at large.”

Now comes the New Yorker, that arbiter of taste and right (i.e., left)-thinking that all the cognoscenti read when they’re not reading the New York Times or listening to NPR, with an article by James Surowiecki, the magazine’s financial writer, on what it regards as The Populism Problem. To Surowiecki, the “problem” is the advice voters are giving to politicians these days:

This advice may be contradictory, but then so are the economic opinions of the many angry voters who are animating what’s being called the new populism. Whereas the economic populism of the eighteen-nineties and the right-wing cultural populism of recent years represented reasonably coherent ideologies, this new populism has stitched together incompatible concerns and goals into one “I’m mad as hell” quilt. The people may have spoken. It’s just not clear that they’re making any sense.

UPDATE

And here’s another one: Sen. Ted Kaufman (D, Del) said in a TV appearance this morning that Sarah Palin’s supporters “don’t follow what’s really happening.”

Presumably if they knew what was really going on, they’d all be liberal Democrats.

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Thomas Bartlett writes on a Chronicle of Higher Education blog this morning that “social sciences are easier than the natural sciences, according to second graders.”

Adults more or less agree. A study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology took a look at which disciplines children and adults thought were the most difficult to learn. For the most part, people of all ages think psychology is easy and physics is hard. That bias begins early and changes some, but not much, the older we get.

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Jere P. Surber, a professor of philosophy at the University of Denver, is either a world-class satirist who has written a hilarious parody of explanations of the liberal arts professoriate’s liberal bias or (and I suspect much more likely) the author of another attempt at an explanation that is actually an example, to the point of being an unintended caricature, of the liberal bias in the academy that he purports to explain. (Yes, those two links are to the same Chronicle of Higher Education article, “Well, Naturally We’re Liberal.”)

Surber offers three explanations, “all of them what common sense might predict, all rather obvious, and none in need of fancy research involving such things as ‘occupational role modeling’ and ‘vocational engendering.’”

1. Class envy

First, ... virtually all instructors in the liberal arts are aware of the disparity between their level of education and their financial situation.... You don’t have to be a militant Marxist to recognize that people’s political persuasions will align pretty well with their economic interests. It’s real simple: Those who have less and want more will tend to support social changes that promise to accomplish that; those who are already economic winners will want to conserve their status.

would want to preserve a situation in which others who are equivalently educated and experienced — doctors, engineers, lawyers, scientists, colleagues in other areas, and, yes, chief executives — receive vastly more compensation, sometimes by a factor of 10 or 100?

2. Deep knowledge of history

A second reason that liberal-arts professors tend to be politically liberal is that they have very likely studied large-scale historical processes and complex cultural dynamics. Conservatives, who tend to evoke the need to preserve traditional connections with the past, have nonetheless contributed least to any detailed or thoughtful study of history.

... if you actually take the time to look at history and culture, certain conclusions about human nature, society, and economics tend to force themselves on you. History has a trajectory, driven in large part by the desires of underprivileged or oppressed groups to attain parity with the privileged or the oppressor.....

As President Obama recently put it, any open-minded review of history (and perhaps especially American history) teaches at least one clear lesson: There is a “right side of history,” Obama said — the side of those who would overcome prejudice, question unearned privilege, and resist oppression in favor of a more just condition.

If you don’t study history, whether because it doesn’t pad quarterly profits, isn’t sufficiently scientific or objective, or threatens your own economic status, then you won’t know any of that. But most of those in the liberal arts have concluded that there really isn’t any other intellectually respectable way to interpret the broad contours of history and culture. They are liberal, in other words, by deliberate and reasoned choice, based upon the best available evidence.

3. Liberal arts professors are liberal because they have been taught by liberals, who have “values”

Finally, most liberal-arts professors come from a background of liberal education, which emphasizes the role that values play in human affairs.... More important, they’ve learned that values inevitably conflict, and they have developed the skills to interpret these clashes with nuance, envisioning various forms of resolution or mediation....

It is this open perspective on what types of values can be considered legitimate, the various ways they can be approached, and the different redefinitions or reconfigurations that they may assume that most differentiates liberal-arts faculty members from their colleagues in business, law, medicine, or the natural sciences. (I don’t mention the social sciences here, because there is no longer any really meaningful line that can be drawn between the humanities and the social sciences.) All of those other fields are structured around specific values that remain relatively fixed: profit and exchange in business; justice and social utility in law; health and wellness in medicine; objectivity, explanation, and prediction in the natural sciences. The liberal arts are distinctive because they are open to considering any of those values outside their narrow professional contexts.

Those are the three reasons. Surber’s conclusion:

It is because we liberal-arts professors have a personal stake in our relative economic status; we have carefully studied the actual dynamics of history and culture; and we have trained ourselves to think in complex, nuanced, and productive ways about the human condition that so many of us are liberals. Most of us agree with President Obama that there is a “right side of history,” and we feel morally bound to be on it.

But I do have an explanation that’s not that different from Prof. Suber’s but is much shorter: liberal arts professors are liberal because they’re liberal arts professors; being liberal is in their job description.

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I have written a number of times about the recent research on the racial achievement gap and affirmative action by Princenton Professor Thomas Espenshade and various co-authors: here, here, here, here, and most recently here. He is also one of the new scholars writing about “diversity” that Peter Schmidt mentioned in an article I just discussed here.

Please read those posts for a more thorough discussion than I will provide here, but an un-nuanced (though not, I think, unfair) summary of Espenshade’s research on data from eight elite colleges is that he and his co-authors find a massive racial achievement gap, correspondingly massive racial preferences in admissions that benefit blacks and Hispanics and bar large numbers of Asians, combined with a commitment to “diversity” that causes them to refuse to recognize the discrimination against Asians for what it is and even to lament what they see as the imminent demise of the race preference regime.

For example, as I noted here, Espenshade and Alexandra Radford noted in a recent article 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.

I bring all this up, again, because Prof. Espenshade steadfastly continues, either obstinately or obtusely, to acknowledge what his numbers, charts, graphs, and statistical analyses clearly reveal: that “affirmative action” as practiced by admissions officers at elite colleges results in massive discrimination against Asian-Americans. (I discussed an earlier example of this refusal here and here.) He professes, lamely, in a recent interview about his new book with the Princeton News Service that he can’t conclude that

because I’ve never actually sat in on an admission committee. But I’m convinced they don’t have an equation like this and say, “OK, if you are Hispanic, you get a certain number of points; if your SAT scores are in this category, you get a certain number of points,” right down the list.

People may read this and want to say, “Oh, because I’m Asian American, my SAT scores have been downgraded.” That is not really the way to interpret these data. Many times people will ask me, “Do your results prove that there is discrimination against Asian applicants?” And I say, “No, they don’t.” Even though in our data we have much information about the students and what they present in their application folders, most of what we have are quantifiable data. We don’t have the “softer” variables -- the personal statements that the students wrote, their teacher recommendations, a full list of extracurricular activities. Because we don’t have access to all of the information that the admission office has access to, it is possible that the influence of one applicant characteristic or another might appear in a different light if we had the full range of materials.

This is neither lame nor silly; it is both dumb and offensive.

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In a long, interesting, and valuable article in the Chronicle of Higher Education Peter Schmidt reviews what he describes as the “increased nuance and complexity” of a “new wave of research on campus diversity.” The new research, he writes,

holds the promise of improving how colleges serve students of different hues. On the fundamental question of whether racial and ethnic diversity produces educational benefits, the latest studies’ bottom line is: Sometimes. With the right mix of students. If handled delicately.

Many of you will recall the controversial report by University of Michigan psychologist Patricia Gurin that played such an important role in UM’s defense of its racial preference policies. (Those two posts, by the way, did not discuss the competence of Gurin’s work so much as its honesty.) Now some scholars are having second thoughts about this and other similar work. “In the period leading to the Grutter decision,” Schmidt writes,

researchers had been focused on the basic question of whether diversity produced any educational benefits, because the courts’ view of the legality of race-conscious admission policies appeared to hinge on the answer.

“There was a rush to get stuff out quickly,” says Mr. Milem, of Arizona, who helped generate research used by proponents of affirmative action to make their case. “The lawyers did not want the nuance. They said, ‘Show us what the outcomes are.’ They pushed us to sort of talk in better, shorter sound bites because that is the way it needs to be communicated.”

The debate over the persuasiveness of research on this point has remained very much alive in the years since Grutter. In an article published in the Stanford Law Review in 2006, for example, Justin Pidot, who was then a third-year Stanford law student and now is a Justice Department lawyer, reviewed the research that had been before the Supreme Court in 2003 and found it inconclusive on the key question of whether colleges must maintain minority enrollments above certain levels to achieve educational benefits.

Of course one need not be a new scholar, or the author of new scholarly research, to find enormous and fatal flaws in the research of Gurin and other early apologists for “diversity.” For example, the Michigan Association of Scholars demolished this research (without, somehow, persuading Justice O’Connor et al.) in an amicus brief submitted to the Supreme Court in Grutter (which I discussed in some detail here). “In an effort to quantify the educational benefits of diversity,” they wrote,

the University solicited and then issued a report written by Patricia Gurin, a Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan. Professor Gurin sought to correlate the racial diversity of classrooms on the one hand with hundreds of educational outcomes on the other. Among her results was the conclusion that students' self-reported intellectual self confidence improved more sharply in classrooms where there was greater racial diversity. But only by wading through pages of regression tables will one find the fact (not much emphasized by the University!) that student self-reported intellectual self confidence in racially mixed classrooms increased for white students. For black students Prof. Gurin found either no correlation or a negative correlation. Black student self-confidence, according to Prof. Gurin, either did not improve, or it declined in more racially mixed classes.

As the University would have it, the University is justified in abandoning normal admissions criteria so as to boost the number of black students in order that white students (but not black students) may feel more self-confident. Whether this shows a need for diversity at all is arguable; that it shows a compelling need for diversity is absurd.

Schmidt’s article surveys a number of recent studies — some of those, such as those by Thomas Espenshade of Princeton I’ve already discussed — and his entire article is well worth reading. I was particularly interested, for a reason you will see below, in Schmidt’s comments about one of those new studies:

Among the latest studies is a soon-to-be-published paper by two Duke University scholars — Peter Arcidiacono, an associate professor of economics, and Jacob L. Vigdor, a professor of public policy and economics — suggesting that colleges interested in promoting educational diversity face a Catch-22: If they relax admissions standards to take in more black and Hispanic students, their white and Asian-American students are much less likely to reap educational benefits, at least as measured by their acquisition of diversity-related skills assumed to increase long-term earning potential.

On the whole, the study, slated for publication in the journal Economic Inquiry, found only weak evidence that the racial composition of a college's student body has a long-term impact on the success of white and Asian-American students in the areas it measured. And where colleges enrolled black and Hispanic students whose academic credentials were lower, on average, than those of other students, the effect of diversity on the success of white and Asian-American students appeared, if anything, to be negative.

This article evaluates the frequently argued but heretofore little tested hypothesis that increasing minority representation in elite colleges generates tangible benefits for majority-race students. Using data on graduates of 30 selective universities, we find only weak evidence of any relationship between collegiate racial composition and the postgraduation outcomes of white or Asian students. Moreover, the strongest evidence we uncover suggests that increasing minority representation by lowering admission standards is unlikely to produce benefits and may in fact cause harm by reducing the representation of minority students on less selective campuses. While affirmative action may still be desirable for the benefits it conveys to minority students, these results provide little support for “spillover” effects on majority-race students....

And, if I do say so myself (well, who else is going to say so?), the discordant, grating song that “diversity uses blacks for the benefit of whites” has been sung here, loudly and frequently, since 2002 (!). Critics of “diversity” often note the unfairness of excluding some whites and Asians so that other whites and Asians could receive the alleged benefits of being exposed to the preferentially admitted minorities. They properly regard such treatment as unfair, I noted in the November 2002 post just quoted,

because they were not treated with what Ronald Dworkin (and others) would call “equal respect.” Their interests were subordinated to the (presumed) interests of others in being exposed to more "diversity" than the rejected applicants could provide. In short, they were treated as a means to the more important ends of others.

Even though they were awarded the prize of admission, they too were treated as a means of providing a benefit to others, i.e., the non-minorities who will benefit from being exposed to them. They are not treated as individuals. They are not admitted, after all, to provide “diversity” to themselves but to others. True, they may receive some benefit from being in a “diverse” student body. But they would receive that benefit no matter what majority-white institution they attended. That is, admitting the preferentially treated blacks admitted to any highly selective university does not provide them with any diversity benefits they would not receive at less selective majority-white institutions. The diversity benefit that preferences are said to provide, that is, flows to the non-minorities exposed to the preferentially admitted minorities. This is treating them as a means, not an end, every bit as much as the rejected whites....

They may well receive some benefit from being admitted to more selective institutions than they would have absent the racial preference they received (or course, they are also less likely to graduate), but the diversity benefit they receive cannot justify those preferences because the preferentially admitted minorities would have received the same diversity benefits at the less selective institutions they would otherwise have attended.

Not to put too fine a point on it, the elite institutions that offer racial preferences are using minorities to provide “diversity” to their non-minority students. In return, those students are allowed entry into institutions whose requirements would have excluded them if they had been judged by the same standards as the other students. This bargain may or may not be beneficial to the instiutions or to the preferentially admitted, i.e., differentially treated, minorities, but it is a fallacy to point to diversity benefits allegedly received by the preferred to justify the preferences extended to them. If “diversity” justifies racial discrimination, it is because of the benefits received by the non-minorities who are exposed to the preferentially admitted minorities. To claim otherwise is less than honest.

I could quote more, such as Paul Brest, former dean of the Stanford Law School, being

honest enough to recognize that admitting minorities so that the other students may benefit from being exposed to their allegedly different perspectives places a burden on them. He notes that “[w]hile minority students complained of the burden of constantly having to educate their white classmates, the minority students learned as well.” Of course they did, but the fact they did does not validate the diversity justification for racial preferences. They would also have learned at the schools to which they would have been admitted without preferences. The diversity argument is based on the contributions the preferentially admitted minorities make to others, not on the benefits they undoubtedly receive.

Tote that barge! Lift dat bale!

Posted by John Rosenberg at 9:58 AM | Permalink | Say What? (1) | TrackBacks (0)

This week, with bi-partisan majorities, the Virginia Senate passed bills that “make it clear that no resident of the Commonwealth shall be required to purchase health insurance.”

According to state Republican Party Chairman Pat Mullins,

“Monday’s bipartisan vote illustrates just how far out of touch Democrats like Rep. Tom Perriello, D-5th, and Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-11th, are on the issue of health care,” Mullins said. “When Republicans asked Senate Democrats to join them in standing up against federal overreach, five decided to put the rights of their constituents ahead of the wishes of Washington, D.C....”

“Even Democrats in the Virginia Senate realize that the health care nightmare being negotiated behind closed doors across the Potomac is bad news for their constituents,” Mullins said. “Monday’s vote shows again that Reps. Perriello, Connolly and the rest of the Democrats in Washington, D.C., aren’t listening to their employers — the voters of the Commonwealth of Virginia.”

Posted by John Rosenberg at 4:18 PM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

On its “The Ticker” blog, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports:

Opportunities Abound for Female Athletes, but Less So for Coaches and AD’s, Report Says

New data in a study that has tracked women’s involvement in collegiate sports over 33 years suggest that while more women compete on college teams than in previous years, they are still in the minority among coaches and leaders of athletic departments. Nineteen percent of athletic departments have female athletic directors, down slightly from 2008, the last time this biennial report, “Women in Intercollegiate Sport,” was published. Meanwhile, 43 percent of women’s athletic teams have female head coaches, a figure that is unchanged from two years ago but a steep drop from 1972, when more than 90 percent of women’s teams had female head coaches.

The fact that women make up a smaller proportion of coaches and athletic directors than they do of athletes does not mean there are less “opportunities” for them in those positions. Maybe their lower representation in those positions implies the presence of discrimination; maybe it doesn’t. The numbers, in short, don’t speak for themselves, and don’t say anything at all about “opportunities.”

But what’s the point of having your own blog if you can’t be snarky on it? At least I behave better in public (something my mother always complained about. She’d have much preferred better behavior at home.)

Posted by John Rosenberg at 10:05 AM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

At a carefully staged appearance at a Democratic retreat,

Senate Democrats held back from asking President Barack Obama about healthcare reform during a carefully scripted question-and-answer session in front of television cameras.

With the cameras rolling, a group of senators selected in advance by the Democratic leadership asked questions about such topics as partisan gridlock and GOP obstruction.

And then came this presidential bomb:

“We’ve got to make sure that our party understands that, like it or not, we have to have a financial system that is healthy and functioning, so we can’t be demonizing every bank out there,” Obama said. “We’ve got to be the party of business, small business and large business, because they produce jobs.”

1) those who don’t like having “a financial system that is healthy and functioning” but understand the need for one, and who thus “demonize” only some banks (many? most?) but not all of them; and

2) those who don’t understand the need for a healthy and functioning financial system and who consequently demonize all banks.

What a party.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 6:25 PM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)