A couple of days ago I asked, What Are Race Preference Defenders Afraid Of? The answer was facts, in this case California Bar Association data on law school graduation rates.
The preferentialists’ fear of facts is both ironic and hypocritical here since these same California preferentialists were vociferous opponents of Ward Connerly’s Racial Privacy Initiative, which would have barred the state from collecting racial data. Then, they argued that “Connerly’s Proposition 54 was about burying information about race.” Now it is they who want to bury it, keeping it away from the prying eyes of scholars who, they fear, might use it to undermine some of their most cherished but unsupported assumptions.
Not to be outdone on the anti-data front, the feminists have long been partners in the preferentialist desire to block or bury data that might embarrass their desire for special treatment. Both the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed report today on their objection to a report from the U.S. Commission on Civil rights that endorses using a measure of women’s interest in sports in determining compliance with Title IX.
To the feminists, of course, asking women, and men, what they want is “controversial,” and indeed the Inside Higher Ed article is in effect a press release for their opposition. Its title is “Recommending a Title IX Loophole,” a conclusion reflected in its lede:
The U.S. Department of Education should encourage colleges and universities to use what has in the past been a controversial method to determine whether their athletics programs are in compliance with Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, a federal panel urged in a report released Thursday.
The recommended survey, IHE “reports” in its next paragraph, “has been criticized as an option that sets back equity for women in college sports.”
Commission chairman Gerald Reynolds wrote that surveying student interest is “the best method for attaining … compliance because it provides a reliable and rigorous method of ascertaining student interest in athletics,” and the commission’s report argues that
since female students are fully capable of expressing interest in athletics, or lack thereof, advocates for particular views on Title IX compliance should not devalue or dismiss their perspectives.
But, hey, determining what women and men actually want is “controversial” because it might impede the preferentialists’ desire to impose their version of “equity,” i.e., proportional representation in sports, whether or not the desire and interests of the students is proportional.
Irony. “Equity” as traditionally used meant making special exceptions for cases where the iron rule of law would be unjust. That is, it was especially sensitive to individual differences.
[…] IX’s most vociferous defenders argue, of course, that such surveys are a fraud — in the words of Marcia Greenberger, founder and co-president of the National Women’s Law […]