Gail Collins, New York Times former editorial page editor and current columnist, disagrees with her colleague David Brooks’ morose president-induced pessimism. “I know Barack Obama’s first year has been rough,” she writes, “but he still manages to be pretty perky....”
Well, as long as he’s “pretty perky” I guess everything is OK.
In the post immediately below I reposted the first of two old posts from several years ago about Goodwin Liu, the Berkeley law professor recently nominated by President Obama to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Here is Pluribus E Unum, the second one.
December 26, 2006Pluribus E Unum
Goodwin Liu, the Berkeley law professor whose OpEd I criticized in the post immediately below, argued in that OpEd that “the idea that Brown prohibits ‘classification’ by race is profoundly revisionist.”
Professor Liu may not be aware that “revisionist” is frequently a badge of honor worn by historians, who take great pride in correcting earlier misconceptions and erroneous interpretations. In that revisionist spirit, then, I have decided to offer a Christmas gift to the opponents of colorblindness.
Since they have to engage in such contortions and distortions to “construe” so many of the foundational documents in the history of race in American in a manner that rids them of the principle that every American should be treated without regard to race, I decided to make it easier for them and “revise” these documents so that they no longer have to read so much into them or out of them.
Here are excerpts from some of those documents, written the way the apostles of racial preference wish they had been written (and “construe” them as though this is how they were in fact written).
Declaration of IndependenceNow, readers with an intimate knowledge of these documents will recognize that there is one ringer above. Yes, it is the first paragraph of the Plessy revision. That paragraph was not changed at all. That’s because, as I’ve pointed out a number of times, today’s preferentialists actually agree with the analysis of the majority opinion in Plessy.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created different, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Enjoyment of Diversity.
[Compare to the original]Gettysburg Address
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all races are created different.
[Compare to the original]14th Amendment
...nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or the experience of diversity, without due process of law; nor deny to any racial or ethnic group within its jurisdiction benefits in proportion to its proportion of the population.
[Compare to original]15th Amendment
Section 1. The right of members of all racial and ethnic groups to vote, and to elect representatives of their own race or ethnicity, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state.
[Compare to original]Plessy v Ferguson
A statute which implies merely a legal distinction between the white and colored races — a distinction which is founded in the color of the two races, and which must always exist so long as white men are distinguished from the other race by color — has no tendency to destroy the legal equality of the two races.…We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff's argument to consist in the assumption that the preferential treatment afforded one or more races stamps the unpreferred races with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the unpreferred races choose to put that construction upon it. The argument necessarily assumes that if, as has been more than once the case, and is not unlikely to be so again, the unpreferred races should become the dominant power in the state legislature, and should enact a law in precisely similar terms, it would thereby relegate the currently preferred races to an inferior position. We imagine that the currently preferred race, at least, would not acquiesce in this assumption. The argument also assumes that social prejudices may be overcome by legislation, and that equal rights cannot be secured unless we ignore race. We cannot accept this proposition.
[Compare to original]Executive Order 10925 (“Affirmative Action”), President Kennedy, March 6, 1961
The contractor will not discriminate against any employee or applicant for employment because of race, creed, color, or national origin unless doing so is necessary to promote diversity. The contractor will take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, with full consciousness of their race, creed, color, or national origin in order to promote diversity through an equitable racial and ethnic balance.
[Compare to original]Civil Rights Act of 1964
SEC. 601. No racial or ethnic group in the United States shall be excluded from proportional participation in, be denied the proportional benefits of, or be subjected to colorblind treatment under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.SEC. 703. (a) It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer--
(1) to fail or refuse to be conscious of an an applicant’s or employee’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin and to fail or refuse to maintain an equitable racial and ethnic balance among all employees; or
(2) to fail or refuse to classify his employees in any way that would promote the employment opportunities of members of various racial and ethnic groups in proportion to their proportion of the relevant labor pool or to take any action that would tend to deprive any racial or ethnic group of proportional representation among his employees.
[Compare to the original]
As I argued here,
the legal theory underlying the Plessy decision is that the Fourteenth Amendment does not require colorblindness and hence that racial discrimination can in many circumstances be reasonable and hence constitutional. Thus it is the preferentialists today, not the critics of preferences, who unwittingly echo the Plessy argument.And here, first quoting that renowned constitutional scholar, Jesse Jackson, and then commenting:
I could go on and on and on but will limit myself going on only once — the famous Southern Manifesto of 1956, which I “revised” at length here. That Manifesto, signed by 19 Senators and 81 Representatives from the South, with only minor revisions, eerily anticipates and previews the arguments of today’s preferentialists. Here’s one example, with my minor revisions in italics:More than 100 years ago, the Supreme Court disgraced itself by ruling that legal apartheid — the lie of separate but equal — was constitutional. Almost 50 years ago, it brought that disgraceful era to an end in Brown vs. Board of Education, ruling school segregation illegal. A generation ago, in 1978, it reaffirmed affirmative action in education in the Bakke decision, even while outlawing quotas. Now the question is whether the court will uphold the commitment to diversity or turn back the clock.I'm always amused by “turn back the clock” references, whoever makes them, implying as they do that history is linear, that there are never any wrong turns that have to be corrected [by revisionists!], etc. It is an especially ironic phrase here since the legal theory underlying the Plessy decision is that equal protection does not require colorblindness and hence that racial discrimination can in many circumstances be reasonable and hence constitutional. The preferentialist argument today is an unwitting echo of Plessy.
In the case of Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 the Supreme Court expressly declared that under the 14th Amendment no person was denied any of his rights if the States took race into account. This decision has been followed in many other cases. It is notable that the Supreme Court, speaking through Chief Justice Taft, a former President of the United States, unanimously declared in 1927 in Lum v. Rice that the diversity principle is “within the discretion of the State in regulating its public schools and does not conflict with the 14th Amendment.”It’s too bad, from a preferentialist point of view, that “diversity” and “integration” were not the core values reflected in our foundational documents, that instead for generation upon generation Americans have unfortunately believed that they were at their best when they honored the principle that everyone should be treated without regard to race, religion, or national origin.
This interpretation, restated time and again, became a part of the life of the people of many of the States and confirmed their habits, traditions, and way of life....Though there has been no constitutional amendment or act of Congress changing this established legal principle almost a century old, the Supreme Court of the United States, with no legal basis for such action, undertook to exercise their naked judicial power and substituted their personal political and social ideas for the established law of the land.
Preferentialists [like Liu], however, should not feel altogether left out of the American tradition, for they too have their own forebears and historical standard-bearers who have argued, with great success, that race preferences are as American as apple pie and are perfectly consistent with the 14th Amendment and the civil rights laws, properly “construed” — from the “moderates” who kept colorblind language out of the 14th Amendment to Justice Brown and his majority opinion in Plessy to the Southerners who defended the right of states to prefer one race over another to today’s “civil rights organizations” who demand preferences based on race.
In a must-read post on NRO’s “Bench Memos” yesterday, Ed Whelan reveals that Ninth Circuit nominee Gordon Liu supports “racial quotas forever.” And, equally striking, he does so by quoting from from the transcript of remarks Liu delivered at an American Constitution Society convention that Liu, chairman of ACS’s board, claimed in material submitted to the Senate that he did not possess and presumably could not find, even though “it’s the first item that popped up when [Whelan] did a Google search of the panel title.”
It should be no surprise that Obama, whom many voters naively believed would lead us to the promised land of post-racialism, has nominated a strong, hard left racialist to the Ninth Circuit. After all, all of his nominees to date to any position having anything to do with civil rights have been firm supporters of race preferences and thus opponents of the principle that the state should treat all citizens without regard to their race. (If I am wrong about this, if Obama has in fact nominated or appointed any supporter of the “without regard” principle to an important legal or policy position with influence over civil rights, will someone please provide the name or, if I’m really wrong, names.)
And it should especially surprise no veteran DISCRIMINATIONS readers that Obama should find Liu an appealing nominee. In honor (?) of his nomination I will repost two of my old posts from several years ago on Liu (hence the “I” in the title above), the first of which follows here.
December 25, 2006Racial Classification In Liu Of Colorblindness
Berkeley law professor Goodwin Liu argues in an OpEd today not only that Brown v. Board of Education “unambiguously” stands for the proposition that classifying and assigning students by race to achieve “integration” is constitutional but even that “[n]othing in the opinion establishes or suggests colorblindness as a legal principle.”
I believe, you will not be surprised to hear (especially if you have read this, this, this, this, and this), that Liu reads considerably more into Brown than what was written or intended, and he also reads a considerable amount out of it that is there.
Like nearly all commentators who see the heart of Brown as a command of integration rather than a bar to discrimnation, Liu mistakenly equates “separation” — an absence of “racial balance” — with state-imposed “segregation,” and folds both of them into the general concept of “racial apartheid.”
As I argued here, however, I think that is mistaken:
I think it is clear that, however imperfectly, the 14th Amendment does embody the non-discrimination principle, however indeterminate the exact borders of that principle may be. But even though the exact dimensions of the Constitution’s principle of non-discrimination may be unclear, the principle in some form is at least clearly there. That’s considerably more than can be said for the principle (if that’s what it is) of “integration.”And here:... Brown stands for the principle that students may not be burdened because of their race — not for the contending principle that cities must do whatever is necessary, including imposing burdens on students based on their race, to implement racially balanced integration — because that contending principle is not found in the Constitution. In doing so Brown was based on a belief — a correct belief — that the Constitution embodies the “without regard” principle of non-discrimination, that the contours of Constitutional principle do not simply coincide with whatever judges happen to regard as appealing policies that produce desirable effects.
... what Brown barred was not the fact of “separation,” whether a lot or a little, but “segregation,” the policy of assigning students to schools based on their race. It was the racial discrimination inherent in that policy that made the “separate” schools inherently unequal, not the demographic fact of blacks attending schools primarily (or even exclusively) with other blacks....Liu writes that “Brown unambiguously held that racial apartheid has no place in public schools or elsewhere in public life.” That observation would not be troubling if it weren’t accompanied by Liu’s apparent belief that “racial imbalance,” wherever it appears, is the same thing as “racial apartheid” that must be corrected by governmental racial classifications.... It seems to me that the underlying principle urged upon us by the Louisville and Seattle school boards and their defenders [including Professor Liu] is that “racial balance” is fundamental. Non-discrimination might be nice, but it’s not essential. What is essential, I believe they claim, is that the need for “racial balance” trumps everything.....
Given that belief, I’m actually rather troubled when he makes what would otherwise be the unexceptionable observation that
[a] decade after Brown, Congress passed landmark civil rights laws that effectively integrated the nation's restaurants, motels and workplaces. In short, Brown's principal legacy has been the dismantling of state-sanctioned racial apartheid in the United States.The Civil Rights Act of 1964, however, did not require “racial balance” or even integration of “restaurants, motels and workplaces.” It barred racial discrimination in those arenas. Given Liu’s view of the meaning of Brown, it’s surprising that he and his friends haven’t demanded a version of economic busing to ensure that every institution and organization [hotel, restaurant, housing development, etc.] has the required degree of “racial balance.”
Oh, wait....
Is there anyone left in America (other than a recently arrived traveler or two from outer space) who believes that the Obama administration favors post-racial policies? If so, and if they’re able to read (which is doubtful), they should take a look at the brief the administration recently filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit supporting the University of Texas’s desire to return to “race-conscious” admissions. As noted by Roger Clegg of the Center for Equal Opportunity (which along with the Pacific Legal Foundation has filed a brief opposing this return to racial discrimination)
[t]he brief is a full-throated endorsement of such discrimination, and it goes out of its way to say that the administration will support it at the K-12 level, too, as well as throughout university admissions: “In view of the importance of diversity in educational institutions, the United States, through the Departments of Education and Justice, supports the efforts of school systems and post-secondary educational institutions that wish to develop admissions policies that endeavor to achieve the educational benefits of diversity in accordance with [the Supreme Court’s 2003 decision upholding the use of preferences by the University of Michigan law school].”There is, for anyone who has followed Obama’s career before the campaign and after the election, nothing surprising here. Nor is there anything surprising about the fact that the usual suspects of the higher education establishment are supporting UT, arguing in their brief that universities have a First Amendment right to discriminate in admissions if such a policies “best meet their needs.” The value of “inclusiveness” is so great, in their view, that they support the right of universities to exclude some applicants who would have been admitted but for their race.
Those same groups (for the most part), however, do not believe that religious student organizations have a First Amendment right to admit members (or not) based on whether applicants share the religious beliefs around which the groups are organized. The education organizations believe that the First Amendment rights of the education institutions trump whatever rights their students may have to organize groups that reflect their views.
The journalist A.J. Liebling famously said that “freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” To the grandees of American higher education, apparently, the First Amendment belongs only to the institutions that ladle it out as they see fit.
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports this morning on a new study by The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports (TIDES) (Don’t you just love that title?) that finds a continuing — indeed, slightly growing — racial gap in the graduation rates of white and black male NCAA Division I tournament-bound basketball players.
The key finding: “Eighty‐four percent of white and 56 percent of African‐American men’s Division I basketball student‐athletes graduate.”
According to Richard Lapchick, the primary author,
the continuing significant disparity between the academic success of African‐American and white men’s basketball student‐athletes is deeply troubling. In fact, the already large gap increased by four percentage points. One of higher education’s greatest failures is the persistent gap between African‐American and white students in general. This is also true for white and African‐American basketball student‐athletes in particularLapchick notes one bright (or at least brighter) spot:
... it is equally important to note that African‐American basketball players graduate at a higher rate than African‐American males who are not student‐athletes. The graduation rate for African‐ American male students as a whole is only 38 percent, a full 18 percent lower than for African‐American basketball student‐athletes. Presently, too many of our predominantly white campuses are not welcoming places for students of color, whether or not they are athletes. There are lessons that our campuses could learn from athletics.Welcoming? The problem is that black males are not sufficiently welcome?
What pap.
Read about the wound (as in shot in foot) inflicted on Virginia Republicans by one of our newly elected Republican office holders? If not, or if you want to read more, read this.
It may lose me some of my new conservative friends, who have until now warmly replaced my long-lost liberal friends.
Mark up Obama’s new education policy as another change in the “Change!” promised during the campaign. Remember his call for universal access to college?
We will prepare the next generation for success in college and the workforce, ensuring that ... any young person who works hard and desires a college education can access it.Actually, that was the quote that appears on the Google link to Candidate Obama’s education policy. If you follow that same link now what you find is:
We will prepare the next generation for success in college and the workforce, ensuring that American children lead the world once again in creativity and achievement....Universal access seems to have been, well, somewhat attenuated. And now the new policy has been unveiled, as reported in the New York Times:After graduating high school, all Americans should be prepared to attend at least one year of job training or higher education to better equip our workforce for the 21st century economy....
The Obama administration on Saturday called for a broad overhaul of President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law, proposing to reshape divisive provisions that encouraged instructors to teach to tests, narrowed the curriculum, and labeled one in three American schools as failing.The article is fascinating, even aside from the NYT’s typical news story editorializing (“His plan strikes a careful balance...”). An interesting feature of this “overhaul” is that
President Obama would replace the law’s requirement that every American child reach proficiency in reading and math, which administration officials have called utopian, with a new national target that could prove equally elusive: that all students should graduate from high school prepared for college and a career.Well, whoever said high school graduates must be able to read and write and add and subtract?
President Bush called the attitude embodied in President Obama’s new policy the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” I think he was wrong about the soft.
By now you’ve all heard of the “Slaughter Solution” to the House Democrats’ dilemma — how to pass health care reform without actually having to vote for the Senate bill:
House Rules Chairwoman Louise Slaughter is prepping to help usher the healthcare overhaul through the House and potentially avoid a direct vote on the Senate overhaul bill, the chairwoman said Tuesday.As the Arizona Republic described this unique new non-voting method of voting,Slaughter is weighing preparing a rule that would consider the Senate bill passed once the House approves a corrections bill that would make changes to the Senate version.
Some House Democrats are proposing a novel way of passing a health-care reform bill, which at the moment is stuck in limbo between the Senate and House.Newt Gingrich had the best line about the Dems flocking to Slaughter:Just “deem” it passed. No “up or down” vote, as President Barack Obama requested. Indeed, no vote on the reform bill at all. Just . . . declare it passed, and that is that.
Briefly, House Rules Committee Chairwoman Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y., is working on a plan that would have the House vote on a “rule” bill accompanying the health-care bill, rather than the bill itself. The thinking is that this would provide political cover to lawmakers who could tell angry constituents they did not vote for the controversial health-care bill. House leaders simply would move to “deem” the health-care reform bill as passed, thus alleviating House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of the burden of rounding up votes.
Last year, the House was passing bills without reading them. This year, they're passing bills without voting on them.If the Democrats’ behavior were portrayed in a movie, viewers would not find it credible. (On the other hand, if it were in a Saturday Night Live skit no one would find it funny — just another routine description of how Democrats behave when they want to pass something the public abhors.)
Speaking of movies, I found the best description of what’s going on now in a book about Hollywood — screenwriter William Goldman’s Adventures in the Screen Trade (which I happened to see at a friend’s house), p. xi:
During the holiday season of ’81-’82, sixteen films were released by the major studios. Of those, only one — On Golden Pond — was a runaway success. And ten of the sixteen each lost more than ten million dollars. One major studio executive told me recently, “Of course the failures are upsetting. But there have always been failures. What’s got us so immobilized now is whatever it is we’re making, we’re missing he audience by a wider margin than ever before. We don’t know what they want. All we do know is that they don’t want what we’re giving them....”
Again, this is the worst period within memory.By the time this book sees print, it may well be the best period within memory. The pont being this: Movies are a gold-rush business.”
So is politics, or at least Deem-ocratic politics in the age of Obama. Until he took office and began doing things, all Deem-ocrats and many normal people thought Obama was golden. Now they know that all that glitters is not gold.
February was Black History Month. Now it’s March, and March is Women’s History Month.
Will someone tell me when is Southern Jewish History Month? I must have missed it last year.
Also, a friend just gave me a copy of Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People. Is there a White History Month that I’ve also missed?
February was Black History Month. Now it’s March, and March is Women’s History Month.
Will someone tell me when is Southern Jewish History Month? I must have missed it last year.
Also, a friend just gave me a copy of Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People. Is there a White History Month that I’ve also missed?
About a year ago I was feeling left out when the White House created a special council on women and girls: Men And Boys Need Not Apply: Obama Wants Fairness For “Women And Girls”. Now I feel left out just about every month.
A reader, E, sent a link to this article about admission to the highly selective specialized high schools in New York (Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, etc.) by John Garvey, a former dean at the City University of New York.
Garvey proposes a solution to the old problem of “woefully small percentages of black and Hispanic students” at those highly selective schools based on the Texas 10 percent plan:
The Department of Education should adopt a proportional admissions plan for the exam schools that would offer admission to the highest-scoring students from each of the neighborhoods of the city.Arguing that “[j]udging students by grades or class rank would offer the fairest estimation of their potential,” he further proposes that the admissions test be scrapped. But there’s something of a disconnect here, since he also argues that there are fewer blacks and Hispanics in the selective high schools because the schools they attend are inferior: “Clearly, segregation and the unequal educational opportunities that result continue to distort the enrollment profile of the city’s most selective high schools.”
Thus what Garvey is saying is that students who do well in poor schools but don’t do well on the entrance tests are as qualified for the selective schools as students who do well in better schools and do well on the tests. This makes no sense.
Garvey notes that a “downside” to his neighborhood-based admission system is similar to an admitted “downside” of the Texas 10 percent plan (guaranteeing the top 10% of the graduate of every high school admission to the University of Texas):
High-achieving black and Hispanic students who rank below the top 10 percent at majority-white schools often do not get admitted to the college of their choice.Apparently Garvey does not regard the fact that high-achieving white and Asian students who rank below the top 10 percent of their classes also often do not get admitted to the college of their choice as a “downside” worth noticing.
Two days ago on NRO’s “The Corner,” Mark Krikorian (Executive Director of the invaluable Center for Immigration Studies) invited us to send a message with our Census forms.
Fully one-quarter of the space on this year’s form is taken up with questions of race and ethnicity, which are clearly illegitimate and none of the government’s business (despite the New York Times’ assurances to the contrary on today’s editorial page). So until we succeed in building the needed wall of separation between race and state, I have a proposal. Question 9 on the census form asks “What is Person 1’s race?” (and so on, for other members of the household)....I second his suggestion, but I am even more impressed and excited by his call for “the needed wall of separation between race and state.” DISCRIMINATIONS veterans with long memories, or empty lives (or both), may recall that as long ago as 2002 I made that same plea here, in Separation of Race and State.... [W]e should answer Question 9 by checking the last option — “Some other race” — and writing in “American.” It’s a truthful answer but at the same time is a way for ordinary citizens to express their rejection of unconstitutional racial classification schemes. In fact, “American” was the plurality ancestry selection for respondents to the 2000 census in four states and several hundred counties.
In that post I discussed (and applauded) the recent important Supreme Court case holding that school vouchers allowing students to attend sectarian schools did not violate the Establishment Clause, but I drew heavily on the dissenters in that case to argue that the history and principle underlying their impressive devotion to religious neutrality also should compel racial neutrality, the separation of race and state.
You are welcome to read (or for you hearty veterans, re-read) that post for those quotes, but I’m giving myself editorial license to include here the guts of my argument there, on the theory that plagiarizing oneself is legitimate after eight years. So:
Separation of Race and State — No, that’s not a typo. I meant to say race, not church. But first we in fact do have to go to church. By now I know you’re probably all tired of vouchers, but please bear with me. I want to suggest that the principle articulately defended in the minority opinions in the recent voucher case unwittingly provides a convincing argument why the principle of religious neutrality they advocate compels neutrality regarding race as well as religion.Amen.The dissenters dissent because in their view vouchers violate the principle of neutrality. Since 96% of the students with vouchers chose to attend religious schools, they argue, the fact of intervening private choice was not sufficient to insulate the government funds from the charge of impermissibly favoring — which in the current understanding is tantamount to establishing — religion.
What I want to emphasize, however, is not that familiar argument. More important, I believe, is the repeated, emphatic recognition throughout the dissents that the principle of neutrality itself derives not so much from the text of the Constitution as from something deeper in the very structure of our society. That something is the overriding fact of religious pluralism, a pluralism that in the absence of official neutrality would lead to constant strife and conflict. The dissenters, in short, recognize that the small “c” constitution of American society of necessity dictates the meaning of the large “C” Constitution.
[Quotes from dissenters]
Race and Sects in American History
Although I think the dissenters are mistaken when they conclude that vouchers violate the principle in, and underlying, the First Amendment, I think their vision of American history, and of the neutrality principle that history has generated, is compelling.
One of the most cherished myths of American history is that our foremothers and forefathers fled the Old World for the New to escape religious bigotry and build a new society based on religious freedom. In fact, the Puritans’ strongest complaint against the Old World was that it was too tolerant, that it was swimming in a sea of such moral sloth and corruption that it had lost all interest in purifying the church. The New World appealed to them because it was empty (except for the “heathens” ripe for conversion), and they could establish Godly communities the way they were quite certain God intended.
And yet within several generations religious toleration had broken out all over. Despite the best efforts of the Puritan divines, diversity could not be denied. The Baptists and Quakers proved irrepressible. Mennonites appeared, and Methodists sprouted like weeds in the wake of itinerant ministers. Even many Congregational churches split asunder as revivalist “New Lights” walked out and founded competing congregations.
What happened? Unintended and unplanned, America began to happen. What Voltaire said cynically about England came to be celebrated here: “If there were one religion . . . , its despotism would be terrible; if there were only two, they would destroy each other; but there are 30, and therefore they live in peace and happiness.”
Toleration developed not because it was valued but because it was necessary. “Freedom came to the Western world,” wrote Reinhold Niebuhr, one of our greatest theologians, “by the inadvertence of history. Toleration was an absolute necessity for a community which had lost its religio-cultural unity and could find peace only if toleration and freedom were accepted.”
America discovered, however, that toleration alone was not sufficient. Strict neutrality was also required, a prohibition against the state favoring any of the contending sects. As Justice Hugo Black wrote in Zorach v. Clauson (1952), “it is only by isolating the state from the religious sphere and compelling it to be completely neutral that the freedom of each and every denomination and of all nonbelievers can be maintained.” Or as the Court held in Abingdon School District v. Schempp (1963), “the government is neutral, and, while protecting all, it prefers none.”
But if the very structure of American society requires a principle of neutrality that in turn requires a separation of church and state (as the dissenters and I believe it does), should it not also compel a separation of race and state? After all, as the eminent Berkeley historian David Hollinger has written, in our time "ethno-racial affiliations have come to play a role similar to that played by religious affiliations at the time of the founding of the republic and throughout most of American history." (POST-ETHNIC AMERICA, Basic Books, 1995, p. 123). Surely racial and ethnic preferences are at least as "divisive" today as debates over school vouchers, which seem to have bothered a few litigants and the courts much more than the society as a whole.
As a perceptive if fickle critic of affirmative action has written, racial and ethnic preferences predictably lead (and in fact have led) to
a real Balkanization, in which group after group struggles for the benefits of special treatment.... The demand for special treatment will lead to animus against other groups that already have it, by those who think they should have it and don’t....That was Nathan Glazer, in AFFIRMATIVE DISCRIMINATION (Basic Books, 1975), and if anything he underestimated the divisiveness of bestowing governmental favors on the basis of race and ethnicity. Now that liberals have abandoned the formerly core value holding that every individual is entitled to be treated without regard to race, creed, or color in favor of multiculturalism and group rights, the very idea of “the larger fraternity of all Americans” is regarded by many as nothing more than right-wing cant.The rising emphasis on group difference which government is called upon to correct might mean the destruction of any hope for the larger fraternity of all Americans.
Or consider the current mantra of “diversity.” Harvard law professor Christopher Edley — former White House aide, co-author of President Clinton's “mend it, don't end it” review of affirmative action policies, advisor to Clinton's race commission, fervent advocate of racial preferences (he described Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom's America in Black and White as “a crime against humanity”), and advisor to the 2000 Gore campaign — has written that “our rich religious diversity” provides a model for racial diversity. “We are fairly united as one of the most religious nations on earth,” Edley wrote, “but we worship differently, celebrate that fact, and recognize that religious differences should play only a limited role in our social and economic lives. Perhaps a model along these lines is what is needed in race.” (Edley, “Why Talk About Race?” Washington Post OpEd, 7 December 1997, p. C1.)
Indeed it is, but this “model” suggests a conclusion that Edley and other preferentialists will not like. If ethnic and racial groups are now analogous to religious sects, why should it be permissible for the state to grant preferences to the former when it is clearly prohibited from doing so to the latter?
Perhaps Justice Breyer and his like-minded brethren, on and off the Court, can be called on to explain why they fear “the risk” of “potential” divisiveness in what they see as religious preferences but not the clear and present divisiveness of racial and ethnic preferences. Or, in the alternative, they could explain why a principle that they believe justifies racial preferences does not also justify religious preference, for certainly they recognize that religion provides as good or better basis for “diversity” as race.
Would they look on religious preferences in admissions and hiring with the same favor they bestow on racial and ethnic preferences? What is it precisely that would make a preference for Arabs acceptable but for Muslims unacceptable? Are not evangelical Christians “underrepresented” among the students and on the faculties of our elite, selective universities? Why must the Michigan law school have a “critical mass” of blacks and Hispanics but not of Missouri Synod Lutherans? Why was the old quota system that restricted the number of Jews in the Ivy League (presumably) wrong, but the de facto quota system that restricted the number of Asians admitted to Berkeley and UCLA under the reign of preferences not wrong?
In short, perhaps it is time to insist on a separation of race and state, to insist in the ethnic and racial sphere, as well as the religious, that government must be neutral, that it protect all of its constituent groups but prefer none — not because the First Amendment compels neutrality in this sphere, but because of the same social reality that led to the First Amendment in the first place.
An major UPDATE II was added to Obama's New Anti-Civil Rights Civil Rights Policy today.
In the two posts immediately below (here and here) I discussed civil rights in the schools, arguing that the Obama administration fundamentally misunderstands civil rights.
Because it didn’t fit the points I was making, I neglected to mention one of the most revealing, and most depressing, tidbits about the Dept. of Education mentioned in the Washington Post article I cited:
With about 600 employees and 12 field offices, the Office for Civil Rights is one of the largest units in the department. Its annual budget is $103 million.Does anyone really believe that “one of the largest” problems of American education today is rampant, pervasive discrimination against minorities?
In the post immediately below I discussed the Obama Dept. of Education’s view that lower minority graduation rates and lower participation in advanced placement courses, etc., reflect a pervasive problem of civil rights violations in our nation’s schools.
In that regard, however, consider the penetrating question asked by George Leef:
American colleges and universities are delighted to have minority students. They’re usually specially recruited and often given favorable treatment by the administration and professors. Some minority students work hard, perform very well, and graduate with honors. So why is it that graduation rates for minority students tend to be low? Is it because schools haven’t learned how to teach them? I don’t think so. The explanation is that on the whole, those students enter college with far lower basic academic skills (which can seldom be overcome just with a remedial course or two) and less academic engagement.Good question. If the “underrepresentation” of some minorities in advanced school courses and programs means the schools are discriminating against them, does the “overrepresentation” of Asians mean the schools are discriminating in favor of them?If you doubt that, ask yourself if the very high graduation rate among Asian students is because schools are “good at teaching them,” or because those students generally have high skills and motivation as they enter college....
Isn’t it posible, that is, that students and their families might be more responsible for how students perform than their schools?
[NOTE: Important UPDATE II Added March 9]
Yesterday, in Does Obama’s “Stimulus” Discriminate Against Minorities? (yes, according to the administration’s definition of discrimination), I noted (referencing this earlier post) that the liberal solution to “structural inequalities” is to regard “all employment policies or practices ... that have a disparate impact as by definition discriminatory by virtue of their disparate impact alone.” Now, according to laudatory articles today in both the Washington Post and New York Times, the Dept. of Education’s Office of Civil Rights is about to launch an all-out attack on the nation’s schools based on that warped view of “civil rights.”
In the Times, reporter Sam Dillon obviously shares OCR’s view that the nation’s schools are rife with discrimination because
[a]t the end of high school, white students are about six times as likely to be ready to pursue college-level biology courses as black students, and more than four times as likely to be ready for college algebra, department officials said. White high school graduates are more than twice as likely to have taken advanced placement calculus classes as black or Latino graduates.Dillon notes that the OCR has been swimming against the current in its effort to enforce civil rights, undermined by its own complicity with violations during the Bush area but also by barriers put up by other opponents of civil rights, such as the Supreme Court.
As it seeks to combat discrimination in schools and universities more aggressively, the administration will be acting in an area in which some Supreme Court rulings in recent years have brought more ambiguity. Federal policy for decades had aimed at compelling school districts to end racial inequality, for instance.The new OCR, in short, will not be deterred by the old, discredited view that “civil rights” recognizes the rights of individuals not to be burdened by the government based on their race, despite the Supreme Court’s continuing (if tenuous) dedication to that quaint notion.But in examining longstanding desegregation efforts in the Seattle and Jefferson County, Ky., schools in 2007, the Supreme Court ruled that school authorities could not seek to achieve or maintain integration through measures that take explicit account of a student’s race, a decision that seemed to reverse the thrust of four decades of federal policy.
Under its new, Obama-appointed leadership, OCR is about to step up its “compliance” efforts. This new effort, predictably, will not limit its attention to “procedures” — which I take to mean whether actual students have been treated fairly — but with results. ““Now we’ll not simply see whether there is a program in place,” Russlyn H. Ali, the new assistant secretary of education for civil rights, told the Times, “ but [we will] also examine whether that program is working effectively.”
And in Obamaland, working “effectively” means not an absence of discrimination but the presence of proportional results. Thus when Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announces new enforcement action in the coming weeks, as the Post reports today, “to ensure that students have equal access to a college-prep curriculum, advanced courses, and classes in math and science,” it is quite clear that he doesn’t really mean “equal access”; he means proportional results, as confirmed in an interview Ms. Ali gave the Post.
Ali said in an interview Friday that “we are weaving equity into all that we do” and that her office would examine potential cases for evidence of discrimination through “disparate impact” against certain classes of students on the basis of race, ethnicity, sex or disability.Since school districts will do whatever is necessary in order to be in “compliance” with the new “civil rights” directives from Washington, it is inevitable that many students across the country will now be excluded from Advanced Placement courses, etc., because of their race, i.e., because other students were included because of their race.Ali said the department plans to initiate 38 compliance reviews this year. There were 29 initiated last year, she said, and 42 in 2008. But she said the depth of the reviews will be “much greater than in the past.”
It is thus the height (or depth) of irony that Secretary Duncan will announce this new anti-civil rights “civil rights” policy today in a speech at the Edmund Pettus bridge near Selma, Alabama, site of one of the epic confrontations during the era when civil rights meant civil rights. And it is sad that he and the worshipful reporters covering the event don’t even recognize the irony.
UPDATE
More (and as usual, better) from Roger Clegg.
UPDATE II [March 9]: Yes, But Where Is The Discrimination?
In an interview with reporters, Secretary Duncan confirmed that he regards “underrepresentation” (or sometimes “overrepresentation,” as in disciplinary proceedings) not as evidence but as proof of “discrimination.”
Mr. Duncan, speaking with reporters from Selma, where civil-rights marchers were beaten by police officers on March 7, 1965, said discrimination today is seen in figures showing white high-school graduates are several times more likely than blacks or Latinos to be ready for college-level algebra, calculus, or biology.So, who is discriminating against those black and Latino students? What discriminatory policies are the culprits? What do schools need to do to get themselves in “compliance” with Secretary Duncan’s version of civil rights?
Here’s a thought: why shouldn’t the Dept. of Education issue individual mandates, on the model of those proposed in health care, requiring black and Latino students to spend a specified number of hours per night doing homework and limiting the number of hours of television watching allowed? It could also use “stimulus” funds, or newly appropriated “jobs” funds, to hire armies of truant officers (possibly using those hired for the Census) to monitor “compliance” with the new edict?
Title VI Complaint by San Francisco Bay Area Coalition Has National Implicationsby Urban Habitat
In the first successful action of its kind in the nation Urban Habitat, helped organize a coalition that filed a civil rights complaint to stop $70 million in stimulus funds from being allocated to a $500-billion boondoggle elevated “people-mover” known as the Oakland Airport Connector (OAC). The funds will be shifted to Bay Area transit agencies to help avert service cuts, fare hikes and layoffs that will affect hundreds of thousands of people, as the coalition recommended.
The complaint, filed by the nonprofit law firm Public Advocates on behalf of Urban Habitat, TransForm and Genesis, charged the Bay Area Rapid Transit agency (BART) with failing to take the needs of communities of color and low-income communities into account when planning the OAC project.
Yes, according to the view of “civil rights” that is dominant in the Obama administration.
The Associated Press reports today that minority firms are getting “less stimulus” funds than they deserve.
Hispanic and black businesses are receiving a disproportionately small number of federal stimulus contracts, creating a rising chorus of demands for the Obama administration to be more inclusive and more closely track who receives government-financed work.And that “pot of money is just a small fraction of the $862 billion economic stimulus.”Latinos and blacks have faced obstacles to winning government contracts long before the stimulus. They own 6.8 and 5.2 percent of all businesses, respectively, according to census figures. Yet Latino-owned business have received only 1.7 percent of $46 billion in federal stimulus contracts recorded in U.S. government data, and black-owned businesses have received just 1.1 percent.
Thus it would appear that the Obama administration is guilty of perpetuating the very sort of “structural inequalities” that the Obama administration promised to cure.
As I argued here last July,
the liberal solution to “structural inequality” is to regard “all employment policies or practices ... that have a disparate impact as by definition discriminatory by virtue of their disparate impact alone,” and now the Civil Rights Division is gearing up to impose that solution. [As the New York Times] reports,... And here, last August:
the division’s acting head, Loretta King, sent a memorandum to every federal agency urging more aggressive enforcement of regulations that forbid recipients of taxpayer money from policies that have a disparate impact on minorities.
Fulfilling the wet dreams of liberals and the worst fears of conservatives, the Obama Justice Department is hiring 50 additional lawyers in the Civil Rights Division while shifting its focus to disparate impact enforcement. “As part of this shift,” the [New York Times] reported,If Obama believes what he and his administration say about “civil rights,” he now must believe that he has become the nations’s Discriminator in Chief.
the Obama administration is planning a major revival of high-impact civil rights enforcement against policies, in areas ranging from housing to hiring, where statistics show that minorities fare disproportionately poorly. President George W. Bush’s appointees had discouraged such tactics, preferring to focus on individual cases in which there is evidence of intentional discrimination.This shift is an effort to restructure American society by requiring racial proportionality everywhere, and hence it destroys any basis for believing that Obama would be a post-racial president, putting bitterly controversial racial politics behind us.
Remember Nancy Pelosi’s famous declaration after the November 2006 elections made her the new Speaker of the House?
The American people voted to restore integrity and honesty in Washington, D.C., and the Democrats intend to lead the most honest, most open and most ethical Congress in history.Perhaps the best measure of how far short of that standard the Dem’s have fallen is not the criticism from Republicans, disillusioned Obama voters (Krauthammer: “You can only be disillusioned if you were once illusioned”), and rightward-drifting independents but what is said in their defense by their plucky, uncompromising defenders.
My favorite example: This headline of a Joan Walsh article in Salon yesterday:
“Are 2010 Dems as corrupt as the 2006 GOP?”
Given the “most honest, most open and most ethical” post-partisan promise of Pelosi, Obama, and their party, would it really matter even if were true that the answer to Walsh’s question is “not quite”?
A couple of months ago I asked, Does Sexual Equality Require Preferential Treatment, which pointed you, with encouragement, to this article on Pajamas Media by an all too frequent DISCRIMINATIONS contributor. That article asked, among other things, “Will the movement for gay rights follow the same trajectory as racial equality — from non-discrimination to preferential treatment based on sexual persuasion?”
Now he’s back, with The Logical Outcome of Illogical Non-Discrimination Policies at Universities, starting about where the former article left off and discussing a new policy at the University of Pennsylvania to recruit gay students.
The Chronicle of Higher Education has a gushing article this morning on the extraordinary lengths Rochester Institute of Technology has gone to in its effort to “diversify its faculty,” such as beginning the recruiting effort years before a candidate receives his Ph.D.
The two best things about the article, so far, are a couple of comments to it. The best, by Roger Clegg, invites readers to
reread this article, asking yourself whether, if Rochester were doing all it’s doing in order to increase the number of white and overrepresented minorities on its faculty, there would be any question that it was engaging in illegal racial discrimination.... Legal considerations aside, by all means cast a wide net, but then ignore skin color and national origin and just hire the best qualified individuals.The second best is by the most frequent contributor to DISCRIMINATIONS, me:
Left unreported is the question of exactly WHY RIT felt, and feels, the need to “diversify” its faculty by hiring more blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans. Will they produce better scientists than the wrongly-colored faculty who would have been hired had the emphasis been limited to scholarly qualifications?
Reader (and Townhall columnist) Joseph Phillips sends word of a new program in San Francisco (where else?) in which “high school students, just months out of middle school, can start earning San Francisco State college credit this fall through a ninth-grade ethnic studies.”
The courses will become part of the California State University’s Step to College program, which has offered college credit for high school students across the state since 1985. Most of those courses require students to be juniors or seniors.And we should be encouraged that that a 9th grade ethnic studies course for 14 year olds on their way to a 2.1 or 2.2 average provides “the kind of information that a freshman [at San Francisco State] taking an ethnic studies course will have”?The program is designed for students who might not otherwise be considering college as an option, said Jacob Perea, dean of the School of Education, who runs the Step to College program at San Francisco State.
“We’re not really looking for the 4.4 (grade point average) students,” he said. “We’re looking for the 2.1 or 2.2 students.”
Students cannot fail the class. They either receive a “pass” grade or are withdrawn from the course if it appears they cannot pass, Perea said.
“All we do is give them an opportunity,” he said. “I do believe that (the ethnic studies) course is a course set up so the kids will come out of there with the kind of information that a freshman here taking an ethnic studies course will have.”
The content of the courses offered in the Step to College program are reviewed by CSU faculty to ensure that they’re equal to any offered at the university. The instructors teaching the courses are vetted and given university adjunct status while the course is in progress, Perea said.
But can ninth-graders really produce college-level work?
Perea acknowledged that asking them to write at a 12th- or 13th-grade level could be difficult, but added: “I doubt that we’ve ever had a student come through the program who shouldn’t have.”
The news from San Diego is that the noose was not really a noose.
(I stole my title from reader Fred Ray, but I like to think I would have thought of it on my on.)
[NOTE: This post has been UPDATED]
Reader Daniel Love Glazer sent the following email, which I quote with permission:
I am a member of The United Methodist Church, and my daughter is a high school senior planning to go to college next year. Someone suggested that our daughter, as an active Church member, might be eligible for one of the scholarships the United Methodist Church provides. I just checked the relevant website, which lists a number of available scholarships. Most are restricted to students at one of the more than 100 United Methodist-related colleges and universities, which is reasonable, but several of these are "open to racial/ethnic minority youth only." Why?If you follow the link, you’ll see that the United Methodist Scholarship Program does indeed provide some scholarships “for racial and ethnic undergraduate or graduate students,” such as the Richard S. Smith Scholarship, which “is open to racial/ethnic minority youth only.”Note: The slogan of The United Methodist Church is “Open hearts. Open minds. Open doors.” It seems that hearts, minds, and doors are more open to racial/ethnic minorities than others.
I replied to Mr. Glazer:
Thanks for passing this on. My first thought is that churches are probably free (and probably should be free) to engage in this sort of discrimination, as unwise and unappealing as it is. My second thought is to wonder whether the African Methodist Episcopal church has scholarships reserved for white and Asian students.My third thought is that, following the holding in the Bob Jones University case, the foundation administering these scholarships and the creators of contributors to the scholarships themselves should receive no tax exemptions.
UPDATE
Reader Mark Mark Chumley read the United Methodist scholarship web site much more thoroughly than I did, and he points out that my mention of one race-based scholarship “only scratches the surface.” He provides a list of others:
The Bishop Joseph B. Bethea Scholarship - Undergraduate scholarship for African American students.Mr. Chumley, a labor and employment lawyer, sent a letter to several church officials about these scholarships, and promises to report anything interesting he learns.The Ethnic Minority Scholarship - Undergraduate award for Native American, Asian, African American, Hispanic, or Pacific Islander ethnic groups.
The Edith M. Allen Scholarship - This scholarship is for outstanding African-American graduate or undergraduate students pursuing a degree in education, social work, medicine, and/or other health professions.
The HANA Scholarship - Applicant must be born of Hispanic, Asian, Native American, or Pacific Island parentage (at least one parent).
The Native American Seminary Award - Award for Native American students pursuing a degree at a University Senate- approved seminary.
The Women of Color Scholars Program - Applicants must be born of African, African-American, Asian, Hispanic, Native American/Alaskan Indian, or Pacific Island parentage (at least one parent)
[This post has been UPDATED]
I have MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on to provide background noise, and I just heard (about 7:45 AM) Sen. Dick Durbin give a breathtakingly novel defense of why Rep. Charlie Rangel should keep his chairmanship. You have to understand, Durbin said, that when Rangel went in the army he was assigned to a segregated barracks, and that’s why we have to keep him.
Really. Durbin said that. I’ll provide a link when a transcript becomes available.
It wasn’t clear whether the point (if there was one) underlying Durbin’s rationale is
a) that the House needs the “diversity” that having a Ways and Means chairman who experienced segregation can provide;
b) that Rangel deserves compensation in the form of suspending rules and regulations that apply to other Congressmen; or
c) that those who personally experienced segregation have been so damaged by their experience that they cannot be expected to meet the same legal and ethical standards expected of others (but they can be trusted to write the tax laws that others must obey).
UPDATE
Reader/blogger Hube sent a link to the video clip of Disturbin Durbin’s Rangel racial alibi (at approx 8:35 in the clip).
He also found Democratic strategist saying, as if on cue, the same thing:
I think Charlie Rangel deserves his day in court, if you will. This is somebody who served in the Korean war, was put in a segregated unit, fought in a segregated unit, came home to serve his country, and has been there for a long, long time.
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.Moving on to the health care summit, Broder continued: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.Wait a minute here. Who’s resisting whom? Did Broder forget that he had just finished saying that it was the Republicans who wanted to focus on “smaller pieces of legislation embodying bipartisan agreement,” and the Democrats who wanted “comprehensive reform”? How, then, did the Republicans all of a sudden become the villains who “resisted [Obama’s] efforts to draw them onto common ground”?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.
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.
BUSINESSES will be forced to employ minimum numbers of females in the workplace under new laws being considered by the Federal Government.Well, at least they’re not being required to employ maximum numbers....
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.”
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.Since black’s make up 1.3% of Utah’s population, I suppose the state should quickly engage in some massive racial and ethnic importation in order to avoid going down the cultural tubes.“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.”
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).Where to begin ... where to begin? How about with the assumption — actually, here it's more overt argument than implicit assumption — that selective universities are at fault, whether they're overtly discriminating or not, if their student bodies are not a demographic mirror of ... of ... what? UCLA presumably should mirror its "county," but UCSD, described as "set on a bluff along the Pacific Ocean," is in a county that in 2008 was only 5.5% black. Should that be the target? Moreover, if the standard is demographic mirroring of, well, of something — city, county, state, whatever — why does the article demonstrate no concern, why does it apparently not even notice, that the proportion of whites in the University of California system (30.5%) is dramatically far below the proportion of whites in the state of California (42.3% in 2008)?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:
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."First, the "fact" that's here but wrong: what O'Keefe was arrested for was "entering federal property under false pretenses," but even that charge is now up in the air. As the New Orleans Times Picayune reported several days ago,
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.But mere factual error and incompleteness is not the most egregious journalistic offense here. Can you imagine discussing James O'Keefe, describing him (accurately enough, I think) as a recently arrested "provacateur," and not even mentioning his role in single-handedly destroying ACORN?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?
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,Today’s news from higher academia raises the question of whether all the following things are alike:
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.”This ad, which appeared on Monday, was perceived “as being against gay rights and diversity,” and by Tuesday it was gone.
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.Their objection, in short, was to the purported “aim” and effect of the sponsor-tainted research, not to the research itself. Presumably all the articles that continue to appear in PLoS Medicine will have been carefully vetted to make sure that the authors’ associations and aims, as well as those of all the entities that provided support, meet the moral and political standards of the editors.
“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.”
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.I wonder if Leader Litvack and the Democrats have any objection to the identical value being “engraved” in the nation’s highest law via the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Why do they react so strongly to a constitutional provision that would prohibit behavior they claim to oppose and assert does not even occur?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.
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.Perhaps someone from San Francisco (or possibly Mars, which is closer) can explain to me the difference between “poverty level” and “socio-economic status,” as well as how an aspiring kindergartner would go about demonstrating his or her “academic achievement.” Perhaps class standing in nursery school?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.Anyone remember Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster singing “One of These Things (Is Not Like The Others)”?
One of These Things (Is Not Like The Others)In San Francisco, the Cookie Monster has morphed into the Diversity Monster. Now any school where three kids “are kind of the same” and only one is “different” is suffering from “segregation,” and the “diversity” police, under the authority of the “Diversity Index,” must round up more kids who are the “most different” and import them, from across town if necessary.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.According to San Francisco school officials, the solution to this seemingly intractable problem is simple: if the students don’t fit the schools, redesign the students.‘The applicant pools are not diverse,” said Orla O’Keeffe, the district official charged with redesigning the system.
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.And “I gotta tell you” that reading her defense qualifies as an even more perfect addition.
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.• She claims to believe that universities have a right to discriminate.
“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.Really? So, if Elite U., believing that “diversity” — especially engineered, race-based “diversity” requiring preferential treatment based on race and ethnicity — produces distracting conflicts and resentments, decided “to compose a student body” emphasizing high grades and test scores and cultural homogeneity (based loosely on the Japanese model), Ms. Kelley would simply respond by saying “so be it”? “I gotta tell you,” I don’t think so.
• 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.• She does not believe that affirmative action involves giving preferential treatment to minorities.
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.• She doesn’t understand that affirmative became “controversial” when, and because, it abandoned colorblindness for racial preferences.
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 desegregationAs long as affirmative action meant taking steps to ensure that everyone was treated “without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin,” it wasn’t controversial. It became controversial — and worse, positively offensive to many — when it abandoned the principle of colorblindness in favor of color conscious racial preferences.
• 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.”The fact that Kelley’s error in linking LBJ’s speech to support for racial preference is quite common does not make it less an error. As I argued here: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.”• She describes affirmative action as pro-active prevention of, or perhaps restitution for, discrimination that might occur in the future.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.It might; it might not. Whatever. And it provides premature restitution to individuals who have not yet suffered any injury, paid for by other individuals who have not been found to have done them any wrong.
• 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.• She believes that “diversity” begets “accessibility.”
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.Maybe it does; maybe it doesn’t. But it clearly has costs, which Kelley does not mention.
• 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.Again, maybe; maybe not. If Princeton Prof. Thomas Espenshade (who favors affirmative action) is right in his finding 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[,]then after sitting next to minority students in a freshman English class white and Asian students might come out of that class with prejudices they lacked when entering, or if they entered with those prejudices they might well find them confirmed and not dispelled.
• 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.”If I were polite, I would refrain from saying that the level of argument in this essay does little to suggest that Ms. Kelley deserves the opportunity she’s been given to write essays in Newsweek.
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).
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....That’s so subtle it’s lost on me. Believing that the belief that Obama is un-Christian or un-American is “subtle” racism is a very unsubtle way of accusing rural rubes of all being racist. It’s also baloney. As famed Virginia Democratic political consultant “Mudcat” Saunders observed during Obama’s campaign,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.Obama didn’t do as well as Wilder (McCain won the “Fighting 9th” with 59%, his highest total in Virginia), but his popularity was dramatically higher in November 2008 than it is now, and he’s no blacker now than he was then.“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.”
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....In a sentence that is unfortunate in construction and incomplete in fact, the CHE article noted thatThe 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....Re those numbers, the SF Chronicle pointed out that
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.Those numbers may be “small,” but they also may not. That is, they may include all of the qualified applicants, i.e., those no longer given a large admission bonus because of their race, who applied and agreed to come. (Thus it would also be helpful to know how many were accepted, not simply how many enrolled.)
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.”Think about this “message.” First, I tried but failed to resist the snarky temptation to ask, “What do you mean We, you Canadian?” Leaving aside the fact that, by birth at least, Birgeneau is not one of “us” to begin with, note how he majestically divides the world (as nearly all “diversity”-mongering preferentialists must) into us and them. Who, after all, are “we”? What exactly is “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.
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.For what it’s worth, my opinion is that it’s hard to tell which is sillier — the argument of Apple et al. that the racial make-up of their work force is a highly sensitive business secret that can reveal their strategy to competitors, or the argument of the race data fanatics that democracy itself requires the release of such data.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.The Apple et al. argument does sound absurd, but I don’t find the law professors’ argument any more persuasive. (This is not the first time I’ve found Stanford Prof. Richard Ford unpersuasive; this is.) Even if Apple or Yahoo or Oracle don’t have as many, say, female Hispanic managers as Prof. Sims or Prof. Ford would prefer, that will fact will reveal absolutely nothing about whether race or sex discrimination “is still going on.” Maybe such ethnically and genderly qualified professionals are in such high demand (to keep the professors and their friends at bay) that they are hard to find, hard to hire, and hard to retain.“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.
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....Rogers said her treatment by the University of Oregon reminded her of the treatment she had received as a child in Japan.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.What is truly and offensively illegitimate is the behavior of the UO East Asian Languages and Literature Dept., and the decision by university officials to defend it, spending taxpayer’s money to the tune of “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.
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.If Reid was “stunned” by Bayh’s decision even after his refusal to confirm his intention to run, if Reid and his staff were not “able to interpret what he was signaling there” even when the signaler was one of their own, their inability to interpret signals from such strange and alien creatures as voters becomes less surprising.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.”
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.As I discussed here, preference pushers attacked the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative with the same incredible assertions, arguing that prohibiting preferential treatment based on race or ethnicity (quoting now from their Brief)
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.My response now is the same as it was then:
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.Indeed, the BAMN et al. argument against MCRI was itself a rehash of an argument against California’s Prop. that even the liberal Ninth Circuit virtually laughed out of court ten years ago:
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.Although this argument has yet to succeed in court, it has, unfortunately, not interfered with the careers of some of those who’ve made it. Ten days agoA 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....President Obama obviously founds his argument agains colorblind racial equality not only not disqualifying but congenial.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.
... 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.No “diversity” drivel, no squeamishness about or attempt to disguise quotas.
... 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.Do liberals, who tend to reject “American exceptionalism” as a jingoistic myth, think American affirmative action is exceptional? Would they like it, as they would like so many other American anachronisms, to conform to the standards of the rest of the world?
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....And what has it accomplished to end divisiveness and reduce stigma?
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.That it is becoming more like the United States?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?
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.Then comes the Muslim Public Affairs Council, which wrote a letter to the UCI chancellor. “Did the letter deplore the thuggish behavior of the Muslim students?” the Examiner columnist asked.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:In short, to radical Muslims speech is aggression and aggressive disruption is speech.
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.
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;because Article 125 of the Soviet Constitution said so.
b. freedom of the press;
c. freedom of assembly, including the holding of mass meetings;
d. freedom of street processions and demonstrations.
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.
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.To which I responded:
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.”Similarly, here I quoted him commenting on California’s Prop. 209, the first state constitutional amendment that outlawed racial preferences: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.And also similarly, I responded:
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.Finally (for this post), here, in discussing a long tendentious report on affirmative action written by Cose, I quoted the following passage from that report:
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]And (this will now be familiar) I commented:
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.In short (appearances to the contrary, this was short; I could have quoted more), Cose dismisses the idea that affirmative action stigmatizes recipients of racial preference as so much right-wing propaganda.
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....Boyd’s posthumous book, My Times in Black and White, is the occasion for Cose’s article. “Boyd,” Cose writes,
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.It is not clear from this summary that Boyd ever received preferential treatment based on his race. Indeed, it would appear that he did not need it to succeed. But nevertheless Cose writes (and here you will see the purpose, I hope, of my rehash of Cose on stigma):
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?”Cose, as usual, remains clueless about the implications of this poignant question on his repeated denials that affirmative action stigmatizes and produces festering doubts, of self and others.
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.
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....I haven’t read all of Sowell’s books either, but I have read most of his extensive criticisms of affirmative action, and it would never have occurred to me to say that that criticism is based on the view that it “doesn’t work.” Maybe I’m simply projecting my own views onto Sowell, or ignoring the thrust of his work by assuming that his criticism of affirmative action shares the assumptions of other critics. If so, correct me by pointing to what I’ve missed. But since I don’t think I’ve ever read any serious criticism of affirmative action by anyone that is grounded in a belief that it “doesn’t work,” I will be surprised if that curious notion — what does “work” mean? “work” for whom? how? — has much to do with Sowell’s argument.
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.The insinuation here that anyone in touch with “reality” will support affirmative action is disappointing coming from Wolfe. Although that belief is a common conceit among liberals, Wolfe is usually better, and less snarky, than that. I have no doubt that Wolfe’s classes are good, or even that they benefitted from the presence of minorities many of whom presumably would not have been there but for the discrimination against some Asians and whites that made their admission possible. (If that presumption is not accurate, then affirmative action is not relevant to the goodness of Wolfe’s classes.)
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.
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.Is this the same Al Sharpton who favors race-based school assignments, race-based college admissions preferences, race-based hiring and promotion, race-based ... well, you name it? If so, then it’s either a good thing he’s not a leopard, or it’s no longer true that leopards can’t change their spots.
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.I don’t want to address the substance of this issue here. For what it’s worth (about what you paid for it), I don’t believe employers should discriminate against gay applicants, and I also believe religious institutions deserve broad exemptions from anti-discrimination laws and regulations that violate their religious beliefs.
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....
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?
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.Now, however, High Priest Thomas thinks God is suffering from a truth deficit. In the February 15 issue of Newsweek, Reverend Thomas writes, no doubt more in sorrow than in anger, that
[t]he president needs to tell the truth on taxes, entitlements, and how to really reform health care — before it's too late....Father Thomas sets a sacramental tone in the first sentence of his piece: “It has long been an unwritten rule of political professionals: “Thou Shalt Not Demand Sacrifice of the Voters.” But now, according to Acolyte Thomas, sacrifices are needed, and on occasion he has seen glimpses of deliverance in his deity.[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.”Fine words, but so far the waters have not parted — nor, for that matter, has “the rise of the oceans beg[u]n to slow, and our planet beg[u]n to heal,” as The Messiah predicted on the night of his clinching the nomination of the party of the faithful.
“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.The flock, once again, sensed danger and dissembling before the shepherds.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.So, none of those 29 or whatever presidential speeches on health care have been “frank”?
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?
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.
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.What is startling about this comment is that there is nothing startling about it. Virtually all the Democrats and talking heads on MSNBC say the same thing, over and over. They really believe, they take it as an article of faith, that their 2000+ page health care bills (and everything else they propose) represent “everything,” that to oppose them is not to favor something else but simply, nihilistically, to say “no.”
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.
I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End.Amen.
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.No doubt Surowiecki is right. It’s not clear ... to him.
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.
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.One adult (me) not only agrees but asks: Yes, but is it true? And if it’s true, why is it a “bias”?
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.“Who, after all,” Surber asks,
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?Oh, I don’t know. There must be some unlettered troglodytes who believe that such high-paid individuals offer more of what more people want, or some similar morally deficient market explanation. But I suppose all Surber is saying here is why liberal academics such as himself don’t like markets.
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.History, you see, is not at all ambiguous, convoluted, dense; it teaches a clear lesson that only people who understand it, and its accompanying “complex cultural dynamcs,” are, well, smart enough to understand:
... 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.....Everybody knows that conservatives never “actually take the time to look at history and culture” (or at least most liberal arts professors know that). Moreover, if He said so, it must be true. But wait; there’s more: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.Conservatives are to History, in short, what astrologists are to astronomy, Holocaust deniers are to the Holocaust. You can be sure, in short, that Prof. Jere P. Surber is, though “biased” in his own words, is biased only towards Truth. He is so open-minded that he would, after his continuing deep study, gladly learn other lessons of History and be a regular viewer of the Glenn Beck show if only those lessons were there for his always-probing intellect to discover.
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....In short, liberal arts professors, unlike their less liberal colleagues in other fields, are open-minded.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.Those of you without access to the Chronicle of Higher Education may think I’m making this up, but I assure you I’m not. I’m not that clever, and could never write anything this humorous.
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.
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.Thus, not surprisingly,
[d]oing away with racial preferences for underrepresented minority students would substantially reduce the number of such students at selective colleges.And, by doing so, it would also substantially increase the number of Asian and Asian-American students at those 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.In fact, his refusal to recognize the discrimination against Asians that his research clearly reveals is worse than lame; it is silly, as in:
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.If this passage means anything, it means that those Asians may look good on paper (grades, test scores, etc.) but for all Espenshade knows they may all share an inability to write admissions essays that can compete with those written by blacks and Hispanics and a similar inability to garner enthusiastic letters of recommendations from their teachers.
This is neither lame nor silly; it is both dumb and offensive.
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.Left unsaid, at least out loud, is what such faint and attenuated praise of the new work says about the quality of the old work it attempts to move beyond. At least some of the new scholars are willing to admit that the first generation of “diversity” research left a good deal to be desired.
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.Even former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who relied on that research in her infamous Grutter opinion, now may have doubts about whether that research “clearly demonstrate[d] the educational benefits of diverse student bodies.”“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.The Michigan scholars argued, in short, that racial diversity is not constitutionally compelling because it is not in fact compelling.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.Note well — in fact, note very, very well — the dramatic but unacknowledged assumption here that virtually screams, in vain, for recognition: the value of “diversity” consists of its effects on white and Asian students. The authors, of course, recognize that “diversity” may have other justifications, but they clearly recognize what most “diversity” advocates prefer to disguise: that “diversity” is justified because of what it does for whites and Asians, not the preferred minorities. Here is their abstract: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....The hollowness of the “spillover” justification for “diversity” (actually, its only legal justification) has been noted before, such as by the Michigan Association of Scholars quoted above (“... 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”).
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.But, I also noted, the same point could be made about the successful, “diversity”-providing minority applicants.
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....I’ve played this song so many times it has become a broken record — such as here, emphasizing that “whatever benefits derive from diversity are provided by the preferentially admitted minorities, not to them.”
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.And here I discussed Hostages to Diversity, dealing with a case where a white student was denied access to a math and science magnet program because allowing his transfer would have a negative “impact on diversity.” Similarly, two Asian-Americans kindergartners were denied transfers to a school with a French immersion program because allowing the transfer would have deprived the students in their current school of the benefits of being exposed to them. When their parents pointed out that the new school has as few Asian-Americans as their current school, the Montgomery County, Maryland, Superintendent of Schools replied to the school board “that nothing in the school system’s policy permits ‘robbing Peter to pay Paul’ by hurting the diversity of one school to help it at another.”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.Since Brest defends racial preferences, he obviously thinks the burden their “diversity” preference bestows on minorities is worth bearing.
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.”
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 SaysTo which I just added the following comment: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.”I could have been snarky and complained as well about the grammar of the hed (even though heds are often ungrammatical) — “Opportunities abound ... but less so....” So, did the Chronicle really mean to say that opportunities do abound for women as athletic directors and coaches, but only “less so”? I don’t t think so.
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.)
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.Nevertheless, the President managed to commit a quote that should headline a chapter in the history books. Responding to a question from the endangered Sen. Blanche Lincoln, who asked if the president “would be willing to push back against liberals and ‘look for that common ground that we need to work with Republicans,’” Obama responded that “he would attempt to convince his party’s left wing to take a less ideological approach to economic challenges.”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.”Under Obama’s leadership, the Democrats seem to be divided into two groups:
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.
I thought the RealClearPolitics link to Anna Quindlen’s Newsweek article, “Obama Won. Now Follow the Leader,” was a mischaracterization of it. She couldn’t have really said that. But she did, and it isn’t.
The article’s actual title accurately summarizes its argument: “Follow the Leader. We elected him to do the right thing — Not take dictation.”
Quindlen believes Massachusetts sent no message in electing Scott Brown. His election “was a classic toss-the-bums-out event, neither specific nor illuminating.” For some reason, though, Obama’s election came with a clear mandate to do ... what Quindlen would like him to do.
It’s not surprising that Quindlen was not illuminated by Scott Brown’s election, because her quotient for illumination seems quite limited. Her understanding of the past, for example, is a dim as of present:
... we forget that most of the things that make America great—civil rights, the safety net, Social Security—were pushed through despite their unpopularity.Even the editors of the New York Times begrudgingly recognize that “Eighty Republicans in the House voted for the Social Security Act in 1935,” and the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights were both passed with bi-partisan majorities.
In the final analysis, Quindlen’s theory — we should follow the president wherever he leads because he won — falls of its own weight, even though that weight is slight. True, Obama won, but so did the senators and representatives whom Quindlen blames for blocking his path. She must think that they, unlike Obama, were not “elected to do the right thing.”
In the post immediately below I discussed a conspiracy of Congressional Democrats meeting behind closed doors to impose a revived health reform bill on a public they regard as dumb and forgetful.
Standard procedure requires the Senate and House to pass identical bills before submitting the legislation to the president for his signature. When the versions differ, those differences are usually ironed out in a conference committee, with the resulting compromise sent back to both houses for approval. The trouble here for the Democrats is that the new version is also subject to filibuster in the Senate, and now the Democrats have “only” 59 Senators, not their pre-Brown filibuster-busting 60.
But Democrats don’t like standard procedures when they threaten to get in their way. So their first attempt at bypassing them came when they eschewed a conference committee altogether (because those pesky Republicans would have been present) in favor of having Democratic leaders from both houses agree among themselves. Even some Democrats couldn’t stomach this deviousness, but that train was on the verge — or “precipice,” in the president’s term — of arriving at its destination when Scott Brown’s election derailed it.
Their apparently pending second bypass attempt is persuading the House to pass the Senate bill as is, based on a promise that the Senate will then “correct” the flaws in the bill — “provisions such as a new tax on high-end ‘Cadillac’ health plans and special aid for Nebraska,” abortion restrictions, etc. — with legislation that could be passed — even though by “reconciliation,” i.e., by a simple 51 vote majority, which they could probably get even though some Democratic senators oppose this maneuver. This stratagem has been widely discussed in the press, but I don’t recall seeing any articles describing it for what it is: a fraud.
Under this scenario, the House would be asked to pass, as is, the current Senate bill based on winks from Obama, Reid, and Pelosi that it’s not the “real” bill, which would emerge only after the Senate passes its un-filibusterable fixes. In short the House would knowingly be voting for a fraudulent Potemkin bill.
On the other hand, that’s about par for course in the House of Pelosi.
The Los Angeles Times reports today that Democrats are conspiring behind closed doors on methods to revive and pass health reform. You may be forgive for thinking the LAT didn’t put it quite that way, but I don’t believe I’ve mischaracterized their report. You decide:
President Obama’s campaign to overhaul the nation’s healthcare system is officially on the back burner as Democrats turn to the task of stimulating job growth, but behind the scenes party leaders have nearly settled on a strategy to salvage the massive legislation.And what of the often-promised but now forgotten “transparency that was supposed to accompany health reform? Again, Obama is not the only one who’s forgotten it.They are meeting almost daily to plot legislative moves while gently persuading skittish rank-and-file lawmakers to back a sweeping bill.
This effort is deliberately being undertaken quietly as Democrats work to focus attention on more-popular initiatives to bring down unemployment, which the president said was a priority in his State of the Union address on Wednesday. [Emphasis added]
In a 24-hour news cycle, with the Internet and bloggers and cable news, sometimes a lot more can be accomplished, especially with healthcare, when it happens behind closed doors,” said Drew Altman, a healthcare policy expert who heads the nonprofit Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.Among those plotters behind closed doors is Arkansas Sen. Mark Pryor, described by the LAT as “a conservative Democrat who was among a group of centrist Democrats from the House and Senate” who’ve been meeting. “Formerly conservative” or “a Senator who would like to be thought of by his constituents as conservative” might be more accurate, but whatever his political coloration at the moment Pryor believes he has plumbed the depths of human nature, and he’s discovered that people, or at least voters, are not as smart as he is.
“A little bit of time and quiet could help,” he said.
“Human nature being what it is, it's always easier to be against something than to be for it. And if you create any uncertainty with change, opponents can jump on that and just try to scare people. . . . That has been hard to overcome politically,” Pryor said. “Maybe over time, people will have a chance to understand what is in the legislation.”In other words, we were too dumb to understand what Obama explained to us in 29 (or was it 39?) speeches and endless snippets from them on TV. But maybe if they just keep quiet about it for a while and bring it up later, we will have forgotten that we don’t like it.
Democratic leaders do not reserve their condescending scorn for voters who disagree with them; they have similar contempt for many of their own skittish followers (or not) in Congress who were, for some reason, “rattled by Brown’s winning campaign in Massachusetts.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) particularly want to give members time to recover from the shock of Republican Scott Brown’s victory in the Massachusetts Senate race two weeks ago. The election cost Democrats their filibuster-proof Senate majority.But why should they recover from the shock? Will the threat to Democrats intent on passing unpopular legislation implicit in the message of Brown’s election lessen over time?But in the coming weeks, Pelosi and Reid hope to rally House Democrats behind the healthcare bill passed by the Senate while simultaneously trying persuade Senate Democrats to approve a series of changes to the legislation using budget procedures that bar filibusters.
The Dem leaders thus assume not only that voters are too dumb to appreciate the wisdom of the Dems’ health reform but also that they are so dim they will forget their opposition, thus allowing the “rattled” Democrats in Congress to recover from their Brown-induced “shock” and stick by their former willingness to impose massively unpopular legislation on a forgetful public.
Given the regard in which Obama-Reid-Pelosi-Pryor Democrats hold their constituents, this may work.
President Obama, speaking in Holmdel, New Jersey, 16 July 2009:
“Let me be exactly clear about what health care reform means to you,” the president told residents of the Garden State. “First of all, if you’ve got health insurance, you like your doctors, you like your plan, you can keep your doctor, you can keep your plan....”President Obama, State of the Union Address, 27 January 2010:
Our approach would preserve the right of Americans who have insurance to keep their doctor and their plan.President Obama, appearing before the Republican Caucus, 29 January 2010
... let me say this about health care and the health care debate, because I think it also bears on a whole lot of other issues. If you look at the package that we’ve presented — and there’s some stray cats and dogs that got in there that we were eliminating, we were in the process of eliminating. For example, we said from the start that it was going to be important for us to be consistent in saying to people if you can have your — if you want to keep the health insurance you got, you can keep it, that you’re not going to have anybody getting in between you and your doctor in your decision making. And I think that some of the provisions that got snuck in might have violated that pledge.What “stray dogs” and “stray cats” would those be? In addition to all their other transgressions, must Leader Reid and Speaker Pelosi now also be reported to the SPCA? Sorry to be snarky here, but would some reporter please ask the president to be “exactly clear” about which of his health care provisions he now regards as stray mongrels?
More seriously, though, “let me say this about health care and the health care debate”: for once I find myself in total agreement with the president. It is absolutely true that the way he has debated the issue “bears on a whole lot of other issues.” He has repeatedly said things that are not true. He has repeatedly denied responsibility for his own decisions — those stray dogs and stray cats somehow “got in” without his knowing about them; those provisions that “might have” violated his pledge “got snuck in” without his knowledge or approval.
One final question: who, Mr. President, were the sneakers?
Last month I discussed how Berkeley Solves Racial Achievement Gap!. “The solution,” I wrote, quoting a recent proposal that had been approved at a meeting of the Berkeley High School Governance Council,
is both obvious and simple: “eliminate science labs and the five science teachers who teach them to free up more resources to help struggling students.”
Paul Gibson, an alternate parent representative on the School Governance Council, said that information presented at council meetings suggests that the science labs were largely classes for white students. He said the decision to consider cutting the labs in order to redirect resources to underperforming students was virtually unanimous.
Now comes frequent DISCRIMINATIONS commenter and retired editor extraordinaire, Linda Seebach, who has a thorough analysis of the “equity”-induced Berkeley educational fiasco on the Breitbart “Big Journalism” site. Read the whole thing.
Really, if Chris Matthews didn’t exist (he does exist, doesn’t he? Or is he simply a figment of Rachel Maddow’s and Keith Olbermann’s imaginations?) we’d have to invent him. I’m not even referring to the thrill he felt going up his leg when he heard Obama speak, but to his even more dramatic outdoing of Harry Reid’s Negro dialect gaffe.
After the State of the Union speech last night, Matthews inadvertently revealed quite a lot about ... Chris Matthews, as reported, well, everywhere (the following from the Washington Post’s “Politics and Policy” blog):
On MSNBC News Wednesday night, “Hardball” host Chris Matthews had an idiosyncratic take on President Obama’s first State of the Union. He told Keith Olbermann that during Obama’s speech, “I forgot he was black.”Let me translate.Matthews seemed to be trying to articulate how Obama had moved beyond race. “He is post-racial by all appearances. You know, I forgot he was black tonight for an hour. You know, he’s gone a long way to become a leader of this country and passed so much history in just a year or two. I mean, it’s something we don’t even think about,” Matthews said. “I was watching, I said, ‘Wait a minute, he’s an African-American guy in front of a bunch of other white people.’ And here he is. President of the United States, and we’ve completely forgotten that tonight. Completely forgotten it. I think it was in the scope of his discussion -- it was so broad-ranging, so in tune with so many problems, of aspects, and aspects of American life that you don’t think terms of the old tribalism, the old ethnicity.”
I forgot he was black.
Most of the time Matthews thinks of Obama as a black president, but last night he forgot.
He is post-racial by all appearances
Obama doesn’t look like a Negro.
You know, he’s gone a long way to become a leader of this country ...
Once he’s been president another couple of years he might actually be a leader
... and passed so much history in just a year or two.
Not sure about passing history. I don’t think Matthews means passing history like passing gas, but he couldn’t be referring to passing legislation. Maybe this is Matthews’ way of saying We Have Overcome. But liberals don’t agree with that view — still too much to be done to have overcome already, etc. — so let’s just say Matthews misspoke here, whatever he meant.
‘Wait a minute, he’s an African-American guy in front of a bunch of other white people.’
Wow! Other white people! Imagine that! Matthews is saying. Obama’s as white as you and me and all those Congresspeople!
... we’ve completely forgotten that [he’s black] tonight. Completely forgotten it.
But if we’ve completely forgotten it, why are “we” spending so much time talking about it? Matthews is quite proud of himself for forgetting about race ... for a few minutes. But more to the point, why did he forget it about it at all? Because...
... it was in the scope of his discussion -- it was so broad-ranging, so in tune with so many problems, of aspects, and aspects of American life that you don’t think terms of the old tribalism, the old ethnicity.
In short, Obama is not black “by all appearances” because he is so well-spoken ... and on so many topics (look at that “scope”!) that blacks don’t usually talk about. All the African Americans we're used to are so, well, tribal. But Obama talks just like us on the very things we talk about, so he doesn’t even look black.
Now I think I’ve finally figured out who Chris Matthews really is. He’s a more verbose, less articulate Joe Biden! Remember, Biden said all of the above, much more concisely, back in 2007:
“I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” Biden said. “I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”Chris Matthews, plagiarist.
Inside Higher Ed reports today that the College Board has released a new study, “The Educational Crisis Facing Young Men of Color,” and the Chronicle of Higher Education reported that four Democratic members of Congress met on Tuesday to discuss its findings regarding “the barriers minority men face along the path to higher education.” The College Board issued a press release summarizing the report, “Destructive Pressures Undermine Educational Aspirations of Minority Males,” and the full report is available online.
The reported problems do seem dire, and they were discussed in (quoting from the full report)
four one-day seminars organized by the College Board to explore the educational challenges facing young men of color in the United States. The Dialogue Days brought together more than 60 scholars, practitioners and activists from the African American, Hispanic/Latino, Asian American and Pacific Islander, and Native American communities.I’m not sure what educational “practitioners” are — teachers? — but all the participants in these high-powered gripe sessions (my characterization)
expressed their opinions and listened to the voices and anxieties of community leaders about the state of educating young men of color in the United States. Each leader brought a unique perspective, experience and expertise to the discussion about the critical problems that exist.These complaints were closely tracked by seven “themes” that were identified, such asThe Dialogue Day sessions pinpointed powerful societal forces that threaten educational aspirations of young men of color. These include the lack of role models, the search for respect outside the education world, the loss of cultural memory in shaping minority male identity and pride, barriers of language, the challenges of poverty, extraordinary community pressures and a sense that the education system is failing young men.
All of this must be placed in the context of the general disadvantaged condition of minority populations in the United States. Whether measured by unemployment rates, poverty, imprisonment or recidivism, the challenges facing minorities — both males and females — are stark and undeniable.
2. At work are destructive community pressures that undermine minority male aspirations and expectations for academic success.The report is suffused with a consensus that society is the culprit, with participants critical not only of schools but3. Lack of male role models leads to a search for respect outside our educational institutions.
4. Cultural and historic memory is deeply important to minority male identity and pride.
also highly critical of the rest of society, arguing that the larger economy undermines minority male aspirations. A sense emerged from these meetings that not only are schools failing these young people, society is failing them. This is a function of communities in which there is no traditional work (but many opportunities in the underground economy) ... of families stressed to the breaking point ... of a society that measures success with an index of stock prices while ignoring the economic circumstances of most people within the economy ... and of governments that seem willing to spend eight to 10 times as much per person to hold young men of color in jail as they do to educate them.These complaints were predictably accompanied by calls for federal action. I’m not sure what Congress or other institutions can do to shore up the “cultural and historic memory” that is said to be lacking among young black men, but some sense of what might be expected in other areas was provided by Congressman Raúl M. Grijalva (D-AZ), who said (quoting here from the Press Release):
Minorities are disproportionately represented in schools with high dropout rates, and we must work to turn those schools around. All middle school and high school students should have the support they need to graduate, and they should be prepared for college regardless of their circumstances. Any policy that fails students in these respects is a policy that fails the country.It is certainly true that all students should be prepared for college and have the support they need to graduate, but how to accomplish those worthy goals and how much it would cost remain unclear. Perhaps Rep. Grijalva could introduce legislation requiring a much larger representation of minorities in schools with low or even average dropout rates.
Roger Clegg, president and general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity, has noticed a central problem not emphasized in the report, which he has generously allowed me to quote since the Chronicle of Higher Education’s “comment” feature seems not to be working:
From the National Center for Health Statistics: By population subgroup, the percentage of children born out of wedlock is 70.7 percent for non-Hispanic blacks, 64.6 percent for American Indians/Alaska Natives, 49.9 percent for Hispanics, 26.6 percent for non-Hispanic whites, and 16.5 percent for Asians/Pacific Islanders. Illegitimacy correlates with just about any social problem you can name (poverty, crime, dropping out of school, substance abuse, etc.), and it — not discrimination — is the principal cause of racial disparities in all these areas. So, I hope the Representatives bear all this in mind.Hope springs eternal....
John Gibson, former president of Alabama A & M, has a letter in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “Affirmative Action: Let's Not Screw It Up,” stating that he is “amazed at the passionate outcries against affirmative action,” citing this article in particular (an article I discussed here.)
According to Gibson,
it is ridiculous to ask questions such as “What is the benefit of diverse student bodies?” What about asking: “What was the benefit of segregated student bodies?” I certainly saw no benefit in segregation, and neither did the courts. Or what about this: “How many complaints do you have about the diversity of athletic teams and the tremendous amounts of money generated by these teams?” Right, none so far!I don’t understand Gibson’s sports question — does he believe, say, professional basketball is “diverse,” or is he simply saying that he has no complaints about the fact that it isn’t? — but I do understand his clear implication that those who oppose engineered “diversity” affirmatively support “segregated student bodies.”I am a baby boomer who remembers the Jim Crow South. I participated in marches with Martin Luther King Jr. in Montgomery, Ala. I was a plaintiff in the desegregation lawsuit in Alabama that found the state still had a de jure system of segregation (Knight v. James). Affirmative action has engendered vast aspirations and achievement goals for future generations—why this recrudescence of 1950s attitudes? We just elected a black president of the United States.
I too remember what Jim Crow Alabama was like, but I also remember that segregation was brought down by the moral force of the argument that it is wrong to deprive anyone of rights because of race, something Gibson seems to have forgotten. Somehow, amazingly, the belief that people should be treated without regard to race has become the “recrudescence of 1950s attitudes.” Left unexplained is how the “black president of the United States” could have possibly been elected by voters who must partake of that “recrudescence,” since according to all polls — and votes in California, Washington, Michigan, and Nebraska — they overwhelmingly oppose preferential treatment based on race.
ADDENDUM
No doubt a few of the criticisms of affirmative action that “amazed” Gibson in the Chronicle of Higher Education article he cited came from Roger Clegg, president and general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity, who was quoted there. Roger submitted the following comment to the Chronicle, but since it has yet to appear there he gave his permission for me to post it here:
Professor Gibson’s generalized claim of historical discrimination as a justification for racial preferences is, to begin with, a legal nonstarter, since the Supreme Court has long rejected it. And the Court was right to, since skin color is a poor and unnecessary proxy for individual disadvantage (plus, how does it justify, for example, giving Latinos a preferences over Asians?).
In any event, the dubious benefit claimed by Professor Gibson of the use of racial preferences must be weighed against its myriad costs: It is personally unfair, passes over better qualified students, and sets a disturbing legal, political, and moral precedent in allowing racial discrimination; it creates resentment; it stigmatizes the so-called beneficiaries in the eyes of their classmates, teachers, and themselves, as well as future employers, clients, and patients; it fosters a victim mindset, removes the incentive for academic excellence, and encourages separatism; it compromises the academic mission of the university and lowers the overall academic quality of the student body; it creates pressure to discriminate in grading and graduation; it breeds hypocrisy within the school; it encourages a scofflaw attitude among college officials; it mismatches students and institutions, guaranteeing failure for many of the former; it papers over the real social problem of why so many African Americans and Latinos are academically uncompetitive; and it gets states and schools involved in unsavory activities like deciding which racial and ethnic minorities will be favored and which ones not, and how much blood is needed to establish group membership.
Adding up all these costs, it’s clear that using affirmative action is what’s really screwed up.
[NOTE: This post has been UPDATED UPDATED TWICE]
Over thirty years ago the University of California got into big trouble because its medical school at the Davis campus
had two admissions programs for the entering class of 100 students - the regular admissions program and the special admissions program....The liberal California Supreme Court found that this procedure violated the Equal Protection Clause. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed about the dual track procedure, although it lamentably did allow the camel’s nose of “diversity” as a rationale for racial discrimination (when all other things are equal, etc.) under the tent.The 1973 and 1974 application forms, respectively, asked candidates whether they wished to be considered as “economically and/or educationally disadvantaged” applicants and members of a “minority group” (blacks, Chicanos, Asians, American Indians).... Special candidates ... did not have to meet the 2.5 grade point cutoff and were not ranked against candidates in the general admissions process.
The University of Massachusetts apparently has a short memory. Inside Higher Ed reports this morning:
The University of Massachusetts, seeking to increase the diversity of its medical school, plans today to finalize a program to set aside 12 slots in its 125-seat medical school classes for members of certain groups who will be admitted to an undergraduate program at a UMass campus, followed by medical school admission, The Boston Globe reported. To be eligible for one of the slots, candidates will need to be either black, Latino, or come from certain Southeast Asian and other groups, or (regardless of ethnic or racial background) come from a low-income family or be a first-generation college student.Stay tuned. I’ll be updating later....
UPDATE
What’s The Problem?
As is typical with programs of preferential admission, the UMass program seems designed to solve two problems, one of them cosmetic and the other a lack of sufficient “diversity.”
Cosmetically, the UMass medical school has been enduring the hardship of not looking like Massachusetts, and not producing doctors that sufficiently match the demographic profile of the state.
The Boston Globe reports that
[f]ive percent of doctors in Massachusetts are black or Hispanic, whereas 16 percent of Bay State residents belong to those groups.... Now, blacks and Hispanics make up 7 percent of UMass Medical School students, bur account for 27 percent of UMass Boston undergraduates, and 8 to 12 percent of students at the other [UMass] campuses.The article did not explain — presumably because those proposing this new admissions program — exactly why Massachusetts need its population of doctors to match the racial and ethnic profile of its general population, or why that need is so compelling as to justify racially preferential admissions.
Well, that’s not completely accurate. The old standby “diversity” rationale was hauled out. Anthony Garro, provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs at UMass Dartmouth, the non-diverse medial students also “stand to gain from a more diverse class” because, he claimed, “[d]ifferent cultures ... handle the issues surrounding illness and deal in different ways, points that are difficult to teach in the classroom.”
Really? That would be news to all the sociology, anthropology, and history professors who teach courses on cultural difference. (Indeed, sometimes it seems as though they teach courses on nothing else.) Are all “Hispanic” attitudes the same? Do Mexican-Americans have the same cultural attitudes as Puerto Ricans-Americans and Cuban-Americans? Is there no concern that each of these sub-groups be adequately “represented”? In any event, it does not seem necessary to have different admissions standards for Hispanic medical school applicants so that the non-Hispanic students can learn about Hispanic approaches to sickness and dying. But then, most “diversity” arguments don’t make much sense when you examine them closely.
“Role Models”?
According Jack Wilson, the UMass president, “a key barrier to recruiting more minority physicians, or those from disadvantaged backgrounds, is the lack of role models.”
You hear this a lot, as in virtually every defense of preferential treatment based on race or ethnicity, but is it really true? Oh, forget true, which might be too exacting a standard. How about: is there even any credible evidence that it’s true? Are there really large numbers of blacks and Hispanics today who don’t know that they can become doctors if they meet the same admissions and performance requirement expected of all medical students? At some point shouldn’t those who assert the “role model” justification for racial discrimination have to provide at least some evidence that a significant number of highly capable blacks and Hispanics who are not doctors would have become doctors if only they’d had black and Hispanic “role models”?
Oddly, a large portion of the Boston Globe article discusses Jessica Zina, “a Portuguese-American in her first year at UMass Medical School, [who] is the type of student the new state program hopes to attract.” Zina is fluent in Portuguese, her father is a construction worker, and her mother a worker in a Hasbro factory, neither of them high school graduates. And yet, despite the absence of any “role models,” Zina “dreamed of becoming a pediatrician since high school.” Her path to medical school was not straight, but she didn’t need a special program designed to produce “role models” to get there.
In fact, the reason Zina did not attent UMass for college was not because it lacked a special admissions program for her.
Although she said she had never considered attending UMass for her bachelor’s degree because if its lackluster reputation, the Medical Scholars Program would have persuaded her to apply.I’m sure it would. Of course such a deal would be “golden” for anyone, not just blacks or Hispanics — unless, that is, there’s intrinsic to the culture of “African-Americans, Hispanics, certain Southeast Asians, and Cape Verdeans, Brazilians, and other Portuguese speakers” that makes them uniquely qualified to appreciate and benefit from preferential admissions treatment, a guaranteed summer research opportunity, and targeted financial aid.“I would automatically want to join something like that,” Zina said. “To be that much closer to medical school would really be an advantage. That would be golden.”
UPDATE II
In addition to the “role model” justification for racial preferences being supported here (and in most places) by nothing more than mere, evidence-free assertion, Roger Clegg reminds us that there is another important argument against that rationale: it has been specifically rejected by the Supreme Court in Wygant v. Board of Education (1986). As the majority opinion in that case stated,
the role model theory employed by the District Court has no logical stopping point. The role model theory allows the Board to engage in discriminatory hiring and layoff practices long past the point required by any legitimate remedial purpose. Indeed, by tying the required percentage of minority teachers to the percentage of minority students, it requires just the sort of year-to-year calibration the Court stated was unnecessary in Swann, 402 U.S. at 31-32....That opinion was written by Justice Powell, whose Bakke opinion pinned a “diversity” exception on the Equal Protection Clause. Another Justice, concurring with Powell, agreed “that a governmental agency's interest in remedying ‘societal’ discrimination, that is, discrimination not traceable to its own actions, cannot be deemed sufficiently compelling to pass constitutional muster” and that “a ‘role model’ theory to justify the conclusion that this plan had a legitimate remedial purpose was in error.”Moreover, because the role model theory does not necessarily bear a relationship to the harm caused by prior discriminatory hiring practices, it actually could be used to escape the obligation to remedy such practices by justifying the small percentage of black teachers by reference to the small percentage of black students....
Societal discrimination, without more, is too amorphous a basis for imposing a racially classified remedy. The role model theory announced by the District Court and the resultant holding typify this indefiniteness....
That Justice was Sandra Day O’Connor, who at the end of her career would nail Powell’s “diversity” exception to equal protection more firmly in place.
According to Charles Blow of the New York Times this morning, apparently all voters except the saving remnant of Democrats are now mindless, belligerent Tea Partiers.
Welcome to the mob: an angry, wounded electorate, riled by recession, careening across the political spectrum, still craving change, nursing a bloodlust....Blow has blown this horn in the NYT before (“Belligerence is the currency of the intellectually bankrupt”), but that was back when he was still confident that we knuckle-dragging, right-wing racist morons were a tiny, hired faction of malcontents limited to raucous town-hall meeting out there in, well, America, i.e., that unknown and mysterious terriroty west of the Hudson.Unfortunately, many now see Barack Obama as a left-leaning version of George W. Bush: just another out-of-touch emperor. It seems as if Obama and the Democrats made the mistake of believing that a heart once won was forever won, that people would be patient, and that the mob would accept their reasoning for lack of results.
They were wrong. The mob is fickle. And it’s back with a vengeance.
Now he seems like the surrounded Lone Ranger in that famous exchange with Tonto (“What do you mean ‘we?’”).
[This post has been UPDATED twice three times]
For once, everyone agrees: the astounding election of Scott Brown changes everything. But as usual, when everyone agrees it’s wise to wonder what everyone is missing.
What is lost among the cacophony of “cataclysmic change!” that is coming from Left, Right, and Center, I think, is realization of the fact that reducing the number of Senate Democrats from 60 to 59 puts it right back it was shortly after Obama was elected. Actually, it puts it back to one better than when Obama was elected. There were only 58 Democrats in the Senate until Al Franken, who ultimately won 42% of the vote in Minnesota plus a fraction more than Norm Coleman, was sworn in the Democrats held only 58 seats. With Franken’s swearing in they were up to 59, and when Arlen Specter switched parties at the end of April 2009 they finally had 60.
At the time everyone thought that 58, then 59, Senators put Obama in an all but unassailably commanding position to accomplish his hope and change, center-left, change the tone, bi-partisan agenda. Silly everyone. Who knew (other than those out of touch, angry, recalcitrant, racist right wingers) that the president would assume that his election gave him a carte blanche to abandon even the pretense of bi-partisanship and push through an uncompromisingly liberal agenda.
President Obama and his administration have attempted to justify their gleeful spending spree by explaining that they had no idea how bad the recession was until they got into office. That doesn’t speak very well of their understanding, but they can hardly claim that they didn’t realize that if they truly wanted to change the tone, reduce divisiveness, and increase bi-partisanship they’d have to, you know, compromise at least a little. The Democrats like to claim that there is no point compromising because the Republicans oppose everything. In the words of that archetypical “progressive,” Rep. Anthony Wiener (D, NY) this morning, commenting on his “expectations for bipartisanship”:
I don't hold out any hope for my Republican colleagues. From almost the word go they've made it clear their strategy has been to stop anything from happening. That's a given.Dropping from 60 Democratic Senators back to the post-election total of 59 is only a calamity for an administration that takes it as “given” that there is no point in attempting to compromise with the opposition party, even on issues where polls show the public opposing its signature policy by margins that range from significant to overwhelming.
UPDATE
In an interview with ABC News today,
President Barack Obama is telling Democrats not to “jam” a health care overhaul bill through Congress, instead urging them to coalesce around popular parts of the bill.If he’d done that a year ago, or six months ago instead of himself trying to “jam” through an unpopular bill, health care reform would have been passed and signed into law by now.
Indeed, other comments the president made in that interview reveal that he still doesn’t understand what went wrong.
“If there’s one thing that I regret this year is that we were so busy just getting stuff done and dealing with the immediate crises that were in front of us that I think we lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the American people about what their core values are and why we have to make sure those institutions are matching up with those values,” Obama told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos in an exclusive interview at the White House.What Obama doesn’t get is that we did “get it.” We did “understand the reasoning behind” those policies. We just didn’t agree with them.The president said he made a mistake in assuming that if he focused on policy decisions, the American people would understand the reasoning behind them.
“That I do think is a mistake of mine,” Obama said. “I think the assumption was if I just focus on policy, if I just focus on this provision or that law or if we’re making a good rational decision here, then people will get it.”
Heaven help us if the lesson Obama has learned from the trouncing Democrats have taken in Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts (Massachusetts!) is that what’s been lacking is his “speaking directly to the American people.” For most of this past seeming interminable year it has seemed like you couldn’t turn on the TV without encountering Obama “speaking directly to the American people” about health care or global warming or the big bad banks or whatever. Are we now going to have to listen to even more of him?
UPDATE II
Coming hard on the heels of the publication of his articulate, light-skinned Negro comment about Obama and his accusation that Joe Lieberman “double-crossed” him on health-care reform, Harry Reid has demonstrated that his remarkable, world-class obtuseness is at least bi-partisan:
Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), whose influence has grown in the wake of Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts, is puzzled over comments made by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid about her intentions to strike a bipartisan health care deal.The sad thing is that Wiener and Reid are probably right: not about betrayals and double-crosses, but given what they want to do, it probably was a waste of time for them to talk to Republicans.Speaking with reporters in the Capitol Wednesday, Snowe said she has yet to speak with Reid regarding his critical comments in The New York Times last week. In the article, the Nevada Democrat is critical of the bipartisan talks that failed in the Senate over health care, and Reid says of Snowe: “As I look back it was a waste of time dealing with her because she had no intention of ever working anything out.”
UPDATE III
A careful and well-informed reader (and former editor), Linda Seebach, reminds me (assuming I once knew) that my order was wrong: Specter switched in April; Franken wasn’t sworn in until July.
When you check only one of two facts, I told her, you’re often only half right.
[First posted on Martin Luther King Day, 2004]
What Do We Honor When We Honor Martin Luther King? (And Who Are “We”?)
When President Bush went to Atlanta last week to lay a wreath on Martin Luther King’s grave, he was greeted with demonstrations and howls of protest. “One protester,” the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported, “held a sign that read ‘Bush — Zionist Puppet and liar.’”
Similarly, as InstaPundit has noted, Howard Dean was greeted with similar jeers when he appeared at a memorial service for Dr. King in Des Moines. One of the organizers of that service was quoted as saying “[t]his was nothing but a conniving way for him to sneak in and take up [sic?] a vote from the African-American community.”
This objection echoed a complaint of one of the organizers of the Atlanta protest of the president’s visit, Rev. Tim McDonald, who “accused Bush, who won just 9 percent of the African-American vote in the 2000 election, of being motivated more by politics than by any admiration for King.”
King, I strongly suspect, would have looked with favor upon white politicians, of both parties, seeking black votes. But not his most vociferous heirs.
These protesters imply that King’s legacy is their private property, which they have posted with “No Trespassing” signs at every entrance. If this is their attitude, perhaps they should reconsider the wisdom of making King’s birthday a national holiday. Or, failing that but perhaps more in keeping with the race preferences they now demand in King’s name, maybe they should consider urging the president to issue an executive order proclaiming that, since only blacks are welcome to honor Dr. King, the King holiday in the future will be limited to blacks. Everyone else should report to work as usual.
[First posted 29 January 2004]
Original Intent And Original Meaning [And Martin Luther King]
Anyone interested in following the contours of high brow Constitutional interpretation will want to read several remarkable recent posts by Larry Solum and Randy Barnett. Rather than attempt to summarize them here, I am going to exploit them instead, which means anyone wondering whether my appropriation of one of their insights is fair will have to read their originals.
Very briefly (and again, this is not a summary), about ten days ago Larry Solum posted a fascinating long post on the current state of play regarding the theory of originalism. He discussed the increasingly important distinction between “original intention” and “original meaning.” An overly simple (but I hope not inaccurate) way of illustrating this sometimes elusive distinction is to look at the debate over how to interpret the 8th Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. An original intent interpretation would say that the ban was limited to the specific punishments that those who wrote and then approved the Amendment in fact thought were cruel and unusual (you can see the problem already of determining a collective intention). An original meaning interpretation would also rely on historical evidence, but rather than asking what punishments the framers (for lack of a better term) had in mind it would examine the contemporary understanding of the words “cruel” and “unusual.” On this view, a particular punishment might well be unconstitutional even if the framers never considered it, so long as it fell within 18th century (not our) understanding of what those words mean.
Several days before Larry’s post, Randy Barnett, who is certainly one of the most impressive advocates of and practitioners of the new original meaning scholarship, posted a short but incisive discussion of the same intent v. meaning distinction, calling it “The Next Big Issue.” Randy explained that “[o]riginally [he] was not an originalist,” but eventually he
adopted a version of originalism based not on the intentions of the framers, but on the public meaning of the text at the time of its adoption and justified, not by popular sovereignty, but by the fact that the constitution is in writing. Its writtenness is a structural feature of the Constitution that would be undermined unless its meaning remains the same until it is properly changed.Randy’s post elicited a reply from Caltech philosopher Dominic Murphy, which he quoted and responded to here. This post, like the others, is worth looking at, as are Larry Solum’s comments on the Barnett - Murphy exchange here.
The best place to look for a full discussion of this issue, and an impressive example of the understanding to which it can lead, is Randy Barnett’s impressive new book, Restoring the Lost Constitution. I should add that yesterday my wife and I drove over the mountains and up the Valley to Lexington to hear Randy discuss his book in a talk sponsored by the Federalist Society at the Washington and Lee University law school, and his performance was dazzling. (We could have driven a shorter distance to hear him at UVa the day before, but we were still iced in.) Randy has been posting his book tour itinerary on Volokh, and anyone who can should try to attend one of his sessions.
So, what does all of this have to do with Martin Luther King? Here is where I attempt to appropriate what Larry and Randy have contributed, and I should emphasize that this is my argument, not theirs.
In a recent post discussing some of the fallout from Martin Luther King’s birthday, I asked “What Do We Honor When We Honor Doctor King? (And Who Are ‘We?)’” There had been many protests of President Bush laying a wreath on King’s grave, nearly all of them criticizing him for betraying King by his opposition to racial preferences. Indeed, nothing seems to send preferentialists around the bend and over the top faster than critics of preferences quoting King’s “I Have A Dream” speech, as we always do.
And they always respond with one version or another of “if King were alive today” he would be a strong advocate of racial preferences. I have some reservations about this assertion, but on balance I suspect it is true. After all, all King’s followers, the NAACP (which had advocated a strong version of colorblindness in court for decade after decade), and virtually the entire Democratic party did an about face on colorblindness starting in the late 1960s, and there is no compelling reason to suppose that King himself would have stood against this trend.
Taking a page from the original meaning book, however, we can see that the proper response to the posthumous King’s probable position is, So what? King’s specific intent does not determine the meaning of the principle he evoked, either for his contemporaries or for subsequent generations. [P.S. It is also worth noting, however, as Randy did in his talk, that when we play the “if X were alive today...” game, we are not talking about actual intent but predicted intent, which is far different.] Of course in this case the text in question is not so dense and opaque, like “due process” or even “equal protection.” What part of wanting people to be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin is so difficult to understand?
Now, King’s speech is not a part of the Constitution (at least not of its text), but it has achieved a well-deserved iconic stature. It gave voice to an understanding of equality that traces it roots back at least to some of the abolitionists, that achieved partial but limited success in the Reconstruction Amendments, and that, finally, was embedded in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in the year following King’s delivery on the Mall.
Thus I beg to differ with a commenter on my King’’s birthday post linked above. Begrudgingly, “[f]or arguments sake,” she was willing “to admit the possibility that one can disagree with another's ideals while still honoring the person.” I believe those of us who continue to resent benefits or burdens being based on skin color are honoring the meaning of Martin Luther King’s ideals much more fully than preferentialists who argue that if he were alive today he would agree with them.
Writing, as I am, about fifteen minutes from Monticello, it seems all too obvious to me that there are some ideals that are not discredited simply because their authors fail to live up to them.
Mike Barnicle, taking a day off from MSNBC’s Morning Joe and other talking head assignments, returns to his roots on the streets of Boston to observe the Scott Brown rally with Rudy Giuliani a few days ago, and writes an almost excellent column about it in Time, “Scott Brown Rides A Perfect Storm in Mass.”
Barnicle perfectly captures the current mood, where
voters sit, feeling helpless, voiceless and powerless as joblessness grows, taxes rise, services dwindle, disillusionment prospers and the roster of family anxieties about tuitions, mortgage payments, employment, two wars and a whole lot more make negative ads and campaign rhetoric seem hollow. Add the fact that many voters seem to feel questions about the cost of health care reform and the size of the budget deficit go unheard, and politics becomes flammable.But then he flushes all his insight down the toilet.
Now, Brown finished speaking. He plunged into the crowd alongside former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Given the often contrived and polarizing conflict that dominates the cable-TV landscape, it would be easy, on the outside looking in, to slap a Tea Party label on Brown’s supporters. But most of those lunging for his hand were not lunatics from the fringe, merely Democrats and Independents feeling bruised, ignored and taken for granted by people in power.Barnicle obviously never attended a real, live Tea Party gathering, where he would have found not “lunatics from the fringe” but angry and frustrated normal people indistinguishable from those he describes so sympathetically in Boston.
Apparently you can take a man out of the MSNBC set, but you can’t take MSNBC out of the man. Barnicle, go back to the polarizing conflict that dominates cable TV and take your assigned seat.
[NOTE: This post has been UPDATED]
Regarding Barack Obama as a “pragmatist” makes about as much sense as describing Ronald Reagan as a socialist, and yet, amazingly, that’s just what Washington Post senior political writer Dan Balz has done in a long, top of the front page, just below the banner article today under the mindboggling headline, “Testing The Promise Of Pragmatism.”
There is probably no term in the lexicon of politics that is more misused, misunderstood, and mangled than “pragmatism” (except perhaps “populism”), but the deep nature of its philosophic meaning as articulated by such noted American philosophers as Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey need not concern us here. I’m tempted to say “I knew those philosophers, and Barack Obama is no pragmatist.” But even under the superficial everyday bastardization of the concept — which can pretty much be summed up as “whatever works,” Obama is still no pragmatist.
Balz’s piece begins:
A month before he was inaugurated, Barack Obama pinpointed one of the biggest challenges he would face as president. Could he restore confidence in government, even as he was proposing the biggest federal intervention in the domestic economy in a generation?If Balz really thinks that “one of the most politically charged” questions of Obama’s presidency is whether his administration “is going to be able to hew to a new, more pragmatic approach that is less interested in whether we have big government or small government,” that it is “more interested in whether we have a smart, effective government,” then I have no interest in his answer or for that matter in anything else he has to say.At the time, Obama said he did not think his victory marked an abrupt end to the skepticism ushered in by President Ronald Reagan toward top-down government and social engineering by Washington.
“What we don’t know yet is whether my administration and this next generation of leadership is going to be able to hew to a new, more pragmatic approach that is less interested in whether we have big government or small government; they’re more interested in whether we have a smart, effective government,” he said on that day in December 2008.
As Obama marks the first anniversary of his inauguration on Wednesday, that question remains one of the most politically charged of his presidency -- and central to the politics of this election year -- and will hinge on how Americans judge Obama and his policies.
The only people who could look at Obama’s health care bill and still quote with a straight face his declaration that he doesn’t care whether government is big or small, that what he wants is “a smart effective government,” are the same sorts of people who are always found praising the Emperor’s new clothes.
ADDENDUM [22 January]
There is, however, one sense in which it is perfectly true that Obama is not simply a pragmatist but in fact the quintessential pragmatist, and that is the sense brilliantly analyzed by Peter Berkowitz, who defines pragmatism as
a theoretical approach popular among law professors and political theorists that overtly reduces questions of principle to questions of what works, and then covertly transforms these into questions of what works to advance progressive goals.
Pointing to a new article criticizing the argument that “race is just a social construct,” Robert VerBruggen noted on phi beta cons yesterday that “[a]cademics like to say race is a social construct because they think this belief undermines racism.” If something is not genetic, innate, then in their view it is reformable. (The ubiquity of that view in academia makes all the more remarkable the belief of the president, provost, and an august faculty committee at MIT that it is not possible to have “a fully meritocratic process” because “our society presents innate biases to which all can be susceptible on some level,” a view endorsed by an MIT report on “diversity” that I discussed here at length yesterday.)
I have shied away from discussing genetics, intelligence, etc., because, among other reasons, I am not well enough informed on the issues and literature to have anything worthwhile to say. (“That hasn’t prevented you from discussing many other issues about which you could say the same thing,” I can almost hear some readers muttering. Didn’t your mothers teach you that it’s not nice to mutter?) But at one point, a good while ago when I worked on EEOC. v. Sears, Roebuck, and Co. (which I discussed in gory detail in the last three quarters of this post), I thought about the nature v. nurture controversy quite a lot. And since one thing I don’t shy away from is reprising old posts, especially very old ones, I’m going to repeat, or substantially repeat, some observations I last offered in Nature, Nurture, Whatever, back in 2005. (One of the rewards of writing a blog for a long time is that many readers don’t stay on board for the whole journey, and most of those who do won’t remember the scenery from five or six years ago.)
The nature v. nurture controversy, I wrote then, is
one of the longest-running (and still going strong) debates between liberals and conservatives.... This is too simple, but typically, or perhaps stereotypically, conservatives believe (or are said to believe) that a great deal of an individual’s identity is natural, inherited, genetic. Liberals, by contrast, generally believe that social influences are more significant than biological ones.This is the sort of observation, I think some wag has already suggested, that could lead Harry Reid to propose federal subsidies for skin-lightening and dialect-removal surgery for blacks.The political implications of this classic division are clear: conservatives often think it is futile, or worse, to try to undo what Mother Nature has done, while liberals, believing as they do that “society” has produced what they regard as unfair conditions, believe that “society” can improve those conditions through various kinds of reform. Nowhere is this division clearer than in differences over sex roles. Indeed, liberals minimize the salience, or even fact, of “sex,” which is biological, in favor of “gender,” which is “socially constructed.” (Ironically, this division is frequently reversed regarding homosexuality, with liberals tending to believe it is genetic, like race, and conservatives arguing that more often it reflects a choice of lifestyles.)
I lived and breathed the Sears case for so long — around five years of many more 80 hour and longer weeks than I like to remember — that for a long time that’s all I could talk about, much to the annoyance and boredom of many of my friends, not a few of whom are now former friends in large part because of my perceived character defect of agreeing to work with lawyers defending a corporation, a big corporation at that, accused of sex discrimination.
One of the things I would say in those days — in part (but not entirely) tongue in cheek, for shock value — is that the conventional wisdom was all wrong: the fact that some practice or behavior was “socially constructed” and not programmed into our DNA often made it harder, not easier, to change. Sex, after, all, can be changed with a sex change operation; “sex roles,” on the other hand, are far more resistant and difficult to change.
There they go again. Inside Higher Ed has a long article today about a much longer report from MIT urging even greater efforts to promote “diversity.” “The report,” Inside Higher Ed reports, “— more than two years in the making, from a faculty panel — makes strong statements about the need to increase the representation of minority groups on the faculty.”
Indeed it does. All such reports calling for more and greater efforts to produce more and more “diversity” make strong statements. What they lack — and the MIT report is no exception — is compelling argument and evidence about why “diversity” is important. As is usual with these reports, a prominent reason among the “strong statements” given for the need to increase minority representation is cosmetic:
While the MIT faculty’s proportion of black, Latino and Native American professors has increased to 6 percent from 4.5 percent over the last decade, the study notes that those groups make up 30 percent of the population of the United States, a share that is growing every year.If it is so “clear” that there are large untapped pools of talent, pools that exist primarily in — may in fact be identical with — the racial and ethnic groups “underrepresented” at MIT, you’d think the report would present some evidence of it. So far as I could tell, however, the report presents no such evidence, other than the statistical disparity itself, a disparity which I suppose is thought to speak for itself.“The contrast in these numbers with the population values is significant; it is clear that there is talent within the United States that has not been tapped at the highest levels of our educational system — our faculty,” the report says. “It is intrinsic to the mission of excellence in science and engineering that we engage a truly diverse faculty; otherwise, we stand to lose in both our competitive advantage and our overall mission.”
Similarly, there are many “strong statements” to the effect that “a truly diverse faculty” is “intrinsic to the mission of excellence in science and engineering,” but no evidence or even argument supporting the assertions. Thus in announcing the report with great fanfare the MIT News Office reported that
the report concludes that while MIT’s efforts to hire and retain URM faculty have produced some gains in recent years, the results are uneven across the Institute, and that more effective policies and practices are necessary.Yes, but why?
“As an institution that prides itself on the ability to address some of the world’s most difficult problems, MIT can and should lead the nation in the important challenge of increasing the numbers of minority faculty via a strong Institute-wide policy that facilitates advancement in the area of faculty diversity,” the report saysAgain, why? Provost L. Rafael Reif, who launched the initiative leading to the report in 2007, issued a statement asserting that
MIT wants, and our students deserve, the strongest possible faculty, and a more diverse faculty is a stronger faculty in all academic dimensions, from research to teaching to mentoring. Our differences enrich our lives and our thinking.Yes, that sounds nice, but what and where is the evidence that having more blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans (the only “URMs,” or underrepresented minorities MIT seems to care about) makes MIT’s science and engineering faculty stronger in any “academic dimension,” much less “all” of them?
The report itself is rife with the same soaring rhetoric about tapping all the talent pools to attract the best faculty supported only by ... more soaring rhetoric about the centrality of “diversity” to its academic mission. Here, for example, is how the report begins, under the heading “The Goal of Diversity at MIT”:
To accomplish its stated mission — “to advance knowledge and educate students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the 21st century” — MIT must benefit from the ability to tap both the nation’s and the world’s brightest minds. The Institute has taken pride in its ability to unite people from a multitude of backgrounds to address the world’s most complex problems and significant scholarly endeavors.Fine, but why does the search for “the world’s brightest minds” require adding more black and Hispanic and Native American minds? Are they necessarily brighter than additional bright minds that could be found among Asians or, heaven forbid, even whites?
Here’s the report’s answer (still from “The Goal of Diversity at MIT” beginning):
Diversity is core to the excellence that MIT seeks for several reasons:In other words, “diversity” is “core” to MIT’s excellence because it is “intrinsic,” because “one must ... be inclusive,” because it is “key,” and because insufficient diversification limits success. In other words, well, just because.
- It is intrinsic in the mission of excellence in science and engineering education that we engage a truly diverse faculty; we must diversify our faculty or we lose in competitive advantage and in mission.
- A part of MIT’s mission is to be of service to humanity — to hope to accomplish such a bold endeavor, one must also be inclusive of humanity.
- A diverse faculty is key to communal scholarship and intellectual scope.
- If we do not succeed in the diversification of faculty across the nation, we constrain ourselves and limit our success in all fields of endeavor.
In short, this report, like nearly all such reports, presents no evidence and even little argument for the centrality of “diversity” to the academic mission. Instead, it intones a mantra, affirms articles of faith, and sings a hymn from a Book of Common Prayer shared by preachers of racial preference and acolytes of the “diversity” faith in academic congregations from coast to coast. That’s why, in their view, rejecting “diversity” is not so much mistaken or wrong as blasphemous.
This now familiar mantra also suffuses a letter from MIT president Susan Hockfield that introduces the report:
Creating a culture of inclusion is not an optional exercise; it is the indispensable precondition that enables us to capitalize on our diverse skills, perspectives and experiences, so that we can better advance the fundamental research and education mission of MIT.... A productively diverse community at MIT will make us better at what we do....Etc., etc. But one of her paragraphs reveals an unrecognized contradiction linking the imperative to tap all our talent with “diversity’s” requirement that that tapping be done only in black, Hispanic, and Native American communities.
A richly diverse America does not await us, it is upon us; it is our present and our future. We draw most of our faculty, students and staff from America, and we must make full use of the talent this country has to offer if we hope to continue to invent the future. We share this challenge with our peer institutions; only by working together with them can we effectively increase the pipeline of academic talent, the central resource in meeting our diversity and inclusion goals.For the “underrepresentation” argument to be anything more than purely cosmetic, i.e., MIT doesn’t look like America, it must assume the existence of large talent pools that are not being tapped, perhaps because of “hidden bias” or “unconscious bias,” terms that occur frequently in the report. There is also, of course, the predictable argument that the concept of “merit” itself is culturally biased. Thus, the report argues, “it is not possible to proclaim a fully meritocratic process when our society presents innate biases to which all can be susceptible on some level.” No surprise here. Well, I guess it is surprising that the president and provost of MIT, and the faculty and staff that produced this report, believe that American society is suffused with "innate biases." Innate? Inherent? Immutable to change? Oh well, what would a report calling for a more “diverse” faculty be without this obligatory attempt to portray merit as merely bias gone to college.
But note that President Hockfield argues something more. In the paragraph just quoted she asserts that only by working with peer institutions “can we effectively increase the pipeline of academic talent....” In other words, those pools of untapped “diverse” talent don’t exist yet; they must be created before they can be tapped.
But, again, why? If the need were really to find and attract the “brightest minds,” would it be necessary to create them? Are there not enough bright minds already out there? Has anyone done a cost benefit analysis to determine the number of “brightest minds” that can be created and put in the pipeline in minority communities as opposed to a search for them with no racial or ethnic qualifications?
The argument that “diversity” is, for whatever reason, imperative and that it requires the creation of minority talent that can then be recruited always reminds me of a tongue-in-cheek answer one of my uncles gave me when, as a 4 or 5 year old, I asked why the local radio station, WTBF (“We Tried But Failed,” as locals described it), had such a tall tower next to it. “So they could put a blinking red light on top of it, so airplanes wouldn’t crash into it,” my uncle explained. At least he, I subsequently realized, was joking.
Not joking is Roger Clegg, president and general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity. Several days ago, here, I urged you to read his excellent piece, Another Bad Idea: ''Diversifying'' Science Faculties, and the publication of this all too typical MIT report leads me to renew that suggestion. Discussing a report from the American Association for the Advancement of Science on “diversity” that is, not surprisingly, similar to the MIT report, Clegg writes:
Taking steps to ensure that the best possible individuals apply and are hired is fine---indeed, that’s precisely what the whole process should be about. Casting your recruiting net far and wide is a good idea, as is reassessing your recruiting policies to make sure that you are not overlooking good sources of candidates. Reevaluating selection criteria from time to time is, likewise, unobjectionable; if some criteria are weighed too heavily or not heavily enough, with the result that the best individuals are not selected, then that needs to be fixed. And, of course, everyone involved in the selection process, from beginning to end, needs to be told that the best individuals, regardless of skin color or national origin, are to be picked.And in a comment to the Inside Higher Ed article I quote above, reprinted on phi beta cons today, Clegg notes thatBut it’s clear that nondiscrimination is exactly what AAAS does not have in mind....
[t]he problem is that the authors of the MIT report do not want the best individuals, regardless of skin color or national origin, to be picked. They want a predetermined racial and ethnic mix (“diversity”), and are happy for there to be subtle and not-so-subtle discrimination in order to achieve it.I first became acquainted with Roger Clegg because my daughter, Jessie, was (and is) a gifted science student. When she was young (or younger) I met many bright young science students, and when one of them applied to a summer program at MIT limited to URMs, and her parents failed to persuade MIT that women, then about 20% of students there, should count as “underrepresented,” I sent a letter to this fellow Clegg. He wrote letters to MIT and, when those were initially unsuccessful, to the Office of Civil Rights in the Dept. of Education. MIT eventually saw the wisdom of opening its formerly restricted program to all students.
It would be nice if it could be persuaded now that programs to promote “diversity,” however nice and whatever its rationale, must stop at the point discrimination begins.
ADDENDUM
Roger Clegg reminds me that his letter to the Office of Civil Rights wasn’t just a letter; it was accompanied by a complaint. As I’ve told Roger on several occasions, my memory is not what it used to be. (At least I don’t think it is, but I’m not sure....)
UPDATE [19 January]
Thanks to Geoge Leef on phi beta cons for his generous remarks, and welcome to visitors who followed his link.
... Sandra Day O’Connor is baaaaack. In a fine if depressing article in today’s Chronicle of Higher Education, Peter Schmidt reports that in an article in a new book, The Next Twenty-five Years: Affirmative Action in Higher Education in the United States and South Africa, Sandra Day O’Connor said she didn’t really mean that anyone should regard her “expectation” that racial preferences wouldn’t be needed after 25 years meant, you know, that racial preferences wouldn’t be needed after 25 years.
In an essay written with Stewart J. Schwab, who had served as one of her Supreme Court clerks and is now dean of the Cornell Law School, Justice O’Connor argues that the majority opinion she wrote in the 2003 affirmative-action case should not be seen as imposing a deadline on the use of race-conscious policies or as relieving the need for more research showing such policies have educational benefits.Oh, so the importance of “diversity” was not “clearly demonstrate[d]” in Grutter? The meaning of the Constitution’s requirement of “equal protection of the laws” changes according to the most recent fads in sociology?“When the time comes to reassess the constitutionality of considering race in higher-education admissions,” the essay says, “we will need social scientists to clearly demonstrate the educational benefits of diverse student bodies, and to better understand the links between role models in one generation and aspirations and achievements of succeeding generations.”
....
In her new essay, Justice O’Connor says, “That 25-year expectation is, of course, far from binding on any justices who may be responsible for entertaining a challenge to an affirmative-action program in 2028.” The task before those justices will be the same as the task before others who previously took up the issue, “applying abstract constitutional principles to concrete educational endeavors.”
I am glad she is no longer on the Supreme Court,” said Roger B. Clegg, president of the Center for Equal Opportunity, which opposes racial and ethnic preferences and had submitted a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of Barbara Grutter, the rejected white applicant to Michigan’s law school who was the plaintiff in the case.Actually, I think my friends Roger Clegg and Terry Pell were both too kind. In my first post on Grutter, written from San Francisco before I'd been able to read the opinions, I wrote:Justice O’Connor, Mr. Clegg said, “is not a social scientist by training, and the problem with her jurisprudence is that she would too often try to be a social scientist rather than a justice. She tried to make policy rather than interpret laws.”
Terence J. Pell, president of the Center for Individual Rights, which provided legal assistance to Ms. Grutter, said, “I think the fact Justice O’Connor is doing this reflects the fundamental weakness of the opinion she offered: It failed to offer a principled basis for limiting — or even judging the effectiveness of — these practices.”
how sad it is that SAnDra DAY ends her career (it is almost over, isn’t it?) by blasting a hole in the dike that heretofore had dammed (damned?) the waters of racial discrimination. But it is far too late in the day to criticize her for writing political, unprincipled opinions.Who’d a thought that, standing in the hole she dug with that atrocious opinion, she’d keep digging?
Apparently there is widespread outrage over the use of the term “Negro” on the 2010 Census form. The Houston Chronicle, for example, reports that “Sparks fly over use of ‘Negro’ by Census.”
A tide of indignation has risen over Question 9, which asks for the person's race. Next to one of the 15 boxes that can be checked are three choices: black, African American or Negro.Perhaps someone should simply suggest to Mr. X and all the other angry activists that the census form was written by Harry Reid.Census officials have gotten an earful in recent days as black activists, politicians and community leaders have expressed displeasure over the decision to include the final word....
The head of Houston Counts, a city-sponsored committee which is partnering with the bureau to promote a complete count, met last week with an angry coalition of people opposed to the word, ultimately deciding not to defend the bureau's use of “Negro” and agreeing to participate in a town hall meeting on the subject.
The upshot of it might be nothing more than a formal statement of protest, possibly endorsed by Houston city government, though activist Quanell X, who pushed for the meeting, is hoping for more.
“We are hoping that President Obama will listen to congressional leaders and pull the word ‘Negro' down because of its offensive connotations,” Quanell said. “I totally agree with those who are hurt and offended by the word, because I am hurt and offended, too. We have evolved beyond the word ‘Negro.'”
[WARNING! This is a long post — possibly requiring multiple sittings, definitely requiring either great interest or dedication, or both]
Two days ago I asked, here, “Will The Sky Fall If Preferential Admissions End?” and answered “No,” based on a new study discussed in the Chronicle of Higher Education. That study found that if racial preferences in college admissions were ended, the numbers of blacks and Hispanics at selective institutions
would decline by about 10 percent, from 3.04 percent of enrollment to 2.73 percent. The total number of black and Hispanic students enrolled at all four-year colleges would drop by about 2 percent.“In short,” I concluded,
in order to prevent the percentage of black and Hispanic students at the nation’s most selective colleges from declining from 3.04 percent of enrollment to 2.73 percent, we have abandoned the formerly fundamental principle that everyone should be treated without regard to race and instituted a nationwide system of distributing benefits and burdens based on race.Left undiscussed, however, was how much discrimination against whites and Asians is necessary in order to increase the presence of black and Hispanics on campus from 2.73% to 3.04%. I’ll address that question in some detail below.What a deal.
Also two days ago Robert VerBruggen of National Review Online’s phi beta cons blog commented on that same study, quoting from a long, excellent review he wrote about six weeks ago of the recent book by Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Walton, No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal. (I have discussed Espenshade's work a number of times, such as here, here, and here.)
You should read VerBruggen's entire review, since I’m not going to quote all of it, but I do want to appropriate his concise presentation of some important data in the Espenshade study of admissions at eight anonymous elite colleges in the National Study of College Experience data set, such as the following:
After academic performance and demographic factors have been taken into account, black applicants are more than five times as likely as whites to be accepted at NSCE private schools, and 220 times as likely to be accepted at NSCE public schools. Asian applicants, meanwhile, are only about a third as likely as whites to get big envelopes from private institutions, and one-fifth as likely to gain admission to public ones.In short, Espenshade’s data make it clear that the institutions he reviewed engage in massive discrimination against Asians in order to boost the numbers of blacks and Hispanics. Or rather, that is clear to everyone except, apparently, Espenshade and his co-author, as discussed by VerBruggen in his review:Putting preferences in terms of test scores, at private schools, blacks get an advantage, compared to whites, worth 310 SAT points (out of 1600), Hispanics an advantage of 130, and Asians a disadvantage of 140....
If NSCE private schools eliminated both the black/Hispanic advantage and the Asian disadvantage, blacks would go from 8 to 3 percent of these colleges’ admittances, Hispanics from 8 to 5 percent, whites from 60 to 53 percent, and Asians from 24 to 39 percent.
But the authors resist this conclusion. Espenshade told an interviewer for the Inside Higher Ed website that he doesn’t have “smoking gun” evidence that Asians are discriminated against, claiming that factors he wasn’t able to include in his analysis — letters of recommendation, etc. — might have been so much worse for Asians that they explained the gap. [So, college admissions officers did not discriminate against Asians, but those students’ high school teachers did? — jsr] The book makes a similar argument about blacks and Hispanics, going so far as to bust out the old tie-breaker meme in this jawdroppingly absurd passage:As I discussed in More On Asians As The “New Jews,” others, such as Christopher Shea writing in the Boston Globe, have noticed the disjunction between Espenshade’s data and his reluctance to follow it where it leads. From my post, quoting Shea:
It would be a mistake to interpret the data . . . as meaning that elite college admissions officers are necessarily giving extra weight to black and Hispanic candidates just because they belong to underrepresented minority groups. This may occur from time to time, especially in situations where two applicants are otherwise equally well qualified. But in our judgment, it is more likely that a proper assessment of these data is that the labels “black” and “Hispanic” are proxies for a constellation of other factors in a candidate’s application folder that we do not observe. These unobserved qualities — perhaps having overcome disadvantage and limited opportunities or experiencing challenging family or schooling circumstances — may be positively correlated with the chances of being admitted when a holistic review of an applicant’s total materials is conducted.In the very same chapter, however, the authors mention “the black advantage” and refer to the disparities as “weight” and “preference.” They also note that at NSCE private institutions, students who are minority and poor get a sizable boost, whereas students who are white and poor actually get penalized — that’s how much admissions officers care about helping those who have “overcome disadvantage,” as opposed to engineering their schools’ racial balance.
So, how much racial discrimination — in favor of some, against others — is inherent in racial preference university admissions? Although Espenshade’s data provide some clues — black admissions declining from 8% to 3%, Asian admissions increasing from 24% to 39%, etc. — those percentages somehow sanitize and even disguise the numbers, the costs and benefits to actual individuals. I want to discuss this question, again, in some detail, but first let me dispense, again, with the ubiquitous canard that there is no discrimination because whites, as a group, are not seriously injured.Espenshade declined to answer questions about the study, saying via e-mail that he only wished to state “the obvious: academic merit is not the only kind of merit that elite college admission officers consider in making admission decisions.”Although on one level this statement is obviously true, on another it’s quite inane, since it is not at all obvious that legacy status or skin color is any “kind of merit” at all.
I’ve criticized this view several times, such as here. And here I discussed this view as presented in this atrocious piece by Elise Boddie, an NAACP Legal Defense Fund attorney. “At the most selective institutions,” Ms. Boddie wrote,
the elimination of affirmative action would have an acute impact on the admissions of African-Americans and Latinos but would likely increase the chances of white admissions by just 1.5 percent. In other words, although there is a widespread perception that masses of white students are losing their seats because of affirmative action, in reality, race-conscious policies have a negligible impact on whites. As a matter of basic math, affirmative action cannot begin to account for the number of unsuccessful white candidates, because the sum of minority students admitted under race-conscious policies is dramatically less than the number of white candidates denied admission....“This argument,” and an identical one by Theodore Shaw, then the general counsel of NAACP-LDF, I replied in my post,Yet opponents still equate affirmative action policies with “discrimination against whites” and draw audacious parallels between such policies and the racist practices of universities during the era of de jure segregation. The University of Michigan is at least 80 percent white, so it isn’t credible to claim that it or its affirmative action policy discriminates against whites as a group.
a foundation of the preference principle, has far more radical implications than is generally recognized, for it in effect redefines discrimination as something that applies only to groups. To say that preferences cannot be discriminatory because the University of Michigan is still 80% white is to say that discrimination against individuals doesn’t count, until and unless it is massive enough to affect the statistical representation of the racial or ethnic group to which they are said to belong. Do “civil rights” groups really want to go there?By now they’ve long gone there, but this argument, I pointed out, is not limited to the NAACP, and I quoted the following from a Q&A re University of Michigan Admissions Policies, which had been on a University of Michigan web site but was subsequently “revised” and “archived” somewhere.
Q: Does the University’s consideration of race hurt a white student’s chances of getting into the University?“What Michigan, and Bowen and Bok, are actually saying here,” I emphasized,A: No. The numbers of minority applicants are extremely small compared to the numbers of white students who apply to the University. The Law School, for example has for the last 10 years had an average offer rate of 29 percent for Caucasian applicants, and 26 percent for African American applicants. Out of the fall 2002 entering class of 352, only 21 are African American. Similarly, of the approximately 24,000 applications received each year for admissions to the College of Literature, Science & the Arts, only about 1,800 come from underrepresented minorities. It is not mathematically possible that the small numbers of minority students who apply and are admitted are “displacing” a significant number of white students under any scenario.
William Bowen and Derek Bok, in their book “The Shape of the River,” look at the nationwide statistics concerning admissions to selective universities. They determined that even if all selective universities used a race-blind admissions system, the probability of being admitted for a white student would go only from 25 percent to 26.2 percent.
is that there is no discrimination because there’s not much of it, and what there is affects only some individuals, not their groups. Their argument is that discrimination against individuals doesn’t count. The only discrimination that matters, that is in effect even worthy of being called discrimination, is against “groups” — and even then, only if its impact is severe enough to make a group “underrepresented.”O.K., but what about actual numbers of students admitted or excluded because of their race? To make this concrete, let’s look at one institution, the University of Michigan, in part because the data was made available during the litigation over preferences there. I’ve discussed the following data several times (here, here, here, here, and here), but unless I’ve missed some posts I haven’t reprised those numbers since 2006, and thus it seems appropriate for me to introduce this data to new readers and to remind you veterans of it. What follows is lifted from those earlier posts, but this is not plagiarism, even though I’m not going to link each lift, because I’ve generously given myself permission to quote freely from them without specific attribution.
Let’s look first at the University of Michigan law school. In order to determine how much actual discrimination was involved, here are some revealing numbers that Michigan itself provided in court about the 2000 class at its law school. How many applicants does Michigan itself say were admitted, and rejected, because of their race that year?
The following is from page 28 of Judge Bernard Friedman’s district court opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger. It discusses data on the effect of preferences presented by Dr. Stephen Raudenbush, the University of Michigan’s expert witness.
In Dr. Raudenbush’s view, a “race-blind” admissions system would have a “very dramatic,” negative effect on minority admissions but only a slight effect on non-minority admissions, due to the vastly greater number of non-minority applicants. In the year 2000, 35% of underrepresented minority applicants and 40% of non-minority applicants were admitted. See Exhibit 187. Dr. Raudenbush predicted that if race were not considered, then only 10% of underrepresented minority applicants and 44% of non-minority applicants would be admitted. If correct, this would mean that in the year 2000 only 46 underrepresented minority applicants would have been admitted (instead of 170 who actually were admitted), of whom only 16 would enroll (instead of 58 who actually enrolled). Under this scenario, underrepresented minority students would haveHere’s what I take out of the above. Keep in mind that these are the numbers presented by Michigan’s own expert, not by the plaintiffs.
In short, 27% of the “underrepresented minorities” who applied would have been accepted under a non-discriminatory, colorblind admissions system; 73% of those who were offered admission would not have been admitted without the racial preference they were given. Thus, in one year 124 whites, Asians, etc., who would have been offered admission to the law school under a race-blind admissions system were denied admission in order to produce a yield of 42 more “underrepresented minority” admits than a race-blind system would have produced, or about three race-based denials for every one of the race-based admits.
Now let’s turn to undergraduate admissions at Michigan. Go back and look at the Bowen and Bok numbers quoted above. [But before you accept these numbers as accurate, you should read the long critique by Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom in the UCLA Law Review, Vol. 46, No. 5, June 1999 (quoted here).] Recall that according to Bowen & Bok, “a white student” has a 25% probability of being admitted to a selective college under the current regime of race preferences, but under a “race-blind” system that probability would increase “only” to 26.2%. (But what if one also considers Asians and other non-preferred minorities? B&B don’t say. ) Thus, based on their numbers, for every thousand applicants to a selective college, 12 whites (Asians, etc., still invisible) are rejected only because of their race or ethnicity. Applying those numbers to Michigan’s 25,000 applicants every year to its freshman class, Michigan rejected 300 white applicants a year based exclusively on their race.
That estimate is probably far too low. Since this post is so long, let me remind you of evidence the University of Michigan presented in court, cited and linked above, that
of the approximately 24,000 applications received each year for admissions to the College of Literature, Science & the Arts, only about 1,800 come from underrepresented minoritiesand Judge Friedman’s comment on data from Dr. Raudenbusch, the Michigan expert, that in the year 2000
35% of underrepresented minority applicants and 40% of non-minority applicants were admitted.... Dr. Raudenbush predicted that if race were not considered, then only 10% of underrepresented minority applicants and 44% of non-minority applicants would be admitted.Keep those numbers in mind, since what Michigan’s expert testified here is that eliminating racial preferences in admissions would increase the acceptance rate of non-minority applicants by 4%.
Using Michigan’s figures, 22,200 applications that year came from non-minorities. Thus, if Dr. Raudenbush’s conclusion that the admission rate of non-minorities would increase by 4% in the absence of race preferences is also true for undergraduate applicants, that means that in one year Michigan rejected 888 applicants to its College of Literature, Science & the Arts solely because of their race. (40% of 22,200 = 8,880. 44% of 22,200 = 9,760.) Actually, in real life the number in subsequent years would be higher because the number of applicants increased after 2000.
The data is similar at other institutions. Just to pick one example: In 1998 10,297 Asian-American applicants applied to Berkeley, 11,479 applied to UCLA, and 7,152 — 32.8% of them — were admitted. If Espenshade is correct in arguing that eliminating racial preferences would result in Asian-American acceptances increasing by 5%, then if racial preferences had been in effect in1998, which according to Espenshade would have dropped the admit rates to 27.8%, Berkeley and UCLA together would have rejected 1098 Asian-American applicants that year solely because of their race. (This calculation assumes, perhaps counter-factually, that Berkeley and UCLA scrupulously adhered that year to Prop. 209’s prohibition of racial preferences in admissions.)
So far as I know, no one has calculated what is surely the staggering number of victims of racial discrimination across the nation resulting from racial preferences in college and university admissions over the past generation. But one thing is clear — the preference pushers and their allies are absolutely right about one deeply disturbing truth: racial discrimination in American society is pervasive, structural, systemic, and continuing. It goes by the name of “affirmative action.”
UPDATE [14 January]
Thanks to Robert VerBruggen, and welcome to readers of his phi beta cons blog on National Review Online.
UPDATE II [14 January]
Thanks also to George Leef and Roger Clegg for their kind comments, both also on the fine phi beta cons blog. Roger’s post reminds me of important data I should have mentioned in my post:
Let me add that the Center for Equal Opportunity’s studies typically estimate the number of students who have been discriminated against by racially preferential admission policies. For example, in our study of the University of Michigan that we released in 2008 (in the run-up to the vote on the anti-preference ballot initiative in that state), we pointed out that, over the four years we analyzed, over 8,000 non-African Americans were denied admission despite having higher SAT or ACT scores and high-school GPAs than the median black undergraduate admittee (the figure, mutatis mutandis, was 4,415 for the law school and 11,647 for the medical school). Our studies can be read here.
From the Associated Press:
Massachusetts' top election official says it could take weeks to certify the results of the upcoming U.S. Senate special election. That delay could let President Barack Obama preserve a key 60th vote for his health care overhaul even if the Republican who has vowed to kill it wins Democrat Edward M. Kennedy's former seat.Ezra Klein in the Washington Post:Secretary of State William F. Galvin, citing state law, says city and town clerks must wait at least 10 days for absentee ballots to arrive before they certify the results of the Jan. 19 election. They then have five more days to file the returns with his office.
Galvin bypassed the provision in 2007 so his fellow Democrats could gain a House vote they needed to override a veto of then-Republican President George W. Bush, but the secretary says U.S. Senate rules would preclude a similar rush today....
Democrats will wrap negotiations and pass the bill before he gets there. It will take some time before Massachusetts certifies Brown's election, and then the Senate has to schedule his swearing-in. It also looks like those dates can be monkeyed with a bit....From the Boston Herald article cited by Klein:
Another source told the Herald that Galvin’s office has said the election won’t be certified until Feb. 20....Rep. Barney Frank:
“That is the stupidest thing I’ve been asked in a long time. That is insane, the suggestion could only come from a demented right wing source,” erupted Representative Barney Frank (D - MA), when asked by The Washington Times about what he thought of assertions that Massachusetts Democrats would stall the certification process should Mr. Brown win. “There isn’t the slightest possibility of it happening — a way of doing it. That is conspiracy theory at its most contemptible.”
Post Politics, “your one-stop shop for political news and views in Nashville and throughout the state of Tennessee,” thinks Harold Ford, Jr., can win a Senate seat in New York by in effect emulating Barack Obama — that is, by persuading voters in New York that the political persona he presented to voters in Tennessee throughout his career up to now was a carefully crafted fraud. (HatTip to InstaPundit)
It’s true that after constructing his whole political persona around winning statewide in Tennessee, Ford has some work to do in fashioning himself as a believable New York political figure. Some say it is impossible for Ford to backtrack, massage and apologize for all his conservative positions in time to beat the appointed incumbent in 2010....Is Harold Ford Jr. really such a deviously unprincipled chameleon, or are New York voters really gullible enough to believe either a) that he is, and elect him because they like that in their politicians (there’s some evidence for this), or b) that he was sneakily hiding his true self then but fearlessly revealing it now?The chattering classes say that Ford is simply too conservative to win in New York and that the necessary transformation will be too difficult. But is Ford really as conservative as his record indicates or can he make the case that he was just shading his politics for his state’s body politic? New Yorkers like to think they’re better than everyone else anyway, so it should be easy for Ford to subtly make the case that he was just placating redneck Tennesseans with conservative red meat.
Well, it’s happened before.
The pundits say that Ford can’t ignore issues and just run on the basis of being a fascinating personality, but those who think that should take a long look at the 2008 election results of 2008 and think again.And just when we were about to think it’s safe to go in the water again, there’s the fin of another Obama.
No, says the buried lede in the Chronicle of Higher Education’s article today, 3 Alternatives to Race-Conscious Admissions Won't Do Much to Aid Diversity, Study Predicts.
That alternatives to race preferences are not as effective at admitting favored minorities is, I suppose, interesting and newsworthy, but in my view not nearly as interesting or newsworthy as other findings in the study that are also reported in the Chronicle article.
The article begins:
A hypothetical nationwide ban on race-conscious college-admissions policies would not have much effect on black and Hispanic students' decisions about where to apply but would probably result in a 10-percent decline in their enrollments at the most selective institutions, according to a study published this month in the Journal of Labor Economics.Only 10%? To listen to the preference pushers, abandoning race preferences would amount to instant “re-segregation,” or worse.
So, no sky falling, no re-segregation. But what would happen? According to the new study, a hypothetical national ban on race preferences
would have resulted in slight decreases in the share of black and Hispanic students receiving offers from several institutions and a slight increase in the share receiving no admissions offers at all.In short, in order to prevent the percentage of black and Hispanic students at the nation’s most selective colleges from declining from 3.04 percent of enrollment to 2.73 percent, we have abandoned the formerly fundamental principle that everyone should be treated without regard to race and instituted a nationwide system of distributing benefits and burdens based on race.Such students’ representation at the most selective colleges—those classified by Barron’s Profiles of American Colleges as “most” or “highly” competitive — would decline by about 10 percent, from 3.04 percent of enrollment to 2.73 percent. The total number of black and Hispanic students enrolled at all four-year colleges would drop by about 2 percent.
What a deal.
Charles Biderman, 63, is no wacko conspiracy theorist. A Harvard Business School graduate, he’s a highly respected Wall Street analyst with his own research firm and many subscribers who pay $20,000 a year to read his insights. According to this report in SmartMoney, he has reluctantly come to believe that the government is “manipulating the stock market and artificially fueling the rally ... effectively helping prop up equity prices, and presumably encouraging other investors to move cash back into stocks.”
Here’s how the scheme might have worked:
Biderman points out that the cumulative capitalization of the U.S. stock market now stands at roughly $16 trillion, up $6.5 trillion from its low on March 9, 2009. Historically, it’s taken roughly $10 of new money invested in the market to boost market capitalization values by $100, Biderman says -- so to achieve a $6 trillion-plus-boom the market should have needed $600 billion in new money.Such massive government purchases of equities may not be illegal, but it’s certainly not, to pick one of Obama’s formerly favorite words, transparent. And, the article concludes,But Biderman and his staff couldn’t find the money. “We track share issuance and money flows. And since this rally started, we just couldn’t figure it out,” he says. He began asking clients where they thought the money was coming from. Nobody knew. Around October he began to wonder if maybe it was the government. “None of the smartest people I talk to can figure out where it’s coming from,” he says. Biderman says that “the only logical conclusion” is that money has been coming from the government, quietly and mostly after market hours.
Here’s how the plan, as Biderman sees it, could have worked. Over a period of roughly nine months, the Federal Reserve or the Treasury could have made steady acquisitions in the stock-futures market, to the tune of $60 billion to $70 billion a month. That added buying power could have halted a selloff and “encouraged huge amounts of sideline cash to flow into equities,” he wrote to his clients.
[f]or those who think Biderman’s theory is reasonable, he offers a sobering thought. “If [the government’s] been buying,” he says, “at some point they’ll have to sell.”
It’s not quite clear why Harry Reid making dumb and offensive remarks should be regarded as newsworthy — to me, his doing so is just another dog bites man story — but everyone seems to be abuzz with his “Negro dialect” remark and, once it came to light, apology.
During the 2008 campaign, a new book reveals, “Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada described in private then-Sen. Barack Obama as ‘light skinned’ and ‘with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.’”
Although that is the comment that has garnered the most attention, I think his apology is even more remarkable and revealing:
I deeply regret using such a poor choice of words. I sincerely apologize for offending any and all Americans, especially African-Americans for my improper comments....Recognizing that he’s in deep political trouble at home in Nevada, Reid also directed part of his apology to his constituents:I was a proud and enthusiastic supporter of Barack Obama during the campaign and have worked as hard as I can to advance President Obama's legislative agenda....
Moreover, throughout my career, from efforts to integrate the Las Vegas strip and the gaming industry to opposing radical judges and promoting diversity in the Senate, I have worked hard to advance issues.Deconstructed, what Reid is saying here is that Reid couldn’t be the insensitive racist his words suggest because he was and is an “enthusiastic supporter of Barack Obama.” And what would he have said but for his “poor choice of words?” Perhaps he regrets saying that Obama doesn’t speak in “black dialect” unless he wants to.
Only multicultural racially sensitive liberals support “issues”; us Neanderthal, knuckle-dragging conservatives always oppose “issues.”
And what does Reid mean by “diversity” in the Senate, and what did he do to promote it? Seems to me he worked to reduce it by supporting Obama’s leaving the Senate to run for president.
Pathetic.
I’ve written a number of times about the offensive silliness of arguments for “diversifying” science education (see, for example, here, here, here, here, here, and here for starters), but never as well as Roger Clegg did yesterday in Another Bad Idea: ''Diversifying'' Science Faculties at Minding The Campus.
He begins:
Should universities weigh race and ethnicity in deciding whom to hire for their science departments?You can probably imagine what Roger does with and to that argument. Actually, no, you can’t, and so should read the whole thing.The American Association for the Advancement of Science thinks so, according to a recent National Journal article. “Science and engineering should look like the rest of the population,” says AAAS’s Daryl Chubin, and if hiring decisions don’t yield the right numbers, “somebody needs to pull the plug and say this has not been an open and fair search.”
When Newsweek editor Evan Thomas is not comparing Obama to God — “ I mean in a way Obama’s standing above the country, above above the world, he’s sort of God” — he’s doing about the same thing, comparing him to Lincoln:
It is the season to compare Barack Obama to Abraham Lincoln. Two thin men from rude beginnings, relatively new to Washington but wise to the world, bring the nation together to face a crisis. Both are superb rhetoricians, both geniuses at stagecraft and timing. Obama, like Lincoln and unlike most modern politicians, even writes his own speeches, or at least drafts the really important ones—by hand, on yellow legal paper—such as his remarkably honest speech on race during the Reverend Wright imbroglio last spring.Thomas goes on to report that when Obama chief strategist David Axelrod saw a draft of a victory speech the day before the election (Obama’s own yellow legal pads must have been misplaced), he sent it back to the speechwriter with instructions that
Barack wants to lean into bipartisanship a little more. Even though the Democrats have won a great victory, we should reach out and be humbled by it. Figure out a good Lincoln quote to bring it all together....The speechwriter, Jon Favreau, looked to Lincoln’s First Inaugural and chose: “We are not enemies, but friends … Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.”
Now that Obama has governed for a year, and not only leaned but fallen completely away from bipartisanship — all relevant negotiations are among Democrats alone, behind closed doors — I think lifting from another famous Lincoln speech, slightly modified, is in order. Honoring the increasing pile of Democratic casualties of his policies, a pile that will surely grow larger after the midterm election, Obama could draw inspiration from Lincoln’s consecration of the Civil War dead at Gettysburg as he begins to organize his campaign for re-election.
I can almost hear him now attempting to rally his troops in ACORN, SEIU, and the Democratic caucuses of House and Senate, urging them to keep Hope and Change alive, to take increased devotion to the cause for which those casualties gave the last full measure of devotion, that we highly resolve that those retired or defeated Democrats did not sacrifice their seats in vain and “that this nation, under God and me, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the Democrats, by the Democrats, for the Democrats, shall not perish from the earth.”
Inside Higher Ed reports on yet another report, this one from the University of Southern California’s Center for Urban Education, that measures the success (or lack of it) of various institutions “in getting students from Latino backgrounds interested in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (or STEM) disciplines and, ultimately, to degrees.”
Yes, but why should we be concerned with the number or proportion or whatever of Latino students getting STEM degrees?
Like many recent analyses, the center’s report embraces the idea that the United States must -- for competitive, economic and other reasons -- draw more, and more qualified, young people into STEM fields to help ensure that it has skilled workers for the information age.As I have argued before, I believe the only reasonable “equity” concern is whether discrimination prevents individuals from any racial or ethnic group from having the same opportunities other students have to choose their own careers. Non-discriminatory factors, such as poverty, may also have a racially disparate impact, but in my view the appropriate response is to have financial aid available to all who qualify, not racially targeted financial aid. In short, equity, like equality, requires colorblind non-discrimination, not racial and ethnic proportionality.But like most of the USC center’s own work, the newly released study -- part of a three-year project financed by the National Science Foundation -- views the issue through the prism of an “equity” framework, which it defines as “creating opportunities for equal access and success among historically underrepresented student populations, such as racial and ethnic minority and low-income students.”
In other words, says Alicia C. Dowd, the center’s co-director and a co-author of the report, the study aims both to recognize the central role that Latinos (given their growing share of the U.S. population) will have to play if the country is to achieve the college completion goals set out by President Obama, and to focus on how well colleges and universities are educating Latinos compared to other students....
But what of the combination of the national need for more scientists with the fact that Latinos will make up an increasing proportion of college students? Doesn’t that justify ethnically targeted policies to encourage more Latinos to become scientists, and to assist those who do choose to do so?
I have my doubts. If public policy should concentrate on the production of more scientists, shouldn’t research be directed toward developing policies and programs that produce, well, more scientists — not more black, Latino, women, etc., scientists?
What if all the money and effort that has been and is being directed toward increasing the numbers of “underrepresented minority” STEM students and graduates had instead been directed toward, say, increasing the number of Asian Americans in STEM fields? Now insofar as “equity” is the concern, we don’t need any more Asian scientists because they’re already “overrepresented.” But maybe with a little money and effort we could produce even more Asian scientists, in fact more than would be produced by spending that money trying to jack up the numbers of scientists from “underrepresented” groups? Wouldn’t that be a better investment?
Just asking.
[NOTE! Broken link now fixed. (Is there some hidden meaning in my not being able to get the link to my own piece right?)]
Have you been accused lately of being “on the wrong side of history”? Yes, I’m sure you have.
But not to worry; a response is here.
The declining popularity of President Obama and his handling of both domestic and foreign affairs has for a while now fueled either hopeful or fearful memories of 1994, when the Republicans took over Congress. A better comparison might be to 1884, when the Democrats were largely done in by a devastating slogan that branded them as the party of “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion.”
In