... that newspapers in major cities can be fair if they put their mind to it.
The Lincoln Journal-Star published a Q&A about the proposed Nebraska Civil Rights Initiative that is fair, balanced, and neutral.
What a shame such coverage is so rare.
The Lincoln (Neb.) Journal-Star reports today that
[a] University of Nebraska-Lincoln professor says the NU Board of Regents violated open-meetings law last month when it discussed a proposed affirmative-action ban without specifically listing the topic on its printed agenda.According to the Journal-Star,Chemistry Professor Gerard Harbison on Tuesday wrote Regents Chairman Chuck Hassebrook to request the board void its resolution opposing the ban, which passed unanimously at the regents’ Jan. 18 meeting....
“The (regents) vote had no democratic validity,” said Harbison, who is a supporter of Super Tuesday for Equal Rights, a group that’s targeting five states, Nebraska included, this year in its efforts to end affirmative action in hiring and admissions processes.
“They could have put it on the agenda, we could have presented our side. ... Why didn’t they do that? Why are they afraid of even hearing the other side?”
Harbison cited Nebraska’s open-meetings law, which says the public should be given “reasonable notice” of meeting agenda items.
Typically, Board of Regents meeting agendas are delivered to media and made available to the public about a week before the board meets. Members of the public are invited to speak before the board on any agenda item.Sounds reasonable to me. “Nice work, Joe. Good work, doctors. Voters, please let us continue to discriminate by race, ethnicity, and sex.” These are all of a piece, right? No reason to notify the pesky public about these resolutions.Near the top of each agenda are “Kudos and Resolutions,” often a time when regents publicly commend NU faculty, staff and students for outstanding work.
Kudos and resolution items are not required to be individually listed in the board’s pre-printed agendas. And they rarely are controversial.
Jan. 18 resolutions, for example, included praise for University of Nebraska Medical Center doctors for their lifesaving work after the Westroads Mall shootings in Omaha and thanks to a fellow regent for his work on strategic issues.
Supporters of racial preferences everywhere seem to be afraid of honest, open debate on the issue. (For the latest attempt to confuse voters and sabotage an anti-preference initiative, see this outrage in Colorado.)
The Lincoln (Nebraska) Journal Star article that I discussed in the UPDATE to this post below quotes John R. Hibbing, professor of political science at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln:
it may be difficult to get Nebraska voters to want to end efforts to increase diversity within state institutions, he said. Nebraskans seem favorable toward helping women and minorities in Nebraska, though they also seem unfavorable toward hindering opportunities for white males.This formulation is so common that, with all due respect to Prof. Hibbing, it is worth pointing out that the state civil rights initiatives most assuredly do not pit compassionate, caring people who are "favorable toward helping women and minorities" against meanies who are opposed to such help. First, reasonable, caring people can believe that preferential treatment of, i.e., lowering standards applied to everyone else for, women and minorities does not in fact help them. Second, even if employing such double standards is regarded as help, reasonable and caring people can also believe that the cost of such help — treating people differently based on their race, ethnicity, sex; implying that women and minorities cannot succeed if held to the same standards as everyone else; etc. — far exceeds the benefit of whatever help the few beneficiaries receive.“Everyone wants to go to heaven without dying,” Hibbing said, referring to the desires of some to help women and minorities without the political backlash that often accompanies such efforts.
Please note that Is Colorblind Equality Xenophobic?, below, has been UPDATED.
xenophobia noun intense or irrational dislike or fear of people from other countries [Oxford American Dictionary via Macintosh]Peter Schmidt has a generally thorough, fair, and hence useful comprehensive report in the Chronicle of Higher Education today on the status of the effort to pass Michigan-style civil rights initiatives barring racial preferences in five states: Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Nebraska. (Subscription required, but non-subscribers can access the article here.)
I say “generally,” because I believe Schmidt’s discussion is marred by an implication that the movement to eradicate racial and ethnic preferences is riding on a tide (perhaps even exploiting the tide) of anti-immigrant sentiment. Schmidt makes this case more through an assortment of quotations from others than by direct assertion. Some examples:
... each of the five states has witnessed a recent backlash against illegal immigration—a sentiment that reflects, and has worsened, tensions between their white and Hispanic populations....Schmidt notes, accurately, that Ward Connerly and the anti-preference forces have themselves drawn attention to a link between illegal immigration and racial preference, most notably in a full page ad in the Washington Times that I reproduced and discussed here and here (Indeed, I should say “ourselves” instead of “themselves,” since I signed the ad), and in this article he quotes Connerly on the subject fairly. Still, the overall effect of the extensive discussion of links between opposing racial/ethnic preferences and opposing immigrants, especially the cumulative effect of the quotations, conveys what I think is a false impression of right-wing xenophobes exploiting nativist antagonisms.Political analysts say the immigration debate will only help Mr. Connerly’s cause.
“I have seen Republican message testing that shows that the illegal-alien issue can move voters,” says Ronald Keith Gaddie, a professor of political science at the University of Oklahoma and president of the Southwestern Political Science Association. In Oklahoma, Mr. Gaddie says, the illegal-immigration issue “is fertile ground for exploiting” because the state’s predominantly Protestant non-Hispanic white population and its predominantly Catholic and rapidly growing Hispanic population are clashing “across the board—on language, on culture, and on religion.”
....
If the debate over the measure in Colorado “comes down to race, given the current climate of anti-immigration, it probably has a good chance of winning,” says Michael Kanner, an instructor in political science at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He expects the measure to encounter substantial resistance in the Denver area while being supported by many residents of suburban and rural areas, many of whom criticize the state’s flagship university as a hotbed of liberalism and, he predicts, may seize upon the opportunity to deny it the ability to consider ethnicity, gender, and race in hiring and admissions.
....
In Nebraska, State Sen. Ernie Chambers, who is black and represents parts of northern Omaha, last week denounced Mr. Connerly as “a tool of Jim Crowism” and expressed confidence that Nebraskans “will see through his shell game.”But John R. Hibbing, a professor of political science at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, says that as a result of Hispanic immigration, many predominantly white communities in the state “feel their traditional way of life is threatened,” adding that “there is a sensitivity to race that I am not sure was around that long ago.”
The connection between colorblind equality and illegal immigration insisted upon by Connerly and friends is the narrow but legitimate recognition that in a regime that awards preferential treatment based on ethnicity and national origin, an undetermined but not insignificant number of people receiving those preferences will not be legal residents of the United States. Moreover, since illegals are not now generally counted in labor surveys to determine who is “underrepresented” in various job and other categories, any mass legalization will swell the ranks of the “underrepresented” enormously. These are not imaginary issues, and being concerned about them does not make one, or one’s movement, xenophobic.
It is no doubt true that there are not massive numbers of illegals who receive preferential admissions to selective colleges and universities, but consider: If there were a move to require institutions receiving federal funds to determine the legal status of all their applicants, do you really think the predictable outrage of all the selective institutions would be based purely on principle and not on the recognition, or at least fear, that they routinely admit a number of illegals, many with preferences?
As I said at the outset, Schmidt’s article provides a useful overview of the anti-preference campaign now getting off the ground in the five targeted states. It would have been even more useful if it had presented more of the argument being waged over the merits of race and ethnic preferences (a good deal of it duplicitously by state officials, as revealed here) and less speculation about the influence of immigration issues on the campaign.
UPDATE [13 October]
Relying heavily on Peter Schmidt’s reporting, Kevin Abourezk has a long article in the Lincoln (Nebraska) Journal Star on the beginning of the campaign to pass a civil rights initiative in Nebraska. Although this article, too, like Schmidt’s, is generally fair and balanced, it is even more seriously marred by a misplaced emphasis on the link between opposing preferential treatment based on race/ethnicity and attitudes about immigration. Indeed, it relies on Schmidt’s so heavily that it takes something from it that’s not, at least explicitly, there:
If Connerly and his supporters tie their ballot initiative to the issue of illegal immigration, a tactic they have used successfully elsewhere, they are likely to find responsive voters, said John R. Hibbing, professor of political science at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.I followed the debate over the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative as closely as anyone, and am more than moderately familiar with the previous debates over the similar measures in California (1996) and Washington (1998), and I don’t recall a single instance of the “tactic” of initiative supporters tying their campaign to the issue of illegal immigration. Indeed, the only “tactic” that remotely fits this description was the full page ad in the Washington Times mentioned above, but that, as mentioned, dealt only with preferential treatment of illegal immigrants and in any event was published June 8, 2007, when immigration “reform” was being debated, and was not part of any state campaign.
I have more to say about this article here.
From an editorial by Henry J. Waters III, publisher of the Columbia (Missouri) Daily Tribune, on the recent racial school assignment decision:
Affirmative action violates the principle of Brown. Chief Justice John Roberts expressed this idea with a rubric sure not to please his opponents when he said the way to eliminate race preferences is to eliminate race preferences.Let’s hope the citizens of Missouri get a chance to express their agreement with this wise editorial by voting in favor of the Missouri Civil Rights Initiative.
....
Civil rights leaders prayed for the day when race would no longer be a consideration in civic life. Many of their self-identified successors continue to push the opposite.I believe the recent Supreme Court school admission decision supports the original principle and does nothing to set back the educational progress of black children.
Mark Tushnet, the distinguished Harvard law professor, has a rather snippy critique of — actually, not so much a critique of as a lament about — the Pacific Legal Foundation in today’s Los Angeles Times.
As most of you know, and as Tushnet points out for those who don’t, the Pacific Legal Foundation is
a conservative public interest law firm involved in the[Seattle racial assignment] case from the beginning ... that developed many of the legal arguments five justices ultimately found persuasive.PLF was the original, the prototype, conservative public interest law firm, and Tushnet asks, in a manner of speaking, where did these guys come from? His first and no doubt favorite answer — they were a product of “big business” — ultimately proves unpersuasive, even to him, since even without big business support “Pacific Legal Foundation and other such law firms continued to operate, funded by donors interested in a conservative agenda.”
Still, despite PLF’s continued existence, and even success, Tushnet remains hopeful.
The Seattle case shows that conservative public interest law firms can win some big cases. These firms, however, are notorious for lacking follow-through. They get publicity from winning in the Supreme Court, not from slogging through the lower courts time and again to define the contours of the law on the ground. Winning in the Supreme Court may excite donors, but haggling with school boards over how to enforce the court's decisions does not....Tushnet’s criticism of PLF is quite odd, on two counts. First, he either ignores or, worse, is blissfully unaware of all the “slogging through the lower courts time and again to define the contours of the law on the ground,” “haggling with school boards,” etc., that PLF has rigorously pursued in California in quite successful efforts to “follow-through” the passage of Prop. 209 by forcing compliance with it.We won't know for a while what the fate of this year's integration rulings will be. But the track record of conservative public interest law firms suggests that they won't carry through on their victory. And what the political environment will be over the next decade is in our hands, not theirs.
For the second oddity of Tushnet’s criticism, I encourage you to revisit this post, where you will find a discussion of his disenchantment with the courts, especially the Supreme Court, and celebration of the people taking constitutional law into their own hands. Odd, because most of PLF’s legal work has been devoted to just that, helping people re-establish the principle that every person should be treated by the state without regard to race, creed, color, or national origin against the determined opposition of “big business” and other elites that Tushnet, the “progressive,” generally purports to oppose.
The victory of MCRI in Michigan, and what many of us hope will be the victories of similar state initiatives in five states in November 2008 — victories that have relied and will rely on the legal assistance of PLF and similar groups, can be viewed as perfect examples of the “popular constitutionalism” that Tushnet claims to favor.
So far, Tushnet has not been heard to endorse these popular efforts to reshape constitutional law.
It is now so widely understood that “diversity” does not mean diversity that it’s hardly necessary to keep mentioning it. Such expressions as “How many diverse students are enrolled at X University?” and “what proportion of the staff is diverse?” have become commonplace.
As these expressions reveal, many people now treat “diverse” simply as a synonym for minority or, more often, black. Another, somewhat inconsistent meaning of “diversity” has also emerged, however, and it is worth mentioning if for no other reason than that its proponents so often hotly deny it: “diversity” as proportional representation. (And, of course, the only way to achieve proportional representation is to employ explicit or implicit quotas, sometimes known as “goals” or “targets.”)
A good example appeared, in passing, in my immediately preceding post describing the schizophrenic reaction to the Arizona Civil Rights Initiative in an article in the Arizona Republic.Let’s look at that example in more detail.
Consider carefully the following paragraphs from the article:
Tempe has placed an emphasis on diversifying the city staff in recent years. The city came under fire after independent diversity audits, prompted by accusations of racism within city ranks that led to a multimillion dollar lawsuit settlement, noted a lack of women and racial minorities within departments such as police, fire and public works.Since Tempe “came under fire” for numbers like these, and as a result has “placed an emphasis on diversifying the city staff,” the assumption here, quite clearly, is that a city work force that is 6% more white and 16% more male than the city population is not appropriately “diverse.”Of the city’s 1,634-person work force, 68 percent of the staff is male, according to an analysis of the city staff from fiscal year 2005-2006. In contrast, 52 percent of Tempe’s residents are male.
The city’s staff is also 72 percent White, whereas the city’s population is 66 percent White, according to that same analysis.
The lesson here is equally clear: if you live in Arizona or Missouri or Colorado or Oklahoma (the “Super Tuesday of Equality” states, so far, that will have non-discrimination initiatives on their November 2008 ballots, if enough signatures are collected) and believe that all individuals should be treated by the state and its agencies “without regard” to race, ethnicity, or gender, then vote in favor of the civil rights initiative in your state.
If, on the other hand, you prefer to be treated primarily as a representative of your race, ethnicity, gender so that all public institutions can become appropriately “diverse,” i.e., proportional, then vote against the civil rights initiative.
Linda Chavez, president of the Center for Equal Opportunity and honorary co-chair of the new Colorado Civil Rights Initiative, explains to Arizona readers why she abandoned her earlier support for affirmative action.
When I entered the University of Colorado as a freshman in the fall of 1965, there were few black or Hispanic students enrolled. During my five years as an undergraduate and graduate student at CU, first at the Denver campus and then in Boulder, I encountered only one other Hispanic in any of my classes and perhaps one or two blacks.That didn’t seem right to me. So I joined with a group of other students to persuade the university to aggressively recruit more minority students and set up tutoring programs and summer sessions of remedial courses to assist those who lacked the skills to compete effectively.
The Educational Opportunity Program started out with great promise. It was exactly what was intended by affirmative action: to cast a wider net and provide the skills necessary to compete on an equal footing.But it soon transmogrified into a program that lowered standards and radicalized students in the process.
The university not only admitted students whose academic preparation made it nearly impossible for them to succeed, but it also permitted many to remain in school despite failing grades.Worse, the program’s organizers encouraged students to take largely segregated ethnic studies courses whose primary purpose was to forge ethnic solidarity and reinforce students’ feelings that they were victims of a racist society bent on their destruction.
By the time I left Boulder in 1970, I had become a critic of affirmative action, and my later experiences as an instructor in the affirmative action program at UCLA made me a downright opponent of such programs.
Arizona and Oklahoma join the party with the launching of drives to put the Arizona Civil Rights Initiative and the Oklahoma Civil Rights Initiative on the 2008 ballot.
UPDATE
Writing earlier today about conflicting confusions in Colorado (here), I noted that some opponents of the new civil rights initiative opposed it because there were no racial preferences to bar while others opposed it because it would reverse and prevent all sorts of good things that depended on bestowing racial preferences.
This confusion must be endemic to preferentialists (unless they are simply following the same script in an effort to obfuscate), for it has now popped up in Arizona.
Arizona Board of Regents spokeswoman Anne Barton said university officials were reviewing the situation. “But in general Arizona public universities do not have any policies in place that would provide a special benefit to a certain race or gender,” Barton said.This defense of the “consideration” of race is a ubiquitous preferentialist obfuscation, since what is being defended is not “consideration” of race but rewarding and punishing on the basis of race. What would be the point of “considering” race if it could not be used in any way to help or hinder someone seeking college admission or public employment?However, a legislator who said she opposes Connerly’s initiative said it could affect current university law school admission practices in which an applicant’s race or gender might be considered along with other aspects of their background.
UPDATE II
I had literally just posted the above UPDATE when I saw this article from the Arizona Republic, reconfirming my point. The article begins:
An effort was launched today to ban Arizona governments and universities from considering race, sex, color, ethnicity and national origin in hiring and other decisions.First, the measure would not, could not, “prohibit ... public universities that consider race”; it would prohibit public universities from considering race. But let’s avoid grammatical nit-picking and move to what passes for substance. In stating that the Arizona Civil Rights Initiative would prohibit everything from giving racial preferences to considering race, the reporter insinuates that ACRI would ban a whole range of things. But, as I’ve just argued above, there is no distance at all between giving preference based on race and considering race! It’s the same thing, and it’s the only one thing that would be banned.The affirmative action initiative would prohibit everything from government contracting that gives preference to minority-owned businesses to public universities that consider race in student admissions....
In another common oddity of the defense of preferences, as reported in the Arizona Republic article, “Rep. Chad Campbell, D-Phoenix, called the measure “just another divisive initiative.”
So, dividing people on the basis of their race and ethnicity, helping some and hindering others because of their skin color, is unifying, but a measure requiring the state to treat all its citizens without regard to their race, ethnicity, or gender is “divisive”?
Do preferentialists ever listen to themselves or each other? Do they have any idea how weird their “divisive” argument sounds? No, not sounds. Is.
Peter Schmidt reports on the Chronicle of Higher Education news blog that former Justice O’Connor acknowledged in a recent speech that “she is not confident the court had preserved affirmative action in higher education for much longer.”
The former Justice would obviously prefer “the people” (my quotes, not hers) to leave constitutions to the courts, and not take matters into their own hands by amending their state constitutions in an attempt to clean up messes made by the Supreme Court.
Speaking at Washington’s National Press Club at a symposium on diversity at colleges, Justice O’Connor said, “The future of affirmative action in higher education today is certainly muddy.” As the basis for her observation, she cited Michigan voters’ adoption last fall of an amendment to that state’s Constitution banning affirmative-action preferences, as well as the passage of similar measures in California in 1996 and Washington State in 1998, and current efforts to place preference bans on several states’ ballots in 2008.Several of her other comments were equally interesting. For example, she stated that in Grutter she and the court’s majority “had tried to be careful in stressing that affirmative action should be a temporary bandage rather than a permanent cure.”
Should be? Was that friendly advice, wishful thinking, or a constitutional command? Alas, her opinion wasn’t careful enough to answer that question.
She was also quoted as saying:
“It probably would be better if we could remedy the racial gap in academic achievement long before application for college admission,” by finding ways to improve elementary and secondary schools enough that race-conscious admissions policies will no longer be necessary.Probably? No matter. The good news, which is what worries Justice O’Connor, is that substantial majorities of the pesky people believe that racial discrimination (politely if euphemistically known as “race-conscious admissions”) is not necessary now.
UPDATE
John Fund has an excellent, longer piece on Justice O’Connor’s speech in today’s Wall Street Journal. You should read the whole thing, but here are some excerpts:
Justice O’Connor continued to defend her original position. She lamented statistics that showed that as a result of California’s Proposition 209 (passed in 1996) only 2.2% of UCLA freshmen were black, and a fifth of those were on athletic scholarships. (California’s overall population is 6.1% black.)These are more examples that the recent study by two Princeton professors, discussed here, can’t explain.She seemed strangely unaware, however, of the growing evidence that racial preferences might have actually decreased the likelihood that blacks and Hispanics will graduate from college. Put differently, if the body of evidence is correct, the whole affirmative action enterprise has been deeply and tragically flawed from the beginning, failing to achieve its most basic aim: increasing the number of minority college graduates, doctors, lawyers and other professionals.
....
Moreover, Justice O’Connor’s comments about UCLA obscured an important and promising real story. While it’s true that black and Hispanic enrollment at UCLA and Berkeley went down after Prop 209, these students simply didn’t just vanish. The vast majority were admitted on the basis of their academic record to somewhat less highly ranked campuses of the prestigious 10-campus UC system, which caters only to the top one-eighth of California’s high school graduates. In the immediate wake of Proposition 209, the number of minority students at some of the nonflagship campuses went up, not down.This “cascading” effect has had real benefits in matching students with the campus where they are most likely to do well. Despite what affirmative action supporters often imply, academic ability matters. Although some students will outperform their entering credentials and some students will underperform theirs, most students will succeed in the range that their high school grades and SAT scores predict. Leapfrogging minority candidates into elite colleges where they often become frustrated and fail hurts them even more than the institutions. It creates the illusion that we are closing racial disparities in education when in fact we are not. While blacks and Hispanics now attend college at nearly the same rate as whites, only about 1 in 6 graduates.
Affirmative action often creates the illusion that black or other minority students cannot excel. At the University of California at San Diego, in the year before race-based preferences were abolished in 1997, only one black student had a freshman-year GPA of 3.5 or better. In other words, there was a single black honor student in a freshman class of 3,268. In contrast, 20% of the white students on campus had a 3.5 or better GPA.
There were lots of black students capable of doing honors work at UCSD. But such students were probably admitted to Harvard, Yale or Berkeley, where often they were not receiving an honor GPA. The end to racial preferences changed that. In 1999, 20% of black freshmen at UCSD boasted a GPA of 3.5 or better after their first year, almost equaling the 22% rate for whites after their first year. Similarly, failure rates for black students declined dramatically at UCSD immediately after the implementation of Proposition 209. Isn’t that better for everyone in the long run?
Peter Kirsanow of the Civil Rights Commission has an excellent article today on the coming “Super Tuesday for Equality.”
He predicts, hopefully, that “[t]he era of affirmative action may be coming to a close sooner than Sandra Day O’Connor had expected”