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http://townhall.com/columnists/monacharen/2013/06/18/the-unmentionable-injustice-n1621828/page/full

The Unmentionable Injustice
Mona Charen | Jun 18, 2013

(snip)


The pursuit of racial justice in education has arguably led to some benefits since its inception in the 1960s. But in the two generations that have elapsed since affirmative action began, evidence of its unintended consequences has accumulated -- even as a society-wide taboo has forbidden honest discussion of that evidence.

The vast majority of elite American institutions supports racial preferences. Of 92 briefs filed in the Fisher case, 17 agreed with the plaintiff that racial preferences should be considered unconstitutional, while 73 urged that the current system remain undisturbed (two were in between). The pro-university briefs included submissions by the U.S. government, 17 U.S. senators, 66 members of Congress, 57 of the Fortune 100 companies, numerous education associations, colleges and universities and establishment organs, such as the American Bar Association.

[including Duke University. People have to be reduced to being members of a herd,
categorized, and shoved into a pre-set. They--especially minorities--are not permitted to be individuals,
and will not be treated as such by universities.]

Criticizing affirmative action (which is code for racial preferences) can be a career-endangering step for anyone, particularly for academics or politicians.

Some scholars have nevertheless been willing to follow where the evidence leads and have found that nearly everything we believe about racial preferences is wrong. In their outstanding book "Mismatch," Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor Jr. document the paradoxical results of giving large preferences to racial and other minorities.

Sander and Taylor argue persuasively that the trouble with preferences is not the injustice done to people like Abigail Fisher, who was denied admission to the University of Texas while less qualified black and Hispanic applicants were accepted -- though that is unfair -- but also the harm it does to those to whom such preferences are extended.

Preferences have created a widespread mismatch between minority students and the schools they attend. Minority students at all levels (least so at the very top colleges) tend to wind up at schools for which they are less well prepared than the majority of their classmates. The University of Texas is typical in awarding the equivalent of hundreds of SAT points to minority applicants. This results in minority students (who've been assured that they have what it takes to be successful) plunging to the bottom of the class. Students accepted under the preference regime often experience severe feelings of inferiority, social segregation and much higher dropout rates. Both for affirmative action "beneficiaries" and their classmates mismatch reinforces negative stereotypes. It also causes more African-American students to flee math, science and engineering majors in favor of softer subjects, such as education and sociology. "Black college freshmen are more likely to aspire to science or engineering careers than are white freshmen, but mismatch causes black to abandon these fields at twice the rate of whites."

Yet research has shown that when minority students attend schools for which they are well matched, there is no attrition in demanding fields of study. It isn't that minority students cannot make it as scientists and engineers but simply that they conclude that they cannot succeed when forced to compete with superior classmates. This phenomenon also accounts for the relatively low numbers of minorities who seek academic careers despite (or rather due to) five decades of preferences. It carries lessons for families considering whether to take advantage of "legacies" for their children. The research suggests that academic and career success is more likely when students attend colleges for which they are well matched.

Nor do preferences benefit the disadvantaged. In 1972, more than 50 percent of black freshmen at elite colleges came from families in the bottom half of the socioeconomic distribution. By 1982, that percentage had dropped to one quarter, and by 1992, 67 percent of black freshman came from homes in the top quartile of income. Among blacks attending elite colleges, 92 percent come from families in the top half of income earners.

Deciding who is a member of a historically oppressed minority group also gets trickier with every passing decade. Intermarriage is up.

Immigration complicates matters. A recent study found that 40 percent of African American Ivy League undergrads are first- or second- generation immigrants. A study undertaken by Harvard Law students found that only 30 percent of the African Americans there had four black grandparents. The rest were either of mixed ancestry, foreign students or recent immigrants from the West Indies or Africa.

There is a place for preferences in higher education -- for those who come from poor homes or tough neighborhoods. But there is abundant evidence that awarding preferences based on race and ethnicity is counterproductive, corrupt and profoundly unjust.

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http://nationalreview.com/article/355356/cheating-colleges-admissions-officers-michael-barone

Cheating at Colleges

Aug. 9, 2013

What is the most intellectually dishonest profession around? My nomination: the admissions officers at highly selective colleges and universities.

Evidence in support of this comes from, of all places, a recent article in the New York Times. The writer is Ruth Starkman, and the subject is her experience as a reader of applications to the highly selective University of California, Berkeley.

“Admissions officers were careful not to mention gender, ethnicity and race during our training sessions,” she notes. But when she asked one privately, “What are we doing about race?” she was told it was illegal to consider it, but that they were looking at “the ‘bigger picture’ of the applicant’s life.”

Racial discrimination in state universities was made illegal in 1996 when California voters by a 55 percent margin passed UC regent Ward Connerly’s Proposition 209.

At first UC admissions officers enforced the law, as Richard Sander (a UCLA law professor) and Stuart Taylor report in their book, Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It.

The result was that fewer blacks and Hispanics were admitted to the most selective UC schools, Berkeley and UCLA, but more were admitted to and graduated from less selective UC campuses.

But then admissions officers started to cheat. They declared that they were using “holistic” criteria, trying to gauge from students’ applications the “bigger picture” of their life.

In practice, this meant racial discrimination in favor of blacks and Hispanics, and against Asians and whites

Starkman’s job was to read applications and rate them on a numeric scale, with 1’s being the most desirable. She “was told I needed more 1’s and referrals. A referral is a flag that a student’s grades and scores do not make the cut but the application merits a special read because of ‘stressors’ — socioeconomic disadvantages that admissions offices can use to increase diversity.”

It’s not hard to imagine what “stressors” might include. A Spanish surname. A home address or high school in a heavily black neighborhood. An essay recounting “the hardships that prevented the student from achieving better grades, test scores and honors.”

So the admissions officers were tipping the scale heavily in favor of certain students — and heavily against others.

“When I asked about an Asian student who I thought was a 2 but had received only a 3, the officer noted, ‘Oh, you’ll get a lot of them,’“ Starkman writes. “She said the same when I asked why a low-income student with top grades and scores, and who had served in the Israeli Army, was a 3.”

What’s extraordinary about this is that you have an organization every member of which is well aware of its main purpose — illegal racial discrimination — but in which no one will say so out loud. A willingness to lie and break the law are job requirements.

(snip)

But racial discrimination is unlawful and has been rightly repudiated by the American people. The corrupt silence concerning such discrimination in college and university admissions suggests that at some level these people know they are doing something for which they should be ashamed.

Unfortunately they are doing their intended beneficiaries no favors. That’s proved beyond demur by Sander and Taylor’s Mismatch. Black and Hispanic students tend to drop out of schools when they find themselves less well prepared than their schoolmates.

Those intending to major in science and engineering tend to back out of those fields. Many do not graduate yet are stuck with mounds of student-loan debt.

Meanwhile, there appears to be a ceiling on the number of Asians in selective private schools, similar to the ceiling imposed on Jews there from the 1920s to the 1960s.

Just 19 percent of students at Stanford and 16 percent in the Ivy League are Asian — numbers that have remained static for two decades despite increasing numbers of Asian applicants.

This is, in my American Enterprise Institute colleague Charles Murray’s phrase, “discrimination against hardworking, high-achieving young people because of the color of their skin.” His word for it: “despicable.”

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http://flawedeconomist.blogspot.com/2012/03/president-and-muzzle.html

Friday, March 23, 2012

The President and the Muzzle


Yesterday President Brodhead gave his annual address to the faculty. You can find the full text here. The topic was Duke and the Legacy of Race. One of the motivations for his talk was the controversy over my paper with Esteban Aucejo and Ken Spenner.

While there was much good in President Brodhead's address, outlining the dramatic progress that has occurred on matters of race in the past fifty years, the way my paper was handled was very disappointing. Despite one troublesome line in the administration's initial response to the study, I was okay with how the administration handled the issue given the tough spot they were in. But President Brodhead's speech was not okay.

President Brodhead refers to the study in two places. Once is at the beginning of the talk when he says: "Within the space of a few weeks, this campus experienced controversy over a piece of unpublished faculty research that appeared to disparage the choice of majors by African-American undergraduates."

Later he states "On the other hand, I can see why students took offense at what was reported of a professor's work. Generalizations about academic choices by racial category can renew the primal insult of the world we are trying to leave behind -- the implication that persons can be known through a group identity that associates them with inferior powers. A further insult was that the paper had been included in an amicus brief submitted by opponents of affirmative action urging the Supreme Court to hear the case I mentioned earlier regarding admissions policies at the University of Texas."

Wow. These statements are troubling on many fronts. Analyzing average differences in choices across demographic groups--race included--is standard practice not just in economics but in all quantitative social sciences. To suggest that this is insulting disparages the quantitative social sciences as a whole. It is also disconcerting that a study which points to racial differences must automatically be linked to Bell Curve-like arguments. Of course, the irony is that generalizations across racial categories is exactly what is done under affirmative action. And it is also what President Brodhead did in the rest of his talk by stressing the importance of numbers of faculty and senior administrators that fit into these different boxes.

While the speech stressed the importance of diversity, it made clear that diversity of opinion on the merits of affirmative action as currently constructed is not wanted. As discussed on KC Johnson's blog, how can it be insulting that a Duke professor's work is cited in an amicus brief in a Supreme Court case? It can only be insulting if only one opinion, the "correct" opinion, is valued. It would be wonderful to move to more nuanced discussions of affirmative action such as the appropriate amount of affirmative action and how such issues would be quantified. But given President Brodhead's address, I can see why few at Duke would want to touch the issue.

This squashing of divergent ideas also shows up in the administration's lack of defense of the study beyond issues of academic freedom and, more importantly, in the administration's lack of a substantive conversation with either myself or my co-authors. Personally, the latter is what I have found most disturbing about the whole controversy.

As I have repeatedly made clear, I am happy to talk with anyone who has concerns about my work. I was disappointed when the Black Student Alliance (BSA) chose to go directly to the press rather than engage in a discussion with me--the called-for forum has not happened. But they are undergraduates. He is the president of the university. To publicly disparage my work without engaging in a conversation with me is not something I would have expected from President Brodhead. To top it off, the speech alludes to administrators working on the issues raised in the paper with the BSA and yet there still have been no substantive discussions of the issues with the authors. Thank you, God, for tenure.

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http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2012/03/brodheads-extraordinary-address.html

THURSDAY, MARCH 22, 2012
Brodhead's Extraordinary Address

Arcidiacono observes that the kind of research Brodhead specifically criticized--"analyzing average differences in choices across demographic groups--race included"--is "standard practice not just in economics but in all quantitative social sciences," and therefore "to suggest that this is insulting disparages the quantitative social sciences as a whole."

Brodhead obviously knows this: indeed, this type of social science research, in a less detailed form than what exists in the academy today, provided the underpinning for many of the civil rights decisions in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. The only possible inference, therefore, to take from Brodhead's criticism is that at least on issues of race, this research strategy is acceptable only when it yields results that conform to the beliefs of the campus majority.

(snip)

Moreover, during the administration of President Richard Brodhead (2005-), the university’s most significant racially-oriented episode involved not racism toward African-American students or professors but a racially-charged crusade directed by members of the school’s African-American Studies Department against a group of falsely accused white Duke students. Apart from a single statement from Provost Peter Lange rebuking an outright racist screed from then-Duke professor Houston Baker—and a vague, tardy, and ultimately toothless apology from Brodhead—there’s no evidence that anyone from Duke’s administration ever addressed this faculty behavior, or ever rebuked those Duke professors whose private biases led them to ignore their obligations to their own institution’s students.

-------------

In his March 22 address to the faculty, Brodhead chose to speak about “the issue of race and inclusion in Duke's history, our recent progress, and the nature of the work that lies ahead.”

Those expecting that the choice of this theme meant that Brodhead would critically self-examine his and his administration’s failure to address the shortcomings exposed by the lacrosse case would be sorely disappointed. The race-baiting of spring 2006 wasn’t mentioned, perhaps because doing so would have forced Brodhead to ask uncomfortable questions about how so many Duke faculty members had addressed “the issue of race and inclusion in Duke’s [recent] history.” It would, for instance, have been very difficult for the president to have reconciled his Faculty Address boast that “this university has had a commitment to making Duke a place of access, opportunity and mutual respect for all” [emphasis added] with the conduct of the Group of 88 (or sympathetic faculty such as Orin Starn, Peter Wood, and Tim Tyson) during the lacrosse case.

Nor did the president display any willingness to consider whether the use of racial preferences in admissions or the obsessive emphasis on certain types of “diversity” in faculty hiring remain tactically wise or morally acceptable in the 21st century world. Once again, the posing of uncomfortable questions was not on Brodhead’s agenda, especially if asking such questions might trigger a faculty revolt.

Instead, the president offered a reflexive defense of “diversity” policies as they have been practiced at Duke (and other elite universities) over the past generation. No surprises there. But the stated motivation for his remarks did raise eyebrows. He selected his topic, he claimed, because of three recent events, the first of which was the “controversy over a piece of unpublished faculty research that appeared to disparage the choice of majors by African-American undergraduates.”

Brodhead thus joined Provost Lange and a host of other senior administrators in publicly criticizing (and in the president’s case, willfully misinterpreting) a piece of research from Duke two professors, Peter Arcidiacono and Kenneth Spenner; and Esteban Aucejo, a Duke graduate student. That paper, as I noted before, used Duke’s own data to show how African-American students (whose admissions test scores were far lower than those of whites or Asian-Americans who enrolled at the university) disproportionately migrated, after arriving at Duke, from majors (the hard sciences, engineering) widely considered as more challenging. As with virtually all other critics of the Arcidiacono, et al., paper, Brodhead did not challenge any of the paper’s data.

Brodhead’s discussion of the paper was nothing short of stunning. After an almost apologetic defense of the principle of academic freedom as applied to faculty research, the president all but seethed with rage when discussing the paper: “I can see why students took offense at what was reported of a professor's work. Generalizations about academic choices by racial category can renew the primal insult of the world we are trying to leave behind—the implication that persons can be known through a group identity that associates them with inferior powers. A further insult was that the paper had been included in an amicus brief submitted by opponents of affirmative action urging the Supreme Court to hear the case I mentioned earlier regarding admissions policies at the University of Texas.”

The last sentence is, perhaps, the most extraordinary of Brodhead’s entire address, and, indeed, one of the most extraordinary statements I have ever seen a university president make. The president of a major research university, in a formal address to his university’s faculty, expressed regret—deeming it an “insult”—that research from his own university’s faculty (research whose accuracy he did not challenge) was included in an amicus brief for a critical case before the Supreme Court.

So much for the idea that a central purpose of a research university is the dissemination of knowledge in pursuit of the truth. The president’s message could not have been clearer: those who dare to pursue research that challenges the (campus) majority’s agenda on race can expect a public shaming—regardless of whether the data those researchers uncover is accurate or fairly presented.

Brodhead concluded his address on a more personal level. “The single front,” said he, “where I myself feel the greatest frustration regards senior leadership positions at Duke.” He noted that among his eight senior administration appointments, he had named two African-Americans, one Asian-American, and one woman. But, he lamented, “the number of women on my team . . . is fewer than I would wish.” And he offered his awareness that “including African Americans in the top academic leadership of this university is a piece of unfinished business.”

If Brodhead’s personal pain about the insufficient “diversity” in the upper ranks of Duke’s administration is as genuine as his Faculty Address rhetoric suggests, an immediate step to address the issue is available to him: He could, today, submit his resignation as Duke president. That move would give Duke’s trustees the opportunity to bring more “diversity” to the school by replacing him with a female or minority leader for the university.

But I strongly suspect that Brodhead’s personal commitment to “diversity” doesn’t quite extend that far. Publicly sliming two members of his faculty is, it seems, so much more satisfying.

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I think that there are two reasons no one wants to talk to you. 1) They're intimidated by the methods used in the paper and don't want to admit that they don't understand them; 2) They don't want to believe that what you say could be true, because it would collapse their view of the world.

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I met with President Brodhead today at his invitation. He knew I was not happy about the speech. He was very nice and stated that he did not see the speech as disparaging my work, nor would he ever publicly do that. That's not how I read the speech, but there are caveats in the speech such as "what was reported" about the research rather than the research itself.

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Sounds like Brodhead. He wants it both ways. Brodhead knows that to openly disparage honest research is an attack on all research, but at the same time, he wants to mollify Karla Holloway and her friends.

The truth is that the remnants of the 88 are the ones really running Duke University. The least productive faculty members are the ones with the most clout, and that really does threaten the well-being of an elite institution.