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No Mismatch
Topic Started: Dec 12 2015, 08:31 AM (362 Views)
Quasimodo

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http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/12/mismatch-a-taboo-subject-for-the-msm.php

DECEMBER 11, 2015
“MISMATCH” — A TABOO SUBJECT FOR THE MSM

When Justice Scalia raised the issue of “mismatch” during oral argument in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, the mainstream media acted as if a stink bomb had exploded in the courtroom. Can it really be that serious reporters on legal affairs were unfamiliar with this carefully researched phenomenon?

Maybe so. Gerard Alexander, who teaches politics at the University of Virginia, offers a plausible explanation for the MSM’s apparent ignorance. He tells me that the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times all declined to review Mismatch by Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor, the best known popular exposition of the phenomenon. They did so despite the fact that (1) Taylor is a leading journalist on legal matters, (2) the book dealt with one of the most discussed and debated topics in America, and (3) it was published by Basic Books, among the most high profile and mainstream publishers around.

You would almost think that the arbiters of opinion wanted a black-out on the argument and the data Sander and Taylor presented.

Professor Sander tells us that in addition to the three newspapers cited above, the following MSM mainstays did not review Mismatch: Time, Newsweek, New Yorker, and New York Review of Books.

The leading publications that did review the book were: New Republic, Wall Street Journal, Claremont Review of Books, National Review, Washington Times, Washington Examiner, and American Spectator. You can see, then, how members of the MSM might be in the dark about “mismatch.”

Justice Scalia, it would appear, did more than discuss an issue that was briefed in the Fisher case. He broke an MSM taboo. No wonder wrath is raining down on him.
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Quasimodo

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You would almost think that the arbiters of opinion wanted a black-out on the argument and the data Sander and Taylor presented.


Remember how difficult it was to find a copy of UPI? The first printing was only 13,000 copies; only about 100 copies were sent to bookstores in
the Los Angeles area (a city of millions). That was far, far less than one copy per store.

Was the book "spiked"?

Worse, were its ideas and facts and conclusions spiked?



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Quasimodo

POSTER COMMENT at site:

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John Edward Drury · Georgetown University

Stuart Taylor told me in October that 16 publishers turned down his newest book on campus rape so Encounter Books, a conservative publisher, run by the New Criterion group is the publisher. This from the well regarded author who wrote the expose on the Duke rape fiasco. Conservatives have a tough time getting published and reviewed. (snip)


Surely book publishers in the business to make money; and wouldn't turn down a book certain to at least make back its publishing costs (as would any book by Taylor, just from library purchases alone)? And likely also to return a not inconsiderable profit besides?

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Quasimodo

POSTER COMMENTS at site:

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Very soon, "mismatch" will be known simply as the "m-word," joining the "n-word" as another politically incorrect taboo.


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Telling the truth is a revolutionary act.


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The elite MSM reporters aren't unfamilar. They are lying by omission.





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cks
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Right now Mr.cks going through process of review of a proposal for a book at UC Press. The vetting is slow and one can be left hanging for long periods with then a request for additional documentation that is needed immediately so that all other work is pushed aside to meet the potential publisher's demands.
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Quasimodo

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http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/12/mismatch-six-notes.php
DECEMBER 13, 2015
“MISMATCH”: SIX NOTES


I want to add six notes to Paul Mirengoff’s posts on Justice Scalia’s reference to the phenomenon of “mismatch” created by “affirmative action” in higher education. Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor, Jr., document the phenomenon in Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It. The mainstream media demonstrate studied ignorance of the phenomenon and the book. Paul explains the operative taboo. The taboo is more effectual than the Victorian reticence about sex. The Atlantic nevertheless published a brief excerpt adapted from the book online as “The painful truth about affirmative action.”

Note 1: The operative taboo derives from the the ideology of “diversity.” The ideology of “diversity” has become ubiquitous in American life. NAS President Peter Wood’s Diversity: The Invention of a Concept, provides a natural history of the the ideology. Wood is an anthropologist by training. He puts his training to great use in the book.

Note 2: Wood observes up front: “The concept of diversity in its contemporary social and political sense is fairly new. It was admitted to the union, so to speak, by one man, Justice Lewis Powell, in Junce 1978, in his stand-alone opinion in the Supreme Court case Regents of the University of California v. Bakke.” Powell’s “stand-alone opinion” in Bakke approved “affirmative action” and provides the backdrop to the Fisher case in which Justice Scalia brought up the subject of “mismatch” last week.

Note 3: Here are a few tenets that seem to me at the heart of the ideology of “diversity”: (a) outcomes must be equal among racial and ethnic groups, except when they accrue to the advantage of a racial or ethnic “minority” (including women); (b) disparate outcomes among racial and ethnic groups represent some form of institutional bias to be rectified by government action; (c) all cultures are equal, except for that of the United States, which is eternally guilty of racism and other -isms under (a) and (b) above; (d) the expression of views dissonant with (a) through (c) must be must be stigmatized as “racist” and/or suppressed.

Note 4: To return to Wood for a moment, he observes in his conclusion: “I see no real good in attempting to make [diversity] a principle for reordering our society into a system of privilege based on group rights, group identity, perpetual resentment and self-pity.” That is an observation that looks prophetic in the context of recent events on campuses around the country.

Note 5: Sander and Taylor’s astounding book was published in October 2012. Amazon does not indicate that a paperback edition is forthcoming. You might want to pick up a copy of the book before it becomes a collector’s item.

Sander and Taylor contribute separate prefaces to the book. In his preface Sander refers to “the culture of secrecy and double-talk” with which the subject of the book is enshrouded in academia. The culture of secrecy and double-talk extends well beyond academia.

Sander is a professor of law at UCLA who describes himself as a former community organizer. He became interested in the subject of affirmative action in law schools when he joined the UCLA Law School faculty.

Sander himself wrote chapters 4 and 5 of the book. Chapter 4 discusses Sander’s research on the effects of “affirmative action” (racial preferences) in law schools. Sander’s pioneering account of this research was originally published in the 2005 Stanford Law Review as “A systemic analysis of affirmative action in American law schools.”

Chapter 5 of the book is Sander’s extraordinary account of the lengths to which supporters of law school “affirmative action” went to suppress the publication of his law review article. It is worth the price of admission to the book. Why would the supporters of “affirmative action” seek to suppress the publication of Sander’s law review article? See note 3 supra, as they say.

Note 6: Paul refers to the review of Mismatch that ran in the Claremont Review of Books. The review is by Thomas Sowell, who has been talking and writing about mismatch for many, many years. Sowell’s review is “The perversity of diversity.”

Sowell is a master of exposition; his review gives us mismatch for dummies. It is a brief review and well worth your time if you have any interest in the subject.

Sowell says this about the book: “Sander and Taylor have written an outstanding book that deserves to be read and pondered in many places for many years. They have performed a major service for all those who have an open mind on affirmative action, however modest the number of such people may be—and a still more important service for those who think that black students on campus should be there to advance their own education and lives, not to serve in a role much like that of movie extras, whose presence enhances the scene for others.”

Sowell says this about the taboo that has precluded acknowledgment of the book among the organs of the mainstream media: “[A] highly successful strategy used by academic administrators and other defenders of racial preferences in higher education has been to simply ignore any and all evidence that goes against their policies or the assumptions behind those policies.”

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Quasimodo

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http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/12/diversity-seven-notes.php

DECEMBER 13, 2015
DIVERSITY: SEVEN NOTES

(snip)

Note 3: As Scott points out, the ideology of diversity stems from Justice Lewis Powell’s stand alone opinion in the case of Regents of the University of California v. Bakke. Justice Powell, the swing vote in that case, believed that the only justification for racial preferences in admissions is to further the goal of diversifying the student body.

The ideology of diversity is therefore based on an accident, so to speak. If Powell had not been the swing vote, or if he rejected racial preferences altogether, or if he had fastened on to another justification, the diversity industry would not exist.

For example, suppose Powell had upheld preferences based as a remedy or reparation for past discrimination against blacks. No one would be talking about how many black students it takes to achieve “critical mass,” or about “qualitative diversity” — i.e., what kind of blacks a college must admit to give other students the full benefits of diversity, or about any other such stereotypical and demeaning topics. Instead, “experts” would be analyzing the extent of past discrimination in the state where the university is located, purporting to measure its present effects, and so forth.

(snip)

Note 5: Few would deny that some racial diversity in a student body is worthwhile. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say they want to see African-American students nearly vanish from elite college campuses.

But it’s easy to question whether a given level of African-American representation in a student body is necessary to achieve diversity as the concept was always understood (see Notes 1 and 2). Stated differently, it’s probably impossible to show objectively that the levels universities strive for are necessary for this purpose.

Attempts to do so, for example by analyzing black representation on a classroom-by-classroom basis, descend into farce. Why must there be a black student in, say, a physics class? What, Chief Justice Roberts wanted to know, is the unique black perspective on physics?

Why, for that matter, is a black needed in any particular class? It would be terrible to attend college and never hear from a black student. But where’s the need to hear from one on the subject of Charles Dickens, David Hume, or the Catholic Reformation? And what if the black student in that class doesn’t speak up?

Note 6: Given the futility of proving a diversity-based need for admitting the number of blacks universities desire, administrators rely on deference to their judgments. The Supreme Court has been willing (at least for a 25 year period, half of which has now expired) to defer to the judgment that diversity serves an important educational purpose. But it is less willing to defer to judgments about whether the racial preferences used to attain this purpose are well-tailored to meet it.

This leaves administrators in a tough spot. It was clear from the responses to question by Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito during the oral argument in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin that the University hadn’t conducted the kinds of analyses needed to satisfied searching “means-ends” scrutiny. When Justice Kennedy brought up the possibility of a remand so that evidence could be presented to address questions like those raised by Roberts and Alito, the University’s lawyer made it clear enough that there is nothing much to add to the record.

Note 7: Courts should not defer to university of administrators when it comes to diversity. For one thing, the ideology of diversity is a contrivance — a litigation-driven yarn developed due to the happenstance of Justice Powell’s opinion in Bakke. (See Note 3).

That aside, administrators have repeatedly demonstrated their bad faith. For example, they suppress data about the scope and impact of their preferences and often ostracize faculty who attempt to point out the seriousness of the problem of mismatch produced by the preferences.

Administrators have also been known to grant secret preferences outside of their regular preferential admissions regime. According to Hans von Spakovsky and Elizabeth Slattery, in Fisher the University of Texas concealed the existence of certain preferences from the court during litigation.

As Thomas Sowell says, in the quotation with which Scott concludes his post, “a highly successful strategy used by academic administrators and other defenders of racial preferences in higher education has been to simply ignore [note: or conceal] any and all evidence that goes against their policies or the assumptions behind those policies.” It’s time for the Supreme Court to render this strategy unsuccessful and to put strike down the racially discriminatory policies it supports.

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Quasimodo

POSTER COMMENTS on the above article:

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I always found it curious why the focus was on admission rates and never on graduation rates. "Mismatch" helps explain that. Also, Mr Sowell's comment about how Blacks play the "role much like that of movie extras, whose presence enhances the scene for others” is an useful analogy as to what diversity is really all about.


Quote:
 

Daniel Kleitman · Cornell University
I remember the 1940s when the "diversity" notion got started. It was not the pleasant notion of attracting people from all over. It was administrators response to the heavy influx of Jewish applicants mostly from metropolitan New York, who were highly qualified, yet were distasteful to the old elites. An applicant satisfied the "diversity" criterion by being non-Jewish. There were not mere slight preferences. There were, in some elite schools, quotas on the number of Jewish applicants accepted, and this was particularly so in Medical Schools. Once the quota was reached further Jewish applicants had no chance of admission independent of their qualifications. The desire for students from Wyoming was an afterthought, intended to give justification for this religious discrimination.


Robert Lee
Fast foreward to the present and now it's Asians that must score much higher than their white counterparts to enter elite universities. A minority penalized by its academic success.



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On any campus that offers gender or minority studies majors, diversity is meaningless. Whether intentional or not, such majors are college versions of "separate but equal" public schools.
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Duke parent 2004
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Quasimodo
Dec 13 2015, 10:44 AM
Quote:
 
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/12/mismatch-six-notes.php
DECEMBER 13, 2015
“MISMATCH”: SIX NOTES


I want to add six notes to Paul Mirengoff’s posts on Justice Scalia’s reference to the phenomenon of “mismatch” created by “affirmative action” in higher education. Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor, Jr., document the phenomenon in Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It. The mainstream media demonstrate studied ignorance of the phenomenon and the book. Paul explains the operative taboo. The taboo is more effectual than the Victorian reticence about sex. The Atlantic nevertheless published a brief excerpt adapted from the book online as “The painful truth about affirmative action.”

Note 1: The operative taboo derives from the the ideology of “diversity.” The ideology of “diversity” has become ubiquitous in American life. NAS President Peter Wood’s Diversity: The Invention of a Concept, provides a natural history of the the ideology. Wood is an anthropologist by training. He puts his training to great use in the book.

Note 2: Wood observes up front: “The concept of diversity in its contemporary social and political sense is fairly new. It was admitted to the union, so to speak, by one man, Justice Lewis Powell, in Junce 1978, in his stand-alone opinion in the Supreme Court case Regents of the University of California v. Bakke.” Powell’s “stand-alone opinion” in Bakke approved “affirmative action” and provides the backdrop to the Fisher case in which Justice Scalia brought up the subject of “mismatch” last week.

Note 3: Here are a few tenets that seem to me at the heart of the ideology of “diversity”: (a) outcomes must be equal among racial and ethnic groups, except when they accrue to the advantage of a racial or ethnic “minority” (including women); (b) disparate outcomes among racial and ethnic groups represent some form of institutional bias to be rectified by government action; (c) all cultures are equal, except for that of the United States, which is eternally guilty of racism and other -isms under (a) and (b) above; (d) the expression of views dissonant with (a) through (c) must be must be stigmatized as “racist” and/or suppressed.

Note 4: To return to Wood for a moment, he observes in his conclusion: “I see no real good in attempting to make [diversity] a principle for reordering our society into a system of privilege based on group rights, group identity, perpetual resentment and self-pity.” That is an observation that looks prophetic in the context of recent events on campuses around the country.

Note 5: Sander and Taylor’s astounding book was published in October 2012. Amazon does not indicate that a paperback edition is forthcoming. You might want to pick up a copy of the book before it becomes a collector’s item.

Sander and Taylor contribute separate prefaces to the book. In his preface Sander refers to “the culture of secrecy and double-talk” with which the subject of the book is enshrouded in academia. The culture of secrecy and double-talk extends well beyond academia.

Sander is a professor of law at UCLA who describes himself as a former community organizer. He became interested in the subject of affirmative action in law schools when he joined the UCLA Law School faculty.

Sander himself wrote chapters 4 and 5 of the book. Chapter 4 discusses Sander’s research on the effects of “affirmative action” (racial preferences) in law schools. Sander’s pioneering account of this research was originally published in the 2005 Stanford Law Review as “A systemic analysis of affirmative action in American law schools.”

Chapter 5 of the book is Sander’s extraordinary account of the lengths to which supporters of law school “affirmative action” went to suppress the publication of his law review article. It is worth the price of admission to the book. Why would the supporters of “affirmative action” seek to suppress the publication of Sander’s law review article? See note 3 supra, as they say.

Note 6: Paul refers to the review of Mismatch that ran in the Claremont Review of Books. The review is by Thomas Sowell, who has been talking and writing about mismatch for many, many years. Sowell’s review is “The perversity of diversity.”

Sowell is a master of exposition; his review gives us mismatch for dummies. It is a brief review and well worth your time if you have any interest in the subject.

Sowell says this about the book: “Sander and Taylor have written an outstanding book that deserves to be read and pondered in many places for many years. They have performed a major service for all those who have an open mind on affirmative action, however modest the number of such people may be—and a still more important service for those who think that black students on campus should be there to advance their own education and lives, not to serve in a role much like that of movie extras, whose presence enhances the scene for others.”

Sowell says this about the taboo that has precluded acknowledgment of the book among the organs of the mainstream media: “[A] highly successful strategy used by academic administrators and other defenders of racial preferences in higher education has been to simply ignore any and all evidence that goes against their policies or the assumptions behind those policies.”

In September of 2006 I sent the following e-mail to David Skorton, then the president of Cornell:

Dear President Skorton:

Your column in today's Cornell Daily Sun (http://www.cornellsun.com/node/18389) reinforces my decision, and surely that of many other alumni, to give money to institutions other than those that have made a fetish of pursuing "diversity."

Several years ago I engaged your Robert Harris in a pointed, though cordial, debate on just what diversity should mean at Cornell. I posed this simple question, to which I am still awaiting an answer: If some minority groups are "underrepresented" at Cornell, are there not others that are "overrepresented"? What, then, are Cornell's plans for dealing with those "overrepresented" groups? Has Cornell begun planning to reduce the percentage of its student body composed of Jews and Asian-Americans? Surely these two groups represent larger percentages of the student body than they do of the American population, would you not agree?

The mere posing of such questions should embarrass you and your diversity minions. As the notable black economist Thomas Sowell has amply documented, there has never been a society in which proportionate representation of all minority groups in occupations or institutions has been realized--or could be realized without impairing freedom, excellence, and prosperity. Where is the cry for "diversity" in the National Basketball Association?

Later in your article you write: "As I stressed in my previous Daily Sun column, political and intellectual diversity is another area of great importance to the well-being of our university." This is the only diversity worth your time and attention. And only when it becomes apparent to me that Cornell pays more attention to what its students and faculty say and write than what they look like will I again own up to having taken my degree there.

If you have not yet read Diversity: The Invention of a Concept, by Peter Wood, I'll happily send you a copy, even though in a technical sense you might then be able to say that you've persuaded me to send a few bucks to my alma mater.

To his credit, Skorton thanked me for my note and assured me he had ordered Woods book and would read it.. Alas, Cornells take on diversity these past nine years is consistent with Skortons never having read that book.
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Quasimodo

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http://www.dukechronicle.com/article/2015/12/dukes-early-decision-acceptance-rate-falls-to-record-low-23-5-percent-for-class-of-2020

Duke's early decision acceptance rate falls to record-low 23.5 percent for Class of 2020
Thursday, December 10

Early decision applicants will receive their decisions Thursday at 7 p.m.
Early decision applicants will make up 48 percent of Duke's Class of 2020—the same proportion of students admitted through the early decision process as last year.

This Fall, 3,455 students applied to Duke early, which represents an 11 percent increase from last year and a record high for the University. Of those applicants, who will be able to view their admissions decisions at 7 p.m. Thursday, 813 will be accepted. This acceptance rate—23.5 percent—is the lowest the University has posted in the early decision process, said Dean of Undergraduate Admissions Christoph Guttentag. The early decision acceptance rates for the Class of 2019 and Class of 2018 were 26 percent and 25 percent, respectively.

“This appears to be academically the strongest group of students admitted early that we’ve had,” Guttentag said. “It’s a more diverse and more interesting group than in past years. I think it’s going to be a terrific foundation for the Class of 2020.”

He noted that students admitted through early decision were more socioeconomically diverse than in past years—48 percent of admitted students indicated they would apply for financial aid, compared to 43 percent last year.

Critics of early decision point out that because the process is binding, applicants are not able to compare financial aid packages from different schools and may be deterred from applying. Guttentag noted that although this is gradually changing, the early decision pool remains less diverse than the regular decision pool.

“That’s one of the reasons we don’t admit more students through the early decision process,” Guttentag said. “Diversity of students is incredibly important to us, and we don’t want to feel limited by having admitted too many students through the early decision process.”

In recent years, as the number of early decision candidates has grown, so has the number of students admitted. Early decision applicants made up 38 percent of the Class of 2016, 44 percent of the Class of 2017, 47 percent of the Class of 2018 and 48 percent of the Class of 2019.

Guttentag said that at this point, the percentage of students admitted early will likely stay near where it is.

“We think it’s appropriate to have at least half of the class or a little more chosen through the regular decision process,” he said. “Unless something significant changes, I would prefer to keep the percentage of students admitted early at or under 50 percent.”

He explained that no single factor can explain the increased number of early decision applicants, attributing it partly to a general rise in interest in the early decision process from students applying to Duke and its peer institutions.

“The admissions process in general has become more selective,” Guttentag said. “More students applying to Duke and schools like it are deciding their best chance is to apply ED. And we’re the beneficiary of it."

This year, 37 percent of those admitted early were students of color—which ties the Class of 2018 for the record. Guttentag said 66 admitted students are black, 70 are Latino/a, 158 are Asian and five are Native American. Nine percent of admitted students are international.

[IE, as persons, these admittees don't count; only the group to which they belong. They have lost their personhood and become statistics.]

The states most highly represented are California, New York and North Carolina—with students from those three states making up 31 percent of the admitted applicants.

Guttentag also noted that the early acceptance rate was slightly higher for applicants to Pratt than for applicants to Trinity.

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kbp

Good thread!
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From the Duke Chronicle article of December 10 posted above by Quasi:

This year, 37 percent of those admitted early were students of color—which ties the Class of 2018 for the record. Guttentag said 66 admitted students are black, 70 are Latino/a, 158 are Asian and five are Native American. Nine percent of admitted students are international.

A few weeks ago I saw a notice from Cornell in which it, too, boasted of a record percentage for the new freshman class of students of color.”. Not long ago the universities preferred using, perhaps out of embarrassment, the expression underrepresented minorities.”. So, it appears it will take another ruling from the Supreme Court to knock these smug progressives from their perches.

Sure, were told by the affirmative-action apologists, diversity means so much more than skin color or ethnicity.. Remember all that huzzah about the comparable legitimacy of pursuing tuba players for the marching band?. Nowadays those players had better be students of color!
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Quasimodo

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http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/12/how_a_raceneutral_admissions_policy_will_promote_minorities_success.html

December 16, 2015
How a Race-Neutral Admissions Policy Will Promote Minorities' Success

As a college professor, one of my duties was to advise undergraduate students. I recall one student in particular, an intelligent African-American who was nonetheless earning mediocre grades, semester after semester. When I suggested that, as bright as she was, she could do better, she responded: "Why should I? I'm going to get a good job when I graduate, no matter what."

Long before she arrived at college in the late 1970s, this student had figured out how to game the system. She had been passed along through high school and college, and she expected a good job with regular promotions regardless of her performance.

As I thought about it, I realized that Susan was acting in a rational manner. The system was bending over backwards to ensure that she succeeded, and she was doing just what was expected of her. In her position, I might have done the same thing.

The problem wasn't Susan; it was an academic system that excused and encouraged failure. No matter how poorly Susan performed, the system was determined to advance her.

This system is damaging to minority students like Susan and to society. Susan would never gain the reward of taking on mental challenges and succeeding on her own merits, and society would be denied the full contributions of a talented woman.

Susan went on to graduate, and she received an excellent job offer at a government research facility. I do not know how well Susan performed in her position, but I do know that she was not as prepared as she might have been.

Whether this sad state of affairs should continue is the matter now before the Supreme Court as it revisits Fisher v. University of Texas. In that 7-1decision, Justice Kennedy wrote that the Fifth Circuit appeals court in the Fisher case had failed to apply the burden of "strict scrutiny" as set forth in Grutter v. Bollinger before considering race as a factor in admissions. The lower court's ruling in the Fisher case was vacated, and the case was remanded to the lower court, which then ruled once again in favor of the university. At this point, the Supreme Court agreed to hear Ms. Fisher's appeal of the Fifth Circuit decision.

Now the appellant, Abigail Fisher, has brought the case to the Supreme Court once again on the grounds that the race-based policy that denied her admission in 2008 has not been remedied. At this point, the Court has the opportunity to make things right by ruling, once and for all, that racial preferences have no part in college admissions (or in any other arena of life, for that matter).

The University of Texas at Austin, seconded by the Obama administration, would seem to be arguing implicitly that the goal of racial diversity overrides the constitutional right of equality under the Fourteenth Amendment.

[Duke has supported this with an amicus brief.]

The Austin campus already grants automatic admission to the top 7% of students in Texas high school graduating classes as a means of supporting diversity. While not explicitly race-based, this policy grants admission to many minority students who would not be admitted on their merits. But the university argues that the top 7% rule doesn't go far enough.

In the words of the university's president, Gregory L. Fenves, "the risk of having fewer students from underrepresented groups … will perpetuate an environment in which no student derives the benefits of diversity." The statement seems misguided in two respects. First, it begins by categorizing students into "groups," which is to say by race, a practice that violates the spirit and letter of the Constitution. The Fourteenth Amendment states that no state "shall deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

The equal protection of the laws includes the right to be considered, without prejudice, for admission to state universities funded by the taxes of all citizens. It is nonsensical to suppose that the Fourteenth Amendment was intended to support racial preferences in college admissions. It is to Justice Clarence Thomas's great credit that, in his concurring opinion in Fisher v. University of Texas, he argued this very point. The value of diversity is not by any means great enough to override the Constitution.

Supporters of racial preference do not often address the Fourteenth Amendment. They speak in terms that suggest the overriding importance of diversity. But is diversity, in and of itself, an ultimate and overriding value? And does it matter by what means this diversity is achieved?

Clearly, it does. Preferential admission on the basis of race violates the rights of non-minority students who have worked long and hard to gain admission to the nation's leading universities. This in and of itself is reason enough to strike down Fisher and replace it with a race-blind admissions policy.

But preferential admission also damages the very students it is intended to help. I have no doubt that administrators such as those at Austin are sincere in their goal of promoting diversity on campus. But to grant preference to one candidate over another simply on the basis of one's skin color is degrading and demoralizing. It promotes the kind of apathy that I saw in Susan 35 years ago. The fact that she was passed along, and knew that she had been, cannot have been helpful in her later development. And this is exactly why the policy is damaging to students at all universities that employ racial preference in admissions.

Knowing that she will gain admission regardless of her record, a minority student is not as likely to work to her maximum potential in high school. By the time she arrives at the university, she has already adopted the mindset of entitlement based on race. That mindset will undermine her studies in college and her job performance afterward. Working hard to gain admission based on merit would prove far more beneficial.

There are those, including some arguing the Fisher case on the side of the University of Texas, who believe that minority students are incapable of competing on a level playing field with others. It is astounding that this view, that minority students are less capable than others, is held by the very persons who insist that they are acting on the behalf of those same minorities.

The only sensible position, at Texas and all other universities, is to insist that minority candidates for admission are equally capable and that they should be evaluated by the same standards as all others. If this results in a temporary drop in the numbers of minority students enrolling, this will be to the long-term benefit of other minority candidates who will then apply themselves to their fullest in high school, knowing that they will be required to meet a neutral standard.

Once Fisher has been reversed and replaced with a race-neutral admissions policy, students like Susan will be rewarded with the knowledge that they have earned admission to the colleges of their choice. With that knowledge, minority students can take pride in their accomplishments in high school and college, and they can enter the workplace on a truly equal footing with others.
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Quasimodo

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http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/261140/attacking-truth-thomas-sowell

ATTACKING THE TRUTH
Why affirmative action mismatchs students and hurts everyone.
December 16, 2015 Thomas Sowell

(snip)

I became painfully aware of this problem more than 40 years ago, when I was teaching at Cornell University, and discovered that half the black students there were on some form of academic probation.

These students were not stupid or uneducable. On the contrary, the average black student at Cornell at that time scored at the 75th percentile on scholastic tests. Their academic qualifications were better than those of three-quarters of all American students who took those tests.

Why were they in trouble at Cornell, then? Because the average Cornell student in the liberal arts college at that time scored at the 99th percentile. The classes taught there — including mine — moved at a speed geared to the verbal and mathematical level of the top one percent of American students.

The average white student would have been wiped out at Cornell.


But the average white student was unlikely to be admitted to Cornell, in the first place. Nor was a white student who scored at the 75th percentile.

That was a "favor" reserved for black students.
This "favor" turned black students who would have been successful at most American colleges and universities into failures at Cornell.

None of this was peculiar to Cornell. Black students who scored at the 90th percentile in math had serious academic problems trying to keep up at M.I.T., where other students scored somewhere within the top 99th percentile.

Nearly one-fourth of these black students with stellar qualifications in math failed to graduate from M.I.T., and those who did graduate were concentrated in the bottom tenth of the class.

There were other fine engineering schools around the country where those same students could have learned more, when taught at a normal pace, rather than at a breakneck speed geared to students with extremely rare abilities in math.


Justice Scalia was not talking about sending black students to substandard colleges and universities to get an inferior education. You may in fact get a much better education at an institution that teaches at a pace that you can handle and master. In later life, no one is going to care how fast you learned something, so long as you know it.

Mismatching students with educational institutions is a formula for needless failures. The book "Mismatch," by Sander and Taylor is a first-rate study of the hard facts. It shows, for example, that the academic performances of black and Hispanic students rose substantially after affirmative action admissions policies were banned in the University of California system.

Instead of failing at Berkeley or UCLA, these minority students were now graduating from other campuses in the University of California system. They were graduating at a higher rate, with higher grades, and now more often in challenging fields like math, science and technology.

Do the facts not matter to those who are denouncing Justice Scalia? Does the actual fate of minority students not matter to the left, as much as their symbolic presence on a campus?

(snip)

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Quasimodo

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http://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2015/12/15/attacking-the-truth-part-ii-n2093670

Attacking the Truth: Part II
Thomas Sowell | Dec 15, 2015

The case currently before the U.S. Supreme Court, involving racial double standards in admissions to the University of Texas at Austin, has an Alice-in-Wonderland quality that has been all too common in other Supreme Court cases involving affirmative action in academia, going all the way back to 1978.

Plain hard facts dissolve into rhetorical mysticism in these cases, where evasions of reality have been the norm.

One inconvenient reality is that racial double standards by government institutions are contrary to the "equal protection of the laws" prescribed by the 14th Amendment to the constitution. Therefore racial double standards must be called something else -- whether "holistic" admissions criteria or a quest for the many magical benefits of "diversity" that are endlessly asserted but never demonstrated.

Such mental gymnastics are not peculiar to the Supreme Court of the United States.

I encountered the same evasive language in other countries with group preference programs, during the years when I was doing research for my book "Affirmative Action Around the World." This was one of the sadder examples of the brotherhood of man.

When the courts in India tried to rein in some of the more extreme group quota policies in academia, that only inspired more ingenuity by university officials, who came up with more subjective admissions criteria.

At one medical school in India's state of Tamil Nadu, those criteria included extracurricular activities, "aptitude" and "general abilities" -- as determined by interviews that lasted approximately three minutes per applicant. The ratings on these vague, wholly subjective criteria could then be used to offset some students' academic deficiencies, and thus preserve group quotas de facto.

Another common feature of group preference policies in various countries in different parts of the world is the illusion that these preferences can be confined to some transitional time period, after which the preferences will fade away.

Even in countries where a time frame was specified at the outset -- as in Pakistan, India and Malaysia, for example -- the preferences have persisted for generations past those cutoff dates. Yet the Supreme Court of the United States has repeatedly indulged in the same illusion of transitional group preferences.

Such preferences have not only extended in time, they have spread to more activities and more groups. In India, it was declared that preferential treatment in the academic admissions process would end there, and not extend to treatment of the preferred groups once they were students in the university.

Yet preferential grading of students admitted with lower qualifications became so widespread in India that these grades acquired the name "grace marks." In Malaysia, committees were authorized to adjust grades to enable the preferred Malay students to be -- or to seem -- more comparable to the non-preferred Chinese students.

In the days of the Soviet Union, professors were pressured to give higher grades to Central Asian students. In New Zealand, softer courses in Maori studies achieved similar results. In the United States, easy ethnic studies courses serve the same purpose. When I taught at Brandeis University, many years ago, an academic administrator confided to me that one of his chores was phoning professors to see if they would "reconsider" failing grades given to minority students.

Often the rationale for group preferences is to help the less fortunate. But, in countries where hard evidence is available, it is often the more fortunate members of less fortunate groups who get the bulk of the benefits. These beneficiaries can even be more fortunate than most of the people in the country at large.

India's constitution, like the American constitution, has an amendment prescribing equal treatment. But in India that amendment also spells out exceptions for particular groups. In the United States, the Supreme Court has taken on the role of creating exceptions to the 14th Amendment.

Many lofty verbal evasions are necessary, in order to keep the American people from catching on to what they are really doing when they claim to be merely applying the laws and the Constitution.



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