Archive for December, 2009
The post’s title is a concise and apt description of the skin deep-only diversity obsession.
George Leef, director of research for the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, responds to an article on diversity in The Chronicle of Higher Education, particularly academia’s obsession with it. Widespread in the humanities and social sciences, diversity is making unfortunate headway in at least one school of medicine. Leef says that “Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City has succumbed and now has a three-person Office of Faculty Diversity.” (Source)
He challenges the diversity officer’s implication that the racial/ethnic make-up of the current faculty makes minorities feel less than welcome.
“You have to wonder…how often it happens that medical professionals in one of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities make people feel unwelcome simply because they’re from a different background…The main rationale Dr. Leonard gives for her office is that American medical schools need to ‘model diversity’ but aren’t doing a good enough job of that because black and Hispanic professors comprise only three and four percent respectively of the faculties at American medical schools, less than the percentages of those groups in the general population.”
How would a medical school do a better job of training doctors if the faculty had the “appropriate” percent of minority faculty members? Leef notes the assumption that a “minority” doctor would be better at treating members of his racial/ethnic group, and it extends to medical school professors.
“[T]he assumption that a med school professor who is black or Hispanic knows about the cultural peculiarities of black and Hispanic patients is unfounded. It’s like assuming that every black person is good at basketball or every Hispanic is a devout Catholic.”
Leef notes that there have been “pockets of resistance” to diversity obsession in math and the physical sciences, where there is either a right or wrong answer, with potentially huge consequences. Medicals schools also should resist focusing on group representation and keep the focus on individual competence, because of the “serious repercussions from bad decisions.”
In my non-scientific, anecdotal observations, I notice that standards are dropped to achieve diversity in less rigorous professions. For example, when was the last anyone proposed dropping standards for commercial airline pilots?
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As you probably read, the University of California system (UC) raised fees by 32 percent for fall 2010 admissions. The American Civil Rights Institute’s Ward Connerly, a former UC regent, says he voted against proposals to raise fees for students during his tenure.
“But with each vote I realized that UC was slowly moving toward the day when basic decisions would have to be made about how the university is financed, who can attend it and what the public should expect from the institution. Well, that day has come; and the public can either dodge the issues or face them, and try to craft a new relationship with UC.” (Source)
Connerly says UC is a business operating as though it were a public service enterprise. While popular campuses like Berkeley, LA, and San Diego could get away with raising fees “significantly,” other campuses can’t. UC seeks to hold on to both identities.
“[M]aintaining its public service identity seems to oblige UC to create and maintain its own internal subsidy for students who cannot afford the fees that others pay,” Connerly writes. “For example, a third of every dollar paid by student fees is used to provide financial assistance to students whose family incomes are considered low to moderate. As my nemesis on the Board of Regents, William Bagley, often remarked, this is a tax on families of UC students. As such, I would suggest it ought to be paid by the state taxpayers rather than solely by the families of UC students. Getting rid of this “Robin Hood” fee structure would enable UC to avoid raising its fees by 32 percent just so it can give 33 percent of that 32 percent back to lower-income students. Instead of a 32 percent hike, the recent increase would have been 21 percent.”
Connerly believes taking a market-based approach, similar to that of selective private schools, would be the better option for UC, rather than an institution that accepts government funds.
“When UC becomes a market-based entity, it might be forced to make cuts in certain courses that can no longer be justified. A market-based entity would also do a better job of reducing the time-to-degree.”
But UC likely won’t do it, because it makes too much sense.
Filed under: UC, Ward Connerly | |3 Comments
The One Florida Initiative, a reaction to Ward Connerly’s campaign to end government racial preferences in the state, was an executive order issued by former Governor Jeb Bush barring race-based preferences in government hiring, contracting, and admissions.
“Although generally sympathetic to Connerly’s campaign, Bush worried that Connerly’s constitutional proposal would sharply divide Floridians, create substantial problems for his leadership, and disrupt his efforts to woo black and Hispanic voters into the Republican Party – votes he hoped would secure his brother the presidency in 2000.” (Source)
In an effort to avoid minority backlash, Bush created the “Talented 20″ program as part of One Florida, which guarantees admissions to Florida students graduating in the top 20 percent of their high schools.
The NAACP balked, claiming the plan would reduce the numbers of blacks admitted to state schools. The numbers did decline in the beginning, but steadily increased over the years. However, one huge unintended consequence of the Talented 20 should have been obvious from the beginning: graduation rates for blacks and Hispanics are “dismal” compared to other students.
Minorities in Florida’s state schools are represented well enough, but they’re having trouble graduating. According to the mismatch theory, such a result is expected. To avoid admitting students based on race, state colleges and universities skim off students graduating at the top of their classes, regardless of whether those classes are academically challenging enough. Once admitted to the college or university, the student and the school are not well matched.
How can schools solve the problem? Extra instruction? Less rigorous classes for everyone? How about admitting and rejecting students based on grades and scores?
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Last month, a black firefighter in New Haven named Michael Briscoe decided to sue city hall, claiming the promotions exam had a disparate impact on blacks. No blacks scored high enough to qualify. He contended that giving more weight to the written part of the test over the oral was a disadvantage to blacks. The written portion of the test was weighted 60 percent; the oral 40 percent. Briscoe scored higher on the oral than any other test taker.
After qualified firefighters asked for promotions last month, a group of black firefighters tried to block the move. The group said if New Haven “makes such promotions without inquiring into the exams’ validity, then it is making a race-conscious decision to promote those whites who used their skin color as a central, divisive basis for their lawsuit. Regardless, at this juncture, it is clear that the city has used race as a strawman in all sorts of ways to attempt to benefit itself, to the detriment of others.”
I noted the strange reasoning, including the implication that skin color is not a legitimate basis for a lawsuit. Racial discrimination claims, by definition, are based on allegations that a person or group infringed on the plaintiff’s rights because of the plaintiff’s skin color.
The city’s fire commission approved the promotions anyway. Yesterday, the group filed a motion in federal court yesterday, asking the court to stop the promotions.
Will the legal wrangling in New Haven ever end? Perhaps if the federal judge denies the black firefighters’ motion. Speaking only for myself, personally, me, and no one else, the low scorers should take the loss like men, drop the suits, prepare for the next exam date, and do their best.
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When the dyslexic firefighter scored well enough on an exam to qualify for promotion to lieutenant, he probably never thought it would take six years.
Today, Frank Ricci is vindicated. He, along with 13 other firefighters, have been promoted.
A dozen white firefighters and one Hispanic in New Haven scored high enough on a promotions exam to qualify. No blacks scored high enough to qualify, and the city, fearing disparate impact lawsuits, tossed everyone’s results.
Ricci and the others filed suit, claiming equal protection violations. After a district court judge dismissed Ricci’s case, a three-judge panel of a federal appeals court affirmed the dismissal. Conservative judges on the court sought to have the case re-heard. Judge Jose Cabranes defined the issue this way:
“May a municipal employer disregard the results of a qualifying examination, which was carefully constructed to ensure race-neutrality, on the ground that the results of that examination yielded too many qualified applicants of one race and not enough of another?”
The appeals court declined to hear the case by a vote of 7 to 6. Ricci petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court, and the court heard the case. By a 5-4 vote, the court ruled New Haven had violated Ricci’s rights.
Earlier this month, the firefighters requested promotions, and on December 1, the Board of Fire Commissioners approved the promotions. (Source)
Ricci v. DeStefano sets the tone for future cases. Before employers decide to discriminate against one group to avoid disparate impact liability from another, they must have a “strong basis in evidence” to believe they would be liable. Score disparities alone don’t qualify as a “strong basis in evidence.” New Haven would be liable only if the promotions exam wasn’t job related, consistent with business necessity, or if there was an equally valid, less discriminatory test the city refused to use.
“Fear of litigation alone cannot justify the City’s reliance on race to the detriment of individuals who passed the examinations and qualified for promotions.”
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Glenn Ricketts and Peter Wood, author of Diversity: The Invention of a Concept, address a topic I’ve written about: colleges considering noncognitive factors in the application process for purposes of diversity. Their focus, however, is on commitment to diversity as a requirement for admission.
Ricketts and Wood quote in “Diversi-Oaths: Creedal Admissions in the American University,” a portion of Yale University’s Common Application Online:
“A range of academic interests, personal perspectives, and life experiences adds much to the educational mix. Given your personal background, describe an experience that illustrates what you would bring to the diversity in a college community, or an encounter that demonstrated the importance of diversity to you.”
This “diversity question,” write Ricketts and Wood, “displays a remarkable intellectual slovenliness.” Considering the so-called educational benefits of skin color diversity isn’t a bad thing, but it’s not clear whether these perceived benefits bring students together or raise the quality of education. The desire for education in and of itself is what should bring students together.
Ricketts and Wood believe diversity doctrines do just the opposite: separate students. A student’s potential to diversify the campus seems to trump his individuality, and pushes students to focus on their “pre-chosen identities.”
“They know their ethnic or racial categorization, their socio-economic status, and other such characteristics matter far more to admissions offices than their actual thoughts about who they are…These ‘diversity’ essay questions are never innocent. They are a tool to keep college applicants aligned with the dominant ideology on campus, which continues to favor group categorizations over both individuality and the broader claims of shared community.”
Colleges and universities ask applicants to describe how they’ve “overcome barriers to access opportunities in higher education, evidence of how you have come to understand the barriers faced by others, evidence of your academic service to advance equitable access to higher education for women,” and so on, but what if you have no such story? What if you simply have the grades, scores, and desire to become a doctor, lawyer, or Indian chief?
The question is rhetorical, as institutions of higher education probably are overwhelmingly filled with students who don’t have hard-luck stories or aspire to socially engineer a world where everything is equal. They just want to go to school.
One unintended consequence of including diversity questions on applications is some students may feel pressured to make up or exaggerate hard-luck stories. Will pledging allegiance to skin color diversity and/or having been a victim of racial discrimination become an explicit requirement for admission?
Filed under: Diversity | |Comments off
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