The Center for Equal Opportunity’s Roger Clegg has a blog post up at Minding the Campus about the Duke study I blogged about on Monday. His is a great title and sums up the main objection nicely:
The study revealed that white students enter college with higher GPAs than black students, and although the gap narrows, the researchers attribute this narrowing to blacks switching to less demanding majors. It’s an important qualitative difference, and undermines the “blacks will catch up” rationale.
An excerpt from Clegg’s post:
There’s not much in it that denies the truth of the paper’s conclusion, but what’s interesting is that the story suggests that many think that researchers should keep such unpleasant facts to themselves:
“The implications and intentions of this research at the hands of our very own prestigious faculty, seemingly without a genuine concern for proactively furthering the well-being of the black community is hurtful and alienating,” wrote the officers of Duke’s Black Student Alliance in an email sent to the state NAACP.
The letter from Nana Asante, president of the alliance, challenged the faculty members involved in the research and the university administration to consider “what image has this … report portrayed to the rest of the country, namely our peer institutions, about Duke and its black students?”
Note the suggestion that that research should not be undertaken by those at a school if the results might turn out to be unpopular at, or unfavorable to, the school. The story concludes:
The BSA officers, in the letter, ask what “acknowledgement or intervention took place, in the best interests of black students” by the university administration when the results of the research were known.
They also extended “an invitation to the authors of this research to engage in a dialogue that addresses our concerns about research’s intent, methodology, analysis and conclusion, in addition to its validity.”
Again, the suggestion seems to be that somehow the administration should have intervened once the study’s results were known, and that researchers need to have the right “intent.”
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