Archive for Diversity
Ann Killenbeck, a professor at the University of Arkansas, offers a fresh perspective on Grutter v. Bollinger, in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the University of Michigan law school’s use of race in admissions was narrowly tailored to further a compelling interest in “obtaining the educational benefits that flow from” a racially diverse student body.
Killenbeck’s article, published in an academic journal, focuses on a rarely discussed aspect of Grutter, which she calls Bakke with teeth. From the press release:
“In Grutter, the court acknowledges that each institution has the right to adopt a mission and policies that embrace diversity as a central element of its educational objectives, Killenbeck said. But the proper use of admission criteria with this objective in mind will succeed only if an institution can show that use of such criteria reflects its mission and that benefits from diversifying its student body are actually occurring. In other words, simply adding admission criteria based on race preference, especially without being able to demonstrate relevant programming or outcomes, does not shield institutions and programs from legal challenges. Killenbeck said she would like to see a shift of perspective in which diversity is defined as the broad spectrum of characteristics, perspectives, values and assumptions associated with personal identity, rather than something that focuses solely on race and ethnicity. She argues that programs and policies that reduce people to a single denominator are unfortunate and shortsighted.
“She also argues, based on social science research, that it is not enough to simply admit a diverse group of students. Rather, institutions must engage in proactive programming designed to ensure that the values associated with diversity are actually realized. That is, what scholars call ’structural diversity,’ simply having the right mix of students, is a first step in pursuing sound educational policies and practices that will benefit all students.”
Former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who wrote the majority opinion in Grutter, raised the legal standard for defending against challenges to racial preferences policies. Under University of California v. Bakke, the landmark racial preferences case before Grutter, schools had more wiggle room to justify the practice. Grutter requires schools to show real, rather than theoretical, educational benefits that justify accepting and denying students based on race.
Did Justice O’Connor intend to raise the legal bar for racial preferences?
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Judah Bellin, a junior at Cornell University, addresses the stigma and academic consequences of racial preferences in the pursuit for skin deep-only diversity.
“The most potent critique of affirmative action is that it brings students to universities they’re unprepared for. As UCLA law professor Richard Sander showed in a comprehensive study of American law schools, the affirmative action regime has forced universities of every caliber to accept minority students with lower standardized test scores and grades than the average of the entering class. This leads to devastating results: Almost half of black law students place in the bottom tenth of their graduating classes. Furthermore, entering black law students were 135 percent more likely than whites to not complete their law degree.
“Worse, even the students who can succeed in these environments are always suspected of benefiting from preferential treatment. Sonia Sotomayor and Clarence Thomas can certainly attest to that.”
Somewhere along the way, the idea of skin color “diversity” took hold and became an all-important goal, one I believe is based on emotionalism and misplaced guilt. What is the basis for the belief that adding more brown faces to the campus produces an educational benefit that justifies lowering standards for owners of those brown faces? FYI, it’s disingenuous to argue that preferences don’t entail lowered standards.
This is how “affirmative action” works in theory: an admissions committee faced with a black and a white applicant with equivalent grades and scores would select the black applicant. (Justifications include remedying past discrimination.) The black applicant is given a special but small advantage over the white applicant, and that advantage is his race.
But that’s not how it actually works. Studies have shown – and common sense dictates – that “affirmative action” admittees have lower grades and scores than their Hispanic, white, and Asian counterparts, and they graduate at lower rates. This indicates a widespread thumb-on-the-scale phenomenon.
Who gains the most from the obsessive quest for skin deep-only diversity?
“We often forget that the argument for diversity is just a little bit presumptuous,” Bellin writes. “Essentially, proponents can often argue something like this: We should bring in disadvantaged or minority students so that we can gain something from them. They’re just pawns in our nice little game of self-awareness. So who really cares about the consequences they face? At least we’re learning.”
My main problem with racial preferences is that the practice gives the government power to make hiring, contracting, and admissions decisions based on race. Once upon a time, that was considered odious. Why is acceptable now? Running a close second is the lowered-standards aspect of racial preferences. If blacks in America want to unburden themselves of the inferior stigma and consequent negative stereotypes, they must take a stand against any government policy that implicitly reinforces that stigma and perpetuates those stereotypes. Racial preferences do both.
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Stories like this are a hoot, and I’m always glad to see a comment section. Common sense injected into obsessive nonsense. Look at all those numbers. Racial bean-counting at its worst.
The freshman class at the University of Georgia at Athens (UGA) is still “mostly white,” (since the U.S. is still mostly white, isn’t this to be expected?) reads the article, but the number of blacks, Hispanics, and Asians (typically a non-preferred minority group) is increasing.
Commenters to the article raise the issue whether UGA uses racial preferences to increase skin deep-only diversity on campus. Does UGA consider race an admissions factor? From the web site:
The proportion of students of color (African American, Latino, Asian American and Native American) at the University of Georgia is small enough that those students are likely to be a “solo minority” or part of a very small group of students, particularly in the small non-lecture-format classes where their contributions to discussion are most valuable. As Gudeman has pointed out, research in social psychology has demonstrated that “a solo is more likely to be objectified and treated as a representative of a category than as a unique person.”
We have a statement from the faculty, posted in the admissions section, implying that a racial minority might feel weird being the only minority in class, because he’s “more likely” to be objectified and perceived as a representative of his racial group, and not as a “unique person.”
Forget about what’s “more likely” to happen. An admissions committee that considers an applicant’s race an admissions qualification definitely is objectifying the minority and treating him as a representative of his group. And why assume a minority’s contributions to the class discussion will be “valuable” based on the color of his skin? Stereotype much? Unbelievable. But they get a pass. Stereotyping is okay when it involves positive traits.
Race neutral alternatives at the University of Georgia have failed to achieve the critical mass of racially and ethnically diverse students to achieve a rich learning environment in our academic community. The University rejects quotas and other mechanical approaches that treat any single factor as a defining feature of an applicant’s file. Nevertheless, it has compelling interest in considering race and ethnicity as one among many factors in consideration for admission.
Nevertheless, it has compelling interest in considering race and ethnicity as one among many factors in consideration for admission.
The answer is yes, UGA considers race an admissions factor. In 2001, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals found UGA’s racial preferences policy unconstitutional. If that’s the case, why is the school still considering race in admissions? Old-fashioned sleight of hand. The court struck down UGA’s point system, as the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the University of Michigan’s undergraduate point system in Gratz v. Bollinger. UGA continues to use race in admissions, based on the court’s ruling in Grutter v. Bollinger.
The problem with the racial preferences policy, aside from the obvious, is the odor left in its wake. Even if a black student was admitted based on his outstanding and competitive record, with no regard whatsoever for his race, he’s still perceived as an “affirmative action” student. It doesn’t matter how wrong or unfair the perception is. That’s the consequence of racial bean-counting polices. Get rid of them and practice race-neutral admissions, and the odor will dissipate.
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The American Civil Rights Institute’s Jennifer Gratz is featured in a story on NPR about “affirmative action,” also known as racial preferences.
The plaintiff in Gratz. v. Bollinger, in which the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the University of Michigan’s use of a racial point system in admissions, told NPR that there “were rumors in high school that the University of Michigan used race in their admissions policy. I remember hearing that and thinking, ‘There’s no way — that can’t be true.’”
Sadly, it was true, and it’s true in colleges and universities across the country.
In Grutter .v Bollinger, the companion case to Gratz, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote that the court expected racial preferences would no longer be necessary 25 years from now. How she came up with that figure is anyone’s guess, but it was just filler. The court found that the government had a “compelling state interest” in racial diversity, and if lowering standards for black students was the way to achieve it, so be it.
The article quotes people on both sides of the so-called debate. John McWhorter says he has no problem with racial preferences, but doesn’t like the lowered expectations the policy fosters.
“What concerns me is that until you get rid of a system that says B-plus is about as well as you have to do, then that’s about as good as all but a few strange shooting stars are going to do…In general, people do as well as they have to. How can black parents know what it is to qualify your student for Yale and Princeton in the way that white and Asian kids can, if black students can get into those schools without their parents having had to learn those sorts of things?”
Preferences proponent Tim Wise gets the last word, calling out the “myth” of quotas.
“The idea that colleges have to have a certain number of black students and certain number of Latino students just isn’t true. But the overwhelming majority of white folks in all the research I’ve seen believe those lies — believe those myths.”
I don’t know what sort of preferences opponents Wise has talked to, but the ones I know don’t make distinctions between racial quotas and lowered standards for blacks. The point is not that schools set quotas; it’s that schools consider race an admissions qualification, quotas or no quotas.
As far as admissions committees are concerned, race serves as a signifier of certain attributes deemed beneficial in the name of skin deep-only diversity. Rather than moving beyond racial stereotypes and assessing the individual as an individual—not as a member of a preferred racial minority group—we allow our government to hold fast to those stereotypes. As long as they “benefit” blacks. That’s not progress. That’s shameful.
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Yesterday, a federal judge temporarily barred the New York City Fire Department (FDNY) from hiring rookie firefighters, because the department used what the court called an exam that discriminates against blacks and Hispanics.
Three years ago, the Department of Justice (DOJ) under George W. Bush filed suit against the FDNY for violating the Civil Rights Act. The FDNY requires all candidates seeking employment, regardless of race, to take an exam that assesses “reading comprehension, problem solving, spatial recognition and applying rules to general concepts.” Blacks disproportionately scored lower on the test than other candidates. Among other things, the DOJ said the department’s “SAT-like questions” didn’t measure an applicant’s firefighting ability.
Last summer, a federal judge ruled that the FDNY discriminated against blacks and Hispanics with an exam used in 1999 and 2002. Earlier this year, the same judge ruled that New York City intentionally discriminated against minorities by continuing to use the exam.
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The American Civil Rights Institute’s Ward Connerly was quoted in a story about the diversity of transfer students to the University of California at San Diego (UCSD). From San Diego Union-Tribune:
UCSD is set to receive a “record number” of transfer students mostly from community colleges, which will increase “diversity” on campus. The director of admissions said “we” don’t factor race into admissions decisions but “recognize that the community college population has a natural diversity…diverse by race, age, income…”
She’s correct on that note, and wouldn’t it be wonderful if diversity of many factors—age, income, geography—were as important to admissions committees as skin color? An excerpt:
“The 2010-11 transfer class will have 82 percent more African Americans that last year, 43 percent more Mexican Americans, 52 percent more Latinos and 75 percent more Native Americans…The number of underrepresented minorities is also up significantly in the freshman class, though not as dramatically as among transfers.”
Connerly, who believes UC should be focusing on community colleges, said “I would say it complies with 209 and I would say it is good educational policy.”
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When I read Senator Jim Webb’s “Diversity and the Myth of White Privilege” article in the Wall Street Journal, my reaction to it was similar to Roger Clegg’s at The Corner. Webb calls for an end to “government-directed diversity programs,” and writes that laws against discrimination should apply to everyone equally.
But he says America still owes a debt to blacks, a group that “despite a veneer of successful people at the very top still experience high rates of poverty, drug abuse, incarceration and family breakup.”
Webb apparently believes the so-called legacy of slavery and Jim Crow are to blame for these social pathologies, and the government must intervene and/or give something to blacks to narrow the disparities. As Clegg notes, Webb doesn’t mention what partly explains social pathologies: out-of-wedlock births.
Only a third of black children in America is born to married parents, and illegitimacy is closely associated with fatherlessness, which itself is correlated with poverty, delinquency, criminality, drug use, and illegitimacy. Family instability exacerbates social pathologies. And generally speaking, a parent has less emotional attachment to and makes a lower financial investment in children he doesn’t live with. That’s a fact of human nature, despite any anecdotes to the contrary.
Webb correctly notes that “affirmative action” was created with descendants of black American slaves in mind, not immigrants, legal or otherwise. Hispanics have already overtaken blacks as the largest racial/ethnic minority in the U.S. Do preferences proponents believe Hispanics, especially first-generation immigrants, should benefit from such policies?
I say let’s end government-sanctioned racial preferences now, and the answer to the question will be irrelevant.
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Abigail Fisher and Rachel Michalewicz are suing the University of Texas (UT) at Austin (Fisher v. University of Texas), alleging racial discrimination in admissions. After losing in district court, the plaintiffs appealed to the 5th Circuit. The Texas Tribune reports that the 5th Circuit will hear arguments next month.
If the plaintiffs lose the case, they may appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. If the court agrees to hear the case, the nine justices will once again grapple with race-based admissions.
The court likely would review its previous decision in Gratz v. Bollinger, in which Jennifer Gratz sued the University of Michigan for racial discrimination in undergraduate admissions. The court ruled that the school’s use of race violated the Equal Protection Clause. The court definitely would look to Grutter v. Bollinger, in which it upheld the University of Michigan law school’s use of race in admissions. Why did the court outlaw preferences in one case and uphold them in another? Michigan’s use of race in law school admissions was relatively subtle compared to undergraduate admissions.
UT uses a so-called holistic approach to admission. It bases admissions decisions on whether applicants graduated in the top 10 percent of their Texas high school graduating classes, where they fall along the socioeconomic continuum, and the percentage of minorities currently enrolled in the schools. The lower court decided this practice was constitutional, based on Grutter.
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Americans of Asian descent are a non-preferred minority. Most of the time, they are not the intended beneficiaries of race-based government policies. Consequently, they face discrimination. For example, Princeton University professor Thomas Espenshade authored a study that revealed black students with 1150s and whites 1460s had the same chance of admission to elite schools as an Asian student with 1600s, top scores.
Russell K. Nieli, who works for and lectures at Princeton, discusses the topic at Minding the Campus:
Asians, unlike blacks and Hispanics, receive no boost in admissions. Indeed, the opposite is often the case, as the quota-like mentality that leads college administrators to conclude they may have “too many” Asians. Despite the much lower number of Asians in the general high-school population, high-achieving Asian students — those, for instance, with SAT scores in the high 700s — are much more numerous than comparably high-achieving blacks and Hispanics, often by a factor of ten or more. Thinking as they do in racial balancing and racial quota terms, college admissions officers at the most competitive institutions almost always set the bar for admitting Asians far above that for Hispanics and even farther above that for admitting blacks.
…
Most elite universities seem to have little interest in diversifying their student bodies when it comes to the numbers of born-again Christians from the Bible belt, students from Appalachia and other rural and small-town areas, people who have served in the U.S. military, those who have grown up on farms or ranches, Mormons, Pentecostals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, lower-middle-class Catholics, working class “white ethnics,” social and political conservatives, wheelchair users, married students, married students with children, or older students first starting out in college after raising children or spending several years in the workforce. Students in these categories are often very rare at the more competitive colleges, especially the Ivy League. While these kinds of people would surely add to the diverse viewpoints and life-experiences represented on college campuses, in practice “diversity” on campus is largely a code word for the presence of a substantial proportion of those in the “underrepresented” racial minority groups.
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You may have read news stories about a case before the U.S. Supreme Court involving the Christian Legal Society (CLS) at the University of California’s Hastings School of Law. The CLS, a group of Christ followers, wants to exclude from membership homosexuals and people who don’t follow Christ.
Although the issue is whether a tax-supported school may deny funds and other benefits to a religious student organization that requires members to agree with the group’s core religious viewpoints, others see a different issue.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, William McGurn notes that Leo Martinez, the law school’s dean, is defending the school’s policy to withhold funds from student organizations not just on religious grounds. Martinez believes that a black student organization receiving funds should be required to admit members of the KKK.
Forcing student groups to admit those who don’t share their beliefs would reduce diversity, says McGurn, which social engineers love so much. “The larger fact is the way that Hastings-style ‘tolerance’ and ‘diversity’ are actually making our campuses less tolerant and less diverse. Dean Martinez helps us see why. If every college group must admit even those who are hostile to its mission and beliefs, the result is nonsense and conformity.”
The libertarian Cato Institute and the Gays & Lesbians for Individual Liberty have submitted briefs in support of the CLS. Both say such groups allow the minority to have a voice. The latter contends that a forced membership policy assures “only majority viewpoints…That is a patently unreasonable way to ‘promote a diversity of viewpoints.’”
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