Roger Clegg

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:

• No Research, Please, Unless It Helps Our Cause

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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Did you know that earlier this month, the Obama administration released two documents to help taxpayer-supported schools admit individuals based on the color of their skin? I suppose a better question is, do you care? If you don’t, you should. In 2011, we’re still allowing our government to discriminate against some and prefer others on account of race.

Although the Civil Rights Act of 1964 states that no individual “in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving” taxpayers’ money, we the people continue to fund programs and activities that violate the law.

Despite clear and plain language to the contrary, our U.S. Supreme Court has interpreted the law to allow racial discrimination in government. Eight years ago, the court upheld the University of Michigan law school’s use of race as a “plus” factor in admissions in Grutter v. Bollinger. As long as a school’s racial discrimination policy is “narrowly tailored” to further the state’s “compelling governmental interest” of increasing brown faces on campus, the court reasoned, it’s okay. With a wink-nod to law, the court contended that schools must engage in “serious, good faith consideration of workable, race-neutral alternatives” before considering race.

According to the court and various “experts,” obtaining a “critical mass” of brown people beyond a few tokens is important for “cross-racial” understanding and breaking down racial stereotypes…you know the kind of stereotypes that deem brown people so unique as to justify racial discrimination to pump up their numbers. These exotic brown people think differently from non-brown people, so everybody benefits when brown people walk among them, sharing their cultures, ideas, and viewpoints.

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The Washington Post published Roger Clegg’s long letter to the editor in response to hiring more Hispanic teachers:

“The gist of the Nov. 16 news article ‘In search of Hispanic teachers‘ was that, because the number of Hispanic students is growing, Prince George’s County public schools and school systems elsewhere want to hire more Hispanic teachers. This is untenable as a matter of both law and logic.

“Federal civil-rights statutes and the Constitution forbid hiring teachers with an eye on race or ethnicity. The Supreme Court has expressly rejected the notion that faculty racial percentages should mirror student-body racial percentages (Hazelwood School District v. United States, 1977), as well as the ‘role model’ justification for faculty discrimination (Wygant v. Jackson Board of Education, 1986). As Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. wrote in the latter case, ‘Carried to its logical extreme, the idea that [minority] students are better off with [minority] teachers could lead to the very system the Court rejected in Brown v. Board of Education.’

“Nor can the fact that many Hispanic students may need teachers who can speak Spanish justify a preference for Hispanic teachers. Many Hispanic teachers do not speak Spanish, and many non-Hispanic teachers do; so if the aim is to hire teachers who can speak Spanish, it makes no sense to hire on the basis of language stereotyping.”

Stereotyping is what racial preferences are all about. Positive stereotyping is that which “benefits” the minority, like “good” discrimination. Racial preference policies presume that an individual’s skin color endows him with certain qualities that are so important as to justify race-based hiring or admissions. If the goal is to acquire more Spanish-speaking teachers, as Clegg notes, the school doesn’t have to prefer Hispanics over non-Hispanics. But the goal likely has more to do with ethnicity than the ability to speak Spanish. The “speak Spanish” requirement or preference is code for Hispanic. Only the dull, the willfully ignorant, and the dishonest will miss it.

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