"American Diversity" class insufficiently heartwarming for some Wisconsin parents.

Daily Mail brings news of a local high school where kids were taught that "minorities had historically been oppressed by white people."

According to handouts..., 'white privilege' in the class was defined as a 'set of advantages that are believed to be enjoyed by white people beyond those commonly experienced by non-white people in the same social, political, and economic spaces...'....

[One] parent became alarmed after seeing the handouts provided to her 18-year-old son... “I felt it was indoctrination,” she said. “This is a radical left agenda and ideology that is now embedded in our school.”

I hate the use of schools for to indoctrinate children, but what exactly is the problem here? The students should be taught American history, and racial oppression is a big part of telling the story fairly and accurately. Maybe the name of the class — "American Diversity" — is misleading, in that it suggests a happy rainbow. That said, I'm not surprised to see parents fretting that the teachers are doing political indoctrination. I understand and share this mistrust.

"I haven't been a black conservative since 1995..."

Glenn Loury talks about people he's known for 40 years who won't say hello, who won't look him in the eye because he USED TO BE a black conservative. USED TO BE! John McWhorter talks about those who think "it would be wrong to even print my name. They think of me as Satan. And that's just how it's been."



Much later in the diavlog, Loury and McWhorter weigh in on the affirmative action case that's pending in the Supreme Court. "Would you think it was a good thing if the Supreme Court outlawed racial preferences as we knew them?" McWhorter takes the "not nuanced" position that racial preferences should be proclaimed "obsolete." (Loury disagrees.)

Madison loses $4.9 million in state aid to schools as Madison kids opt to attend schools in other districts.

The state has an open enrollment policy, so you don't have to go to school in the district where you reside. You'd think students from outside of Madison would choose to enroll here. (Good lord! What property taxes we pay here! I just wrote a check for nearly $15,000.) Why is Madison a school district to flee — as more than 1,041 students have?

... Madison lost the equivalent of 3.8 percent of its student population to other public schools, not counting those who transferred into the district....

According to the district report, those leaving Madison are disproportionately white and largely come from attendance areas that border other suburban school districts. About 70 percent of students leaving are white; about 45 percent of the district population is white....

For years the district blocked many student transfer requests to preserve racial balance at schools. The School Board ended the practice in February 2008 in response to a federal court ruling. Transfers out have steadily increased since then.

A 2009 survey of families opting to leave the district found that more than 60 percent mentioned "environmental issues" related to safety, drugs, alcohol and bullying in the schools....

In Madison. Can you figure that out?

ADDED: White flight, Madison style.

"Students told to disavow 'American-ness, maleness, whiteness, heterosexuality.'"

Asserts a headline at The College Fix that's getting a lot of attention right now. See Memeorandum and Instapundit. But the text, even as it tries to stir up our outrage, does not support the assertion:

A political science professor at Butler University asks students to disregard their “American-ness, maleness, whiteness, heterosexuality, middle-class status” when writing and speaking in the classroom – a practice the school’s arts and sciences dean defended as a way to negate students’ inherent prejudices.

Disregard? The headline said "disavow." There's a big difference between disavowing something and disregarding it.  But "disregard" isn't even the teacher's word. What is the teacher's word? I'm guessing, from reading this far, that the teacher would like students to become aware that their attitudes and opinions come from their own perspective and to enlarge their field of vision.

The syllabus of the class, called Political Science 201: Research and Analysis, goes on to ask students “to write and speak in a way that does not assume American-ness, maleness, whiteness, heterosexuality, middle-class status, etc. to be the norm.” It is taught by a black, female professor.

So "do not assume"... It doesn't say "disavow" or "disregard." It says do not assume. Do not assume that do not assume means more than do not assume. 

The writer at The College Fix, a student at Butler, says he "dropped that politically correct political science class."

Clearly, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Butler University believes its students were raised as racist and misogynist homophobes who have grown to harbor many prejudices, a stance that is both offensive and hostile to any student’s ability to learn.

Now, I don't see the evidence that the teacher deserves this harsh judgment, but I believe the student really did experience her expression in this very negative way. It's easy to point at the probable and amusing irony: He read the syllabus from the perspective of a white, middle-class, heterosexual, American male. Maybe he'd benefit from experimenting with reading it from different perspectives. The teacher said do not assume and he assumed a lot (as far as I can tell). He assumed that she assumed that the students were racist, sexist homophobes. He was afraid she thought that and afraid she wouldn't be fair or that he couldn't learn very much from her.

That's where the teacher failed. She didn't anticipate the way her message would be perceived by incoming students. She repelled this student. And there's the other irony: She was not — to use the word she seems to treasure — inclusive.

"So what you're saying is that what counts is race above all.... You want underprivileged of a certain race and privileged of a certain race. So that's race."

Said Justice Anthony Kennedy at during the oral argument over the the University of Texas affirmative action policy. UT, following state law, automatically admits everyone who graduates from a Texas high school in the top 10%, a colorblind policy that produces a certain amount of racial diversity, especially since there are many high schools in Texas that have a very high proportion of black or Hispanic students.

So why does UT do any additional affirmative action as it fills up the portion of the entering class not admitted through the 10% program? You've already got a lot of diversity, so why do you need more? The additional affirmative action is precisely to bring in privileged black and Hispanic students, that is, the black and Hispanic students who did not attend racially isolated schools. If white students get too many of the top 10% spots at those schools, then the 10% program does not bring enough of these minority students into UT.

The university says... that the highest-ranked students at a disadvantaged school have lower SAT scores than some in the middle of the pack at a more competitive suburban high school. UT's affirmative-action program aims to open doors for minority applicants from middle-class or professional families. Such students can "help dispel stereotypical assumptions…which actually may be reinforced" by minorities admitted only because of the top-10% plan, UT said in its brief.

Justice Samuel Alito seized on that point. "I thought that the whole purpose of affirmative action was to help students who come from underprivileged backgrounds, but you make a very different argument that I don't think I've ever seen before," he said.

Actually, under the Court's case law, the diversity that is considered a compelling interest (which is what the state needs to defend race discrimination) is not about boosting the underprivileged. In Grutter v. Bollinger, the majority approved of the idea of  assembling a class that includes "a 'critical mass' of minority students," which does not mean "racial balancing, which is patently unconstitutional" but is "defined by reference to the educational benefits that diversity is designed to produce."

These benefits are substantial. As the District Court emphasized, the Law School’s admissions policy promotes “cross-racial understanding,” helps to break down racial stereotypes, and “enables [students] to better understand persons of different races.”...These benefits are “important and laudable,” because “classroom discussion is livelier, more spirited, and simply more enlightening and interesting” when the students have “the greatest possible variety of backgrounds.” ...

The Law School does not premise its need for critical mass on “any belief that minority students always (or even consistently) express some characteristic minority viewpoint on any issue.”... To the contrary, diminishing the force of such stereotypes is both a crucial part of the Law School’s mission, and one that it cannot accomplish with only token numbers of minority students. Just as growing up in a particular region or having particular professional experiences is likely to affect an individual’s views, so too is one’s own, unique experience of being a racial minority in a society, like our own, in which race unfortunately still matters.

If it's about breaking down stereotypes, the 10% approach creates a problem: The minority students in the classroom tend to come from the racially isolated schools, the less privileged Texans. So, it seems, the additional affirmative action is needed to get a more varied group of minority students, in which case, the point is to bring in privileged minority students, because these are the students who — in Grutter terms — might provide the classroom benefit of teaching all the students that minority students don't have "some characteristic minority viewpoint."

Obviously, there were dissenting opinions in Grutter. For example, Justice Scalia scoffed at that idea of the compelling interest: The lesson taught by classroom diversity is "essentially the same lesson taught to (or rather learned by, for it cannot be 'taught' in the usual sense) people three feet shorter and twenty years younger than the full-grown adults at the University of Michigan Law School, in institutions ranging from Boy Scout troops to public-school kindergartens."

I'm not taking a position on whether UT's admissions policy is good or whether it's constitutional. (Do not assume you know what I think. You don't.) All I am saying is that if Grutter is to be applied (and not limited or overruled), an affirmative action program that's all about boosting the most privileged minority students actually makes sense.

Did Justice Alito not see that (or was he mainly expressing disapproval)? Here's his quote (along with Justice Kennedy's), put in context, beginning at page 43 of the PDF transcript:

JUSTICE ALITO: Well, I thought that the whole purpose of affirmative action was to help students who come from underprivileged backgrounds, but you make a very different argument that I don't think I've ever seen before. The top 10 percent plan admits lots of African Americans -- lots of Hispanics and a fair number of African Americans. But you say, well, it's -- it's faulty, because it doesn't admit enough African Americans and Hispanics who come from privileged backgrounds. And you specifically have the example of the child of successful professionals in Dallas. Now, that's your argument? If you have -­ you have an applicant whose parents are -- let's say they're -- one of them is a partner in your law firm in Texas, another one is a part -- is another corporate lawyer. They have income that puts them in the top 1 percent of earners in the country, and they have -­ parents both have graduate degrees. They deserve a leg-up against, let's say, an Asian or a white applicant whose parents are absolutely average in terms of education and income?

[GREGORY G. GARRE, counsel for the University of Texas]: No, Your Honor. And let me -­ let me answer the question. First of all, the example comes almost word for word from the Harvard plan that this Court approved in Grutter and that Justice Powell held out in Bakke.

JUSTICE ALITO: Well, how that question be no, because being an African American or being a Hispanic is a plus factor.

MR. GARRE: Because, Your Honor, our point is, is that we want minorities from different backgrounds. We go out of our way to recruit minorities from disadvantaged backgrounds.

JUSTICE KENNEDY: So what you're saying is that what counts is race above all.

MR. GARRE: No, Your Honor, what counts is different experiences -­

JUSTICE KENNEDY: Well, that's the necessary -- that's the necessary response to Justice Alito's question.

MR. GARRE: Well, Your Honor, what we want is different experiences that are going to -- that are going to come on campus -­

JUSTICE KENNEDY: You want underprivileged of a certain race and privileged of a certain race. So that's race.

MR. GARRE: No, Your Honors, it's -- it's not race. It's just the opposite. I mean, in the LUAC decision, for example, this Court said that failing to take into account differences among members of the same race does a disservice -­

JUSTICE KENNEDY: But the reason you're reaching for the privileged is so that members of that race who are privileged can be representative, and that's race. I just -­

MR. GARRE: It's -- it's members racial group, Your Honor, bringing different experiences. And to say that -- if you took group, if you had an admissions process that to admit from a -- people from a particular background or perspective, you would want people from different perspectives.

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Counsel -­

MR. GARRE: And that's -- that's the interests that we're discussing here. It's the interests that the Harvard plan specifically adopts and lays out -­

Philip Roth fights Wikipedia.

Over what they said about the source material for "The Human Stain." Maybe he should have stayed above all this. The book speaks for itself. But this essay speaks for itself too. Does it not?

My novel “The Human Stain” was described in the entry as “allegedly inspired by the life of the writer Anatole Broyard.”...

This alleged allegation is in no way substantiated by fact. “The Human Stain” was inspired, rather, by an unhappy event in the life of my late friend Melvin Tumin, professor of sociology at Princeton for some thirty years. One day in the fall of 1985, while Mel, who was meticulous in all things large and small, was meticulously taking the roll in a sociology class, he noted that two of his students had as yet not attended a single class session or attempted to meet with him to explain their failure to appear, though it was by then the middle of the semester.

Having finished taking the roll, Mel queried the class about these two students whom he had never met. “Does anyone know these people? Do they exist or are they spooks?”—unfortunately, the very words that Coleman Silk, the protagonist of “The Human Stain,” asks of his classics class at Athena College in Massachusetts.

Almost immediately Mel was summoned by university authorities to justify his use of the word “spooks,” since the two missing students, as it happened, were both African-American, and “spooks” at one time in America was a pejorative designation for blacks, spoken venom milder than “nigger” but intentionally degrading nonetheless. A witch hunt ensued....

"If only [racial] change were as swift and simple as a child’s dance recital."

Here's a second article about race giving central, front-page attention on the NYT website this morning. (The previous post discusses the first.)

Reaching out longingly to female readers, this article features a picture of adorable kindergarten girls in pink tutus and white tutus... and — mostly — nonwhite skin. It's a performing arts magnet school, and the serious topic of the article is the federal grant program, dating back to the 1980s, that supposedly helps with racial integration.

The idea was to create a themed curriculum that attracted children from outside a school’s immediate neighborhood to reduce the isolation of one minority group....

About 58 percent of the students in District 14 public schools are Hispanic, 26 percent are black, 12 percent are white and 3 percent are Asian, according to the Education Department. At each of these four elementary magnet schools, Hispanic students represent more than 70 percent of the population.

These are the wrong percentages, for some reason that is supposed to be obvious to you, and the promise of putting their little girls in tutus is intended to lure white parents into doing what the government deems valuable, diluting the minority population. We are assured that "decades of research studies show that children perform better in integrated schools," and then there's much talk about the magnet schools hitting academic targets. But the tutu school in the photo is under investigation for cheating
(because kids did so well on the tests at the school, but badly when they moved on to middle school).

Complicating desegregation even further: a 2007 United States Supreme Court ruling that restricted schools in selecting students. The court, in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, ruled 5 to 4 that schools could not explicitly take race into account when selecting students.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who voted with the majority, nevertheless kept alive the importance of school integration: in a separate opinion, he wrote that school districts could be creative, perhaps reconfiguring attendance zones to spur socioeconomic diversity....

Historically for magnet schools, white middle-class students have been the prize. Despite the odds, one of the Williamsburg schools has been able to attract them in droves.....

Education officials placed Brooklyn Arbor [Public School 414] in a prime location to draw families from the Northside neighborhood: just south of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, near the trendier parts of Williamsburg. The new principal, Eva Irizarry, did the rest. Her aggressive recruiting and her commitment to progressive, hands-on learning helped persuade white middle-class families to try the new school.... [The school's theme is] global and ethical studies. Ms. Irizarry plans to build eco-friendly classrooms and a greenhouse on the roof...

When it came to recruiting, Ms. Irizarry said, she got no response when she went to Head Start nursery schools in the surrounding Dominican neighborhoods.

She had more success pitching a new concept to Northside parents. At Mommy and Me yoga classes, she left brochures that featured the school’s carefully designed green tree logo and 13 children of all ethnicities photographed in green T-shirts....

Ms. Irizarry... was concerned that Hispanic parents might feel they were being pushed out of the school.

White middle-class students have been the prize.... the trendier parts of Williamsburg... commitment to progressive... learning.... So the success of the project is measured in terms of how many white kids enroll, and the theme is designed to appeal to white people... But it's the presence of white people that "decades of research studies show" is what's really best for the nonwhite kids.

Here's the Parents Involved case, in the event that you'd like to brush up on the constitutional law. The Supreme Court has been clear that racial balancing is not an acceptable basis for classifying individuals by race. Diversity — which is — has a different meaning, and, to keep this post from getting much longer, I'll just say the Court has struggled to define diversity and what may be done to achieve it.

Whatever the law says, there are still policy decisions to be made, and here, I'm puzzling over the paradoxical high valuation of white children and their use for dilution purposes.

For at least 6 years, during Elizabeth Warren's tenure at Harvard Law School, Harvard University reported that there was a Native American woman at the law school.

Boston Globe reports on documents Harvard filed with the federal government:

The US Department of Labor requires large employers to collect diversity statistics annually and suggests they be based on employees’ classification of themselves. In cases in which employees do not self-identify, federal regulations allow some administrators to make judgment calls on the correct categories using “employment records or observer identification.’’

The administrator responsible for Harvard Law School’s faculty diversity statistics from 1996 to 2004, the period in question, was Alan Ray, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation who, like Warren, has fair skin, blue eyes, and Oklahoma roots.

But Ray, now president of Elmhurst College in Illinois, said in a statement that he “did not encourage the Law School to list any faculty member as one particular race or ethnicity, including Professor Warren.’’ He further said through a spokeswoman that he “never encouraged any faculty member to list himself or herself in a particular way.’’ Ray added that Harvard “always accepted whatever identification a faculty member wanted to provide,’’ a characterization another highly placed former Harvard administrator backed up.

The linked article also recounts the history of Harvard Law's perceived diversity problem circa 1990, just before Warren arrived. Lawprof Derrick Bell had gone on "strike" (unpaid leave) to protest, some students brought a lawsuit (unsuccessful), and the U.S. Department of Labor audited what the article calls "Harvard's diversity practices" and found 10 violations. Warren arrived in 1992 (as a visiting professor), at which point she "had been listing herself for seven years as a minority in a legal directory often used by law recruiters to make diversity-friendly hires." She was still on that list when Harvard Law gave her a permanent position in 1995.

In 1996, law school news director Mike Chmura, speaking to the Harvard Crimson, identified Warren as a Native American professor.

In 1997, the Fordham Law Review, citing Chmura, referred to Warren as Harvard Law’s “first woman of color.’’

I find it hard to believe that — after all the uproar over diversity in 1990 — that the law school could quietly pass off Warren as its "first woman of color." There were so many people who were genuinely angry over the lack of diversity. Why would they have tolerated the school making such a lame assertion? Wouldn't they have wanted to keep up the pressure? If you were at Harvard in the 1990s, what do you remember about this?

The Globe article has more detail about Harvard's "affirmative action plan," a 1999 document, which "lists one Native American senior professor at the entire university," and, in a section on the law school, specifies that there is "a single Native American senior professor." This must be Warren, right? But this document also defines Native American in a way that would not include Warren: "a person having origins in any of the original peoples of North America and who maintains cultural identification through tribal affiliation or community recognition."

The inference is that Harvard itself lied on diversity documents filed with the federal government (and posted on line for years).  Note that this information is used to recruit students, some of whom may care a great deal about whether there are faculty who seem as though they will be special mentors. I wonder whether there were students who chose Harvard and sought out Warren as a mentor because of her perceived status as a Native American.

There's something very odd here. A lot of things, actually. This isn't just about whether Elizabeth Warren is a worthy candidate for the U.S. Senate. This is about more general chicanery about diversity at Harvard and even more general deception and manipulation in the politics of diversity.

Second-grader — assigned to come to school dressed as a historical figure — chooses MLK Jr. and gets in trouble.

Because he wore blackface.

"I think they would stop calling me white girl if there were white kids... "

"Because my skin is a little lighter and I can’t dance, they call me that. Some of them can’t dance, either.... I could talk the way I talk.... They will say to me, ‘You are so white.’ I tell them, I have two black parents. Do I look white?... I speak a bit more freelance with my friends. Not full sentences. I don’t use big words. They hate it when I do that."

At the Explore Charter School in Brooklyn, there aren't too many white kids.

The Chronicle of Higher Education fires blogger Naomi Schaefer Riley for mocking university Black Studies programs.

Here's a Wall Street Journal editorial column condemning the Chronicle (including the disclosure that Riley is married to a member of the Journal editorial board):

As best we can make out, the Chronicle's editor, Liz McMillen, fired Naomi Riley for doing what she was hired to do—provide a conservative point of view about current events in academe alongside the paper's roster of mostly not-conservative academic bloggers....

Riley herself has an op-ed over there at the Journal. (It's not like this lady is starving for media outlets.)

Recently, the Chronicle of Higher Education published a cover story called "Black Studies: 'Swaggering Into the Future,'" in which the reporter described how "young black-studies scholars . . . are less consumed than their predecessors with the need to validate the field or explain why they are pursuing doctorates in their discipline." The "5 Up-and-Coming Ph.D. Candidates" described in the piece's sidebar "are rewriting the history of race." While the article suggested some are skeptical of black studies as a discipline, the reporter neglected to quote anyone who is.

Like me. So last week, on the Chronicle's "Brainstorm" blog (where I was paid to be a regular contributor), I suggested that the dissertation topics of the graduate students mentioned were obscure at best and "a collection of left-wing victimization claptrap," at worst.

This is, I think, a little more complex than what Riley's supporters are saying. She mocked individual graduate students. This reminds me of the big Sandra Fluke controversy, which got traction because an established media professional took aim at a student. Riley made fun of dissertation titles and breezily threw out the opinion that the entire field of Black Studies was left-wing crap. Maybe it is. I don't know. I'm not reading the dissertations. It's tempting to riff on intuition and to speak provocatively, and that's what bloggers do. If the Chronicle wants bloggers — readable bloggers, bloggers who spark conversation and debate — they need to get that.

But combining that blogging style with an attack on named, individual students, where you are speaking from a high platform in the established media... that's the problem, and I don't see Riley stepping up and acknowledging it.

Riley, in this new column, proceeds with her critique of the field of Black Studies... or rather the media's resistance to critique:

[A] substantive critique about the content of academic disciplines is simply impossible in the closed bubble of higher education. If you want to know why almost all of the responses to my original post consist of personal attacks on me, along with irrelevant mentions of Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and George Zimmerman, it is because black studies is a cause, not a course of study. By doubting the academic worthiness of black studies, my critics conclude, I am opposed to racial justice—and therefore a racist.

Knowing of this resistance, Riley could have begun her attack with something more sober and fact-based than lampooning the titles of students' dissertations. Maybe she deliberately sought personal attention by writing something too crude and impolite. It certainly worked. I'd never noticed her before and now everyone is talking about her.

"Black students, especially boys, face much harsher discipline in public schools than other students..."

"... according to new data from the Department of Education."

One in five black boys and more than one in 10 black girls received an out-of-school suspension. Over all, black students were three and a half times as likely to be suspended or expelled than their white peers.

And in districts that reported expulsions under zero-tolerance policies, Hispanic and black students represent 45 percent of the student body, but 56 percent of those expelled under such policies.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan characterized these findings as a "civil rights" problem, a violation of "the principle of equity at the heart of the American promise." But what is the real problem here? Is it believed that the teachers are racially prejudiced? Are there "white" (or middle class) standards of behavior that are used unfairly to judge and punish black children? Are there female standards of behavior that are used to judge boys?

These are very uncomfortable and disturbing statistics, and the solutions are far from clear. But certainly, you can't even out the numbers by going after white kids. There needs to be one set of rules and individuals must be treated as individuals, based on what they did. That's a "principle of equity" that cannot be abandoned.

But there are some subtleties here. For example, I suspect that teachers notice boy misbehavior and overlook the things girls do. I saw some outright sex discrimination in one class here in Madison, where the boys were all stamped as bad and disciplined as a group. The boys did act up in a way that annoyed the teacher. They bonded in a way the teacher perceived as ganglike, with their own culture and slang. Meanwhile, the girls had their culture, but it involved signals and looks, and things that perhaps the teacher saw as sweet and harmless and reasonably allied with the educational effort.

Also, here in liberal Madison, I was always astounded to attend an assembly and see the teachers singling out black kids for discipline. Didn't the teachers worry about how bad that looked? Presumably, they saw misbehavior, but something is seriously wrong, and the adults are responsible for conditions at school. You need discipline, but discipline has to work, and it shouldn't be sending a negative message to the rest of the children who see what is happening and draw their own conclusions.

One solution is to develop charter schools with different models of learning that are responsive to the needs of children who succumb to misbehavior in traditional schools. Here in Madison, there's the proposal for the Madison Prep school, but it has faced opposition. Teachers unions want unionized teachers. The ACLU will litigate if it's an all-boys school. Read the whole story at the link.

"Women, more than men, are staying out of the work force to pursue higher education."

"When the economy improves, will this education gap break the glass ceiling? Or will men still be better off because they were gaining work experience while women were taking on student loan debt?"

What are the women studying? What are the men working at? I suspect the higher-ed/no higher-ed distinction is the wrong distinction.

"Our children aren't there to be subjects of teachers and teachers unions."

"But the decisions that have been made in the Madison Metropolitan School District for a mighty long time have been determined by adults getting what they need first before kids."

Said Kaleem Caire, president of the Urban League of Greater Madison, who has been trying to get approval for the Madison Preparatory Academy, a charter school aimed at low-income, minority students.

At one point, Madison Prep agreed to hire union teachers, and the union agreed to remain neutral on the proposal. When that plan proved too expensive, Madison Prep revised its plan to use nonunion teachers....

The union contract, which expires in 2013, doesn't allow Madison to hire nonunion teachers. Exceptions have been made previously through negotiated agreements between the union and the district.

There's some disagreement about whether, under under the state's new collective bargaining law, such an agreement would nullify the whole contract.

Evidence and ideology.

Looking at basically the same problem, the Wall Street Journal gravitates toward reform that breaks the hold of unions, and the NYT finds new reasons to keep government spending flowing into the same old program.

"National Merit has never been transparent about, for example, the ethnic diversity of the people who receive National Merit scholarships."

Said William Fitzsimmons, the admissions dean at Harvard, quoted in an article that reports that NYU — like at least 8 other schools — has withdrawn from the National Merit scholarship program, which distributes money based on PSAT scores.

“National Merit has developed a kind of grandeur that is misguided,” said Lawrence Momo, director of college counseling at the private Trinity School... “The mythology that has been created about it in the public imagination is overblown.”

Dropping out of this test-based merit system because of racial/ethic disparities — assuming that's what's going on here — is distinctly different from adopting an affirmative action program to correct for disparities caused by the use of test scores in admissions.

In the Supreme Court case Grutter v. Bollinger, which approved of the University of Michigan Law School's use of race as a "plus factor" in admissions, Justice Clarence Thomas, in dissent, blamed the law school for creating the disparity itself by relying on the standardized test:

[N]o modern law school can claim ignorance of the poor performance of blacks, relatively speaking, on the Law School Admissions Test (LSAT). Nevertheless, law schools continue to use the test and then attempt to “correct” for black underperformance by using racial discrimination in admissions so as to obtain their aesthetic student body... The Law School itself admits that the test is imperfect, as it must, given that it regularly admits students who score at or below 150 (the national median) on the test....

Having decided to use the LSAT, the Law School must accept the constitutional burdens that come with this decision. The Law School may freely continue to employ the LSAT and other allegedly merit-based standards in whatever fashion it likes. What the Equal Protection Clause forbids, but the Court today allows, is the use of these standards hand-in-hand with racial discrimination....

Ending reliance on a standardized test is exactly the solution Clarence Thomas suggested. It does not classify individuals by race or ethnicity.

Taking race into account — simply wrong or rather complex?

Louis Molepske, a Democratic member of the Wisconsin Assembly, questions Roger Clegg, president of Center for Equal Opportunity, which has released a study that supposedly shows that the University of Wisconsin has engaged in serious race discrimination in its admission process for the undergrad program and the law school. Clegg responds. This short clip — shot by Meade, edited by me —  shows that the 2 men are not on the same page about affirmative action.



The colloquy took place at a hearing on October 17, 2011,  before the Assembly Committee on Colleges and Universities.

Molepske utters a classic quote: "We got a lot of white people in Wisconsin."

ADDED: Here's the thing. The University's policies align with the Supreme Court's case law, which permits race discrimination narrowly tailored to serve the goal of classroom diversity. Clegg performs moral clarity: He says race discrimination is "wrong" and "bad." That's something he just knows, quite aside from the CEO's study. He asserts it in answer to any question from someone who thinks there's something more complicated here — that is, someone who would leave it to the University to design and implement its own admissions policy.

That's why the 2 men talk past each other.

"It irks me when someone says our young black children either go to charter schools or they go to prison... I have 4 children that went to Madison public schools, and all succeeded."

Said one of many speakers at the 3-hour public hearing last about the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy, "semi-private charter school proposed by the Urban League of Greater Madison, designed to raise graduation rates for at-risk students."

Some accused the Urban League of blaming the district for students' shortcomings....

More than few saw Madison Prep as an instrument of conservative groups pushing for the privatization of public education. Others worried that board approval would mark the return of segregated schools in Madison.

"This will contribute to the destruction of our public schools," said one.

I did not attend the hearing, but Meade did. Here's my favorite of the pictures he took. It seems to capture the mood of earnest but tired officials performing the obligation of listening to the people:

"Not everyone on the UW-Madison campus is a fan of the university's 'holistic' admissions policy."

"That's the gist of a strongly worded email I received over the weekend from UW-Madison physics professor Marshall Onellion," writes Cap Times reporter Todd Finkelmeyer, somewhat mischaracterizing Onellion's point. But the email is reprinted in full — we can read it — and Finkelmeyer spoke by phone to Onellion and includes a quote:

"I don't actually object to any admissions policy as long as I know what it is.... Right now, I don't believe you or I know what the UW admissions policy is. If [UW-Madison Interim Chancellor] David Ward says [the Center for Equal Opportunity's] report is wrong in some way, then tell us what is wrong and tell us what the actual facts are. And then you and I and everybody else can form our individual opinions about what we agree and disagree with. But right now, we don't know what the facts are."

A lack of transparency is, of course, inherent in the process of performing the "holistic" style of admissions that the U.S. Supreme Court found constitutional in Grutter v. Bollinger. That's what Justice Ginsburg complained about in dissent in the companion case, Gratz v. Bollinger, where the majority rejected an insufficiently holistic form of admissions:

The stain of generations of racial oppression is still visible in our society... and the determination to hasten its removal remains vital.  One can reasonably anticipate, therefore, that colleges and universities will seek to maintain their minority enrollment–and the networks and opportunities thereby opened to minority graduates–whether or not they can do so in full candor through adoption of affirmative action plans of the kind here at issue. Without recourse to such plans, institutions of higher education may resort to camouflage. For example, schools may encourage applicants to write of their cultural traditions in the essays they submit, or to indicate whether English is their second language. Seeking to improve their chances for admission, applicants may highlight the minority group associations to which they belong, or the Hispanic surnames of their mothers or grandparents. In turn, teachers’ recommendations may emphasize who a student is as much as what he or she has accomplished.... If honesty is the best policy, surely Michigan’s accurately described, fully disclosed College affirmative action program is preferable to achieving similar numbers through winks, nods, and disguises.

Boldface added to make my point. The clarity the physics professor longs for is exactly what the Supreme Court's doctrine disincentivizes.

"How do you escape the notion that getting rid of affirmative action is white supremacy?"

2 UW-Madison students challenge Roger Clegg — the president of the Center for Equal Opportunity:



Like the clip in the previous post, this was recorded at a Federalist Society-sponsored debate on September 13th.

[Video shot and edited by me.]

ADDED: I want to say that, for me, the second questioner exemplifies a central problem for Clegg and his agenda. The students at a university are always the students who were admitted. They feel hurt or outraged if they think the message is that they shouldn't be here. They're here, in the room, and the individuals who did not get in are not here to cry out with corresponding outrage.

It reminds me of debates about abortion. Those who were aborted are never present in the room to express their perspective on the issue. The emotions of those who are not present may be expressed, vicariously, by others, but it's another matter entirely to say to human beings as they stand in your presence: Under my proposed policy — the only morally/constitutionally permissible approach — you  lose.

Now, I'm sure Clegg would try to find a way to say these students wouldn't lose. Under a race-blind approach to admissions, some of them would get in, and, if so, they won't be burdened by a stigma that, he would say, attached when race is taken into account. And, in any event, a switch to a color-blind approach would only take place prospectively, so it wouldn't affect any of these students, who got in under the existing policy, and no matter how illegal or immoral the policy is, they didn't design it. They played by the rules in effect at the time, and they won and deserve their prize.

The policy will only affect individuals who are not in the room, who are out there, just as the students who didn't get in this year are out there. The difficult thing — and the true moral challenge — is to visualize those who are affected who are not in the room to express pain when you hurt them.

AND: I don't know that Clegg's primary concern really is for the individuals whose applications were rejected but who would have gotten in under a race-blind approach. I think he expressed more concern for the harm done to the students who did get in, the ones who were in the room resisting his message. He was telling them, to their faces, that they were being stigmatized by affirmative action. In that light, the young woman's statement "You disrespected me" really is not such an inaccurate understanding of what he was saying. He was concerned about her, but it wasn't a kind of concern she appreciated.