NAS Blog

I could be wrong, but in the wake of all the mudwrestling that’s followed the NAACP’s recent branding of Tea Partiers as racists, I think that the ideological fulcrum of the “diversity” debate has significantly shifted ground. For once, the response by public figures has been direct and emphatic, instead of the usual backpedaling after some vague, apologetic mumbling about the need to “include” all groups, the value of a diverse work force or the wish to avoid offending anyone, etc., etc., etc. The public rejection of the NAACP’s allegations, moreover, has been bi-partisan, including prominent Republicans such as Sarah Palin and no less than Vice President Biden and President Obama on the Democratic side of the aisle. Hopefully, this means that absurd or silly allegations of racism will no longer compel politicans and bureaucrats to jump through the hoop as they’ve done so frequently in the past.

Especially encouraging, though, is this piece by Virgina Democrat James Webb in today’s Wall Street Journal. Webb argues that although “diversity” policies had their origins in the laudable and necessary efforts to redress the unique injustices suffered by black Americans, they have long since become obsessed with skin color or ethnic background, often with unconcealed hostility toward whites. Thus, newly arrived immigrants often benefit from these policies, even though their own experiences don’t remotely resemble those of blacks. It doesn’t stop there either, since in many academic institutions, “diversity” and “inclusiveness” now extend to ever -expanding categories of sexuality, life experiences or those with physical disabilities. A particularly hard sell for me has always been affirmative action for “women” within the diversity rubric, as though the largely white, middle-class feminist movement could claim grievances comparable to those suffered historically by blacks. Yet many academic job postings routinely specify that “women and ethnic or racial minorities are especially encouraged to apply.” That doesn’t compute.

Anyway, Webb says it’s now time to end racial preferences, stop discriminating against whites, and simply treat everyone equally under the law. Amen.

Of interest to law professors, lawyers, and curious individuals, NAS has recently published three articles about law schools:

“Conferring Privilege: DOJ, Law Schools, and the New Politics of Race” examines the Association of American Law Schools’ efforts to prevent racial colorblindness.

“’They So Despise Her Politics’ – Do Conservative Faculty Candidates Get a Fair Shake?” presents documents in the lawsuit of an unsuccessful faculty candidate for a position at the University of Iowa College of Law who believes she was denied the appointment because of her politics.

“Potemkin Admissions: Law Professors Propose to Hide LSAT Data” exposes a movement to persuade law schools to withhold LSAT scores from U.S. News and World Report. The idea is to make it harder for the public to see how much the pursuit of racial preferences drags down the quality of admissions.

“They So Despise Her Politics” has received attention from the Daily Iowan, Instapundit, TaxProf Blog, and One Minute Lawyer.

Princeton’s Russ Nieli has an illuminating essay on Minding the Campus entitled “How Diversity Punishes Asians, Poor Whites and Lots of Others.” It absolutely knocks the stuffing out of the contention we hear so often from college administrators that their reason for using certain preferences is that a more “diverse” student body will enhance learning and break down stereotypes. If they actually wanted to do that, they would look for students who really do bring different beliefs and perspectives and would drop the bias Nieli shows against students from military families, those who have been active in groups like 4H, and so on. They aren’t looking for Justice Powell’s phantom “educational benefits of diversity” but are merely looking to fill quotas.

Nieli advocates that elite colleges get over their diversity mania and follow what he calls the Cal Tech model: focus on enrolling students who are the most academically talented and the most eager to learn.

Jennifer Gratz, plaintiff in Gratz v. Bollinger in 2003, testified in court last week against AB 2047, a new bill that if passed, will overturn Proposition 209 and allow racial preferences in California university admissions. When asked, “If you had to bet your $5 on which kid was going to be more successful…one kid white, one kid of color, which kid do you think you should bet on?” she replied, “I wouldn’t bet on either kid based on their race, I would look at the kid as a whole.”

Her interviewer pressed, “I regrettably come to the conclusion that race does still matter in terms of the ability of young people to succeed,” to which Gratz answered, “I think the question should be: how do we get to the point, then, where it does not matter? And the government sticking its nose in the issue of race and determining based on someone’s race who gets into a university, and picking and choosing winners and losers based on skin color, does not get us there.”

Watch the exchange in the 5-minute video below (via ACRI):

Proposition 209, the law prohibiting racial preferences at public universities in California, is under attack.

Last week the California Association of Scholars (CAS), an affiliate of NAS, filed a motion to intervene in a lawsuit against Prop. 209 by an organization that, as NAS president Peter Wood said, “has deployed questionable tactics against civil rights initiatives in every state where they have been proposed.” CAS, along with Ward Connerly and the American Civil Rights Foundation, will be represented by attorneys with the Pacific Legal Foundation.

There is also a bill called AB2047, which would effectively overturn Prop. 209 and is now in the hands of the California Senate. CAS president John Ellis has sent a letter to the Senate chair, Gloria Romero, urging her and her colleagues to vote down this law.

Links

Press Release on CAS and BAMN lawsuit

CAS Letter to State Senate

Chronicle of Higher Ed

Pacific Legal Foundation Press Release

In this week’s Pope Center Clarion Call, Roger Clegg addresses the question of discrimination against Asian students. Of course, selective colleges don’t say, “We’re against those geeky, overly studious Asian kids. Let ‘em go somewhere else!” Rather, they just don’t want to have “too many” of them, so as to have enough room for all the “under-represented” groups, whose students are presumed to add so much interest to the student body. The result is the same, though: some students are rejected on account of their ancestry.

California State University at Chico’s president, Paul Zingg, has just circulated a draft “diversity action plan for 2010-2015” titled To Form a More Inclusive Learning Community. He asks for feedback on the draft. NAS was happy to oblige:

Diversity came to have a precariously balanced double meaning.  On one side, it evoked the genuine pleasure that Americans have in cultural variety and friendship.  “Diversity” is the sweetness of knowing andliking people unlike yourself and discovering cultural variety.  This aspect of diversity found its way into mainstream marketing and a thousand greeting cards, quilt displays, and children’s TV programs.

But this sweet side of diversity was never far away from a distinctly harsher reality: diversity was also based on stoking group identity by evoking (real or imaginary) grievance. Diversity had its own hierarchy of grievances.  The group with the best grievance story is African Americans, who took pride of place in any scheme for distributing the compensatory rewards of diversity.  But the grievance game had and still has lots of players.  The currency is having a narrative of how “my group” suffered at the hands of an intolerant and oppressive society.  Even if, as was often the case, an individual suffered no oppression at all, mere identification with a supposedly oppressed group would suffice.  Diversity in this second sense is a doctrine of group grievance, not a recognition of the particularities of individuals.

The two sides of diversity were always in tension.  The first allows for individuality; the second demands conformity to a group identity.  One result was a whole industry of individuals explaining themselves in terms of group identity.  We saw the birth of diversity memoirs, diversity novels, diversity painting, and so on—all aimed at bridging this unbridgeable gap.  How do you make sweetness and bitterness co-resident in the same person?

In this week’s Pope Center Clarion Call, Martin Morse Wooster contributes a critical review of the recent book purporting to defend “affirmative action” in college admissions, No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal by Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford.

The book, Wooster finds, is in the same vein as Bowen and Bok’s The Shape of the River in that it relies on data not available to outside researchers and uses the data to defend the regime of racial preferences at elite college and universities, while overlooking obvious problems with that case.

Advocates for the continued use of racial preferences keep writing books like Espenshade and Radford’s and James Sterba’s Affirmative Action for the Future (reviewed here by Larry Purdy, whose book Getting Under the Skin of Diversity eviscerates the arguments for preferences), but they’re little more than cheerleading for one of the great intellectual failures of our time: the idea that there is some great social benefit in shuffling a few students whose ancestry puts them in some “underrepresented” category up into colleges they otherwise wouldn’t qualify for while at the same time shuffling an equal number of students whose ancestry doesn’t qualify them as “diverse” down into somewhat less selective schools. The benefits claimed for that policy are miniscule if not entirely imaginary, but the costs are real and serious.

For those readers who serve on faculty hiring committees, Roger Clegg, president of the Center for Equal Opportunity, offers strategies for speaking up when the committee begins to talk about “diversity.” Here are his recommendations, in brief (to read his accompanying remarks in the original article, click here):

1.  I think we need to check with the university counsel on this.

2.  The Supreme Court has rejected the role model justification.

3.  Title VI is not the same as Title VII.

4.  Suppose we were doing X in order to increase the number of white males – would you say that wasn’t discrimination?

5.  Why are we using race or sex as a proxy for something else?

6.  You know, we’re discriminating against some minorities in favor of other minorities.

In today’s Pope Center piece, Larry Purdy (one of the lawyers who worked on the Grutter case) reviews Affirmative Action for the Future by Notre Dame philosophy professor James Sterba.

Purdy finds the book to be little more than repetition of the cliches that proponents of “diversity” have been using for decades and that it completely ignores the many arguments against both the morality and utility of giving certain individuals preference just because of their ancestry.