Discriminations

Change! Hope!

2011-04-22T20:35:55Z

Or is that Hope! Change? In any event, and despite the fact that I’m convinced inertia/doing nothing is usually the best policy, Change! is coming to DISCRIMINATIONS. Our Movable Type platform is about to be replaced by WordPress.

If all goes well (and with John Walker, my blog host and all-purpose web guy, they usually do), this transition should be ~~seamless~~ not too painful. If you run into difficulties, or notice any glitches, please shoot me an email — jsr [at] jst.net should work.

While this is happening behind, or underneath, the scenes, Helene and I are enjoying the ACC tennis tournament in Cary, North Carolina for the weekend. Let’s hope the University of Virginia, which is No. 1 nationally, undefeated this year, and has won the ACC championship the past four years, repeats its winning ways.

More Incredible (Or Maybe Not) Wash. Post Bias

2011-04-20T20:59:55Z

If I had not provided a link in my post immediately below to the Washington Post’s biased or economically illiterate (or both) whole page headline a few days ago (“To some in GOP, ending a tax break is the same as a tax hike”), I’m sure many readers (if there are many readers) would think I made it up. “What would have been real news,” I noted, is if the Post “could produce a single Republican office holder or official who does not believe that ending tax breaks amounts to a tax hike (at least if unaccompanied by lowering tax rates).”

Today, however, another front page story, “Freshman Republican’s bind: Vote convictions or help economy by rising debt limit?” by comparison makes that headline look like competent, objective, fair and balanced reporting.

First, competence: rise is an intransitive verb. Thus no one — Democrat or Republican; Congressman, Senator, or President — can “rise” the debt limit. (Indeed, it’s not clear at the moment whether they can even raise it, but that’s a question of political, not grammatical, competence.)

The reporter, Philip Rucker, is no doubt not responsible for his story’s hed, but presumably he and his editor are responsible for the story’s content, about which the best thing that can be said is that it belongs on his paper’s opinion page, or perhaps (at the risk of being redundant) a Democratic press release. But even the hed, despite its grammatical lapse, does a good job of conveying the message of the “news” story: the conflict between Republican convictions and helping the economy.

Newly elected Arizona Republican Rep. David Schweikert, the hook for the Post’s political broadside in the form of a news story, has a “dilemma”:

He knows Congress has little choice but to raise the amount of money the government can borrow to prevent the economic havoc sure to follow if the United States defaults on its loans. He also knows doing so is deeply unpopular — not only among his conservative base, but among some moderates and liberals, too.

But this “dilemma” is his and his party’s own damn fault.

If Schweikert finds himself in a difficult political spot, it’s partly of his own making. He and the scores of other Republicans who were elected last fall ran on an unyielding pledge to cut spending, reduce the nation’s debt and generally get the country’s finances in order, a mission that has been fully embraced by party leaders in Washington.

Now, a few months after taking office, they are caught between their convictions, their constituents and their duties as congressmen.

I suppose reasonable people can disagree about how important it is to reduce government debt. There can be reasonable disagreement over using a vote on the debt ceiling to force reduced spending and even over how calamitous it would be to vote against raising the debt ceiling. But I fail to see how there can be reasonable disagreement over the gross impropriety of a purportedly major newspaper reporting, presumably as fact, in a front page news story that for Republican office holders there is an inherent conflict between their convictions and helping the economy by doing their duty.

The Washington Post: Anti-Republican Bias Or Economic Illiteracy?

2011-04-16T02:20:41Z

If you read this front-page story in the Washington Post today, “No-tax-hike pledge creates Republican rift, potential roadblock to deficit deal,” it looks like normal WashPost anti-Republican fare — exaggerating what seems more like a difference in emphasis and negotiating positions into an alleged intra-party civil war, accompanied by a photo of Boehner and Mitch McConnell portraying them as almost grotesquely stupid and perplexed.

But that’s only if you read the text version online. If you happened to read the paper copy as I did today, you see something else — instead of the typical, snide, but rather understated anti-Republican bias, a big, bold across the entire top of page 9 headline screams out a bias against Republicans that is so extreme my first thought was that a conservative had stuck it in as a parody: “To some in GOP, ending a tax break is the same as a tax hike”! Lest you think I’m making this up, here’ a link to a graphic of the page.

I could say a number of things about this hed and what it reveals, but I’ll limit myself to these two:

The WaPo hed-writer obviously does not think that ending a tax break is the same as a tax hike. If, say, his mortgage deduction were taken away and his tax obligation thus increased, he would not believe that he had experienced a “tax hike.”
The hed asserts that only “some” in the GOP believe that “ending a tax break is the same as a tax hike.” What would be real news, unlike this article, would be if the WaPo reporters (Peter Wallsten and Lori Montgomery) or their editors could produce a single Republican office holder or official who does not believe that ending tax breaks amounts to a tax hike (at least if unaccompanied by lowering tax rates).

Boy, those Republicans who believe that having to pay more tax is a tax hike must be really dumb!

Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between anti-Republican bias and economic illiteracy.

Why Not Just Confiscate The Wealth Of “The Rich”?

2011-04-15T01:53:47Z

Why not? Well, leaving aside such trifling concerns as law, morality, justice, fairness, etc, even confiscating the wealth of “The Rich” wouldn’t make a sizable dent in the deficit.

“According to Internal Revenue Service data,” the Wall Street Journal reported today,

the entire taxable income of everyone earning over $100,000 in 2008 was about $1.582 trillion. Even if all these Americans — most of whom are far from wealthy — were taxed at 100%, it wouldn't cover Mr. Obama's deficit for this year [emphasis added].

In his now abandoned — indeed, apparently forgotten — 2012 budget submitted to thunderous derision only two months ago, President Obama himself predicted, perhaps optimistically, that this year’s budget would be $1.6 trillion, the largest in American history.

More Startling News From Academia...

2011-04-07T16:42:12Z

New Studies Show How Life’s Tough Turns Can Derail Students

Now there’s a surprise....

I’m Sure There’s No Connection Between...

2011-04-07T15:58:00Z

... Obama’s support among blacks slips unexpectedly, Hispanics too

and

Obama teams up with Al Sharpton in New York to woo African-American voters ahead of 2012 election

If Sharpton, why not Farrakhan?

On Spending, Even Many Democrats Don’t Think Democrats Are Reasonable...

2011-04-04T21:56:41Z

The Hill published some interesting poll results today. Its main finding — that “A plurality of likely voters believes Republicans have been more reasonable than Democrats in the negotiations over spending cuts” — is hardly surprising. After all, most voters aren’t stupid.

But this struck me as quite interesting:

A new poll conducted for The Hill showed 41 percent polled said the GOP had been “more reasonable,” while 29 percent said Democrats had been more sensible. Twenty-two percent said neither party was more reasonable than the other, and 7 percent were not sure.

But the survey also found that, despite the favorable view of Republicans’ tactics, respondents said it wouldn’t change their votes from last year.

Forty-five percent of respondents said they voted for a Republican last November, and 47 percent said they would do so if the election were held now. Forty percent of respondents said they voted for a Democrat, and 42 percent said they would do so now, according to the March 31 survey of 1,000 likely voters.

Since 40% of the respondents voted Democratic last November and 42% would do so now but only 29% think the Democrats are more reasonable than Republicans on spending, it’s clear that many Democrats plan to vote for the party they believe less reasonable on that issue.

Of course, the deficit of deficit-concerned Democrats is not inherently unreasonable. Many Democrats, after all, support Democrats because of their stands on other issues, such as:

Obama’s attack on Libya, or his retreat from Libya;
Obama’s determination to close Gitmo and try terrorists in federal court in New York, or his decision to keep Gitmo open and try terrorists in military tribunals there;
Obama’s embodiment of and rhetorical commitment to post-racialism, or his strong support for continuing racial preferences throughout American life;
The not-hostile takeover of the Democratic Party by public employee unions leading to its still-unannounced re-naming as the Democratic Labor Party.

This last reason may be the most important, since the less reasonable the Democrats are on spending, the more they serve the self-interest of the unions.

Two Views Of Students As Customers

2011-04-01T11:31:52Z

From Inside Higher Ed today, a report from Northeastern Illinois University of “a two-year anthropological inquiry into how today’s students do research.”

The goal of such an approach is priming librarians to “see the library through the eyes of others,” [associate university librarian David] Green said. In other words, librarians who serve large Hispanic populations need to learn how to empathize with first-generation college students who might never have used a library before and whose relationship with academic research is less than intuitive than many librarians are used to....

“I came to understand that over time that if we are less judgmental about our students’ [lack of] desire to dig into their research the way we think they should, and understand what it is they’re coping with, we can be much more effective service providers....”

And from the Chronicle of Higher Education two days ago, an essay, “Educating Our ‘Customers,’” by Brian Hall, an assistant professor of English at Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland. “Foolishly,” Hall reports, he asked for an explanation of why one of his students in a developmental English course was withdrawing,

and he spent the next five minutes outlining every instance in which I had interfered with his learning style, including by assigning homework, giving tests, taking attendance, and requiring that all essays be typed, printed out, and handed in at the very beginning of class.

When I began to tell him that I do all of those things because I’m trying to teach academic responsibility, he interrupted and said, “You’re not letting me be me.”

As a faculty member, I have found myself on a number of occasions dealing with students who are upset with me for not letting them be them, or, as some say, for “disrespecting” them. I’ll admit that my definition of “respect” must be different from theirs, because many times when I’m told I’ve been disrespectful, it usually occurs when I don’t give the lecture notes to a student who missed two or more weeks of class, or when I tell a student not to answer her cellphone in my class, or when I tell a student that he lost points from his final grade for disrupting the classroom when his friend entered my class to ask when it would be over because he was hungry and my student was his ride.
....
Maybe students are so used to our consumer-driven society that they have an inaccurate sense of entitlement. They believe the customer is always right. Maybe it's true, and customers are always right. Maybe the academic and business sides of education have become so blurred that my title of assistant professor has actually been changed to "educational liaison," and I am only supposed to teach students what they want to know and nothing more.

What we have here is obviously a failure of cultural communication. Perhaps Prof. Hall should be given time off to engage in some serious anthropological research on today’s students.

A Social Psychology Hoax? (Or Is Social Psychology Itself A Hoax?)

2011-03-30T14:23:49Z

[NOTE: THIS POST HAS BEEN UPDATED!]

Remember the wonderful Alan Sokal hoax on the ponderously pontificating journal, Social Text? As the New York Times reported in May 1996,

A New York University physicist, fed up with what he sees as the excesses of the academic left, hoodwinked a well-known journal into publishing a parody thick with gibberish as though it were serious scholarly work.

The article, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” appeared this month in Social Text, a journal that helped invent the trendy, sometimes baffling field of cultural studies.

“At first glance,” according to the Sokal Hoax entry in the Museum of Hoaxes,

the article appeared to be an unlikely candidate for controversy. It was written in the typical style of academic articles, slightly overbearing and verbose, and it came armored with a bristling flank of footnotes (more footnotes than actual text). But on the day that the Spring issue of Social Text appeared in print, the author of the article, New York University physics professor Alan Sokal, published a letter in the academic trade publication Lingua Franca revealing his article was intended as a parody, a fact which the editorial board of Social Text had apparently failed to recognize.

“Any competent physicist or mathematician (or undergraduate physics or math major) would realize that it is a spoof,” Sokal asserted. He suggested that his article’s acceptance by the journal pointed to “an apparent decline in the standards of rigor in certain precincts of the academic humanities.” He also fumed over “how readily they [Social Text] accepted my implication that the search for truth in science must be subordinated to a political agenda.”

Is Too Much Freedom of Choice a Problem?, a PsychCentral report by “Rick Nauert PHD News Editor,” of a study about to be published in Psychological Science, is so bizarre that I immediately wondered if we were confronting another Sokal-sized hoax in the making.

The study purports to find that “a central tenet of American life,” choice — the availability of choices and the necessity of making them — is a bad thing. Bad for individuals; bad for the society. Really. Thus: “Social psychology researchers found that just thinking about choices makes people less sympathetic to others and less likely to support policies that help people.”

You may think I’m joking, but I assure you: if there’s a joke here, it’s not mine. According to the PsychCentral report:

So the researchers conducted a series of experiments to look at how thinking about choice affected people’s feelings on public policies.

For example, in some experiments, participants watched a video of a person doing a set of routine daily activities in an apartment. Some people were told to push the space bar every time he [sic] made a choice; others were told to do so every time he [sic] touched an object for the first time. They were then asked their opinions on social issues.

That was the research design. Here’s what the research is said to have found:

Simply thinking about “choice” made people less likely to support policies promoting greater equality and benefits for society, such as affirmative action, a tax on fuel-inefficient cars, or banning violent video games.

Another experiment found that when people think about choice, they are more likely to blame others for bringing bad events on themselves, like having a heart attack or losing a job.

By now some of you may still think I’m making this up, but at least anyone who has been reading this blog for a while will know that’s impossible because I’m not that clever. Nor does it seem likely that the main researcher, Krishna Savani, a postdoctoral research scholar at the Columbia Business School, is capable of creating such a mind-boggling parody of social psychology today. Oh, wait. Perhaps I’m being unfair to him. Could Prof. Savani’s description of his teaching and research interests itself be part of the hoax?

[His] research examines how the ideas, practices, and situations pervasive in different societies shape the way people think, feel, and act.... His recent research has focused on using knowledge gained from cross-cultural comparisons to improve people’s decision making and to increase their support for collectively beneficial public policies.

Alas, I’m afraid Prof. Savani and his research are not only real but in the mainstream of how social psychology is all too often practiced today. His blithe but revealing assumption that “affirmative action, a tax on fuel-inefficient cars, or banning violent video games” are “collectively beneficial public policies” and hence that people who oppose them are “less sympathetic to others and less likely to support policies that help people” shows him to be a member in good standing of what University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt called (as I discussed on Minding The Campus) the “tribal moral community” of social psychologists today, a tribe with shared “‘sacred values’ that hinder research and damage their credibility — and blind them to the hostile climate they’ve created for non-liberals.”

Despite the findings of Prof. Savani’s research, I’m confident in concluding that at least one choice we have remains beneficial to both individuals and society: the choice to laugh at this research.

UPDATE [31 March 2011]

Dirty Liberals, Or: Is Social Psychology All Washed Up?

I know some of you still suspect that I made up the research described above, despite my insistence that I did not and despite the fact that regular, or even occasional, readers know I’m not imaginative enough to have done so. For such doubters, you need look no further than an article in yesterday’s Chronicle of Higher Education for additional evidence that social psychologists commit this sort of research atrocity on a regular basis.

“We already know,” the Chronicle’s report begins, “that literally having clean hands affects your moral judgment. But can it also influence your politics?”

Speak for yourself, Chronicle; I certainly didn’t know that. Following that link, however, I learn — or rather, see some social psychologists want me to learn — that conservatives are priggish.

A new study titled “A Clean Self Can Render Harsh Moral Judgment” found that opinions on social issues like pornography, adultery, and drugs were affected by whether people had washed their hands prior to being asked. Participants were told to rate their feelings on social issues, like the ones mentioned above, on an 11-point scale from “very immoral” to “very moral.” Those who lathered up beforehand were significantly more likely than those with grubby palms to find, say, profane language immoral.

In a second experiment, some participants were simply told to think of phrases like “My hair feels clean and light. My breath is fresh. My clothes are pristine and like new.” Meanwhile, another group was told to think “My hair feels oily and heavy. My breath stinks. I can see oil stains and dirt all over my clothes.” The groups were then asked, using the same 11-point scale, to rate the morality of abortion, homosexuality, and masturbation. Those who had been thinking clean thoughts were more likely to deem those practices immoral.

Now, if the stars produced by your smacking your head at the sheer brilliance of these findings have gone away, you may have noticed that this argument that “Cleanliness Is Next to Priggishness” says nothing about conservatives. So why, you wonder, did I make that connection?

Wonder no more; I made the connection because I had first read yesterday’s Chronicle article, “Filthy Liberals and the Politics of Purell,” linked above, reporting on more recent research arguing that conservatives are cleanliness freaks.

Researchers asked 52 college students to complete a questionnaire about their political attitudes. Some were asked to “step over to the wall” to answer the questions while others were told to “step over to the hand-sanitizer dispenser.” Those who simply stood in the vicinity of the hand-sanitizer rated themselves as more conservative....

Apparently social psychologists have, well, a fixation (“a preoccupation or obsession”) on finding that conservatives are, at least, deranged or just a bit weird. Thus, the Chronicle tells us, “In a previous study, researchers found a connection between disgust and conservatism.”

And indeed they did. In that study, “Conservatives Are More Easily Disgusted Than Liberals,” Yoel Inbar and David Pizarro of Cornell and Paul Bloom of Yale found that conservatives have “a general disposition to feel disgusted by a variety of stimuli,” that “disgust seems to be an important component of the moral and political views of many conservatives....”

Conservatives like Leon Kass, the Chronicle notes, argue that since some things are in fact disgusting, “our feelings of disgust aren’t simply silly, visceral reactions. Instead they’re indications of the ‘wisdom of repugnance.’” Liberals find that view, well, disgusting.

Martha Nussbaum has written an entire book on the politics of disgust. In it, she argues that Kass is wrong and that “disgust is not wise but terribly obtuse.” She goes on to write that “projective disgust is inspired by a powerful loathing of aspects of the self, and it typically seeks a handy scapegoat. The idea of subordinating others by imputing disgusting properties to them lies at the heart of disgust’s dynamics.”

Tom Bartlett, the clever Chronicle author, concludes by asking,

Could you influence the outcome of an election by distributing free samples of Purell to voters? And would that be a dirty trick, or a clean one?

I think I’m about ready to wash my hands of social psychology.

The Lilly Ledbetter Chickens Come Home To Roost

2011-03-30T02:18:46Z

Lilly Ledbetter still lives! Not the actual human person Lilly Ledbetter (although she too still lives), but the ostensible victim of pay discrimination who became the symbol of all things good and virtuous about the victorious Democrats in 2008 when, in 2009, the first bill President Obama signed into law was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. As a symbol, LL not only lives but soars: she was just inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame; and a few days ago Karen Finney, former spokeswoman and communications director at the Democratic National Committee, used the passage of the “fair pay act” named in her honor to attack “the war on American women currently being waged in Republican-controlled legislatures around the country.”

Never mind that the act itself was in most respects a fraud. If you think that characterization too strong, take a look at the extensive commentary by the National Journal’s Stuart Taylor and the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Hans Bader, many of whose excellent discussions of that act are listed here. Read any — or better yet, all — of those linked pieces for an introduction to the misrepresentations in the legislation and the commentary about it, since I’m not going to summarize here.

“What I do want to do here,” if I may begin by quoting myself from my post two years ago, Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire and Rubber: Where The Rubber Meets The Road, Or ... Bring On The Unintended Consequences!,

and most emphatically, is to call attention to a BIG SURPRISE that may be in store for the Obamanauts who are now celebrating doing away, in effect, with the time limitations on filing pay discrimination complaints. I wish I had thought of this looming unintended consequence myself, but I didn’t. I’m indebted for it to Michael Rosman, General Counsel of the Center for Individual Rights, whose email to me I quote with permission:

Hi John. Now that President Obama has signed the Ledbetter bill into law, it might be an appropriate time to remind the readers of your blog that you do not need to be a minority or a woman to take advantage of its provisions. Specifically, anyone who was harmed in the 1970's or 1980's (or later) by a race-conscious affirmative action program can sue for damages if that person is still receiving a check (paycheck or pension) from the same employer that somehow reflects the injury.

Given all the public and private employees (and now retirees) who have been injured since the late 1960s by the preferential treatment given to others because of their race, sex, or ethnicity, I suspect the Obamanauts may not be altogether pleased by the flood of litigation their folly may produce.

Now the flood may have begun. Today Michael Rosman wrote a follow-up to his earlier note:

Yesterday, the Seventh Circuit decided Groesch v. City of Springfield. The court found that the Ledbetter Act revived the claims of three white policemen with the City of Springfield who claim that the City's passage of a special ordinance favoring an African American police officer (permitting that officer, unlike the white plaintiffs, to retain credit for years of service after resigning and subsequently seeking reinstatement) violated Title VII and the Equal Protection Clause. I'll let you read the decision for yourself, but it appears to permit those white police officers to seek backpay and other possible damages back to 2003. (It would have been even further back had the officers not sought relief in state court before filing a federal lawsuit.) The court only reached the question of timeliness, and did not address the merits of the plaintiffs’ claims.

Yet another example of unintended consequences, huh?

First, thanks to Michael and CIR for standing watch and guard on issues like this. I’ve read the opinion, and I encourage readers here to read it as well. It certainly does appear that the three white policemen who appear to have been victims of what is euphemistically referred to as “reverse discrimination” (there is, of course, nothing “reverse” about it; it’s just discrimination) can thank Lilly Ledbetter and the Democrats who fawned over her for being allowed back into court.

As for unintended consequences, I’ve just had occasion to note in another but similar connection that

I’ve often thought that the English language needs a pithy word (even an un-pithy one would do) to describe a consequence of one’s action that is “unwanted,” unintended, but nevertheless not only entirely predictable but that was actually predicted.

Since Michael Rosman actually and accurately predicted that the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act would provide unintended, unwanted assistance to victims of racial preference like the three white policemen in Groesch, perhaps in situations like this we should speak of Rosmanded rather than unintended consequences.

Libya’s WMDs

2011-03-29T03:15:01Z

In his speech tonight President Obush argued that his intervention in Libya was justified because “Qaddafi declared he would show ‘no mercy’ to his own people. He compared them to rats, and threatened to go door to door to inflict punishment.”

In other words, we went to war in response to Qaddafi’s WMDs, his Words of Mass Destruction.

UPDATE

Welcome to readers who followed the InstaPundit link. Keep reading; I actually have some posts that are longer.

UPDATE II

You think I’m joking? If so, I’m not the only one:

Reading the speech of the president I’m wondering, if Gaddafi didn’t say aloud that he would have kill[ed] the people of Benghazi would we have intervened?

Why Can’t A (Princeton) Woman Be More Like A Man?

2011-03-28T22:22:10Z

I bet Lerner and Loewe never considered that the president of Princeton and the former president of Wellesley and Duke would turn out to sing the same tune as Prof. Henry Higgins. To see why they should have, see my Why Can’t a Princeton Woman Be More Like a Princeton Man? on Minding The Campus.

“Diversity” As Tribalism II

2011-03-28T13:19:20Z

About two weeks ago I criticized a letter in the Chronicle of Higher Education from David Dixon, a Stanford graduate student. Dixon, who identifies himself as “an active member of the Choctaw Nation,” pointed out that in order to receive preferential treatment Native Americans must prove that they “maintain tribal affiliation or community attachment” and wrote that it would be a good thing if universities “required all minorities to demonstrate that they were serving in their racial communities before they received special consideration for admissions and scholarships.”

I was not kind to this suggestion, questioning the relevance or even existence of “racial communities” of Hispanics and Asians and raising the specter of “Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, et al. sitting as tribal elders deciding who qualifies for officially sanctioned membership in the black ‘racial community.’”

Mr. Dixon emailed, very politely, that I (and I think others) had misunderstood his position. His email, with permission:

Many students receive scholarships, admission to to schools, and jobs based solely on their minority status, and I think this is wrong. But, since the supreme court has authorized this sort of affirmative action (Grutter v Bollinger among others) — then this is the reality in America. My point is that if a university is going to give a scholarship to a person b/c they are a minority, then at least ensure that person will take that scholarship and reinvest it in their ethnic community (through mentoring, volunteering, etc.) in order to help bring that community out of poverty. Ultimately, this could help end affirmative action all together.

I ate dinner with Shelby Steele last week and I believe his essay “The Age of White Guilt” captures many of my thoughts and feelings on this issue.

http://www.cir-usa.org/articles/156.html

Also, please check out my Op Ed that I wrote in the Crimson on Diversity la st year while getting my first masters. I think you will concur with some of my thoughts. Either way, glad to help spur a discussion

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2010/4/22/diversity-harvard-students-political/

In a still friendly follow-up email Mr. Dixon, whom I now know is a Marine combat veteran being sponsored by the Marine Corps at Stanford and returning to Quantico this summer, explains further:

Just to be clear, I only recommend universities using “active community involvement” for admissions and scholarships, not to determine whether a person is actually black or hispanic. Most minorities admitted to top schools are from rich educated families. Unless those rich minorities take that gift of admission and scholarship and reinvest in their communities, then I fear we will never break the generational poverty and be stuck with these ineffective affirmative action policies forever.

Mr. Dixon is, quite clearly, much more critical of affirmative action than his original letter in the Chronicle suggested. Shelby Steele’s article is indeed a classic (read it immediately if you haven’t, and re-read it if you have), and I also encourage you to read Mr. Dixon’s Harvard Crimson piece, which is indeed devastating on affirmative action as practiced at Harvard. “In a recent class,” he wrote,

my professor took a blind poll of all the students’ political affiliations. Of the 40 students polled, I was the only conservative Republican. The vast majority of the class was liberal, including the professor — he had served in the Clinton administration. In my short time at Harvard I have taken courses at the law, business, government, and education schools, and every class has had a similar make-up.

I felt alienated as usual, but I had to laugh as I looked around the room. Thirty of the 40 students were female, and almost 50 percent, including myself, were “students of color.” President Faust would have been overcome with euphoria to walk into our lecture and observe the “diversity.” As I sat alone in a classroom of peers, I realized that diversity at Harvard is an intellectual joke.

It’s clear, in short, that Mr. Dixon is no fan of affirmative action, but I’m afraid that commendable lack of enthusiasm — and, indeed, often penetrating criticism — still does not make his proposal of required service to “racial communities” for beneficiaries of racial or ethnic preference any more appealing.

There is of course nothing novel or objectionable about requiring service of grant recipients — medical students who receive financial support from the armed forces are required to serve as many years as they receive support; recipients of public health scholarships must serve in “a federally-designated underserved area,” etc. — but these requirements should never be race-based. In the past, it is true, I have suggested affirmatively requiring racial minorities to provide the “diversity” for which they were given preferences — by requiring them to take classes or even enroll in majors where minorities are underrepresented, even drafting them and sending them to schools where they’re needed — but this was more in the manner of a reductio ad absurdum than a serious proposal.

Mr. Dixon relies on Grutter — “this is the reality in America,” he writes — to justify race-based service requirements of those who receive race-based preferences, but fortunately Grutter cannot be stretched that far, relying as it does only on the need in higher education for an ephemeral and undefined “diversity” to justify the racial favoritism and discrimination it protects. In fact, he gives far, far more deference to Grutter than it deserves, writing as he does in his Harvard Crimson piece:

Is there some value to giving special treatment to race, culture, and gender? The Supreme Court thinks so (Grutter v. Bollinger), and I completely agree.

I’m not sure about “culture” (is anybody?), but I definitely do not agree to special treatment based on race or gender, and I’m certain that all the things that Mr. Dixon obviously does not like about how affirmative action is currently practiced will continue as long as special treatment based on race, ethnicity, or gender is allowed.

Natural Selection?

2011-03-25T16:56:18Z

In my last post I invited (well, maybe urged) you to take a look at my discussion on Minding The Campus of yet Another Report on MIT’s Female Faculty by Its Female Faculty.

Shortly after that report appeared two new studies appeared of “the anemic underrepresentation on higher education faculties of another marginalized group, political conservatives,” and I discuss them, again, on Minding The Campus in Is This Natural Selection?.

Go take a look. You may not agree with me. You may think it really is worth spending time, effort, and money “attracting more men to nursing or women to agriculture.”

More On Women At MIT...

2011-03-23T21:43:29Z

I have another discussion of women in science on Minding The Campus this afternoon. (If I keep writing about that topic enough, I may become an “expert” on it at some point.)

If you’re interested, see Another Report on MIT's Female Faculty by Its Female Faculty.