Flashbacks re Michigan's Affirmative Action vote

Parent Cafe
161

<br>

<br>

<p>I think it’s legit for different schools to make different decisions about that. One school may say 5% is fine; another says the admit pool should reflect the applicant pool; another may say that what’s important is that there’s more than 100 URMs in each class. Others may not care one way or another. But if I’m personally deciding whether to enroll at Duke? I’ll know when I’m on campus – if I feel like my comfort is contingent on being white, then I’m not going to be comfortable.</p>

<br>

<br>

<p>You’re wrong when it comes to black students, unless you propose to eliminate the SAT and the high school transcript as admissions factors. It is a reality, right now, that if you’re Duke, and you say that everybody needs to meet the same threshold on those, you’ll admit a tiny, tiny number of black kids, and they’ll all turn you down and go to Harvard. </p>

<p>Even if you believe that a white person’s college education doesn’t suffer at all if she never meets a black person, I just don’t think it’s a good answer to tell all the black kids you reject, “Sorry, your parents didn’t push you to take AP classes, and they acted like your 1800 SAT was a great achievement, so you thought that was good enough, and maybe in another generation we’ll have fixed that problem, but in the meantime, suck it up.”</p>

162

<p>Tourguide, if the purpose and focus of a University was as narrow as that of a baseball team, you’d be right. But it’s not. And unlike a baseball player who doesn’t make it to “the show”, the consequence of an Asian (or Jew, or White kid) not making the Harvard “team” is that that kid goes to Penn, or Notre Dame, or UVa, or wherever - and gets just as good an opportunity for an education. The problem is that the perceived value of the Ivy League and handful of other schools deemed to be Ivy-equivalent is grossly inflated from the actual differential in educational value of other top schools. They all even have a lot of very bright kids. I have no doubt that a student could manage to hang out with a group of less intellectually gifted fellow students at an Ivy league school than he or she could find at any number of other schools - and some do.</p>

<p>So what’s the beef? The beef is this: a lot of schools want a diverse student body, for a lot of reasons. And since “merit” is a lot less objectively determinable for college than for baseball teams, those schools pick a diverse group of students. And then a lot of people who have inflated the perceived value of attending college “A” over that of attending college “B” get their noses out of joint, because their idea of “merit” hasn’t been honored.</p>

163

<p>

I’m sure some people feel this way (I’m not saying you do) but it’s a shame. If this is what people really want, then I suppose the answer is racially segregated colleges but I think most of us don’t want that. Some believe that non-AA will drive a college towards a single race but it doesn’t although the racial makeup may not be what some people ‘want’ it to be. The end result of not considering race as a factor may affect the racial makeup of the institution - especially as the institution becomes more and more academically selective. As the demographics of the US changes, so will the racial makeup of the selective non-AA institution. Perhaps there’s really nothing wrong with this even though we’d all like a more ‘ideal’ breakdown. For me, that ideal would be manifested in having all races being equally competetive such that it wouldn’t occur to anyone to even consider race. Achieving this ideal though is a complex issue that must examine the reasons the ideal isn’t achieved. Solving that would solve far more issues than just selective college admssions.</p>

<p>

<br>
So this method is basically still geared around pre-determined ‘numbers’ targeted for each race for admissions albeit different schools will come up with different equations (and there will still be people unhappy with the equation or method). I suppose that could be one method for admissions although by definition, racial discrimination would have to occur to achieve this. One would have to say “nope, we’ve reached our maximum number of Asians and now we need x more Whites, y more Native Americans, z more Hispanics, etc. so throw out the rest of the apps from Asians and let’s move on to the apps with the ‘White’ box marked until we’ve reached our number for those…”.</p>

<p>Another way to handle admissions would be to evaluate the candidate based on academic achievement in the context of their environment. One could arguably state that person A with the 2000 SAT is more desirable than person B with a 2100 SAT because person A held down a 30 hour a week job and acted as a surrogate parent and still managed a 2000 while person B had no responsibilities other than the ECs they were comfortable with (i.e. they didn’t ‘have’ to do them), attended SAT coaching classes, etc, yet only managed to achieve a 2100. This argument I can understand since it’s likely in this case that person A will actually out-achieve person B once in the same environment. The problem though is making an assumption that a person is pre-determined to be the A or B type due to their race and race alone and therefore one can simply evaluate based on the race rather than the true conditions of the individual.</p>

164

<p>“1. If you do a little research, you’ll find that the concepts of valuing the “whole well-rounded person” and “geographic diversity” were created by Harvard, Yale, and Princeton in the early 20th Century as a means of keeping the % of Jewish students low.”</p>

<p>Tourguide, I’m sure that assertion can be argued extensively. Are you saying that, prior to the “great Jewish invasion”, grades and test scores were the only thing that determined admission to HYP, et al? If so, I’d have to say, baloney. The only criteria that HAD to be met were that, you must be a white male, generally financially well off, and usually prep school educated. High Grades and test scores were not critical for admission. Having your ticket punched by the right people from the right social circles, was. Merit?----feh! In other words, elite college admissions has NEVER been about hard numbers alone. At that time, elite college admissions were among the LEAST egalitarian of American social systems. So don’t sit there and try to assert to me with a straight face that the concept of campus diversity is responsible for ruining what had previously been a "fair"process. College admissions is still not contingent upon having the highest raw numbers. You’ll have to go to China for that. Are you advocating that we adopt that system? If we do, don’t be surprised if NOBODY is happy with the results. </p>

<p>“Look at Major League Baseball. No affirmitive action, no quotas, no nothin’.”</p>

<p>If you want most of us to swallow that most disengenuous of analogies, you are going to have to lobodomize us. What do a baseball team and a college campus have to do with one another? Well…very little. </p>

<p>“That’s what was so weird about Poet claiming I was saying the URMs brought nothing to the table other than their ethnicity. I was saying the exact opposite–that if you base the decision on non-ethnic factors, you’ll still end up with a diverse group exactly BECAUSE URMs have other things going for them.”</p>

<p>Nice bit of obfuscation there, Tourguide, but you have indeed asserted that URMs bring nothing to the table other than their race/ethnicity. What I’m saying is that it really doesn’t matter what the URM brings to the table, because in the minds of many, it is ultimately immaterial. The very fact that they are present on campus is proof to many that they “took the spot of someone more worthy”. It doesn’t matter if they are high scoring, with stellar GPAs, or hardworking but relatively low scoring students from disadvantaged backgrounds. They don’t belong is the common belief, and that belief DID NOT begin with AA. It goes back centuries. People just put a pretty, quasi-PC face on it today.</p>

165

<p>

At a non-AA institution, this would clearly be an incorrect conclusion since racial bias wouldn’t have been used for admission. At an AA practicing institution, there are likely some who reach this conclusion and generalize that conclusion (which of course, shouldn’t be generalized). This is one of the downsides of AA that’s very difficult to get around.</p>

166

<p>

</p>

<p>Giving the fact that elite schools have beed the leading producers in academic and science research fileds for as long as they have been existed, it’s hard to belive that being a white, wealthy person is the only criteria for all the students that they admitted. For some, maybe, but not for majority.</p>

167

<p>TourGuide:</p>

<p>Great post, #156.</p>

168

<p>The arguments made by universities, educators and major U.S. employers resonate with me because of my personal experiences.</p>

<p>I am not sure there’s much place for anecdotes in this discussion, but here goes.</p>

<p>I was one of those “kids from Wyoming” (more or less) and I think it added to the value of my peers’ education to have actually met me. That sounds arrgant, but it was apparently a revelation to some of them that someone from my state could grow up in town (not a farm), study foreign language, and listen to punk rock. I benefitted from living with someone from Georgia who challenged the same dumb stereotypes I had about that state. I’m also grateful there were some diversity on my campus, because there was one black kid in my entire high school. One. One Indian kid. Maybe a handful of other Asians. </p>

<p>I wish there had been more diversity on my undergraduate campus; it wasn’t until graduate school that I really had a chance to live and learn in a multicultural environment. Despite my parents’ sense of fairness and equality, I know I grew up with some misleading impressions and beliefs–those weren’t really challenged until I had a chance to see, up close and personal, how many ways we were alike, and find that our differences lay in areas other than those I’d assumed.</p>

<p>I believe I am a better citizen, a better employee, a better parent, and a better person for having had those experiences. I am glad I got that out of my college and grad school experience. I am not convinced that having somewhat “more qualified” people fill some of the seats that had blacks and hispanics and kids from Idaho in them would have advanced my education significantly more. Perhaps that is a failing of my own parents for not raising me in such a way that diversity (or lack of it) would have any impact on my education, but the truth remains I am convinced I’m the better for it. </p>

<p>So, as I said above–when the Fortune 500s say they want people who went to college with a diverse group of students? That makes loads of sense to me, even before anyone trots out the research findings.</p>

<p>Did I benefit from other types of on-campus diversity (not just geographic and ethnic)? Of course. And I’d applaud efforts to increase that as well.</p>

<p>I guess I don’t know what I expect anyone to answer to this, but there you have it.</p>

169

<p>“Nice bit of obfuscation there, Tourguide, but you have indeed asserted that URMs bring nothing to the table other than their race/ethnicity.”</p>

<p>Poet, I’d love to see the quote on that. Maybe this is you WANT to believe my position is. One more time, here’s the crux of my position:</p>

<p>The whole civil rights movement was about getting race and ethnicity OUT of the judgement process. It wasn’t about stopping using race and ethnicity to discriminate for or against GROUP A, only to use it for or against GROUP B. In other words, it was about evaluating people as individual humans, not as members of this ethnic group, or that race. So how do you evaluate them? By using the radical concept of what their skills and talents are. It’s here that I make the controversial assertion that the different races and ethnic groups don’t come with an intrinsic set of talents or skills based ON that group. So I think it’s ok to say “I want a bluegrass fiddle player BECAUSE he can play bluegrass music on the fiddle.” But I hope we are past the point where we say things like “I want a Puerto Rican because he will (necessarily) be (fill in the skill you presume all Puerto Ricans will bring to the table just BECAUSE they are Puetro Rican).” All fiddlers can play the fiddle, and all shortstops can play shortstop. But all Blacks are…what? It’s the use of someone’s race or ethnicity as if it were ITSELF a skill (or necessarily comes with a certain set of traits) that I think is an obsolete concept of pigeonholing and stereotyping.</p>

<p>Suppose Brigham Young University wanted to shed it’s boring image? Would it be ok if they said, “Let’s get us some of those Irish kids from Chicago, New York, and Boston–they all drink beer like there’s no tomorrow?” Or if Harvard said, “We’re tired of being perceived as wimpy and effete–let’s get some of those big Polish kids from the Rust Belt…their fathers are all coal miners, steel workers, and Teamsters…they’ll teach our students how to spit and kick butt.” Sure, some Irish-American kids like to drink…but they like to drink because they like to drink–they don’t like to drink because they’re Irish. So if BYU said “Let’s go get some hard-drinking kids to liven up the campus,” and some (or even ALL) of them turn out to be Irish, fine. But when you go after them BECAUSE they are Irish–as if being of Irish descent means they are x, y, and z–then I think you’re going at the situation in a way that should be obsolete by now. Remember how Paul Hornung got raked over the coals for asserting that Notre Dame needs to lower its academic standards so more minority players could get in? That’s exactly the sort of position that you, Poet, are asserting–that minorities come with a certain buch of qualities.</p>

<p>I say you treat people like individual humans, and you will end up with diversity precisely because skills and talents are possessed by all sorts of people.</p>

170

<p>“I suppose the answer is racially segregated colleges”</p>

<p>How can that be the answer? I said that if I went to Duke and looked around, and all I saw was white people, I wouldn’t be comfortable, because I would feel that we were excluding others on an inappropriate basis. I’m white. So a racially segregated college is certainly not the answer.</p>

<p>“The whole civil rights movement was about getting race and ethnicity OUT of the judgement process.”</p>

<p>Says who? I say it was about the elimination of race hatred and the establishment of opportunity for a group that had been shut out of every kind of privilege in this country by the force of law for 300 years. There’s still plenty of progress to be made on both fronts. The great figures of the civil rights movement who are still around – like Congressman John Lewis, leader of SNCC, and Ambassador Andrew Young, leader of SCLC – are strong proponents of affirmative action.</p>

171

<p>Does this sound familiar? “I have a dream…”</p>

172

<p>

Of course it’s not an answer. As I stated, I think few people would want it - certainly I don’t think there should be such a thing. I was merely responding to the notion of one’s ‘comfort factor’ based on the racial makeup of the college. Frankly, this is probably difficult to achieve for anyone so attuned to race that it’s a major factor to them. The white person may think the student body should be at least 50% white to feel ‘comfortable’ but then so might the AfAm, the Hispanic, the Asian, etc. It’s clear that they all can’t be 50%. So what if it’s broken down to 20% each? Well, the white (or any other race) may not feel that being only 1/5 of the population is ‘comfortable’ enough. </p>

<p>In California the non-AA practice in the state universities has changed the racial makeup such that now my kids are not the majority racial group - especially in engineering. I don’t think there’s any problem with this and neither do they.</p>

173

<br>

<br>

<p>While you didn’t exactly offer a fully developed argument, I guess that your implication is:</p>

<ol>
<li><p>Martin Luther King founded and ran the civil rights movement single-handedly, and no one else’s opinions or motivations are relevant in understanding what the movement was about, and</p></li>
<li><p>You, based on one speech that you heard, have a better understanding of Martin Luther King (the only one whose opinion matters) than those who were marching beside him, planning protests and strategy with him, and running the organization that he founded and represented. Affirmative action advocates like Thurgood Marshall, A. Leon Higginbotham, Whitney Young…none of them knew King like YOU know King.</p></li>
</ol>

<p>If you can’t defend both point 1 and point 2, then perhaps we can agree that “I Have a Dream” is not, by itself, sufficient to teach what the civil rights movement was about.</p>

<br>

<br>

<p>What do the black engineers at Berkeley think?</p>

174

<p>I’m not going to speak for John Lewis or Andrew Young. They can think anything they want. If it makes you feel better, I’ll pretend I wasn’t paying attention during the 1960s and retract all references to the civil rights movement. Let’s say I’m simply interested in solving the problems, not perpetuating the problems or the appearance of the problems to keep my job. So the quicker we get towards a position where–hold on to your hat–we aren’t making decisions based on race and ethnicity, the better. If you or John Lewis or Andrew Young disagree with that goal, fine. I will take the side of the evil voters in California and Michigan who have decided that’s the sort of state in which they want to live.</p>

175

<p>

I don’t know what they think or what anyone else thinks regardless of their race. I don’t know if you’ve been to the campuses of UCB, UCLA, UCSD, UCI or not lately but if you were to go there and head over to the engineering departments, you’d find that whites aren’t in the majority either. Females are also in a minority in that area. Combine White, female, and engineering and it amounts to only a very small handful of students in those areas at those schools. This is the minority I was referring to when I said it doesn’t bother my kids or me - i.e. that they’re in a small minority in their classes. They’re much more focused on the homework, major, their studies, etc. than worrying about racial issues. I don’t equate this exactly to the experience of an AfAm in the same situation since they’re even more of a minority but whites will need to get over the idea of being in a majority everywhere because demographics are changing.</p>

176

<p>

</p>

<p>I agree, but I don’t see it happening as soon as I’d like. Maybe we should all be forced to marry outside of the ethnicity and/or race we were born to. That would speed up the process. ;)</p>

177

<p>Great suggestion, Mathmom. That IS one solution, but to make it happen, we’d still be making decisions based on race and ethnicity. I was sort of thinking that we get race and ethnicity out of the admissions process by getting race and ethnicity out of the admissions process. Too bad the admissions officers are such a bunch of racist rednecks that can’t be trusted to evaluate applicants evenhandedly unless they have an AA guidebook on their laps.</p>

<p>And can someone forward the memo with the subject line reading “How Black Engineers Think” to Ucla Dad? And a gold star to whoever can recite the infamous question asked to NFL quarterback Doug Williams a few decades ago.</p>

178

<p>

</p>

<p>?? What’s with this?</p>

179

<p>I think it’s called “sarcasm.”</p>

180

<p>I think TourGuide is lapsing into sarcasm because of frustration at being out-numbered in this dialog. So, while I plan to just lurk from this moment on, I want to offer my support to TourGuide. I came of age in the 1960’s, grew up in a house full of racists. It got to the point that my father and I barely spoke to each other for many years. I guess I was just naive, but I certainly saw the struggles of that period as aiming for a single goal: a race-blind society. The realization that many AfAm leaders have resorted to redefining that struggle in order to keep their faces in the news is, for me, the most disillusioning development among all the disillusionments of adulthood.</p>

<p>Tourguide, I hope you speak up in person like you do on cc.</p>