I support affirmative action. Nevertheless, I do understand some of the objections to it, that maybe it should be more class-based rather than gender and race based, and that it could potentially set people up for failure (someone who might have flourished at UC Riverside but flounders at Berkeley hasn’t been done a favor). So I don’t think everyone who opposes it is necessarily some kind of a right-wing nut.
But if you think we live in some kind of colorblind society, or worse yet, one where “reverse racism” rules, then you really have your fucking head up your ass (via):
In an experimental context, when reviewers were told the author of a legal brief was black they consistently rated identical pieces lower in quality and identified more spelling, grammar, factual, or analytical errors. It’s evidence that, even if the days of overt bigotry and explicit discrimination are mostly past, the United States still struggles with a deep problem of implicit racism.
Arin N. Revees, the president of Nextions and the author of the study, argues that the implicit racism happened because reviewers take the racial information she provided as a cue for how they should judge the work. When the author is supposed to be white, reviewers excused errors as out of haste or inexperience. They commented that the author “has potential” and was “generally a good writer but needs to work on” some skills. When the author is supposed to be black, those same errors became evidence of incompetence. A reviewer said he “can’t believe he [the author] went to NYU,” and others said he “needs lots of work” and was “average at best.”
Are you surprised? I’m not.
Punchy
And when a young white man open carries a handgun in a suburban Kay Jewelers, he’s openly and honestly expressing his 2nd Amendy rights. When a young blah man does the same, at best he’s arrested and/or pepper sprayed. At worst he’s pushing up daisies.
Imagine that.
Mike E
Damn.
Mnemosyne
I was at a screenwriting symposium a couple of weeks ago, and the guy who runs the Academy Nicholl Fellowships said that, for years now, they have removed all identifying information from the screenplays that are submitted for judging. That way, they can’t look at the screenwriter’s name and think (my example), Why does a guy named Darrell Washington think he can write a romantic comedy?
One famous example is among classical musicians — after orchestras switched to “blind” auditions (with the musician auditioning behind a screen), women were hired at a much higher rate because they were now being judged on their musicianship without the judges’ preconceptions about how a woman “should” play.
Omnes Omnibus
One of my favorite poems ever.
Howard Beale IV
@Punchy: Too bad the preamble of the Second Amendment has been ignored. You wanna gun? Join your local militia.
Funny thing is, many of these Zardoz-worshipping whack-jobs who keep screeching ‘2nd Amendment’!?!? were nowhere to be found to defend the country against the foreign and domestic enemies when the biggest assault against this country occurred during the Great Recession.
Morans.
Violet
No, I’m not surprised at all.
Omnes Omnibus
The most common writing problem I have seen in my AA students has been a tendency toward casual rather than academic English. The most common writing problem I have seen in my white students has been a tendency toward casual rather than academic English. Anecdotal, of course.
jl
@Violet:
Neither am I surprised. There should be a post on stereotype bias if a story on that comes out in the news. If a society is well and goodly biased, the invidious and arbitrary judgments can come from both the discriminator and discriminatee.
And re affirmative action, I’ll repeat my hypothesis from earlier thread that, unfortunately, that program came along about the same time that opportunities at the top got rarer and consequences of not making the cut at the top became much more severe. So, also maybe what we’ve seen in terms of resentment and anger has been at least partly a result of the old divide and conquer strategy to control the ‘lesser people’, no matter race, ethnicity, gender, rural or urban or suburban, or whatever you please to use to categorize people.
cthulhu
The report is a little light on methodology, only reporting means with no values for variance. The sample was probably too small for sub-group analysis but one wonders if the non-white sub-group (a respectable third of the sample) were equally biased as the white sample.
Regardless, it is not like this is the only study to show such effects. Still, though these effects are consistent they are often small and thus while they certainly have impacts on a societal level, they may be not obvious to observers on a small scale (e.g., within a firm) so everyone assumes things are fine and we are living in that color-blind world conservatives are always talking about.
cthulhu
Also, totally agree that a probably better approach is to take a class-based approach. But that would be class warfare, right?
Completist
And let us not forget the follow-up:
http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/a7fde48976/kill-the-white-people-from-nino
Omnes Omnibus
Sotomayor says that the Supreme Court fundamentally misunderstands racial bias.
? Martin
Riverside and Berkeley aren’t that different academically. The main difference is that Berkeley is overachieving A students and Riverside is B students (aka, normally accomplished people). The courses aren’t any harder, and Riverside in many ways is more difficult – 10 week quarters vs 16 week semesters, for one.
I’m also opposed to affirmative action, but people really misunderstand how admissions works. It’s simply not possible to rank students from 1-60,000, and decide to take everyone from 53,200-60,000. At best you get 1-10 and take all the 10s, most of the 9s, half of the 8s, and a few of the 7s, and within each subgroup you’re really choosing between students that you cannot differentiate academically.
Why take a 7 over a 9? Lots of different reasons. Some schools will reject the high-need 9s in favor of low-need 7s because they know their financial aid pool will run out of money. Some schools have additional criteria they need to meet. That straight-A kid that isn’t ready to take calculus isn’t a good choice against an A/B student that has done calculus for the engineering college. You have auditions for drama, practical experience for nursing, and a host of other things. Public universities reach out to populations of students that did well but had a low opportunity to learn. That inner city kid that got As but lowish SATs and lived in a car for 2 years? Yeah, they’ll take that kid over the B student from the high-rent suburbs that scored 2300 on the SATs. Which one do you think is more likely to plow through when they run up against some adversity?
Remember, schools measure their success as much by how many students they get to graduation as the stats when they walk in the door. Strong schools like Cal don’t have any students that are insufficiently prepared academically. Hell, even Riverside doesn’t have many.
So, assuming every student is adequately prepared, what are the merits of choosing a high SAT over a low SAT student on that basis alone? What if the lower SAT student brings something distinctive to the institution? The public doesn’t often think of these things, but if you want your drama department to put on great shows, you need people with the skills to build sets, and a kid that spent a few summers framing houses is almost a necessity. Or the nursing student that spent a summer interning at a hospital – nurses need to know what they’re getting into – those AP Latin scores don’t prepare you for drawing blood and cleaning up bodily fluids. And particularly in engineering, which is often the most academically difficult program to get into, the measure of a good engineering design comes in its construction. You can’t really tell the difference between a good heart valve and a bad one until you build it and test it. So it’s not just a need for a handful of students with practical skills, you need a ton of students with practical skills, and you’re far more likely to find those kids in Compton than in Beverly Hills.
And there’s relatively little consideration given to whether the standards for academic selection are even fair. SAT correlates more strongly with income than with student performance. So choosing high SAT students is really just a proxy for choosing students from wealthy families. Low income schools typically offer fewer AP courses, so choosing high GPA or AP scholars is often just a proxy for choosing students from wealthy school districts. Would SCOTUS or the GOP recognize choosing students based on other measures of achievement? Of course not, but there are countless measures of achievement, and some are even biased in favor of low-income students.
Omnes Omnibus
@? Martin: Sorry, if you are in favor of taking all sorts of background information into account, how can you say you oppose affirmative action?
fleeting expletive
George FWill on Colbert. Why doesn’t that vapid man get a new rug? He’s trying for the Troy Donahue look and it just doesn’t work for him. That thing has to be 20/25 years old. How often does he clean it? How do you clean a toupee anyway? Also he’s a dipstick.
Omnes Omnibus
@fleeting expletive: If he changes the rug, he acknowledges that is is a rug.
Gex
Reminds me of a story I heard on NPR about an orchestra that would hire as many female musicians as male musicians, but was concerned about the fact that women almost never made it to first chair.
They started having auditions behind a curtain and once that started, women started getting more equal representation in the first chair position.
ETA: Mnemosyne beat me to it at 3. And managed to find a link to boot.
Omnes Omnibus
@Gex: Mnem linked to it early on.
ETA: You found it too.
? Martin
@Omnes Omnibus:
Because the background information says nothing about race or gender or anything else. And it’s a measure of achievement thats defensible, even if it’s not recognized by people outside of academia.
Affirmative action really says that the standard measures are the proper measures, but should be ignored in some cases. I’m saying that the standard measures are largely shit and should be mostly ignored in all cases. Background information is expensive to implement. UC campuses are each running around 60,000 apps for freshman admission. Each file needs to be read twice. Reading and scoring 120,000 applications in a month is really fucking hard. CalState doesn’t do this. They shove the GPA and SAT scores through an algorithm and do most of the selection based on that with some additional criteria factored.
UC solved the need for affirmative action by working really goddamn hard and getting that background information as part of the process. CalState hasn’t done that, nor have a lot of other universities. Affirmative action may boost the minority numbers, but there are better ways of doing it – better for both the students and institution. It’s not easy, but its worth it.
pzerzan
Why am I somehow reminded about this-
http://www.theonion.com/articles/white-male-privilege-squandered-on-job-at-best-buy,35835/
Omnes Omnibus
@? Martin: And affirmative action, as okayed by the Supreme Court, basically approves taking a total person approach. You seem to advocate a total person approach. So what is it that you don’t like?
ruemara
They could have paid me the money for the study and just asked me some questions. In 40 years, I’ve learned that if you’re black, you must be excellent. If you have the temerity to be excellent at things considered “white (which I fully admit to not understanding why), you must never fail to be perfect. Because you will be publicly excoriated. Also, show no personality that could ever be considered objectionable, human or remotely ill tempered.
gian
@? Martin:
Doug, he is correct, the UC system is good all the way round. IIRC the whole system is supposedly for the top 10 or 12 % of in state students.
meaning mostly As and a few Bs for the less prestigious UC schools, and As for the UCLA and UCB kids. If you were to draw lines it’s the Cal States versus the UCs where the student resume has more differences (and the Cal Poly schools, Pomona and San Luis Obispo are really competitive)
If you’re relying on US News their rankings are based on surveys which ask people about the schools, not necessarily people who KNOW anything about the schools. The ones with a national reputation because they’ve been around longer or have a storied basketball program get more name recognition
but the whole system is underbuilt for the population so I expect it’s a bit of a lottery as to which school admits a top 10% kid, and the name recognition schools get maybe the top 1-2% and the others get the 3-10% based on applications weighting toward the name brand ones..
? Martin
@Omnes Omnibus: The debate is really over whether race or gender should be considered. That’s what affirmative action means. I’m arguing that if you’re strong enough to overthrow the SAT as a measure of anything other than minimal competency that you don’t need to consider race or gender to achieve equity.
Now, there are a bunch of other institutional barriers for minorities outside of admissions selection that need to be addressed, but the admissions problem is solvable in other ways. And the affirmative action issue in public universities also masks a different problem (for the university, not the student), which is that public universities really struggle to attract competitive minority students because private universities will throw full scholarships at them that the public’s can’t match. That’s not the sole reason why minority enrollment is so low at many publics (far from it), but situations like that don’t help. Other things that don’t help – fraternities hosting racist events, campus police that harass minority students, and about a bazillion other things that drive students away.
gian
@gian:
in a local riverside paper this week:
http://www.pe.com/local-news/topics/topics-education-headlines/20140422-uc-admissions-latinos-surpass-whites-for-first-time.ece
Omnes Omnibus
@gian: Sometimes the difference is about the culture of the school. Universities don’t just offer academic education; they can offer socialization into a type of culture as well. Berkeley and Riverside are different cultural milieus.
Omnes Omnibus
@? Martin:
I guess that I simply disagree. Considering race, gender, class, geographic origin is simply something that I think a university should do to put together a good class.
? Martin
@gian:
It’s top 9% now. Changed a few years ago. Applications to the system doubled, enrollments barely increased, selectivity has gone through the roof.
Most people don’t realize this, but the CalStates serve specific geographic regions. You’re basically guaranteed admission to your local CalState if you meet minimal criteria (GPA/SAT sliding scale). Pomona is still open locally. SLO I think is the only campus fully impacted both locally and by program. SLO is roughly comparable to UC Merced in most programs and comparable to UC Riverside in engineering (what SLO is best known for) in terms of difficulty to get admitted.
UC isn’t that underbuilt, it’s mostly just underfunded right now. UC could shift about 25% of current enrollment from non-residents to California residents if the state was willing to cover the in-state tuition component. That’s a straight up budget issue. But the facilities, faculty, etc. already exist.
Sondra
I am more surprised that either the test was not described well by whoever wrote the article, or that he/she/they only found 2 problems with the conclusion.
Why, if there were 6 spelling errors, did the reviewers not find all 6 errors in either one or both memos? Or if there were 5 factual errors, why didn’t they find more than just a few errors in both memos? Who reviewed the reviewers?
Either the test was badly designed or ex falso sequitor quod libet: from a false premise, anything follows.
It is most likely true that some people have biases like black/white, male/female, gay/straight, but I don’t think this particular test proves that. Or, whoever wrote the article didn’t do the test justice in the way he/she/they described it.
some guy
Anne Barnard and haaretz on th3 hudson haz a sadz. their “car bomb revolution” was not exactly what sauidi intelligence and the American Neocon Chorus promised passive voice,. how O beseech theee
some guy
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/23/world/middleeast/syria.html?hp
this URL brought to yuo by the Committee To Buy Omnes Omnibus a Chromebok
Omnes Omnibus
@some guy: Next time try to connect it to your original post. It isn’t that complicated. I do note your effort at improving. Nice job.
some guy
@Omnes Omnibus:
car bombs, oh how theyproduce so many bitter tears. al qaeda, despite copious amounts of a certain love f(rom our betters at butter) that dare not speak its naeme , HOMS!!!!! to 11
this URL brought to yuo by the Committee To Buy Omnes Omnibus a Chromebok
Omnes Omnibus
@some guy:
Christ, if you are going to go that way, use Spellcheck.
ETA: Whatever the merits of the point you are trying to make, you do it no good by your method of communication.
ETAA: Why should someone side with your view? And what the fuck is your view – that might help?
AxelFoley
@ruemara:
It’s almost as if you’re describing President Obama…
some guy
But the challenge is to overcome not just the shattered infrastructure, but also the deep resentments that come from being bombed, starved and run out of the city. The amnesty alone left hard feelings on all sides.
Omnes Omnibus
@some guy: Post again when you are sober.
Loneoak
A dear mentor of mine, who was well ensconced in a feminist-Marxist tradition of sociology, was pretty negative on affirmative action (at least within university contexts). Her objection was really based on a well-grounded understanding of what does and doesn’t work within a university to support diversity and equity, and her experience as someone who came to college with zero cultural capital herself and fought her way to a PhD. Basically she claimed that unless universities are re-structured to promote the thoughtful transmission of cultural capital to under-privileged students all the way through their education then affirmative action was largely a whitewashing charade. Unless universities actively value and reward mentoring of students of underprivileged backgrounds then no one was really going to do it. Make it a tenure requirement to closely mentor a diverse group of students and then you’ll see real change. If we leave diversity up to the admissions office and only value faculty via publications and research money metrics then you’ll just replicate inequity in most cases.
I find her point pretty persuasive, as far as it goes. But I still think everyone is better off if the widest range of people at least get a shot at success and find it hard to abandon affirmative action as a desirable policy.
srv
I used to troll the masses at reddit who were all into a post-racial worldview.
Then apparently all the progressive olds got a chromebook. It’s interesting to see a post-Eternal September where the olds start biotch-slapping the white youts about how they’re not victims.
@Omnes: How does one stay sober when they realize Obama’s baby killing project hasn’t work out? Hitler Assad won. Right-to-Protect joins COIN in the ash heap of history.
@Martin: Teh Google has failed to explain to me what the jihad against CCSF is really about. I can’t believe you can unaccredit the largest CC in the world over ‘administrative’ issues. Where’s the fourth bullet?
Jewish Steel
Don’t need no affirmative action.
Reparations will do instead.
srv
Good god, Don Rickles is still doing live shows?
? Martin
@Loneoak:
I agree with this, in the case where you are only hiring and tenuring non-minority faculty. Put another way, your minority student population will inevitably be a reflection of your minority faculty population. You won’t need to incentivize your minority faculty to mentor minority students – they’ll do it automatically, and they’ll do it well. And that goes for women in disciplines where they are underrepresented as well. So an alternate approach is simply to hire a diverse faculty body.
@srv:
Oh, that’s totally believable. I work with several accrediting bodies, but not that particular one. Accrediting reviews are often inconsistent from year to year, and it’s not hard to get hung out a bit. That said, I’ve never visited an institution that took accreditation as seriously as it should, and few are experienced at dealing with the checks and balances that exist within accrediting bodies to smooth out the inconsistencies. And frankly, I don’t have a high opinion of CCSF.
California universities often struggle with accrediting bodies because of the scale of the systems. 10% of all colleges in the nation are CA public schools, and because of the scale, schools tend to specialize in ways that open up gaps that rely on other schools to fill. CCSF is oriented away from transfer to 4 year schools. That’s a bit of a problem because the California Community College (CCC) charter has been moving the campuses increasingly toward transfer to help address the difficulty of getting into the UC and CS systems. So the campus is almost actively acting in defiance of its own charter. They would be better able to argue their case if they were yielding a lot of vocational certificates and other 2 year degrees, but they aren’t doing a particularly good job of that either. Community colleges also simply offer course opportunities to any and all comers, but they cannot survive on that alone, and CCSF simply has lost it’s balance, and with the budget cuts of the last few years, they simply aren’t managing the institution well. 90,000 students is really damn hard to oversee, particularly when you are already lightly staffed and your budget is getting slashed. I think many universities have too many administrators, but CCSF only has about 40, for 90,000 students. I don’t see how you can possibly maintain an institution of that size with so few.
But many accreditation problems are administrative – staffing and budgeting levels, student safety, compliance with various other regulations, graduation rates (which need to be measured and communicated to faculty), etc.
Darkrose
@? Martin:
Purely anecdotal, but I think they have a way to go yet. After 10 years, it’s always a bit of a surprise when I run into someone else who looks like me on the main campus.
Darkrose
@? Martin:
Purely anecdotal, but I think they have a way to go yet. After 10 years, it’s always a bit of a surprise when I run into someone else who looks like me on the main campus.
? Martin
@Darkrose: That’s a different problem. If only 4% of applicants to UC are African-American, you cannot fault the admissions process for an admit pool that is only 4% African-American. And you cannot fault the process if only 2% of students that choose to attend are African-American.
Like I said, there are many other impediments proper representation at UC. The biggest impediment is that students select themselves out of the pool (not that they don’t often have good reasons to select out). The 2nd biggest impediment is that the students that do get admitted get courted so heavily by privates that you can’t fault those students for following the full ride.
Loneoak
@? Martin:
Yeah, I should have finished the thought there, at the very least to fairly represent her view. She had seen many minority faculty get hired into prominent positions just to flounder with the often implicit obligations those positions carried. In other words, not because they weren’t smart or ambitious enough, but because the system didn’t really value their presence like it claimed and it often wasn’t anyone’s job to help them through it.
Jerry
I’m not sure how the admissions process for U of Michigan works nowadays, but it used to be based on a point system. There was a total of 150 points that you could earn for various things like GPA (up to 80 points), challenging courses, competitive high schools, extracurricular programs, etc. An applicant could earn up to 20 points for having an economically disadvantaged background, being an underrepresented minority, attending a high school serving a predominately minority population, or being a scholarship athlete, among others. However, an applicant could also earn up to 16 point for being a Yooper (someone from the Upper Peninsula which is predominantly white). In all of the debates over Michigan’s application point system, I don’t recall anyone saying anything about a kid from the U.P. being awarded extra points just for being from up North. It was all black black black black.
Woodrowfan
@? Martin: thanks, as a fairly new college teacher that was really interesting. I’d wondered how it worked…
Sherparick
I went on Media Matters and Faux News appears to have spen the day really beating the racial resentment drum, with not so unspoken assumption of white, male, superiority being the default natural condition of things.
I must admit that living close to 20 years in Europe allows you to see things and the unspoken assumptions we Americans (white, black, and brown) inhale with our culture. I also got a perspective on what it must like being Black in America by hanging around English friends, especially in the 1980s and early 90s, who detested the Irish (and who did not realize I was only a second generation Irish American) and would make many casual remarks about Irish stupidity, perversity , and violence (which I thought was especially rich coming from the English who had spend much of the previous 500 years going to foreign lands and slaughtering the inhabitants and this being the era when England’s soccer hooligans were notorious).
D58826
Given enough time and I’m sure John Roberts will find a good reason to reverse Brown vs Board of education and return us to the wonderful days of yesteryear with Jim Crow for all.(sigh)
wuzzat
I used to see this happen a lot when I was a college tutor. It wasn’t necessarily true that the black kids were graded harder than the white kids, but much of the time they were graded harsher, particularly boys. Instead of “This has a lot of potential, but needs further development,” they got, “This is incomplete and needs to be rewritten.” Of course, based on that specific group of kids, I suspect that part of it was internal racism and the rest was candy-coating things for the entitled white boys who tended to get pissy at any hint that they might not actually know everything.
srv
@? Martin: Thanks for the detailed reply.
Another Holocene Human
@AxelFoley: Is this why white people love Samuel L Jackson so much? That his rants in Pulp Fiction are extremely cathartic in a society where a Black man expressing an emotion vociferously is not only taboo, but one of the most deadly taboos there is?
Jebediah, RBG
@Omnes Omnibus:
If I contribute the price of a Chromebook, will that silliness stop?