# Are Ivy League and other top universities hotbeds of racism? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [December 10, 2015, 2:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-ivy-league-and-other-top-universities-hotbeds-of-racism/740033 "2015-12-10T02:55:00Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 11\ **Page:** 9
**Author:** ![brickbacon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/898d66/32.png) [@brickbacon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/brickbacon)\ **Post date:** [December 16, 2015, 3:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-ivy-league-and-other-top-universities-hotbeds-of-racism/740033/161 "2015-12-16T03:11:27Z")
> [@ITR\_champion](#): > > The reason why you left that part out is because it’s so obviously fatal to your case. I asked you to provide a cite for your claim that “people in Appalachia ARE given preference”. Thus far, you haven’t provided any evidence that any university anywhere treats people in Appalachia. You can’t provide any such evidence, because you claim is not true. Are you high right now? This isn’t just two state university systems. Read the article: > [@](#): > > For decades, colleges and universities have pursued geographic diversity in their student bodies. Web pages proudly trumpet that this year the college has students “from all 50 states and from over 80 countries” (Harvard) or that “ the students come from throughout the United States and the world” (Stanford). Even public universities use these formulations. At the University of Michigan in 2011, students came from “81 of 83 Michigan counties, all 50 states, and 54 countries.” > > Nobody bats an eye at geographic diversity. Notice how they quote Harvard and Stanford, two elite universities. Notice how the language is basically the same language that used with regard to pursuing racial diversity? Notice how the first sentence talks about colleges and universities without any qualifications? This is a common practice. So common that your insistence on arguing the point only highlights your ignorance, once again. I would hope someone wouldn’t need to make explicit to you the fact that “pursuing geographic diversity” cannot be done without giving some people preference. I have explained to you WHY the typically kid from Applacahia is given preference. Why you cannot put 1 and 1 together is beyond me. > [@](#): > > While we’re on the topic of claims that you haven’t provided a cite for. you also said this: > > I asked for a cite for that, and you’ve failed to provide one. A cite was already provided. If you want more read any of the many amicus briefs on the Fisher case presently before the SC. ---
**Author:** ![ITR\_champion](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/c67d28/32.png) [@ITR\_champion](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ITR_champion)\ **Post date:** [December 16, 2015, 6:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-ivy-league-and-other-top-universities-hotbeds-of-racism/740033/162 "2015-12-16T06:25:39Z")
> [@brickbacon](#): > > Notice how they quote Harvard and Stanford, two elite universities. Notice how the language is basically the same language that used with regard to pursuing racial diversity? Notice how the first sentence talks about colleges and universities without any qualifications? This is a common practice. So common that your insistence on arguing the point only highlights your ignorance, once again. What the article actually says is about Harvard and Stanford is: Web pages proudly trumpet that this year the college has students “from all 50 states and from over 80 countries” (Harvard) or that “ the students come from throughout the United States and the world” (Stanford). Bragging on a webpage about how the fact that your students come from many states and countries is not the same thing as discriminating for and against certain students based on where they’re born. The article does not make any mention of Harvard or Stanford discriminating based on geography. > [@](#): > > I would hope someone wouldn’t need to make explicit to you the fact that “pursuing geographic diversity” cannot be done without giving some people preference. Actually it can, and is. There are many methods by which a university aim for geographic diversity (or racial diversity or any other type) without having the admissions office discriminate for or against anybody. For example, if a university wanted more students from a certain region of the country, they could do more advertising in that part of the country. No preferences, no discrimination, just a little more focus on where you mail flyers and send recruiters to college fairs. We all know, I presume,[the results of race-based affirmative action](http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-adv-asian-race-tutoring-20150222-story.html#page=1). Lee’s next slide shows three columns of numbers from a Princeton University study that tried to measure how race and ethnicity affect admissions by using SAT scores as a benchmark. It uses the term “bonus” to describe how many extra SAT points an applicant’s race is worth. She points to the first column. African Americans received a “bonus” of 230 points, Lee says. She points to the second column. “Hispanics received a bonus of 185 points.” The last column draws gasps. Asian Americans, Lee says, are penalized by 50 points — in other words, they had to do that much better to win admission. If students from Appalachia actually got any preference in college admissions, a similar study could document a similar discrepancy for them. But you haven’t linked to any similar study. ---
**Author:** ![ITR\_champion](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/c67d28/32.png) [@ITR\_champion](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ITR_champion)\ **Post date:** [December 16, 2015, 7:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-ivy-league-and-other-top-universities-hotbeds-of-racism/740033/163 "2015-12-16T07:00:18Z")
> [@brickbacon](#): > > A cite was already provided. If you want more read any of the many amicus briefs on the Fisher case presently before the SC. No cite has been provided, saying that “The mismatch theory has largely been debunked, and is not widely accepted in academia,” which is what you claimed. Anybody who reads the thread will easily see that no such cite has been provided. Claiming that you’ve provided a cite, when in fact you have not, seems to be a favorite tactic of yours, but nobody’s dumb enough to fall for it. Rather, I’ve provided many cites showing that mismatch theory is backed by a mountain of research and widely accepted in academia. Anyone can read the thread and see them. But what the hey, I’ll post them again. > **[stem.pdf](https://public.econ.duke.edu/~psarcidi/stem.pdf)** > > 584.98 KB We examine differences in minority science graduation rates among University of California campuses when racial preferences were in place. Less-prepared minorities at higher-ranked campuses had lower persistence rates in science and took longer to graduate. We estimate a model of students’ college major choice where net returns of a science major differ across campuses and student preparation. We find less-prepared minority students at top ranked campuses would have higher science graduation rates had they attended lower-ranked campuses. > **[Why "Mismatch" is Relevant in Fisher v. Texas — The James G. Martin Center...](https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2015/12/why-mismatch-is-relevant-in-fisher-v-texas/)** > > Affirmative action is before the Supreme Court again this week, as it rehears arguments in Fisher v. University of Texas. Perhaps the most important question about racial preferences is one that's not directly raised by the case: do they even work?... Suppose that Sally dreams of becoming a chemist, does very well in a standard high school chemistry course, and receives a preference into an elite school where most of her classmates have taken AP chemistry. Even if Sally does not experience “learning” mismatch, she is likely nonetheless to end up with a B- or a C in chemistry simply because of the strength of the competition. A long line of studies (e.g., this excellent study by two psychologists) have shown that students receiving large preferences, facing these pressures, tend to abandon STEM fields in large numbers. Competition mismatch thus appears to have large and damaging effects on the number of blacks, in particular, graduating with science or engineering degrees. > **[The Painful Truth About Affirmative Action](https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/10/the-painful-truth-about-affirmative-action/263122/)** > > Why racial preferences in college admissions hurt minority students—and shroud the education system in dishonesty. The single biggest problem in this system – a problem documented by a vast and growing array of research – is the tendency of large preferences to boomerang and harm their intended beneficiaries. Large preferences often place students in environments where they can neither learn nor compete effectively – even though these same students would thrive had they gone to less competitive but still quite good schools. And why not include some more: > **[Increasing Faculty Diversity: The Occupational Choices of High-Achieving...](https://www.amazon.com/Increasing-Faculty-Diversity-Occupational-High-Achieving/dp/0674009452)** > > Increasing Faculty Diversity: The Occupational Choices of High-Achieving Minority Students \[Cole, Stephen, Barber, Elinor\] on Amazon.com. \*FREE\* shipping on qualifying offers. Increasing Faculty Diversity: The Occupational Choices of High-Achieving... Working with a large sample of high-achieving minority students from a variety of institutions, the authors conclude that minority students are no less likely than white students to aspire to academic careers. But because minorities are less likely to go to college and less likely to earn high grades within college, few end up going to graduate school. The shortage of minority academics is not a result of the failure of educational institutions to hire them; but of the very small pool of minority Ph.D. candidates. In examining why some minorities decide to become academics, the authors conclude that same-race role models are no more effective than white role models and _that affirmative action contributes to the problem by steering minority students to schools where they perform relatively poorly_. > **[aa.pdf](https://public.econ.duke.edu/~psarcidi/aa.pdf)** > > 539.63 KB If the mismatch theory has been debunked and is not widely accepted in academia, interested readers might wonder why some many researchers from academia keep writing papers saying that the mismatch theory is true. They might start wondering if one anonymous internet user who claims he provided a cite but didn’t should actually be trusted above a large body of recent, peer-reviewed research. > [@brickbacon](#): > > If you want more read any of the many amicus briefs on the Fisher case presently before the SC. Okay, I’ll do that. Here are some quotes from one of those amicus briefs. It is now generally conceded that large admissions preferences — regardless of whether these are based on race, “legacy” considerations, or other factors — cause students to receive lower grades. The median black receiving a large admissions preference to an elite law school, for example, ends up with grades that put her at the 6th percentile of the white grade distribution — an effect that is almost entirely due to the preference itself.6 (Data made available to researchers after the Grutter decision revealed that 60% of blacks admitted to the University of Michigan Law School had GPAs in the bottom tenth of their class.)7 Dartmouth psychologist Rogers Elliott and several colleagues published a study in 1996 that found very high attrition rates from the sciences in four Ivy League schools for students admitted with large preferences.8 Students who had weaker academic preparation than their peers were particularly vulnerable in science and engineering classes, where grading is on a rigid curve, professors often teach at a challenging pace and material builds sequentially from one course to the next. Students with significantly weaker preparation than the median student can become overwhelmed, and consequently transfer to less rigorous majors at a high rate. This phenomenon came to be known as “science mismatch,” because similar students attending less elite colleges appeared to have higher persistence rates in science. The cumulative effect is that even though black entering freshmen have levels of interest and aspiration in science comparable to (or higher than) whites, they make up only a small proportion of those with degrees in science and engineering.9 So you told me that if I read any of the amicus briefs, I would find evidence that the mismatch theory has been debunked and rejected. I read one, and instead it says that mismatch theory is widely accepted. Maybe you should have read some of those amicus briefs before recommending that I do so. ---
**Author:** ![Waymore](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/919ad9/32.png) [@Waymore](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Waymore)\ **Post date:** [December 16, 2015, 7:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-ivy-league-and-other-top-universities-hotbeds-of-racism/740033/164 "2015-12-16T07:30:23Z")
It boggles the mind that the mismatch theory is even controversial. Of course thrusting somebody into an environment he or she isn’t ready for will tend to have a negative outcome. That’s just common sense. But the discussion of race in the US is so laden with dogma that something that is blindingly obvious will be dismissed out of hand. ---
**Author:** ![Chief\_Pedant](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/a6a055/32.png) [@Chief\_Pedant](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chief_Pedant)\ **Post date:** [December 16, 2015, 12:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-ivy-league-and-other-top-universities-hotbeds-of-racism/740033/165 "2015-12-16T12:21:58Z")
At the heart of U Texas’s concern in Fisher is preserving the need to get the best black students in order to minimize the “mismatch” effect which results from the 10% guideline. In higher education, we need to preserve race-based diversity. University education is such a critical stepping stone to success in our society that closing those doors to an entire self-identified race group would be (has been) catastrophic for blacks. At the same time, when admissions are limited to the 10% mechanism, the black students who would be admitted under this policy–while enough to fulfill a race diversity need–fall into the lower edges of academic performance and are therefore de facto marginalized into the group of students who are very weak. Worse, when the student body is otherwise composed of high-performing students, the perception that blacks as a group are inferior students is compounded. This kind of mismatch results in a disproportionately high representation of blacks within the academically poor cohort, and surely promotes whatever racism exists. To remedy this, U Texas wants to ameliorate mismatch by assigning to privileged blacks a race-based priority for admission instead of being confined to a 10% rule. This policy allows about 25% of their black students to be matriculated outside of the 10% rule, but not have to compete directly with their socioeconomic peers. I think this is the right approach, but U Texas v Fisher is a reasonably clear example that academic mismatch is real. ---
**Author:** ![Human\_Action](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/ac91a4/32.png) [@Human\_Action](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Human_Action)\ **Post date:** [December 16, 2015, 12:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-ivy-league-and-other-top-universities-hotbeds-of-racism/740033/166 "2015-12-16T12:39:52Z")
> [@ITR\_champion](#): > > There are a lot of studies purporting to show that there’s a subconscious bias against people other races in everyone, or perhaps just in white people. I think it’s understandable that many people are skeptical of such things. Scientific claims to know what’s going on in everyone’s subconscious started with Sigmund Freud, who said that men are subconsciously attracted to their mothers and that women subconsciously have penis envy. His claims weren’t true, and neither were a great many other supposedly scientific findings about the subconscious. > > The article that you linked to is about a survey of researching attempting to determine which regions of the brain are active when people are making judgments after seeing someone’s race. The tool being used is MRI brain scans, and [there are many seriously reasons to be doubtful about MRIs being used in that way](http://www.yalescientific.org/2014/04/debunking-science-fmri-a-not-so-reliable-mind-reader/). Indeed, at the moment there seems to be no reliable proof that MRIs can isolate what brain region is used for any social tasks. > > More generally, in psychology research, [most results can’t be replicated](http://www.sciencemag.org/content/349/6251/aac4716). There are [a great many possible causes](http://www.weeklystandard.com/making-it-all-up/article/1042807): small and unrepresentative samples, bias towards positive findings, outright fraud. Findings about subconscious racism are among those that have proved difficult to replicate, to put it mildly. > > Even before the Reproducibility Project, direct replications failed to find evidence for many other effects that the social psychology literature treats as settled science. “Single-exposure conditioning”​—​if you’re offered a pen while your favorite music is playing, you’ll like the pen better than one offered while less appealing music plays. The “primacy of warmth effect,” which tells us our perceptions are more favorable to people described as “warm” than to people described as “competent.” The “Romeo and Juliet effect”: Intervention by parents in a child’s romantic relationship only intensifies the feelings of romance. None of these could be directly replicated. > > Perhaps most consequentially, replications failed to validate many uses of the Implicit Association Test, which is the most popular research tool in social psychology. Its designers say the test detects unconscious biases, including racial biases, that persistently drive human behavior. Sifting data from the IAT, social scientists tell us that at least 75 percent of white Americans are racist, whether they know it or not, even when they publicly disavow racial bigotry. This implicit racism induces racist behavior as surely as explicit racism. The paper introducing the IAT’s application to racial attitudes has been cited in more than 6,600 studies, according to Google Scholar. The test is commonly used in courts and classrooms across the country. > > That the United States is in the grip of an epidemic of implicit racism is simply taken for granted by social psychologists​—​another settled fact too good to check. Few of them have ever returned to the original data. Those who have done so have discovered that the direct evidence linking IAT results to specific behavior is in fact negligible, with small samples and weak effects that have seldom if ever been replicated. One team of researchers went through the IAT data on racial attitudes and behavior and concluded there wasn’t much evidence either way. > > “The broad picture that emerges from our reanalysis,” they wrote, “is that the published results [confirming the IAT and racism] are likely to be conditional and fragile and do not permit broad conclusions about the prevalence of discriminatory tendencies in American society.” Their debunking paper, “Strong Claims and Weak Evidence,” has been cited in fewer than 100 studies. Addressing the MRI issue, which is the only one related to my post: No, MRIs don’t allow mind-reading. It does allow one to quantify the physical processes of the brain, and try to correlate them with stimuli. In other words, exactly what the article you linked to says: One of fMRI’s most celebrated advantages is its ability to quantify psychological processes that people are either unwilling or unable to report honestly. For example, people might not be aware that they respond emotionally to photos of loved ones, but fMRI can show emotion centers in the brain demanding higher blood flow. Another more controversial example is lie-detection. Deception activates the prefrontal cortex; with this knowledge, fMRI can be used to indicate whether or not an individual is lying. However, that does not that mean scientists can divine someone’s exact thoughts from what lights up in an fMRI brain scan. An increasing number of cautionary voices have started to emphasize the limitations of fMRI. I was in no way claiming that MRIs allowed one to divine someone’s exact thoughts. ---
**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\ **Post date:** [December 16, 2015, 5:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-ivy-league-and-other-top-universities-hotbeds-of-racism/740033/167 "2015-12-16T17:51:48Z")
> [@brickbacon](#): > > Are you high right now? Knock it off or take it to The BBQ Pit. (And, **ITR champion** , your statements come too close to accusations of lying in the post he was quoting.) Everyone stick to the topic and leave the persdonal comments out of this. [/Moderating] ---
**Author:** ![lance\_strongarm](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/87869e/32.png) [@lance\_strongarm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lance_strongarm)\ **Post date:** [December 16, 2015, 6:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-ivy-league-and-other-top-universities-hotbeds-of-racism/740033/168 "2015-12-16T18:51:37Z")
> [@Waymore](#): > > It boggles the mind that the mismatch theory is even controversial. Of course thrusting somebody into an environment he or she isn’t ready for will tend to have a negative outcome. That’s just common sense. But the discussion of race in the US is so laden with dogma that something that is blindingly obvious will be dismissed out of hand. It’s because people think the mismatch theory is a reference to race, e.g. that it’s saying blacks just aren’t ready for a rigorous environment because they are black. Nobody stops to think or understand what’s actually being said, they just react. ---
**Author:** ![Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/left_hand_of_dorkness/32/7156_2.png) [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)\ **Post date:** [December 17, 2015, 6:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-ivy-league-and-other-top-universities-hotbeds-of-racism/740033/169 "2015-12-17T18:12:45Z")
> [@ITR\_champion](#): > > No cite has been provided, saying that “The mismatch theory has largely been debunked, and is not widely accepted in academia,” which is what you claimed. [The “Mismatch” Research Violates Basic Principles Of Causal Inference…Sander’s “Mismatch” Research Does Not Represent A Consensus In Social Science](http://gking.harvard.edu/files/gking/files/fisher_amicus_final_8-13-12_0.pdf). ---
**Author:** ![ITR\_champion](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/c67d28/32.png) [@ITR\_champion](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ITR_champion)\ **Post date:** [December 18, 2015, 2:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-ivy-league-and-other-top-universities-hotbeds-of-racism/740033/170 "2015-12-18T02:48:21Z")
Fantastic. If one amicus brief argues for the theory and another against, the justices can read both and decide which makes a more convincing case. ---
**Author:** ![Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/left_hand_of_dorkness/32/7156_2.png) [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)\ **Post date:** [December 18, 2015, 11:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-ivy-league-and-other-top-universities-hotbeds-of-racism/740033/171 "2015-12-18T11:38:54Z")
> [@ITR\_champion](#): > > Fantastic. If one amicus brief argues for the theory and another against, the justices can read both and decide which makes a more convincing case. As can we. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-ivy-league-and-other-top-universities-hotbeds-of-racism/740033.md?page=8)