If the only choices available were flipping a coin or using race as the deciding factor, I’d favor flipping the coin. At least that would be impartial.
Tejota: I think you are going to alienate your fellow pro-AA types with statements that Republicans (presumably only of the white persuasion) are less valuable than minorities (in any context). But maybe that doesn’t matter to you.
It was not primary. They each had the same rather crappy SAT scores you gave them and the same somewhat mediocre GPAs. If it had been primary, the Student B would be getting in ahead of a kid with a 1550 SAT, a 4.0 GPA from Cranbrook, and two UoM graduate parents who were famous for their endowments to the university.
It was a tie-breaker, not the primary selection.
True. And I have no problem arguing for this position. However, UoM has made a marketing decision to push for diversity that an impartial decision* would not guarantee.
*(And, of course, we’re all pretending, here, that GPAs and SATs and the quality of one’s high school, and the strength of one’s academic program are actually objective standards.)
Tom: Do you know when we get to hear the final verdict on this from the Supremes?
Oral argument has not even been heard yet. It’s one of the last cases they will consider this year. Expect a decision in June.
U of Michigan should have tomndebb assist and polish the oral arguments.
Not really. I really am ambivalent about the program and would probably not make a really forceful presentation.
Minty: Thx for the info. I guess we can look forward to hashing these same ideas back and forth for at least 5 more months.
If this isn’t germain to the debate, sorry. Also, it may have been posted already.
Damn if he ain’t the finest current editorial cartoonist in the US.
Not really, given that my remarks were specifically in response to Tejota’s claim that it is “wise” to consider blacks “inherently more valuable” than whites on university campuses. The notion that one’s race makes one inherently better than those of another race really is the same premise put to evil ends fifty years ago. You’re reading my comments to broadly. AA as a remedy? Well, we can talk about that. Skin color equaliing inherent worth? Yeah, I have a problem with that.
There are several problems with this very interesting thought experiment.[ol][]One cannot set up a counter-factual with any certainty. If SSU hadn’t decided to add 1,000 black-preferenced freshmen, they might have decided to add 1,000 unpreferenced freshmen. There’s no way to know.[]In the real world, universities have not increased their student body by the number of special acceptances, so the thought experiment is not a useful guide.[]You are wrongly equating “black” with “non-white.” Most selective universities that I know of would be far below 95% white even without preferences, because of all the Asian students.[]If you change your example to “under-represented minorites” instead of “blacks” (as many AA supporters would do), then you are admitting that there is a quota to get “under-represented minorities” up to some appropriate percentage of the student body.[/ol]
Now this is weird: Powell has come out against Bush’s position:
http://www.salon.com/news/wire/2003/01/19/affirmative_action/index.html
I’m not saying that this has anything to do with the issue, but I do think it’s rare and weird. Most people say that the Bush team is hard on dissidents, but in the face of this, it’d be hard to explain this acceptance of pluralism within the administration.
Something strikes me as very wrong that this article looks at the position of all the black people in Bush’s employ. Being black doesn’t make you a special expert on justice or affirmative action policy.
Excuse me if I misconstrue this, as I’m skimming the thread - but did he just say something horribly racist here that went almost totally unchallenged?
Is it acceptable because of the specifics?
Beef: It didn’t go unchallenged.
I thought Dewey challenged it rather forcefully, (although it was clearer to me in his second post than in his first).
On the other hand, I initially read the statement that the value was associated with the diversity, not with the skin color, which was why I misunderstood Dewey’s first response.
If Tejota actually intended to place a value on the color, alone, I would agree that the statement is racist.
[QUOTE]
Originally posted by december *
There are several problems with this very interesting thought experiment.[ol][li]One cannot set up a counter-factual with any certainty. If SSU hadn’t decided to add 1,000 black-preferenced freshmen, they might have decided to add 1,000 unpreferenced freshmen. There’s no way to know.[]In the real world, universities have not increased their student body by the number of special acceptances, so the thought experiment is not a useful guide.[/ol][/li][/quote]
Nope, sorry, you don’t get to change the terms of my thought experiment. SSU hasn’t decided to “add 1,000 black-preferenced freshmen.” It has decided to make a conscious effort to increase the ethnic diversity of the student body, and it has decided to increase the size of the incoming freshman class. Those 1,000 extra spots are not reserved for minority students, though they will make it easier for the university to achieve its goal of increasing ethnic diversity.
Not at all. My thought experiment expressly stated that the population of the hypothetical state is 20% hispanic and 12% black. Given this fact, I have no idea how you think I’m “wrongly equating ‘black’ with ‘non-white.’”
Again, I don’t know where the heck you’re reading this black-centric “diversity” into my thought experiment. Nor do I understand how you leap to the conclusion that seeking to address the problem of “under-represented minorities” in any way corresponds to “quotas.” That’s the same ridiculous leap that Bush made in his comments last week. It’s like the guy believes if he says “quotas” enough times, everybody will believe the case is really about quotas.
Or even more frightening, maybe Bush really believes there is a quota involved. Surely, his staff should have disabused him of that notion?
Well, if it was meant to imply that non-whites are inherently more valuable than whites, then it basically did go unchallenged. If someone made a statement here that declared whites to be superior to non-whites, they’d get bitched out by at leats 10 people and probably talked to be a moderator.
So if he did intend to say that non-whites were superior to whites, the response was extremely underwhelming. It struck me that that was what he was trying to say - but it’s possible I misread it and he was talking about the benefits of diversity.
SenorBeef: My apologies. In the future I will try to be more strident in my remarks. 
This hits on a subtle philosophical point, which I want to focus on, minty. Re-stating my criticism #1:
I assert that your thought experiment is impossible, so it provides no enlightenment. It’s impossible because of the unstated assumption, which I will add in red: Selective State U. decides that’s a shitload of white folk, especially considering the population of the state of Selective is 20% Hispanic and 12% black. So SSU decides they’re going to increase enrollment by a mere 1,000 freshmen per year, and they’re gonna make damn sure that there are a bunch more non-white students and it is known that if they not provided non-white-preferences, they would not have added 1000 freshmen.
I claim that the red addendum is implicit. Without it, a white student might claim that she would have been one of the additional 1000 freshmen who might have been added without preferences, and therefore a black student has her spot.
This is merely a quibble. As I read the thought experiment, Asians were apparently lumped in with whites (or totally ignored) and Hispanics were certainly lumped in with non-whites. Both of these are wrong.
Sorry about the confusion. This really came from a separate discussion I once had with a cousin who explained that the concept of “under-represented minorities” justified giving extra spots to blacks and Hispanics and takijng spots away from Chinese, Japanese and other Asians. My cousin offered no evidence that the former groups suffered greater racism than the latter ones. The goal was merely to get each group to have a proper percentage of students. Your example seems to agree that a proper percentage of students bears a relationship to the percentage of that group in society.
IMHO a goal that reflects the a percentage, rather than the amount of racism, is more-or-less a quota. A non-quota preference would aim to offset whatever amount of damage prejudice done to each group. By that standard, Asians might get smaller preference credits than Hispanics*, but they certainly wouldn’t deserve a preference debit.
[sub]*BTW I’m not sure that anti-Asian bigotry really was less severe than anti-hispanic bigotry 50 tp 75 years ago. Anti-Asian bigotry was pretty damn strong. [/sub]
I was more irked that the “enlightened” view we have here seems to be that racism is perfectly acceptable, so long as it’s directed against whites.
I’m not talking about “non-white preferences.” I’m talking about casting a wider net with the intention of catching more qualified minority students, not reflexively giving 20 extra credit points every time an applicant checks the “black” box. (Yes, that means I strongly dislike the Michigan admissions system.)
Sure, she could claim that. But she would be wrong. Once again, Reward A =! Punish B. Your hypothetical white student wasn’t getting in under either system. No harm, no foul.
That would be presumptively true in a society where one’s ethnicity didn’t matter. Sadly, ours is not such a society. Blacks and hispanics in my state are hugely underrepresented in colleges and universities, particularly at the state’s best schools, UT and A&M. I’m willing to listen to explanations for this giant discrepancy that don’t involve the race of those groups, but it better be a damn convincing explanation.
True story: The students who live in one Texas A&M dormitory got in trouble last weekend for holding a “ghetto party.” Blackface, malt liquor, etc. Apparently, this has been an annual event for the last few years, only nobody noticed that it was a stunning example of institutional racism until this year. As I recall, the current percentage of black students at A&M–and this is after Bush’s diversifyin’ idea of giving automatic admission to every person graduating in the top ten percent of their their high school class–is somewhere around 3%.