Yeah, I actually managed to catch that. Certainly I understood that you were taking a slippery slope approach to the entire thing. But as I said, this isn’t something I’m advocating at all, just something that struck me and seems a little strange. It’s hardly something I’m passionately involved in. And of course, on issues like this, I want to be certain that the extreme slippery slope view of things is not misattributed to me.
Mace, she may be thinking about scholarships. I know that I could have gotten into my current school if I was white. But chances are I wouldn’t have come in with a full scholarship (one of my friends with a slightly higher GPA, slightly lower SAT didn’t get jack). Honestly, without the scholarship, I probably wouldn’t be at UMD.
She speaks as though the only 2 choices are AA or Jim Crow. I don’t know how to make it any cleaer than that as far as the statement being naive at best, ignorant at worst.
John, her statement may be ignorant, but look at the UoM. Does it look like a melting pot of love and happiness? Do you think it would look like a melting pot of love and happiness simply by doing away with AA?
The article makes an important point: why are blacks and Latinos being lambasted so harshly but other groups–like legacies, people from underrepresented states or locales, and athletes–are not receiving the same kind of heat? I find it hard to believe that if racial minorities received the same number of points as these other groups that everything would be just fine and dandy. For some reason, the race thing bothers everyone more than everything else.
Personally, I don’t have a problem with legacies getting a few points. This is like the grocery store that gives you a discount for being a loyal shopper. Being from an underrepresented area doesn’t make any more sense to me than AA does. Athletes are a side issue that could make a huge hijack, but in brief there is a need to be competitive in sports, if for no other reason than it brings in scads of money. Ideally, athletics should be ignored in admission but that would put selective schools at a large athletic disadvantage compared to less selective schools.
I believe all public policy should have as its default case that all persons are absolutely equal in every way. If an institution wants to deviate from that default, then the burden is on them to demonstrate that their policy is in the public interest and that it is not unfairly biased against any particular person or group of people.
First question is whether diversity is in the public interest in and of itself. Is it better to have the most qualified people enter the student body or is it better to have a student body that reflects the demographics of society? For political science, law, and humanities, I think you could make a very good argument that diversity in the classroom is in the public interest. For engineering or medical students, I don’t think the case is easily made.
The second question is whether the policy is unfairly biased. I think U-M is on shakier ground here. Awarding more points for pigmentation than for intellect seems to be too far of a stretch. If race were say 1/4 of the value of a perfect SAT, then as was said earlier, this would have passed under the radar.
The U-M policy should be modified, not scrapped.
To paraphrase earlier posts, one needn’t choose between radical AA and Jim Crow, there is some middle ground that can be found.
We’re making an error in suggesting that radical AA and Jim Crow are somehow the extremes of a continuum in the first place.
Obviously, this country’s history of slavery, Jim Crow and racism makes race far more important than athletic skill or playing the French horn (“Freedom horn”?).
But, please don’t assume that opponents of AA are opposed to the interests of minoriites. Many people believe that AA now does more harm than good for minorities. Maybe we’re wrong, but please don’t impute our motives.
Toning down the rhetoric slightly, could she just simply mean “unofficial” resegregation and inequality? I mean, even with current AA policies and our society’s preaching of tolerance, she’s already seeing overt racism, segregation, and race-based isolation in her life. Perhaps she’s simply worried abouit how much worse things will get if AA is repealed.
I don’t think anyone expects the United States to backslide far enough to require separate drinking fountains, but if the laws were lax enough, an employer could easily deny you a job that you’re well-qualified for and never admit that race was a factor…
Monstro:
No, I don’t think love and hapiness would be the state either way. Racism is hard to get rid of, and I doubt it’ll EVER disappear completely.
As I said earlier, though, I doubt this case would’ve gone to court if the racial kicker was 5 pts instead of 20. I’d still think it was wrong, but I think they could’ve flown under the legal radar. But perhaps 5 pts wouldn’t have give the desired result in terms of minority enrollment. And that’s why the lawyers will argue that the U of M scheme is a thinly disquiesed racial quota system.
Just had a flash of deja vu, as if we’ve had this discussion before…
On another tangent, I’d be curious if you would support a form of AA that went something like this: minority students who can’t get accepted to, say, U of M are given 2 yrs (or whatever) of remedial education to make up for lower academically inclined schools they may have attended. Then, they must compete in a color blind process for admission.
RJUNG:
At the risk of making a mountain out of a molehill by analyzing this poor girls statement to death, yes it is possible. Segregation, however, is ACTIVE racism as in a formal policy of excluding minorities. Maybe that’s not what she meant, but that’s what she said. And that’s the last word I have to say on that subject.
Well, for medicine, there is a definite public interest in increasing the number of African-American and Latino physicians. There is a need to provide physicians for underserved communities, and a physician of the same ethnic or racial background as his/her patients in those communities may be more readily accepted and better able to provide care. Latino physicians, for example, are more likely to be bilingual, and therefore able to communicate with their patients better. There may also be more trust initially. Those physicians can also serve as role models for the next generation of potential medical students.
**
Well, this brings up the whole issue of whether a perfect SAT should be worth a huge number of bonus points, as compared to other factors (extracurriculars, recommendations, essay, etc.) For those who are test-fixated (which is a whole topic in and of itself), exalting the perfect SAT above other factors is a natural position to take because it supports their position that the test, and only the test, matters. But those of us who live in the real world know that whether someone got a 1550 or a 1600 on the SAT really makes no difference in their ultimate success in college. So it’s really a stretch to argue that an African-American with a 3.8 GPA and a 1550 SAT is less qualified or deserving of a place at U-M than a white applicant with a 3.8 GPA and a 1600 SAT. While one may argue whether race should be the deciding factor, it’s really hard to argue that a less than perfect, but still good, SAT score makes one automatically less desirable as a student than a perfect SAT.
Many uncited assumptions in this comment. I don’t know that the Black or Hispanic communities have a lack of physicians. AFAIK the main underserved areas are small, isolated towns. It’s possible that patients may prefer physicians of their own ethnic group; OTOH maybe better care would come from having the most qualified doctors possible.
If that’s the goal, why not directly give points for speaking Spanish?
I agree with this.
I’m not imputing anything, december. All I know is that there are much better ways of voicing disagreement than doing the vile things done by some of the students at UofM. Like stupid people, they don’t seem to realize their actions only add more fuel to the pro-AAers’ stance that we still have a long way to go.
Well, why are just minority students getting all this extra help? Isn’t this still giving them an extra boost, albeit in a backdoor way?
Let’s say theoretically that UofM instilled a GPA minimum of 3.8 and SAT score of 1250. If you don’t meet these requirements, you ain’t getting in. Why does it make sense to make a minority student with a GPA of 3.7 and a score of 1100 take 2 years of remedial coursework, just to meet some arbritrarily set standards?
When I applied to Georgia Tech, the average SAT score was 1350. About two hundreds point higher than my score. I was ranked 13th in my senior class and I had taken 2 AP classes, but I hadn’t taken calculus like most freshmen. Now, I know my credentials looked pretty mediocre compared to a lot of the kids at GT. If I hadn’t been a woman and a black one at that, I don’t think I would have gotten in. But was I remedial? Was my record that inferior that I should have wasted 2 years of my life in community college? Perhaps so.
But did I mention I’m getting my Ph.D in biology a few months? And that it only took me 4 and a half years?
We aren’t comparing knuckle-dragging black and Latino students with Albert Einstein white students. The differences are small here. Idiots of any race will flunk out of college if they aren’t prepared, and then another student can take their place. And it’s not like there are only three freakin’ colleges in the country. Dog-eat-dog world that it is, a smart student who was rejected from UofM can get in at UofChicago or Indiana University or Northwestern. Or shoot, even Notre Dame. They’ve got a lot of choices. That’s why I have nary a lick o’ pity for the whiners who are bringing suit against the UofM.
jeevmon- there may be value of having more minority physicians, but I don’t see the value of having more minority viewpoints in the medical classroom. Medicine and engineering are more factual disciplines as opposed to political science courses where minority viewpoints in the classroom do enrich it. You are correct and we do make too much of SAT scores. The black student with a 1550 SAT score probably won’t do any worse than the white student with a score of 1600. But I do have a problem telling a prospective white student “Hey, your score of 1600 on the SAT still puts you 8 points behind a black student that scored zero !” (12 SAT points + 0 minority points < 0 SAT points plus 20 minority points)
Monstro:
By this logic, blacks who objected to being refused service in restaurants in the Jim Crow days should have simply gone to restaurants that would serve them. The truth is, having a law degree from U-M does confer the graduate with an economic advantage compared to most other law schools. Therefore, being denied admission because of race is an economic hardship and is legally actionable.
This looks to me like an argument against AA in college admissions. It’s unnecessary. People don’t have to go to Harvard in order to succeed very well.
You might have a point if UofM didn’t have a student body that’s 70% white. Even if whites are being discriminated against, they’ve got a long way before it’s anything close to Jim Crow.
According to the Census Bureau , whites compose about 70.6% of the population. U-M reports 26% of the students are black, Hispanic, Asian, or Native American. This leaves 74% white. If your number is correct that the student body is 70% white, that’s hardly a condemnation. I don’t think a reasonable conclusion is that whites are overrepresented at U-M.
Monstro:
Sorry if I wasn’t clear. I didn’t mean to say there should be a REQUIRED 2 yr catch-up course, just that it was made available to those who wanted and/or needed it. Go for 6 months if that’s all it takes, but no academic adjustments for race at the university level. This is a hypothetical, and it surely has many of the same “racial preferenec” issues as more conventional AA, I’m just wondering if an AA supporter such as yourself would agree to that sort of an approach. It seems like it supports the goal of giving “disadvantaged” kids some sort of help, but shuts up all the people who object to racial preferences at the University level.
If diversity is a good thing for Mostly White U., then why isn’t it a good thing for Mostly
Black U.? Do any majority black schools have AA programs?
Great point. At Howard University in Washington DC, 86 percent of the students are black. AFAIK nobody is recommending that Howard reduce its black enrollment to 12% in order to give its students the “benefits of diversity.”
My wife went to the same all-women’s college as Hillary Clinton, Cokie Roberts, and many other successful women (Wellesley). Ms. december believes the women there got a better education because there were no men.