response 71 of 232:

Jan 19 20:09 UTC 2003

re resp:68: Asserting that affirmative action benefits everyone does 
not convince me that it really does so, or really will do so.

I don't think affirmative action ever really benefits anyone, except in 
the very short term.  It gives an unearned bonus -- based on race; it's 
called "discrimination" -- to an individual.  The individual then has 
to accomplish the same from the opportunity as others, who have not 
been given a bonus, and can be expected to be more qualified.  The 
benefitting individual is then at a disadvantage, making him more 
likely to fail.  Also, everyone who is ever in that same position 
again, and who *might* have benefitted from that bonus, is suspect as 
well.  Meanwhile, a more qualified individual who didn't receive a 
racial bonus is left out of the opportunity he otherwise would have had.

Where's the benefit?  That society has "done something"?

response 73 of 232:

Jan 19 20:52 UTC 2003

Many employers only look to prestigious schools when recruiting new graduates.
Many graduate schools calculate the difficulty of the undegraduate program
into their weighing of an applicant's GPA. Having a lower GPA at a more
prestigious school isn not necessarily an impediment to future success - and
in many cases it can create a multi-generational advantage (as lesser
intellects descended from graduates are given bonus points as the children
of alumni.) The Republican Party has given us a couple of interesting cases
in point - Dan Quayle, admitted to law school on a "color blind" affirmative
action program, despite a dismal undergraduate performance, and GW Bush,
admitted to Ivy League undergraduate and graduate institutions as a legacy.
But for the preference, would either have achieved the same level of success?
(And this, despite Quayle's being described as "vapid" by a former professor,
and Bush's admitted "Gentleman's C" average.)

Further, for a variety of reasons, schools across the board seem to be
turning out students who are less suited to college performance than past
generations. Colleges are spending ungodly amounts of money on remedial
education, and not just for "affirmative action" students. There's
something more than a bit racist in the assumption that students who are
admitted through "affirmative action" are academically inferior and
undeserving, when associated with the expression or implication that those
who came in as legacies, or through less visible diversity programs, are
deserving. 


With regard to Texas, while the "10%" formula has led to a bounce-back in
enrollment of minorities at the undergraduate level, the same cannot be
said for Texas graduate schools.

Something that I find interesting is the Republican call for a
"color-blind" society. Prior to 1964, the factions of the Republican party
which are most obsessed with race weren't making that call. They seemed
perfectly content to let the Constitution make color-based judgments, to
their own benefit. Should we be surprised that their new demands for
"color-blind" laws *also* work to their advantage?

response 75 of 232:

Jan 20 22:26 UTC 2003

Re: 73 - that doesn't do you much good if you flunk out.  The article I quoted
above reported that in some cases, black drop-out rates were twice those of
white students.

response 77 of 232:

Jan 21 03:11 UTC 2003

Maybe legacies only get 4, but athletes get 20, the exact same number as
affirmative action students.  So if we rephrase aaron's statement to
talk about athletes, instead of legacies, I think his point still stands.

response 79 of 232:

Jan 21 05:10 UTC 2003

I've taught a couple football players.  Failed one.  One struck me as being
in over his head, the other struck me as quite smart, but short of time to
study adequately.  I'm inclined to think that football players don't, as a
rule, get much in the way of an effective education in their classes.  I don't
particularly get upset about this, because presumably they are getting a
chance to excell at football and open up some pretty good opportunities.
They are getting something out of the college experience - just not what most
other students are getting.

Note also that stereotypes about dumb football players abound on campuses.
This is not particularly accurate, but if you encounter a football player in
the classroom, you might easily get that impression.  I think some of the
same artificial factors that encourage stereotypes about dumb football
players can function to encourage stereotypes about dumb blacks.  I consider
the latter much more socially harmful.

You don't particularly see stereotypes developing about "dumb students whose
parents attended this college".  I think that's because unlike blacks and
football players, legacy students aren't easily identifiable to other students.
So whatever problems are being caused to individuals, the social group is
not being much harmed.

response 81 of 232:

Jan 21 07:56 UTC 2003

Even Affirmative Action supporters don't tend to be terribly excited about
it, because its opponants are right that it's a lousy system.  It's just not
a lousy system in the way the opponants seem to think.  Just as nobody should
get sick and need medical care, nobody should be discriminated against and
need Affirmative Action.  But at least in the cases of sociallly acceptable
diseases, we don't withhold medical care because it's an unfair disadvantage
to the healthy people.

Taking that discrimination as a disease a step further, if we were to instead
consider the case of an applicant who had spent their childhood battling some
debilitating disease and instead ended up with an A- average instead of an
A average, we'd probably consider them far more worthy of adulation and
admission than a healthy A student.  By that thinking, if we can acknowledge
that discrimination makes life harder for some students than others, perhaps
a more worthwhile debate would concern the number of bonus points to award,
rather than whether to award them at all.

The stigma is of course a concern, but we are talking about educational
institutions here.  Perhaps that could be addressed with better teaching about
these issues.  Then again, I'm not convinced the stigma has any real
relationship to Affirmative Action at all.  This country has hundreds of years
of history of racial discrimination.  Blaming that on the last few decades
of desegregation efforts seems a little simplistic.

response 83 of 232:

Jan 21 14:56 UTC 2003

re resp:79: "Legacy" students, children of previous graduates, offer a 
small benefit to the university, of building up multi-generational 
loyalty to the school.  They're from families who have demonstrated 
they can succeed at the university, and so they get a small benefit 
from the university.  And yes, they probably do, as a group, donate a 
lot more money to the school than the general populaton.  Money talks.

Athletes, similarly, bring money into the university.  They bring in a 
lot of it; millions of dollars if it's the U-M and the athlete is a 
football player.  They bring prestige, too.  More people know of 
Michigan's championships in football and basketball than they do about 
the new life sciences initiative.  More people know Michigan by their 
sports department than know that Michigan has a graduate school.

re resp:81, Interesting analogy, medical care and affirmative action.  
It doesn't fit, though.  With medical care, we treat the individual 
people who need it.  Not everyone gets heart surgery.  With affirmative 
action, we apply it to entire segments of the population.

When you talk about addressing it with "better teaching about these 
issues", what it really means is indoctrinating students with different 
political beliefs.  I think universities should not be doing that.  
They *do* do it, but they shouldn't.

response 85 of 232:

Jan 21 17:11 UTC 2003

Not at the U of M. There are minority affairs offices that keep very close
track of the statuses of minority students, and inform minority students
of the "facts of life" in regard to the problems they may face and what
they may need to do to succeed. When a minority student gets into academic
hot water there is plenty of support available in the form of encouragment,
tutoring, etc. These are also all available to majority students too, of
course, but it is noticeable for minorities because they stand out by
virtue of being a minority. 

response 87 of 232:

Jan 21 17:34 UTC 2003

re:  "#81 (scg):  Even Affirmative Action supporters don't tend to be 
terribly excited about it, because its opponants are right that it's a 
lousy system."

Even if it weren't "lousy," it would still be unconstitutional.

response 89 of 232:

Jan 21 17:59 UTC 2003

Actually, according to my sources, the SC struck down the University of 
California's race-based admission policiy.

response 91 of 232:

Jan 21 19:37 UTC 2003

klg continues to look at the issue out of context.  We have a group in our
country whose ancestors were kidnapped, brought over to the US or the colonies
that preceeded it in conditions that would amount to torture, and, if they
survived, enslaved for several generations.  The slavery officially ended less
than 140 years ago, and was replaced by a legal system that forbade people
from that group from living in the same neighborhoods as the rest of the
population, attending the same schools as the rest of the population, or in
many areas using the same drinking fountains or bathrooms, eating in the same
restaurants, or sitting on the same part of the bus.  During that period, it
was also perfectly legal to discriminate based on race in hiring, and this
was done blatantly (take a look at the employment classifieds from the Ann
Arbor News in the 1950s -- they had separate sections for "help wanted, male,"
"help wanted, female," and "help wanted, colored").  That system didn't go
away until the 1950s and 60s, at which point it was replaced by a less formal
system, in which black people are no longer prohibitted from moving into white
neighborhoods or sending their kids to white schools, but doing so often has
the effect of getting the white families in the area to decide the
neighborhood has become "unsafe," and to pack up and leave, generally taking
the jobs and other opportunities, not to mention the resale value of property
in the neighborhood, with them.  So now we have a situation where most members
of this group continue to live in poverty, do far worse economically than the
rest of the population, and score lower in school.  Given all this, what do
those who want to eliminate Affirmative Action now want to do instead to
remedy the situation?

In #83, jep raises some more interesting points, in terms of medical care
treating only those who need it, versus Affirmative Action treating an entire
segment of society.  It should first be pointed out that that isn't always
true in the case of medical care, in dealing with big crisis situations such
as a big outbreak of some fast spreading infection.  In those cases, often
everybody who has been exposed is given a vaccine or antibiotics, because it
just isn't possible to test them all, and overtreatment is considered a lesser
risk than undertreatment.  Aside from that, however, if you can find black
people in the US who haven't been negatively affected by discrimination, and
can develop an easy to apply test for this, I'm eager to see your proposal.

jep also suggests that what I call "better teaching about these issues" would
really be "indoctrinating students with different political beliefs," which
he opposes.  I don't think that's what I meant at all, though.  When I was
in school, we generally had one week a year, around Martin Luther King Day,
when we would learn about racial discrimination.  We would be told,
essentially, that The South (in other words, somewhere else) used to be
segregated, but that Martin Luther King had come along, led some marches, and
made us good Northerners aware of the problem, and as a result the problem
had been fixed and everything was equal now.  To some extent, all teaching
is indoctrination, and this certainly was.  It was indoctrination in a belief
that the problem was solved, and hadn't really concerned our part of the
country anyway.  Imagine instead in depth presentations of the history
involved, not just in The South, but in all parts of the US, charting of
demographic data over time, up to the present, in depth discussions of how
things got to their current state and what the current state is, presentations
and analysis of arguments on many sides of the issue, and so forth.  It may
be that most reasonable people woudln't come out of such a class with the
views that jep wants them to have, but the goal should be to make sure they
have enough information to make their own reasonable judgements.

response 93 of 232:

Jan 21 20:31 UTC 2003

The "context" is the U.S. constitution.  Or don't you believe in 
following the law?