"Bans On Affirmative Action Help Asian Americans, Not Whites, Report Says" reads a Chronicle of Higher Education headline this week reporting on a new study of preference bans and attendance, offering little surprise to… any, it seems, aside from the study's authors. The study examined the results of preference bans at a number of colleges, and found that they yielded significant increases in Asian American applicants, significant declines in black attendance, and mixed portraits otherwise, with some declines in white attendance, which can partially be attributed to demographic change in the applicant pools. It's slightly odd to see race-blind admissions yielding a decline in white attendance, but, substantively speaking, it's been apparent for a significant amount of time (to anyone who's watched the UC schools, for one) that the end of preferences is principally a boon to Asian American attendance. And despite all this, opposition to preferences has continued to mount. How do the researchers explain this? Whites have been fooling themselves.

In a grim and considerably unfair portrait of the movement against affirmative action, the report suggests that their findings "can hardly be satisfying' to 'those who campaigned for the elimination of affirmative action in the belief that it would advantage the admission of white students." Yes, it would be dissatisfying to those persons, but what is that demographic? I seem to recall broad enthusiasm for restoring merit as the source of anti-preference arguments and success, not white American racial interest. The report continues in this vein, predicting that whites may begin opposing affirmative action bans if Asians continued to make gains, observing that "Whites are still too influential in politics and in the private sector to sit quietly while this trend continues." I was struck by the profound cynicism of this commentary, seemingly attributing the success of bans to narrow white misconceptions of their self-interest, until I saw the final line of the Chronicle report. One of the study authors, Charles E. Young, former chancellor of UCLA, stated, about the effects of preference bans in colleges, that "limits on affirmative action have 'clearly negatively affected their ability to provide diversity in education,' hurting the education of their students." Hurting the education, of course - now it's easy to discern a narrative. What's a new way to stem the tide against preferences and install diversity forever? Convince whites that they might want them!

The study commentary seems to advance a recent tradition of pro-preference argument, which seeks to bolster support for preference regimes by seeking to incorporate aggrieved parties into their preference schemes. Already, some have argued that preferences for vanishing males could convincingly be incorporated into existing diversity systems. Now we'll see preferences for whites? It's a novel universalist argument, but hey, any argument's worth a try if it might keep affirmative action alive, right? I look forward to reading the full study.

In our latest podcast, John Leo interviews Ward Connerly on his efforts to eliminate racial preferences in five states this November and the role of diversity in college admissions. Listen here.

Randy Cohen, the New York Times "Ethicist", offered a very slippery response to a reader last week, on the question of financial incentives for the hiring of minority professors. You'd best read the whole exchange first. My comments are beneath:

I teach at a state university that offers financial incentives to hire minority candidates. A department receives $1,000 for completing a tenure-track hire but $5,000 if it hires a minority candidate. I'm concerned that colleagues will make recommendations based on the financial reward rather than pursue the "best" candidate. Should the institution offer these bounties? - DR. MARK E. CHASE, SLIPPERY ROCK, PA.

There's nothing discreditable or even unusual about using financial incentives to prompt estimable conduct. Governments use tax codes to promote desired activities. Businesses offer bonuses to encourage certain kinds of job performance. (Full disclosure: I have a "financial incentive" to write this column. It's called a "paycheck.") Be wary of skewing your argument with a loaded word like "bounties."

It is admirable of your school to acknowledge that some minorities are underrepresented on campus, that this is unjust in itself and that it subverts the school's mission: it is important for students to encounter professors (and fellow students) of diverse backgrounds and viewpoints. In pursuit of this goal, the school may try various things. There might be better ways to genuinely expand faculty diversity, but until such methods are on the table, and unless the danger you worry about actually emerges, financial incentives are worth a try.

Be comforted that hiring a new faculty member involves so many layers of scrutiny, so many opportunities for colleagues to weigh in, that the hazard you invoke is minimal. Remember: this tactic is not meant to lower hiring standards but to broaden the pool of people considered for the job.

For so long there has been so much social (if not legal) pressure arrayed against hiring such folks - in effect, incentives to hire white men - that it seems hypocritical to object only when incentives benefit minority candidates.

First, yes, the incentive that Dr. Chase writes concerning is clearly a small one. It's unlikely that a department would contort its hiring decision much on the basis of a $4,000 "bounty" - after all, they'd have to work with the hire. Cohen's right to point out that the "hazard is minimal" - yet his answer concerning that minimal danger is far from forthright. Consider this, the slipperiest sentence from above:

It is slowly dawning on the public that fake hate crimes, like the one just perpetrated by Princeton student Francisco Nava, are quite common on college campuses. Perhaps some aspiring academic, casting about for a PhD. thesis, will try to explain why these hoaxes - mostly imaginary rapes or fake attacks on black students - have come to seem so routine.

I have been following the phenomenon and writing occasional columns on the subject for ten or twelve years. When my eldest daughter was at Oberlin, the campus was propelled into uproar by anti-Asian graffiti in the campus quad. Someone had written "Death to Chinks" and other racial slurs on the monument to members of the Oberlin community who had died in the Boxer rebellion in China. Anger, various demands and a few scuffles went on for weeks until an Asian-American student announced that she had written the graffiti to make manifest the racism she thought was inherent in the monument. This turns out to be a popular rationale for faking hate crimes - the need to create a fictional outrage adequate to express the feelings of an angry student. The more campus voices are raised against "institutional racism" and the alleged sexual dangerousness of all males, the more fake race crimes and fake rapes there will be. Look into the hoax reports and you will see an endless parade of students painting racist graffiti on their own cars, tearing their clothes and writing hate phrases on their own bodies or sending themselves politically useful death threats.

Many campus hoaxes turn out to be teaching instruments of a sort, conscious lies intended to reveal broad truths about constant victimization of women and minorities. At a "Take Back the Night" rally in Princeton in the 90s, a female student told a graphic story of her rape on campus. When the alleged rapist threatened to sue, she recanted the story and a spokeswoman for the Women's Center said, "Listen we can't hope to find truth in all these stories," meaning that the story line was important, not the truth of any one rape.

The Alice-in-Wonderland view of Duke University received yet another boost: a committee of the board of trustees has affirmed President Richard Brodhead's "compelling vision" for Duke and found "general support, overwhelming support, for the leadership that the president is providing."

The obvious question here is "What leadership?" Brodhead's performance during the Duke non-rape crisis was surely a disgrace large enough to get him fired immediately on any moderately alert campus.

Let's review Brodhead's dismal handling of the case. He fired the lacrosse coach without any hearing or finding that the coach had done anything wrong. He took no action and made no relevant statement when some of the hard-left professors harassed lacrosse players in class, and when one professor punitively reduced the marks of one player. (Imagine how he would have sprung into action if a gay person or a woman had been treated this way.) He refused to look at the overwhelming evidence, offered to him by defense counsel, that the boys were innocent. He made no comment when the racist black professor Houston Baker bitterly and falsely denounced the three white players. He said nothing and did nothing when death threats were made against the three. Instead of offering protection, he and his administration appointed a committee to examine "persistent problems involving the men's lacrosse team, including racist language and a pattern of alcohol abuse and disorderly behavior," a statement clearly implying that the players were racists while an out-of-control prosecutor was issuing the same untruths to voters and jurors.

Still Brodhead knows how the game is played and he surely judged his strategy by what happened to President Lawrence Summers at Harvard. Summers told many unwelcome truths and leftist professors forced him out. Brodhead told some welcome untruths and therefore kept his job. Brodhead 's performance was "a moral meltdown" of a cowardly man, in the words of Stuart Taylor Jr. and K C Johnson in their book, Until Proven Innocent. But given the moral climate of the modern university, cowardice was probably his safest course.

Five students drinking Gatorade and water for a week are apparently all it takes to bring a major university to its knees. Columbia has had more than its share of lunatic events this year - the noose, the cancellation of the Minuteman speakers for the second time, inviting and then abusing the Iranian madman, and last week another controversy over a biased comment someone had scrawled into a library book. But the collapse of the university in the face of five student hunger strikers - the number was reduced to two students before the university folded - makes all the previous lunacies seem sane.

The strikers got most of their scattershot agenda. New faculty will now have to endure diversity indoctrination as part of their hiring. Columbia's core curriculum, much too "Eurocentric" for the strikers, will now feature more more required courses on Asia, Africa, and Latin America. More money and staff will be added for ethnic studies. The Office of Multicultural Affairs will be expanded and another high-ranking diversicrat will be named to the administration. The collapse will cost Columbia at least $50 million.

But the university's reputation for weakness and cowardice in the face of PC-mongering is not the key to this story. Columbia has been working for years to expand north into Harlem. It wants to add to its campus four large blocks from 129th Street between Broadway and 12th Avenue as well as three properties east of Broadway. Columbia must run the gantlet of many hearings and approvals, including those of the City Council, which is unusually sensitive to racial complaints about the curriculum and behavior of a historically white institution about to annex a chunk of Harlem. The strikers played the race card by denouncing Columbia's "institutional racism."

Columbia may have feared that one or more of the hunger strikerrs would become seriously ill or die. One abandoned the strike after fainting in the library and two others quit to get medical help. But the real aim was to protect the expansion program. One professor told me it was "a brilliant move" by President Lee Bollinger to buy off the protesters for only $50 million, while at the same time demonstrating some politically useful concern for racial and ethnic studies.

But it's only a brilliant move if it doesn't teach future strikers how easy it is to get concessions from Columbia. Protestors are still trying to kill the expansion into Harlem. Bollinger's decision to buy off the strikers may lead to more protesters and larger demands.

By John Leo

Beware the words "social justice" and "dispositions" when used by schools of education and the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE). These apparently harmless terms lay the groundwork for politicizing the training of teachers and giving the ed schools an excuse to eliminate conservatives from their programs. The news this week is that NCATE is backing down a bit from its use of "dispositions" and "social justice" while denying the political use of these words and calling its new policy a "clarification."

"Dispositions" refers to the correct mindset that would-be teachers must have. "Social justice" is the most controversial of the dispositions sought. In its benign sense, "social justice" means a sense of fairness, honesty and a belief that all children can learn. In its politicized sense, it can refer to endorsement of affirmative action and a formal (often written) endorsement of policies favored by the political and cultural left.

"NCATE never required a 'social justice' disposition", NCATE said on its web site. True, but the statement is a slippery one. In fact, the group had ruled that education departments could "include some measure of a candidate's commitment to social justice" - in effect ruling that public school teachers could be evaluated on their perceptions of what social justice requires. So the ed schools, basically a liberal monoculture, could rule that a student flunked "social justice" by displaying a negative view of multicultural theory and other policies of the left. At Washington State University, where the college of education tried to expel a conservative student for flunking "dispositions," the dean was asked whether Justice Antonin Scalia could pass a dispositions test at her school. "I don't know how to answer that," she replied.

As NCATE tells it, "the term 'social justice,' though well understood by NCATE's institutions, was widely and wildy misinterpreted by commentators not familiar with the working of NCATE." The group now defines professional dispositions as "professional attitudes, values and beliefs demonstrated through both verbal and non-verbal behaviors. The two professional dispositions that NCATE expects institutions to assess are fairness and the belief that all students can learn. Based on their missions and conceptual framework, professional education units can identify, define and operationalize additional professional dispositions."

This is a mild improvement. Still, one wonders about those "non-verbal behaviors" and how they will be judged. The word "fairness" remains a linguistic sinkhole and the phrase "additional professional dispositions" keeps the door open for more politicization. NCATE's "clarification" doesn't clarify much.

Fear that Proposition 209 has whitewashed the University of California? A majority of students at seven of the nine undergraduate campuses at the University of California are now foreign-born or have one foreign-born parent, a new study by the Center for Studies in Higher Education at UC Berkeley reveals. Chinese, Latino, Korean, Vietnamese, Filipino, East Indian, Pakistani, Japanese, Pacific Islander, and white immigrants now constitute a majority at all UC schools save for UC Santa Cruz and UC Santa Barbara - where students who are immigrants or have one immigrant parent still make up almost 40% of each student body.

The report contained other striking revelations; socioeconomic diversity is on the rise as well; 24% of attendees reported annual parental income of under $35,000. Surprising? Well, it's not unrelated. The report additionally indicates that those students immigrant backgrounds are "much more likely" to come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds than their peers. 74% of those in the under-$35,000 bracket grew up speaking a principal language other than English, or English along with another language.

What does this all mean? Well, the report's explanation is simple, and convincing:

UC is becoming increasingly racially and ethnically diverse in complex ways that reflect major demographic changes in the state, with Chinese students largely from immigrant families now representing the second largest identifiable racial/ethnic group in the UC system, followed by Chicano/Latino and then Korean and Vietnamese students.

The representation of Asians in the UC system is a continued success story, but the encouragingly high Latino\Chicano rate of attendance, at 14% of the undergraduate body, is an encouraging rejoinder to objections that Proposition 209 decimated Latino attendance rates. Latinos constituted a bit over 13% of the UC population prior to Proposition 209, according to the California Research Bureau. They've clearly now achieved comparable results free of preferences.

What's more, the report posed a number of questions about students' priorities at college. The more affluent students were, the more likely they were to skip classes and to value "social involvement - time spent on fun" over "academic involvement - time spent on academics." The students from less affluent backgrounds, by contrast, were most likely to report never skipping classes, and valued academic involvement over social involvement by the greatest margin. The changes in the UC student body reflect a clear shift towards greater seriousness in student performance. Hopefully we'll see more of the same.

Inside Higher Ed features a piece today by Gary Orfield, Erica Frankenberg, and Liliana Garces bemoaning the impact of the Supreme Court's late desegregation ruling.
They foresee an associated collapse of minority applications to colleges, as they glimpse minorities sinking into underperforming all-minority schools. They bolster their case with citations from Eric Hanushek, who's written convincingly on the poor performance of mainly-minority schools. Yet it might have done them good to read more of Hanushek. Read their claim first:

Colleges and universities, especially selective institutions, tend to draw their successful minority applicants from interracial schools and their admissions offices know well that many of the segregated minority high schools fail to prepare their students well enough to succeed in college. Research by the Civil Rights Project has shown that too many segregated urban high schools are "dropout factories" where the main product is dropouts and successful preparation for college is rare. Conservative economist Eric Hanushek found that the damage was worst for the relatively high achieving black students, the very students likely to comprise the college eligible pool. So making segregation worse cuts the number of well prepared students. In addition to academic preparation, students from segregated backgrounds are also often not ready to function socially on a largely white, affluent campus. It also means of course, that the most segregated group of students in American schools, whites, also have less preparation to deal successfully with diversity. So colleges may have won, but also lost.

The Regents of the University of Colorado are meeting to determine Ward Churchill's fate tomorrow, July 24th. The ACLU has written the University of Colorado arguing against Ward Churchill's firing. This isn't surprising - its letter repeats a central canard in the case - that the Churchill investigation was merely a pretext for larger, sinister pressures:

It is undisputed, however, that Professor Churchill's views are protected by the First Amendment, and cannot serve as a legal basis for any adverse employment action. Nevertheless the University soon launched the investigation of Professor Churchill's scholarship in an effort to find more defensible grounds for sanctioning him.

Churchill defenders willfully conflate all elements of the proceedings against Churchill - "the University" you notice, is here presented as judge, jury, and (perhaps) executioner. No difference is admitted in agency or person between the submission of a complaint as to Churchill's work, and the creation of a University panel looking into the question; the processes are looked upon as one and the same. The timing of the complaint about Churchill's research is viewed as an ineradicable taint, no matter what they unearth or how often they address the question directly of the reason for inquiry. Consider the Standing Committee on Research and Misconduct's statement here:

Since the Supreme Court last week decided against Seattle and Louisville, Kentucky’s policies of assuring a certain degree of racial diversity in public schools, we have heard much about the undoing of Brown v. Board.

However, I have a hard time mourning the decision, though the brute notion that we must ignore race to get beyond it is, surely, simplistic.

Preliminarily, I think of the plethora of schools nationwide where all the students are brown and yet excellence is a norm. I think of the fact that to the extent that black teens tar excelling in school as "acting white," it tends to be when they go to school with white people, as scholarly studies have shown.

Yet I openly admit that my discomfort with racial (as opposed to socioeconomic) preferences in education is also based in part on gut impressions - based on my own experiences in academia over, now, almost 20 years. Too often, commitment to "diversity" has nothing to do with recognizing the humanity and individuality of the persons in question, and much to do with reaffirming other people's sense of moral legitimacy.

As it happens, it was ten years ago this week that I had one such experience.
Every two summers, linguists have a kind of summer camp, the Linguistic Society of America Institute, where linguists from around the world give mini-courses for students on a college campus. I was invited to teach at the one in 1997.

In anticipation of a new U.S. Commission on Civil Rights report on historically black colleges and universities, Gail Heriot at The Right Coast has been doing some reading.

These institutions, which produce only 20% of African-American students, launch a striking 40% of all African-American science and engineering graduates. Heriot wonders as to this:

Why might this be? In 1996, Rogers Elliott, A. Christopher Strenta, et al. took a look at the why African-American and Hispanic students are less likely to follow careers in science than white or Asian-American students in "The Role of Ethnicity in Choosing and Leaving Science in Highly Selective Institutions." They found that African-American and Hispanic students at elite colleges and universities are about as likely as white or Asian-American students to start off intending to major in science. But they abandon those intentions in larger numbers. The authors concluded that mismatch probably played a major role.

Heriot cites segments from the report:

Why are so many talented minority students, especially blacks, abandoning their initial interests and dropping from science when they attend highly selective schools? The question has many possible answers, but we will begin with the factor we think most important, the relatively low preparation of black aspirants to science in these schools, hence their poor competitive position in what is a highly competitive course of study. As in most predominantly white institutions, and especially the more selective of them, whites and Asians were at a large comparative advantage by every science-relevant measure ...

It'd be interesting to see the hypothesis tested against African-American students' performance at non-elite, non-historically black colleges. The study's attention to a common level of academic preparation (without the lags that dog black performance at elite colleges) seems the most convincing factor. Perhaps they're additionally better at providing encouragement to minority science careers than institutions of comparable quality? Hopefully the Commission's report will shed additional light on this.

John Rosenberg has an excellent post at Discriminations on, among other things, Lee Bollinger's latest slippery utterances in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Rosenberg offers a superb paragraph's description of the filigreed nature of diversity goals:

Since preferentialists speak in platitudes and not principles, their defense of racial preferences provides no guides to policy makers or guidelines by which to judge the policies they defend, other than the numbers of favored minorities they produce. How "critical" is having a "critical mass," and how "massive" must it be? By what principle (can't escape them), if any, should its size reflect the "mass" it attempts to represent, and where must that "mass" be - local, national, anywhere in the world? When, where, and why do differences, say, among Japanese, Chinese, and Koreans disappear into their presumably shared Asian-ness? Are Cherokees fungible, for representational purposes, with Cheyenne? If some discrimination is acceptable to produce the desired result, why not more discrimination to produce an even better result? Is there a limit, and if so where does it come from?

Any idea? I certainly don't know. By all means read the rest of the post.

Henry Lewis Gates, renowned Harvard professor of African-American Studies - which is to say, someone about as deep as can be gotten in the belly of the diversity-obsessed academic beast - said something quite remarkable the other day. Invited to address the graduates of Kentucky's Berea College, founded in 1855 as the first integrated college in the South, from the speakers platform Gates trod very familiar territory. He lauded the benefits of affirmative action, and instructed the grads that it isn't enough to "pay lip service" to diversity. But in an interview he gave an enterprising reporter for the Lexington Herald-Leader, things got interesting. Gates allowed that while he, the son of a janitor, had needed affirmative action to get ahead, his own privileged children did not; nor should they benefit from it. But poor white children should. "We need to get more black people into the middle class," he concluded. "We need to get more white people into the middle class."

One cannot help but wonder whether the learned professor realizes that such a position -support for economic affirmative action, but opposition to the kind based merely on skin color - is identical to that held by the nation's leading crusader against racial preferences (and a man much detested by campus liberals and leftists), Ward Connerly. Indeed, in his successful fights on behalf of state initiatives to end race-based college admissions and government hiring in California, Washington and Michigan, Connerly has been bitterly denounced as a race traitor and worse for saying the very same thing; demanding, for instance, how affirmative action supporters can fail to see the elemental unfairness of a college admissions officer giving preference to the child of a black surgeon over the child of a white coal miner who would be the first in his family to go to college.

The yield of the University of California's "holistic" admissions process is now becoming apparent with the release of enrollment figures. Admissions were conducted under a novel system for the current year, a "holistic process" which was promoted as a means to improve the relative chances of disadvantaged students who lacked AP courses and other academic opportunities that wealthier peers enjoy.

Now that the matriculating class of 2007 has been selected, University administrators are hailing the result as a great success. So it proved a boon for low-income students? Well, no, not at all actually. The number of students from families with incomes under 30,000 declined from 955 in 2006 to an estimated 689 for 2007. The number of first-generation students fell by about 400.

What do University administrators have to say about the results? Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs Janina Montero declared to the UCLA Daily Bruin "We are certainly out of crisis mode." Acting Chancellor Norman Abrams was "very pleased" with the result.

How is this? Well, black enrollment increased from 96 in 2006 to 203 for the present year. What would most rational persons call a policy that traded modest increases in black enrollment for much more severe declines in immigrant and other low-income enrollment? Flawed? Only a university administrator could look at such a result and declare themself pleased.

By Edgar B. Anderson

Recently I sat down with a young woman who shared with me the experience of her first year at Thurgood Marshall College, one of the six colleges of the University of California at San Diego. She explained to me that regardless of her major field of study and in order to graduate she was required to take certain "general education" courses, the centerpiece of which is a three-quarter, 16-unit creation called "Dimensions of Culture." What she had to tell me is a warning to both parents and students.

The Dimensions of Culture program (DOC) is an introductory three-quarter social science sequence that is required of all first year students at Thurgood Marshall College, UCSD. Successful completion of the DOC sequence satisfies the University of California writing requirement. The course is a study in the social construction of individual identity and it surveys a range of social differences and stratifications that shape the nature of human attachment to self, work, community, and a sense of nation. Central to the course objective is the question of how scholars move from knowledge to action. - UCSD Course Description

Edgar B. Anderson: So let's talk about Dimensions of Culture. That's vague. What's that mean?
Student: I don't know. Each quarter, the first quarter is called Diversity, the second quarter is called Justice, and the third quarter is called Imagination. So Diversity is we studied everything about minorities - like women, homosexuals, and then Asians, blacks, Latinos.
Q. So what's left out - white males?
A. Yeah, pretty much if you're a white male you're bad, that's kind of the joke among all the students.
Q. Women are not even a minority, they're a majority.
A. But it's more about the workforce.
Q. Power.
A. Yeah, that's kind of how they presented it. We didn't really focus on women that much. It was mainly how Asians have been oppressed in history and how Latinos continue to be oppressed and how blacks continue to be oppressed, all of that.

By Gail Heriot

(Ms. Heriot is a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. This piece is adapted from Ms. Heriot's Commissioner Statement for the Civil Rights Report on Affirmative Action at American Law Schools released last fall.)

I have no doubt that those who originally conceived of race-based admissions policies - nearly forty years ago - were acting in good faith. By lowering admissions standards for African-American and Hispanic students at selective law schools, they hoped to increase the number of minority students on campus and ultimately to promote minority integration into both the legal profession and mainstream society. Similarly, however, I have no doubt of the good faith of those who opposed the policies. Indeed, their warnings that academic double standards cannot solve the nation's problems and may well exacerbate them seem especially prescient in light of recent research.

The real conflict over race-based admissions policies has not been about good or bad faith or about whether we should aspire to be a society in which members of racial minorities are fully integrated into the mainstream. There is no question we should. The conflict is about whether racial discrimination - something that nearly all Americans abhor - is an appropriate tool to achieve that end. Put starkly: Should the principle of non-discrimination be temporarily sacrificed in the hope that such a sacrifice will, in the long run, help us become the society of equal opportunity that we all aspire to?

Justice Stanley Mosk warned of the risks associated with such temporary compromises with principle over thirty years ago, when, writing for the California Supreme Court in Bakke v. UC Regents (1976), he held racially discriminatory admissions policies to be unconstitutional:

To uphold the University would call for the sacrifice of principle for the sake of dubious expediency and would represent a retreat in the struggle to assure that each man and woman shall be judged on the basis of individual merit alone, a struggle which has only lately achieved success in removing legal barriers to racial equality.

By Michael Meyers

At a recent Manhattan Institute forum, Ward Connerly, the fierce opponent of race and sex preferences by government (who's leading a state-by-state referendum drive to abolish affirmative action) admitted how the Bush Administration has disgraced itself by endorsing racial and gender-conscious policies and practices. Connerly did not give examples, but one glaring illustration is President Bush's Education Department's failure to address racial and gender discrimination underway in public schools and higher education in the guise of helping black men through differential treatment and separate programming.

This latest rage in education takes the form of Black Male Initiatives, which usually include "special" classes, counseling, mentoring, tutoring, and, on some campuses, even separate residences for blacks and ethnic minorities. The U.S. Education Department simply won't comment. I know because I asked Secretary Margaret Spellings to do so ­in the context of the Administration's claims that it supports the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, which overturned the "separate but equal" doctrine in the field of public education. There are a plethora of laws that dictate that race may not be used as a proxy for educational disadvantage by public schools and universities, yet programs have been designed and implemented for black men only in public higher education systems and lower schools in Georgia, Kansas, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York. Many of these efforts proclaim their intent to "save" black boys and black men and also to "restore" them to their "rightful place" as credits to their race and as leaders "in their own communities" and, also, as heads of "the black family." All of that racial rhetoric is propagated by governmental and academic leaders at a time we are supposed to have entered a color-blind, 21st century, world where racial and gender stereotypes are not only old-hat but dysfunctional.

Spellings never answered but instead punted to the DOE's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) which can on its own, if it wanted, give recipients of federal funds guidance on the do's and don'ts - especially the don'ts - of separating and differentially treating children and adults in education solely on the basis of their skin color and/or gender. But notwithstanding this Administration's commitment to color-blindness and equal sex treatment, it, like the Clinton Administration, is frozen and mute when it comes to giving leadership and clarity on this momentous government-assisted, publicly-financed racial and gender divide of our times. So, I brought a complaint to OCR, so that they could no longer ignore the race fad that was sweeping the nation under the nomenclature of the "Black Male Initiative."

By Peter Wood

Defenders and advocates of group preferences generally make their stand on a moral claim: group preferences are needed to advance the common social good. To oppose group preferences is, in turn, to act immorally. The vehemence with which defenders of group preferences frequently speak and the extreme tactics of some pro-preference groups such as By Any Means Necessary stem from this rootedness in moral conviction and moral antipathy.

Critics of group preferences also often make their stand on a moral basis. Many believe that group preferences perpetuate the sort of inequalities in our society that undermine the common good. Other critics tap directly into an almost visceral sense among Americans that group preferences are unfair. The critics of group preferences likewise imply some moral deficiency on the part of their opponents, who they see as not just advocates of unwise policy but also as architects of an unjust social order.

The moral claims of both supporters and critics run deep, but they of course do not exhaust the terms of the debate. We also make legal arguments, pragmatic claims about the likely consequences of policies, historical analyses, international comparisons, statistical investigations, and political appeals. This sprawl is characteristic of American life: whenever we debate something of fundamental importance, the arguments avalanche. Racial and gender preference began as an issue in graduate and professional programs in the 1970s, expanded into all of higher education, found welcome in the armed forces, and by the late 1980s moved into the corporate world. As the use of preferences expanded, the ideology of preferences centered on the concept of diversity diffused throughout American life until it was granted Constitutional imprimatur in 2003 in Justice O'Connor’s opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger.

But behind the avalanche of arguments when Americans debate something of fundamental importance, there is always a central moral question. Or perhaps better put, there is a tightly knit cluster of moral questions. Who are we? Whom do we aspire to become? What is the right way forward?

By John Leo

Yale's burgeoning diversity program has another announcement: it wants to "incorporate the role of ethnic counselor into that of freshman counselor, who will become responsible for providing enhanced community support for cultural affairs on campus," according to the Yale Daily News.

What does that mean? Well, according to the News, which neglected to supply an English-language version of the plan, "students would become increasingly aware of extant cultural resources on campus, along with gaining knowledge of new support to be rolled out under the restructure."

Okay, that clears it all up. There is, however, dissent. "This is unbelievable. It reads like an article from the Onion," said the first reader comment on the News site yesterday. "Do these people realize they are becoming laughing stocks?" Apparently not. The feeling at Yale seems to be that most students lack sufficient diversity awareness and are in some danger of going mainstream instead of remaining in their identity cubbyholes.

Yale currently has 90 residential counselors in its 12 residential colleges and only 13 ethnic counselors, hardly enough by today's diversity standards. The Daily News says the ethnic counselors have a "sometimes nebulous role within the college community," but nebulousness seems destined to fade. The goal, as one ethnicity counselor told the News, is to change the culture at Yale so students aren't afraid to talk about diversity and race and "really understand the way in which ethnicity plays a role in their life within the residential colleges." To that end, the "intercultural educators" take a missionary position, planning speeches and intercultural events, and preaching the diversity gospel.

By Ward Connerly

John Moores is a friend of mine. When I was a member of the Board of Regents of the University of California, John was my closest ally. Occasionally, we found ourselves on different sides of specific issues, like student fees. But, more likely than not - and especially on other fundamental issues - our perspectives and our votes were in accord. I grew to respect John as one of the most dedicated and talented Regents with whom I had the pleasure of serving during my twelve-year term.

On November 12 of this year, John tendered his resignation, nearly a year and a half before the scheduled expiration of his term. With the resignation of John Moores, California is losing an extraordinary public servant. Because of his stature as an icon in the San Diego community, one of California's most distinguished citizens, and one of America's most generous and successful entrepreneurs, it is useful for us pause and reflect on the reasons for the early resignation of John Moores.

Color and Money: How Rich White Kids are Winning the War Over College Affirmative Action
by Peter Schmidt

Reviewed by George C. Leef

Exactly how important is a college degree from a prestige school? Many believe that having such a degree is extremely important - a virtual guarantee of success in life. The higher education establishment works hard at propounding the idea that without a college degree, a young person's life will be one of almost Hobbesian misery and the elite institutions go a step further and portray themselves as the essential training grounds for the nation's leaders. If you accept those views, the destiny of the nation is largely shaped by who goes to college and where.

Peter Schmidt has swallowed them hook, line, and sinker, which isn't surprising for a reporter who has been immersed in higher education for many years. In his new book Color and Money he writes, "In modern American society, many of us assume - or at least desperately hope - that the people in leading positions in government, business, and the professions are our best and brightest... How do we decide who deserves such status? Generally, we rely on academic credentials. We entrust the task of identifying and training our best and brightest to our elite higher education institutions..."

By Ward Connerly

David Leonhardt, an economics columnist for the New York Times, recently visited the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and took a careful look at the current admissions process of that campus in the wake of Proposition 209, the California ballot initiative that outlawed race and gender preferences in public education, as well as in public employment and contracting. In particular, Leonhardt examined the application and the fate of one Francis Harris, a black student from Sacramento, who became the case study for his article. Here is how Leonhardt describes Ms. Harris:

She has managed to do very well in very difficult circumstances, and she is African-American. Her high school, in the Oak Park neighborhood of Sacramento, was shut down as an irremediable failure the spring before her freshman year, then reopened months later as a charter school. Midway through high school, her father developed heart problems and became an irritable fixture around the home. She also discovered that he was not actually her biological father. That was a man named Leroy who, when her mother took Harris to see him, simply said his name was George and waited for her to leave. In Harris's senior year, her mother lost her job at a nursing home and the family filed for bankruptcy... Harris, for instance, scored a 22 on the ACT test - slightly above the national average and well below the U.C.L.A. average.

The underlying question posed by Leonhardt with regard to Harris is the extent to which her "disadvantages" should factor into her application for admission to U.C.L.A. As did Leonhardt, most college admissions officers look primarily at one facet of Harris's life: "...she is African-American." They start from the premise stated by Peter Taylor, a good friend mentioned in Leonhardt's column, that "race has an enormous effect on the lives of applicants."

An excerpt from the new book Education's End, Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life by Anthony T. Kronman, Sterling Professor of Law, Yale Law School (Yale University Press)

By the early 1970s, the humanities were floundering. Ideological rifts were widening. Traditional ways of teaching had lost much of their authority, and there was worried talk of a "crisis" in the humanities. To many it seemed less clear than it had a quarter century before, when Harvard published its famous report on the aims of liberal education, what the humanities are supposed to do and why their doing it is important. In this anxious and excited environment, a new set of ideas began to gain currency. The first idea was an outgrowth of the civil rights movement and is associated with the concept of diversity. The second generally goes under the name of multiculturalism, and reflected the deepening suspicion of Western values provoked, in part, by the Vietnam War. The third, which provided philosophical support for the other two, I shall call the idea of constructivism, though its supporters have given it a variety of other names ("postmodernism", "antiessentialism," and the like). Loosely inspired by the work of philosophers as different as Marx, Nietzsche, and Foucault, constructivism affirmed the artificiality of all human values and the absence of any natural standards by which to judge them. It insisted, in particular, that the values of the West have no inherent superiority over those of other civilizations and are merely instruments of power in disguise that must be unmasked and resisted as weapons of colonial oppression. Together, these three ideas are the source of the culture of political correctness that has dominated the humanities for the past forty years.

Each has something to recommend it. Each has a core of good sense with intellectual and moral appeal. And each draws its appeal from a feature it shares with secular humanism, which also acknowledged the diversity of human values and the need to construct one's life by making a choice among them. Together these ideas have helped to maintain the confidence of many in the humanities that they do in fact have something special to contribute to the work of higher education. They have helped define a new and distinctive role for the humanities, organized around attractive moral and political values - one that fills the void that opened up when teachers in these fields abandoned their role as guides to the question of life's purpose and value in favor of the research ideal. And they have done this in a way that appears consistent with the values of secular humanism itself.

By John M. Ellis

The welcome news that Ward Churchill has been removed from the University of Colorado faculty is blighted by the fact that the means used has allowed the university to avoid the much larger problem that Churchill's conduct pointed to. It was in early 2005 that the public learned of, and was appalled by, excerpts from an essay that had been posted on the web by Churchill, a full Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado, on the subject of 9/11 terrorist attacks. Now, over two years later, Churchill has been fired after due process within the university for plagiarism and falsification of research. But what the public heard and responded to was not fabrication and plagiarism. Though these are certainly legitimate grounds for a dismissal, they could never have attracted the attention of the public, still less caused a widespread sense that something must be horribly wrong with a university that employed such a man as a professor.

The ACLU, basing itself on this undeniable discrepancy between the furor of the public's response and the narrow grounds of the decision, has charged that the firing is illegitimate because the real motive is nothing to do with the ostensible reason that has been given for the university's action. But that charge makes no sense. Al Capone may have been jailed for tax evasion when his far more serious offense was racketeering, but he was certainly guilty as charged, and so is Ward Churchill. Yet in both cases the limited grounds had the effect of removing one man from the scene while leaving a larger systemic problem untouched.

The manner of Churchill's dismissal clearly sidestepped the issues that the public was so disturbed by. The ACLU maintains that the public furor was caused only by Churchill's unpopular political opinions. Again, it is wrong. Far left political expression by professors is nothing new to the American public - Noam Chomsky's views are just as extreme and unpopular, but they do not lead to calls for his dismissal. What the public reacted to was something much more than this. All of their own experience of what their teachers and professors had sounded like told them that the man they heard should never under any circumstances have been a professor at a major university.

By KC Johnson

This week, as expected, the University of Colorado regents dismissed Professor Ward Churchill from his tenured position in the Ethnic Studies Department. (A university committee had found that Churchill committed plagiarism and misused sources.) And, as expected, Churchill has filed suit, alleging First Amendment violations.

The move against Churchill - who first attracted attention after describing those who perished (except for the terrorists) in the World Trade Center attack as "Little Eichmanns" - came over the opposition of the ACLU, which charged that the "poisoned atmosphere" of the inquiry into Churchill's scholarship rendered meaningless the committee's findings. ACTA president Anne Neal, on the other hand, welcomed the dismissal as "a very positive message that higher education is cleaning up its own."

The viewpoints of both organizations raise additional questions. The ACLU's position, if established as a precedent, would invite academics who (like Churchill) had engaged in research misconduct to issue inflammatory public statements, in the hopes that a public outcry (preferably from "right-wingers") could then provide a First Amendment shield for their academic misdeeds.