This feisty blog has occasionally talked about issues of discrimination against minority-group members and women, in science, or in academia, or just more broadly. We have also, one must admit, occasionally taken the Bush administration to task for this or that example of egregious malfeasance. Thus, rigorously fair folks that we are, it’s only right that we also mention those instances when the administration takes time off from its busy schedule of intelligence-doctoring, operative-outing, deficit-growing, and hurricane-ignoring to actively fight the pernicious effects of discrimination.
So, here we go: the Justice Department is going to sue Southern Illinois University for discriminating against white males.
No, you can’t make this stuff up. SIU, like almost every university in the country, is seriously under-represented by minority groups among its graduate students; out of 5,500 graduate students, only about 8 percent are Latino or African-American (compared to over 20 percent of Americans). So they have a few fellowship programs that specifically target women and minorities, and help out a tiny number of people — perhaps 40 per year. The Bush administration, tireless warriors for social justice that they are, will stop at nothing to squelch this manifest anti-white bias:
“The University has engaged in a pattern or practice of intentional discrimination against whites, non-preferred minorities and males,” says a Justice Department letter sent to the university last week and obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times.
The letter demands the university cease the fellowship programs, or the department’s civil rights division will sue SIU by Nov. 18.
I don’t know about you, but if I’m going to discriminate against someone, I would be able to do a much better job than that. You know, like actually having fewer members of the discriminated class at my university than in the surrounding society, rather than significantly more.
Sadly, this is an issue that (even) scientists don’t always think very clearly about. There is a feeling in some circles that perfect fairness consists of taking the tiny part of society’s workings over which you have control, and pretending within that part that there is no such thing as race or gender, everyone should be treated equally. But in the real world, where we are not all born into equal circumstances and presented with equal opportunities, it makes perfect sense to recognize that and account for it when we recruit and train students.
Of course, people will complain that singling out minority-group status forces us to treat people according to some external characteristics rather than as individuals, and amounts to an insidious form of reverse racism, ultimately hurting the people it tries to help. This philosophically appealing position has the downside of being in flagrant contradiction with the evidence. Although it’s true that programs typically aim (small amounts of) resources at people because of minority-group status rather than a detailed understanding of their personal history in overcoming obstacles, the fact is that this clumsy strategy actually works. People gain access to education and training that they otherwise would not, and the result is that the pool of highly-educated and successful people grows more diverse, which helps both the people in those groups and the society as a whole. As crude as it is, the strategy of targeting fellowships at under-represented groups is both cheap and effective.
Deep down, nobody likes affirmative-action type programs. Nobody. We would all much prefer it if universities and other employers could truly ignore the race or gender of applicants and workers, because they were treated completely fairly throughout all of society. But that’s just not reality. And until it is, making a tiny little effort to help out people who have faced systematic bias throughout their lives — even if the efforts are clumsy and imprecise — is the least we can do.
The only concern I’ve ever had about these programs is the way that they conflate race and class. In real terms, you can show that, statistically, it can be as hard to suceed starting out as a rural white person as it is being an urban black person. They are not parallel situations, but there is a real issue there that isn’t being 100% addressed–I know in Missouri, the most poorly funded school districts were the ones in the rural white areas.
bittergradstudent, you’re right on target. “Class” is a word that’s conspicuously absent from most discussions of politics in this country. An affirmative action program based on applicants’ socioeconomic backgrounds rather than race or ethnicity would be both color-blind and fair. In most cases, class background and race/ethnicity cut the same way, but the sons and daughters of the poor and the working class should get an affirmative action hand up whether they’re from the ghetto, the barrio, or the trailer park.
Discrimination against racial minorities has been negligible in the United States for over thirty years. It continues to exist, but it is now exceeded by other forms of discrimination such as that against the short, the fat, the stupid, and the ugly.
One place where racism unfortunately persists is in the minds of well-intentioned politically liberal persons. Many harbor the perhaps unconscious belief that certain races, due to their inherent inferiority, cannot possibly succeed without standards being lowered for them. That such persons never advocate standards being lowered for impoverished Appalachian whites, is evidence that they are hosts to a meme that is factually racist.
When buying and selling are regulated, the first items to be bought and sold are the regulators.
The rub with victimology and rule of the disempowered is that there is always somebody even less qualified, a worse victim, and more screwed up than you are. You wanted a break for being a woman? Okay, but you’re a white woman and just got euchred out of that position by a Chicana two-fer. She finds herself competing against a sexually harassed Black lesbian single mother intravenous drug addict with AIDS doing the Macarena in a wheelchair.
Affirmative Action: jobs given to those who cannot do them.
Bilingualism: communication fostered by format incompatibility.
Compassion: an evolutionarily stupid act committed at others’ expense.
Discrimination: objective evaluation.
Equality: majority
Hate language – empirically validated opinion.
Inequity – keeping score.
Issues – straw men embellished into tar babies.
Justice – extorted outcome.
Liberal – one who believes HIV and AIDS are spread by a lack of funding.
Liberal education – carving one’s initials into the next generation’s flesh.
Rights: protection of confused angry ignorance against achievement.
Al wrote:
“Compassion: an evolutionarily stupid act committed at others’ expense.”
I’m sorry that you view the world this way. I hope you find some comfort and peace.
Elliot
I don’t see why class-based affirmative action has to be mutually exclusive with race-based affirmative action. There’s no reason why both factors (and probably many others) can’t be incorporated as a way of evaluating the hurdles an applicant has had to overcome along the road.
The truly bone-headed way of doing admissions is to merely look at standardized test scores and grades and assume that they are a proxy for merit, as if no other factors could possibly intervene in that measurement.
Unfortunately, doing things the first way takes a lot of time and discernment, while the second way can be done by computer, so schools with big admissions numbers often take the easy way out.
Tim D–
I agree, but the former is never talked about, and the latter is talked about quite often, and rural poverty and non-social mobility is never talked about on TV when the media discusses these issues.
bittergradstudent- Yeah, you’re totally right. Americans hate to talk about class, and poor, rural whites definitely get screwed just as badly as inner-city black kids. It’s a different set of problems, but just as pressing.
I just feel that, despite what Belizean says, racism is not negligible in this country, it is just not as chic as it used to be. If I had more time, I would elaborate, but I gotta run.
Belizean:
In an earlier post on a different subject, I wondered if you and I were living on different planets. Now I’m sure of it.
What evidence to you have to support your contention that “discrimination against racial minorities has been negligible in the United States for over thirty years”?
Just because rural poor isn’t talked about on TV doesn’t mean no one tries to address it in admission… at the two different Ohio universities which I’m familiar, they both consider appallachian an underrepresented minority.
That said, I always find it humorous how quickly the perfect becomes the enemy of the good in these discussions–because some people feel that poor white people may be left out, then we shouldn’t be trying to do anything to help anyone until we can come up with a perfect solution that works for everybody. The current solution is clumsy, yes, but it’s better than not doing anything at all.
Tim D is getting at the core of this–which is there’s a misunderstanding that test scores == ability, and that only test scores should be used by admissions to build a class. Even the notion that students can somehow comprise an ordered set is ridiculous on its face, but there it is…
My opinions about this issue is here.
This lawsuit is particularly timely, given what is currently happening in France. There we can see just how successful the reverse approach has been. If you tell everyone that are equal often enough, it turns out there is no need for either affirmative action programmes or keeping statistics on, say, how many in minority groups are unemployed or in university/government positions. The good nature and tolerance of the majority group results in everyone integrating just fine.
Samantha–
that was never the French appraoch. Contrary to what Fox News advertises about the issue, there has been a long standing history of overt discrimination against the Arab minority, tracing back to colonial times. The Jean Marie Le Pen did not finish second in the last presidential election because the way that the French public embraces multiculturalism.
So… I hardly dare ask, bittergradstudent, but what is FOX news saying? NPR has done an OK job explaining about Algeria etc.
The point I am trying to make is not to knock the French (yes, really) but rather that we have a paradigm where a Western society has tried to become multicultural without using affirmative action. And it has been spectacularly unsuccessful. And this should be a warning to us.
This is retarded. (And I am speaking as a person who came from a country where there is a affirmative action program for the majority!)
The problem is that this lawsuit is going to end up hurting the white majority of SIU more, by denying them a chance to interact with people of other races. I think the thing that is always forgotten is that increasing diversity in any program will benefit the whole.
I know that I’ve benefitted immensely, in my college years, that I got to finally interact with students of other races in my own country Malaysia, after 13 years of grade school education in a purely chinese school (not my choice). The price I paid is that I have to work triple hard to get into my own country’s college because of my skin colour, but that only made me a better person in the end.
I’m sorry, I guess I overreacted to the implications that the riots were the result of a multicultural approach to things, when it is likely that it is quite the opposite–these riots, as far as I can tell, grew out of exclusion and repression, not out of touchy-feely blind acceptance.
Dear Eugene,
the U.S. is not Malaysia. The United States of America is a country that follows its own constitution and other laws, and whether or not a Malaysia-born person feels that he benefitted from a particular policy somewhere in his country is absolutely irrelevant.
All the best
Lubos
Samantha & bittergradstudent: You might want to have a look at this article in NYT today.
(Le Pen did very well, that’s true. That’s why Sarkozy is trying to embrace his voters by showing he’s a tough guy, calling the rioters “scum”. His threat about throwing out the rioting kids from the country has not been so well received though.)
Lubos, I just read your post and you are walking a semantic tightrope. The fact that a minority is given a stipend in no way discriminates against whites. This is financial aid not admission preference. If you accept the Cornell groups “interepretation” of the 14th (which is only an opinion not settled law) you cannot conclude that the whites have been damaged. They simply haven’t recieved the benefit of these grants.
Why the Justice Department is bringing this at this time is puzzling as it appear that the justification is completely political. That would be to shore up the Bush administrations sagging support with white conservatives who are beginnng to question the war, gas prices, the lying, and everything else about this administration that they are finally being called out for. I wonder if GWBs approval ratings were higher if this would even be an issue.
Elliot
bittergraduatestudent et al,
Many affirmative action programs do treat class and race equally. Two examples I am familiar with:
U Michigan which was recently sued by white students for their affirmative action program used a point system in which grades, test scores etc. were assigned points. Underrepresented groups as well as people from low-income households could earn up to twenty additional points. These points could also be awarded to athletes or children of alumni etc.. An additional twenty points could be awarded at the provosts discretion for geographical location, personal essay etc. This takes into account not only those poor whites, but addionally those that are from rural areas.
Before affirmative action was outlawed at the University of California white students from economically disadvanted backgrounds were among the main beneficiaries of the program. Without affirmative action the median family income of white students at UC Berkeley has risen to $100,000/year.
Economic background is in fact a central issue.
Race and class. Yes, class can be a burden. But it appears that race by far overwhelms class — take a look at the SAT statistics:
SAT (wikipedia)
SAT by race, income and parental education
A student from a black family with an income of $70k or more scores lower on the SAT than a student from a white family that makes less that $10k. A black student from a family with a graduate degree barely outperforms a white student from a family without a high school diploma.
I love how affirmative action people throw the term ‘diversity’ around like it means anything else than ‘black and latino’. Its such glaringly obvious rhetoric it boggles the mind smart people buy into it.
If universities were serious about upping diversity counts they would take more foreign students in. I can pretty much guarentee that will be more ‘diverse’ than picking up Joe instead of Frank (where both are american and live in the same neighborhood and one happens to be black the other white).
Moreover ‘diversity’ is so ill defined a concept I have difficulty even finding an appropriate definition applicable to the law. Are we talking about diversity of mind or background? No one seems to talk about that in admissions offices, the reality is they just look at your race and gender (and look for hints of sexual orientation now too since evidently gays are discrimated against) and preferentially focus longer on apps that include those traits, wheras they might normally have tossed it (I know this for a fact as my xgf works in such an office).
Either way losing sight of meritocracies should be frowned upon, especially in science. We don’t want our students to be supbar candidates, only the best and the brightest will do. Having anything other than pure meritocracy does a disservice to the ideal and hence should be rejected ad initio.
Incidentally Sean seems to think there is considerable evidence for AA helping society and our universities. Well please link such ‘causal’ evidence, as far as I can see all the program has advanced us is a correlation with higher drop out rates.
Right! Look how great things are working out in France and they don’t have ANY affirmative action!
Note: I’m British and we think sarcasm is funny.
Incidentally, this seems to be more of a problem in undergraduate life. You can spot the affirmative action babies from a mile away when you teach their classes. In the end the immense majority of them just dont make it, at least in physics but usually college in general.
What kills me is there is always a percentage of those minority students who are super smart, and are probably at risk of being wrongfully labelled when they could probably have gotten in anywhere AA or no AA. It seems to me AA does that subset the biggest disservice of all.
(please don’t feed the troll, everyone!)