July 02, 2003

The Fulford File, By James Fulford

Surprise! Diversity Is Not Strength; etc.

Six months before the Supreme Court perpetrated the Michigan Mess, Steve Sailer wrote here that 

“The University defends its quota system by claiming that ‘diversity’ improves all students' educations. But an upcoming International Journal of Public Opinion Research article called ‘Does enrollment diversity improve university education?’ by social science heavyweights Stanley Rothman, Seymour Martin Lipset and Neil Nevitte will blast that claim out of the water. (The first draft was accidentally distributed on the Internet last October.)”

You can now read Lipset, Rothman, and Nevitte’s conclusions online in The Public Interest [Racial diversity reconsidered, By Stanley Rothman, Seymour Martin Lipset & Neil Nevitte, Spring 2003].

Surprise! It turns out that increased minority enrollment does not improve the educational experience:

“As the proportion of black students rose, student [all races] satisfaction with their university experience dropped, as did their assessments of the quality of their education and the work ethic of their peers. In addition, the higher the enrollment diversity, the more likely students were to say that they personally experienced discrimination. The same pattern of negative correlations between educational benefits and increased black enrollment appeared in the responses of faculty and administrators.”

The authors noted that this negative “diversity effect” was related to increased black and Hispanic enrollment, rather than Asian-American enrollment.

“U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Chairman Mary Frances Berry recently averred, ‘It seems to me that if racial diversity is a worthy goal, rather than people squirming around to address race, they should acknowledge there is nothing wrong with giving a preference here.’ To the contrary, our findings suggest that not all forms of diversity are created equal. The increased presence of black and Hispanic students has not led to the expected improvements. Meanwhile, the increased presence of Asian Americans seems to have at least some positive impact.”

Of course, there is no reason why increased diversity should improve students’ education. Schools that are more or less homogeneous are less likely to experience racial strife. Students who feel that “different groups are held to different standards” will continue to come into conflict.

Academic affirmative action is not helping race relations, it is not really helping its recipients, and it’s not doing anything to further the cause of higher education - which is, come to think of it, the purpose of a university, rather than all this social engineering babble.

Affirmative Action does, however, provide an excuse to bash whites –  for excessively passing tests, “dominating” the pool of “economically disadvantaged applicants who are prepared for college,” and for being the undeserving heirs of the racist past.

Which means that it probably will continue for years to come.

Reference the above piece using this permanent URL:
http://www.vdare.com/fulford/diversity_etc.htm#surprise

Affirmative Action’s Negative Effects

Worth noting: the effect of preferences on those “preferred minorities” who are actually qualified.

Marcus Cole, a black professor at the Stanford Law School, says in the Volokh Conspiracy blog that he “feels compelled to put his standardized test scores and National Merit award on his CV.” [Posted on the web in PDF.] Cole explains:

“Why do I do this? For those of you who do not know me personally, it is not a matter of braggadocio. Every September I have to deal with nearly 60 prima donna first year law students whose first and only (initial) reaction to my skin color is that they have been cheated out of a "real" Contracts professor, and are stuck with an "Affirmative Action" instructor. Many of them come around when, as some ‘gunners’ often do, they look up my CV and find that I have outscored virtually every single one of them on the test around which they have centered their lives, the LSAT. Others usually come around by mid semester when they have had an opportunity to compare my teaching to that of their other instructors.”

As long as racial preferences continue in America, no African-American can be free from this kind of suspicion. Clarence Thomas gets it all the time. During the Michigan case a black columnist called Thomas “the individual who is America's most prominent affirmative action hire.”

Thomas also gets bashed by liberals for voting against the preferences of which he is a supposed beneficiary. Interestingly, this criticism is never made of others who vote against privileges from which they’ve benefited, e.g. male justices who vote for women’s rights - or white justices who vote for black civil rights.

Cole continues:

“I recently told a ‘pro-affirmative action’ friend who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania that my dream for my two sons is different than most other Americans. While most other Americans dream of sending their children off to Harvard, Yale or Stanford, I dream of my two sons attending the University of California at Berkeley, a school to which only the objective accouterments of their abilities will gain them access.

He’s got a point: California’s Proposition 209 means that if you get into a California university, you got there on merit - although there’s been a lot of resistance from university administrators.

Reference the above piece using this permanent URL:
http://www.vdare.com/fulford/diversity_etc.htm#effects

Moynihan Report Remembered

In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote a report called “The Negro Family: the Case For National Action,” generally known as the Moynihan Report, which became famous and of course, controversial, at the time. (Moynihan was accused of “blaming the victim,” et cetera.)

I mention this because I just discovered that it’s available online, at no charge, through the website of the Department Of Labor, which originally commissioned it.

A couple of points:

1. This report could not be published today, especially Chapter IV, even though

2. Everything is much worse than it was in 1965, although a little better than it was in 1995, and

3. Unemployment in the black community is so high that this Report would no longer be issued by the Department of Labor but Health and Human Services. They’re not laboring, they’re on welfare.

Why the huge unemployment, in spite of laws banning discrimination passed in 1964?

Well, 1965 was the year the new Immigration Act passed. Blacks found themselves underbid by foreigners who hadn’t suffered the discrimination Moynihan talks about, and who suffered from fewer, or different, pathologies.

Government giveth, and  Government taketh away.

Chapter I. The Negro American Revolution.

Chapter II. The Negro American Family.

Chapter III. The Roots of the Problem.

Chapter IV. The Tangle of Pathology.

Chapter V. The Case for National Action.

Footnote References.