Civil Rights Less Than Roundup
I didn’t do a roundup today, but I did write two posts that are pretty directly tied to civil rights (not including the Sarah Palin’s wardrobe post I just linked to below).
First, the data is now out on how barring affirmative action affected minority enrollment at Michigan’s state universities. The result? It’s a mixed bag, but the overall trends are a shift in minority enrollment to less-prestigious universities, a greater difficulty in attracting even qualified minority students (in part because of the elimination of race-conscious scholarship programs), and, most oddly, a fall in minority enrollment at some schools which never used race-conscious policies in the first place.
Also in that post, a citation to a study of minority law graduates from the University of Michigan law school from 1966 – 1996, when the school still used affirmative action. The authors found that the minority graduates had equally-successful careers along every metric compared to their White peers.
The other post noted a new rule by the Federal Bureau of Prison prohibiting the shackling of pregnant woman during labor or delivery. Readers might recall that I flagged a case this summer ruling that such procedures do not violate the 8th amendment, because, the 8th circuit said, pregnant women giving birth present a “flight risk”. Since that dealt with a state prison, and this is a federal rule, it is likely that the rule would have had no effect on the case even if it was enforced at the time. But it does give us some momentum, and that’s a good thing.
5 Responses to “Civil Rights Less Than Roundup”
I love how universities will throw every bit of their integrity out the window to hold on the discriminatory practice. At the same time that they claimed that their separate and unequal admissions programs did not really mean that much they show that when the admission system is blind that blacks are admitted at a much lower rate.
then the turn around and claim that their admission process is meaningless and that anyone who is admitted to a top flight law schools will succeed.
the better question is whether the white students who were not admitted ot UM because of their race performed as well as the black students who were admitted using a lower admittion standard. Somehow I doubt anyone wound fund that study.
SD — Again, I think you miss the point. College is not there for the purpose of rewarding those students who were lucky enough to have been born rich (or white). College is there to educate people. The admissions policies are there to help that university decide which students will excel within that environment, and hopefully graduate, become productive members of society, and kick back a little to the university afterwards.
An example: At one point in college, I roomed with a woman who had been smuggled across the border by her parents as a kid, grew up in a terrible part of the greater LA area, took care of her younger brothers when her mom died, finally ended up with a decent GPA and slightly better-than-average SAT scores, and also managed to become a US citizen before leaving high school. When I roomed with her, she was finishing up her PhD in a technical field where our university was #1 in the country, after having graduated from undergrad at the top of her class, after having brought a great deal of valuable research to the university, and after having been very active in other campus activities. Just looking at her test scores and grades, she would not have been admitted to a top-tier university; she was most certainly an Affirmative Action entrant. But was allowing her to enter really a bad choice for the university? Of course, the answer is no. Unless, of course, you think the purpose of college is to reward rich white kids for not having done anything to mess up their chance to be a rich white adult.
roro,
The government should never make policy based upon anecdotes. What is know is that the government is forbidden to discriminate on the basis of race without due process. For the last fifty years, the left has been trying to figure out how to discriminate against whites. they have been repeatedly struck down in court.
If the university wants to have a highly selective admission policy, then the policy should be applied to all students equally without regard to race, gender, or ethnnicity. The overwhelming majority of whites in the U.S. support this idea even though they know it benefits women more than men and Asians more than whites.
Blacks and Hispanics on the other hand seem to love the separate and unequal admissions programs that have been illegal for 50 years.
If you want the government and organizations to take the government's money to be able to district, then do what is right and amend the constitution to allow racist behavior by the government. If you do not want to change the law, then comply with it.
Huh? You link to an article about how hard it is to pay for college because tuition and living costs are up while savings and home equity are down. What in the world does that have to do with AA? The whole premise is “getting in won't be a problem, paying for it will”. Did you even read the article?
Also, my anecdote was an example of why AA is important. It's not meant to be proof, just an example, so don't get your panties in a twist. I can't even answer the rest of your comment, as it's so full of incorrect assumptions about what black people love, how white people think, etc.
Ms. Price would not be able to think about Johns Hopkins is she were white. That is why the white middle class people reading the post get so upset about AA. Ms. Price gets to attend college that their own children with higher GPA's and higher SAT scores cannot even think about attending.
And the worst part is that in the employment makret, people will think that Ms. Price is smarter than all of the whites who were rejected by Johns Hopkins even though they had better credentials for admissions.