UCLA's Latest Display of Outrage

UCLA's Version of Rational Discourse

UCLA law professor Richard Sander has been the target of student protests at his university this week. Sander, a critic of affirmative action, published a report that argued UCLA’s supposedly “holistic” admissions process was quietly including race as a prominent factor in deciding who would be admitted to the university. Based on his analysis of admissions data, Sander argued that while UCLA’s holistic process, which included factors such as socioeconomic disadvantage in deciding who would be accepted, was not racially discriminatory by itself, admissions officers did not strictly follow the process and made offers to students who not only had relatively weak academic backgrounds, but even low scores in the holistic ranking. These offers, according to Sander, went disproportionately to black students. If Sander is correct, then UCLA’s admissions office has been surreptitiously violating California law, which prohibits the state’s universities from considering race in admissions or hiring.

The report, according to the website Inside Higher Ed, “infuriated minority student leaders at UCLA (not to mention administrators).” The students perceived it as “offensive” and described themselves as being “under attack.” UCLA Associate Vice Chancellor for Enrollment Management Youlanda Copeland-Morgan had not reviewed the statistics in the report and therefore could not judge the report’s accuracy, but nevertheless described Professor Sander’s analysis as “hurtful and unequivocal attacks.”

Professor Richard Sander

As I read through the Sander report, I could see no attempts to “attack” or “hurt” anyone. He makes an argument, based on evidence. One may disagree with his argument or, after having reviewed his evidence, conclude that the facts do not support it. But other than making vague claims that somehow the holistic process includes considerations that cannot be measured statistically, apparently no one has made any serious efforts to rebut Professor Sander’s reasoning. In an interview excerpted by Inside Higher Ed, Sander, who had attended the protest against his report (brave man), observed that "Some fairly cynical leaders saw an opportunity to create a cause ... and they are milking it to the full. There was no rational discussion. There was no identification of any mistakes in my report, and no concern about what it would mean if the analysis were correct."

I have no argument with the right to peaceful assembly and it would be perfectly legal for people to gather to protest the laws of physics, if they should choose to do so. Still, I find the events at UCLA appalling. A university should be a place where we encourage careful, dispassionate reasoning. Shouting slogans and shaking fists in the air do not lend themselves to the cultivation of rational analysis. While Professor Sander does not appear to be intimidated by outraged crowds, this kind of emotional display does make it more unpleasant to express unpopular views and therefore undermines the openness to intellectual diversity that should be the essence of university life.

Affirmative Fantasy

In one of the latest contributions to the commentary on the Fisher case, sociologist Thomas Espenshade speculates that institutions of higher education may be facing the end of affirmative action. Citing the study of affirmative action students he did with his co-author Alexandra Walton Radford, Espenshade acknowledges in a New York Times opinion piece that students admitted to selective colleges tend to graduate toward the bottom of their classes. However, Espenshade argues that no policy, including socioeconomic affirmative action, would generate as much racial and ethnic diversity as race-based affirmative action. “Most important,” he writes, “our study found that without affirmative action, racial diversity could only be preserved if there were no racial differences in learned skills and knowledge or in college preparedness.” In other words, he sees affirmative action as necessary precisely because it brings relatively unprepared students with comparatively low academic skills and knowledge into selective colleges, and these students tend to remain behind others throughout their academic careers.

Professor Thomas Espenshade

If affirmative action ends, Espenshade observes, maintaining racial and ethnic diversity will require either “giving more weight in admissions to those factors that are sometimes close substitutes for race” (i.e., engaging in subterfuge) or “putting their endowments and influence behind a comprehensive effort to close the learning gap that starts at birth.” Now, according to most indicators, contemporary colleges and universities are not doing a very good job of educating their own students. Yet, Professor Espenshade would have us believe that these institutions have almost limitless potential to re-shape the lives of children across the nation, taking over the work of communities and families, and ending all variations in educational preparation across demographic categories. If you believe that this is within the capability of higher education, I’d like to forward you some of the investment opportunities I’ve been receiving in my email from unknown parties abroad.

Obama Ancestries and the Problem of Race Conscious Policies

I recently ran across a report of a genealogical study that found that President Obama’s mother probably had at least one African ancestor, in addition to her European forebears.  One of Obama’s now recognized distant cousins, who said that he has always considered himself “Caucasian,” had his DNA analyzed and found that he had sub-Saharan African genetic traits in his Y chromosome, indicating an African ancestor in his paternal line.  This has not been as widely reported as Michele Obama’s descent from Irish immigrants, but I think it is just as significant. The complicated White House ancestries suggest just how wrong-headed official racial categorizations and preferences are.

Recognizing the complexity of race does not mean accepting the American Sociological Association’s official dictum that race is nothing but a “social construct” without any biological foundation. If that were true, then the DNA tracing of racial ancestry would not be possible.  Work by geneticists at Stanford University, looking at large and representative samples of hundreds of sites on human DNA, has indicated not only that race has biological meaning, but that the statistical variations among genetic traits are largely consistent with popularly recognized races. The five clusters of DNA differences are linked to continents of origin: Africa, western Eurasia, East Asia, Oceania, and the Americas. (see Noah A. Rosenberg  et al. (2002) “Genetic Structure of Human Populations.” Science 298: 2381-2385. A newspaper report of the results is available here). The problem is not that race has no biological status at the level of populations, but that there is no good way to categorize individuals on the basis of statistical clusters.

As the example of Michelle Obama illustrates, some European genetic background is common among those classified as African Americans. Several years ago, I taught at a university in southwestern Louisiana, where many of my students had family backgrounds that blended so many physical heritages that they could not be readily classified on the basis of appearance. The genealogy of Barack Obama gives us the other side of the story: the phenomenon of “passing” in American history means that some unknown proportion of white Americans could claim to be “black,” if only they would make use of the resources that companies such as Ancestry.com now make available.  Would these newly discovered African Americans be eligible for affirmative action benefits?

In order for institutions to make decisions on the basis of categories there must ways of defining the categories and of placing people in them. If the categories are self-reported, job seekers and college applicants would be well-advised to find out what categories are desired and report themselves accordingly.  If appearance is going to be the criterion, who is going to decide who looks right? Or will every applicant need to provide a cheek swab?