Recent articles

I have gotten two opinion pieces out this week:

1) A piece in Areo on the doubletalk around diversity and affirmative action.

2) A piece in Real Clear Education on the obstacles to improving graduation rates when students are underprepared and need to work to support themselves.

Next Book: The Color Bind

I'm currently reading The Color Bind: California's Battle to End Affirmative Action by journalism professor Lydia Chavez. I stumbled across it pretty randomly and thought the topic looked interesting. It was written in the 1990's, and looked at the battle over Prop 209, which ended most forms of affirmative action in California's public institutions. I was in California but not very aware of this stuff at the time, so it's an interesting look at that era for me, written by someone who was on the scene at the time.

I doubt I'll blog all of it in detail, but in the first few pages it's interesting to see that some of the key proponents were a couple of obscure academics, one of them an adjunct philosophy instructor with various affiliations, and the other a tenured professor of anthropology at Cal State Hayward (now known as Cal State East Bay). On pages 7-8 she describes the anthropologist's experiences at a 1989 conference on multiculturalism, and the strong emotions he came away with. (He was not pleased.)

I suppose some readers might say this is too simplistic, to ascribe so much to an obscure academic conference. And if the question is why millions of people voted as they did, it's obviously about far more than one frustrated anthropology prof. On the other hand, if the question is why one guy became an activist willing to do the work, well, everyone has an origin story, and often those stories start with seemingly small things. Whatever you think of the bigger subject and controversies, it's a very human and convincing detail.

This is NOT a test! I repeat: This is NOT a test!

The University of California, possibly in collaboration with the California State University, as well as anyone else who would like some roasted unicorn with a side order of rainbows and fairies, is going to devise its own admissions tests.  These tests will be totally better than the SAT/ACT, will do a better job of predicting college performance, and will NOT perpetuate inequities, because they will only test what REALLY matters.  So all groups will score equally well and all of our problems will be solved.

These tests will be made from scratch and available by 2025 (really, 2024 if they want to admit freshmen freshpersons people of freshness with it in the fall of 2025). Whereas so many other educational measures reflect disparities in American society, these tests will not show disparities, and so they will be much fairer than the SAT/ACT, and will get buy-in from all ethnic groups.  (Except for Asian Americans, who are doing great on the SAT/ACT and will lose spots from this.  But I'm told that Asians aren't diverse, so I guess that's OK.)

Look, if it is true that a test of what REALLY matters for academic performance is blind to all of the disparities and inequities in our k-12 system (not to mention the wider societal context in which k-12 students are reared and prepared) then those equities don't actually matter.  Years of under-preparation?  Irrelevant! None of it mattered.  The preparation that other kids got wasn't an advantage, and the preparation that some were denied was not a disadvantage.  Everything is the same for all people in all context so who cares about anything? Inequality of opportunity is just a lie. (And, well, yes, it springs from falsehoods, but falsehoods can do real harm.) If we accept these premises, then everyone is off the hook for the first 18 years of life, and all responsibility now rests on the shoulders of college professors.

Sadly, under-preparation is real.  Some of it can be remedied, because people are (to some extent) adaptable.  Some of it can't be, because what happens early in life is (to some extent) of lasting consequence.  But pretending that it's irrelevant, and everyone can just be admitted to the same programs that start from the same place and proceed at the same pace, that's insanity.

Let us not talk falsely now.  Everybody knows what this is about. Everybody knows what they want.  So let's do it.  Let's replace the admissions tests with neural nets that infer race.  It's what they want.  It's illegal under Prop. 209, but it's nonetheless ethically defensible (at least from certain premises), so do it, and let the righteous battle be joined.  Fight for principles and premises that you believe in, rather than demanding that we all tell lies about preparation and tests. My 100% sincere opinion about affirmative action is that it is far more honest than anything else we do in higher ed, and I hate lying more than anything else. So let's do it.