Armstrong: A Likely Story: The “Diversity” Myth Consumes the Canadian Literary Scene

2024/04/10 Leave a comment

Of note:

….I am not calling for contracts, publicity and awards to be given out on a demographically proportional basis. Women buy more books than men, so it’s no surprise if more women want to write and there’s no injustice in the industry catering to women’s interests when it comes to signing and promoting authors. The experience of being in a racial or cultural minority might be more likely to inspire people to become writers – witness the flowering of American Jewish literature in the 20th century. The desire to write and the talent to do it very well make for a rare combination and we can’t expect that combination to show up by quota. Maybe the “disproportionate” results I see are purely innocent, based on the merit of authors and the demands of the marketplace.

Except that they are accompanied by countless indicators of a literary culture that is working to create much more disproportionate results in the future, once all those current beneficiaries of race-based emerging writer awards and mentorships are ready to move into positions of literary leadership. If literary gatekeepers – the publishers, editors, conference organizers and the like behind those exclusionary measures I referred to above – are going to use race-based criteria to bar the majority of the nation’s population from many of their programs and publications, there had better be compelling evidence to justify those measures.

But the success of BIPOC writers over the last two or three decades, and especially in the last five years, suggests that these extraordinary measures are not justified. Remember, books promoted between 2018 and 2020 were written and landed publishing deals before the affirmative action initiatives I listed above, and yet BIPOC writers already managed to be moderately over-represented in Canadian literary circles. (And that some of these measures target women generally because they’ve been excluded from Canadian literature is so preposterous as to be laughable.)

If you look up Canadian writers online, increasingly you find that they define themselves immediately in racial terms, whether they are black or white, Asian or Indigenous or any combination. Often, the writer will include a health diagnosis of some sort, especially in cases where there’s no other potential affirmative action hook.

But far from easing off the affirmative action, the people piloting the good ship CanLit are pushing the throttle harder. Jesse Wente, “chairperson” of the Canada Council, in an interview with the Toronto Star called the institution he headed a “colonial” organization and described his mission as reducing the harm it causes to Indigenous, black and other communities. Given that this is the man who campaigned to destroy the career of author Hal Niedzviecki over an awkwardly worded call for writers to bridge cultures (the so-called Appropriation Prize kerfuffle of 2017), we can guess what this might mean.

In my own province of Manitoba, the government-funded arts council recently announced a new set of “strategic priorities” focused on equity, diversity, reconciliation and projects that “build communities.” The money quote in this document: “Refine program assessment criteria that favour a Eurocentric concept of excellence to instead focus on impact.”

What could possibly be done when so many publishers, agents, editors, academics, prominent authors and funding bodies are pushing harder than ever for identity-based affirmative action? A change in the federal government, which seems likely, might bring in new leadership at Canadian Heritage and the Canada Council that is less sympathetic to race-based program criteria. So the next federal election may put the brakes on some of these measures.

Perhaps more significantly, though, we may be able to count on boredom and frustration among readers and writers who are tiring of literature becoming a mere subsidiary branch of the greater social justice movement. How many Canadian Percival Everetts are there who are just as tired of trauma narratives as the protagonist of American Fiction? And how many book buyers have grown tired of being told again and again that equity and diversity are good and racism is bad?

It will be, admittedly, a steep and long mountain to climb. If you look up Canadian writers online, increasingly you find that they define themselves immediately in racial terms, whether they are black or white, Asian or Indigenous or any combination. Often, the writer will include a health diagnosis of some sort, especially in cases where there’s no other potential affirmative action hook: “Jane Smith is a settler of mixed Finnish and Irish ancestry living with long Covid and bipolar disorder on the unceded lands of the Anishinaabe.” Perhaps a culture that encourages writers to view themselves as individuals first and group members second would be more likely to produce the kind of exciting, unpredictable literature that encourages readers to shell out cash and turn the page.

Bob Armstrong is a Winnipeg-based novelist. His last novel, Prodigies, was published in the United States by Five Star/Gale after Canadian publishers and agents turned it down, going on to win the 2021 Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction. Armstrong previously wrote a weekly book news column for the Winnipeg Free Press for 12 years.

Source: A Likely Story: The “Diversity” Myth Consumes the Canadian Literary Scene

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Dear colleagues: How to achieve student diversity, legally [affirmative action after SCOTUS]

2023/09/04 Leave a comment

Of note:

On 14 August the Biden administration provided colleges and universities with scenarios that would allow them to maintain the racial diversity of their student bodies following the Supreme Court of the United States’ (SCOTUS) decision last June that ended affirmative action.

Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona cast the maintenance of racial diversity in the nation’s colleges and universities as both an economic necessity and the fulfilment of America’s promise to itself. “For higher education to be the engine of economic opportunity, upward mobility and global competitiveness, we need campus communities that reflect the beautiful diversity of our country,” he said.

The Washington DC-based American Council on Education (ACE) welcomed the guidance provided by the Biden administration.

“This guidance from the Department of Education is a welcomed effort to delineate the limits of the ruling and help colleges better understand this new environment as they seek to meet their diversity and inclusion goals within the new limitations imposed by the court’s ruling,” said Audrey Hamilton, associate director of ACE’s public affairs.

Pushback against court findings

In the United States, SCOTUS is the final arbiter of constitutional questions. Its decisions are binding on both the federal and state governments.

While the Biden administration was well within rhetorical norms when it expressed regret about the decision, official government statements such as the “Dear Colleague letter” addressed to colleges and universities and signed by Kristen Clarke, assistant attorney general for civil rights at the Department of Justice (DoJ), and Catherine E Lhamon, assistant secretary for civil rights at the Department of Education (DoE), are not generally considered the place to re-litigate constitutional issues in public.

Still, the administration pushed back against the SCOTUS’ rejection of the notion that student diversity adds to the educational experience of college and university students, stated most clearly in Justice Clarence Thomas’ concurring opinion in the case of Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) v President and Fellows of Harvard College (SFFA).

“I have sought to understand exactly how racial diversity yields educational benefits,” said Thomas. “With nearly 50 years [since the establishment of affirmative action programmes] to develop their arguments, neither Harvard nor UNC – two of the foremost research universities in the world – nor any of their amici [friend of the court briefs] can explain that critical link.”

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), and Harvard University were sued by SFFA which claimed that the universities’ affirmative action programmes discriminated against Asian and white applicants.

The Dear Colleague letter underscored that both the DoJ and DoE believe: “Learning is enriched when student bodies reflect the rich diversity of our communities. Research has shown that such diversity leads to, among other things, livelier and more informative classroom discussions, breaking down prejudices and increased cross-racial understanding, and heightened cognitive development and problem-solving skills.”

The letter further states: “The benefits of diversity in educational institutions extend beyond the classroom as individuals who attend diverse schools are better prepared for our increasingly racial and ethnically diverse society and global economy.”

Holistic application-review processes

The DoJ’s guidance, that accompanied the letter from Clarke and Lhamon, is grounded in the SCOTUS’ decision in SFFA and, specifically, in the statement, just before the end of the majority decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts, that “nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration or otherwise”.

As interpreted by the DoJ, Roberts allowed universities and colleges to continue to use holistic application-review processes that provided opportunities, through essay prompts, to assess how an applicants’ background and individual attributes – including race, experience of racial discrimination or the racial composition of his/her schools or neighbourhood – position the applicant to contribute to the college or university in a unique manner.

Among the concrete examples the guidance provides are:

• “A university could consider an applicant’s explanation about what it means to him to be the first Black violinist in his city’s youth orchestra”; and

• “[A]n institution could consider an applicant’s discussion of how learning to cook traditional Hmong dishes from her grandmother sparked a passion for food and nurtured her sense of self by connecting her to past generations of her family (the Hmong are an indigenous group from East and Southeast Asia)”.

When Dr Alí Bustamante, deputy director of the New York-based Roosevelt Institute’s Worker Power and Economic Security Program, was asked if the DoJ’s examples were pitched only to those students who excelled in high school, and thus made them good candidates for Harvard at the expense of those students who managed to do well in the many poorly equipped and underfunded high schools in America’s slums, he said: “Yes.”

“A more apt example of how race directly impacts lived experiences is a narrative about a Black student that graduates from an underfunded school, lived through years of systemic exclusion, and/or residing in an over-policed community. These examples better show how race commonly impacts lived experiences and overcoming these experiences should be valued,” he wrote in an email to University World News.

Further, the decision does not, the DoJ told universities and colleges, prevent them from considering that data if it comes from a third party.

“An institution could . . . consider a guidance counsellor or other recommender’s description of how an applicant conquered her feelings of isolation as a Latina student at an overwhelmingly white high school to join the debate team,” says the Dear Colleague letter.

Measures beyond race

The SCOTUS decision dealt with a narrow question: did affirmative action programmes violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution ratified in 1868, one of the three post-Civil War amendments that banned slavery?

The clause reads in part: “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States . . . nor deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” SCOTUS decisions interpreted the phrase “No state” to include the federal government and, thus, included the laws under which affirmative action was implemented.

The decision does not prohibit colleges and universities from using means other than specifically identifying a student’s race to foster diversity. Both outreach and recruitment programs can, the DoJ says, “consider race and other factors that include, but are not limited to, geographic residency, financial means and socioeconomic status, family background, and parental education”. (Postal codes are strong predictors of race and these other sociological factors.)

Colleges and universities that seek diverse student bodies can direct their outreach/recruitment towards schools and school districts that serve predominantly students of colour and students of limited financial means.

They may also “target school districts or high schools that are underrepresented in the institution’s applicant pool by focusing on geographic location (for example, schools in the Midwest, or urban or rural communities) or other characteristics”.

Among these characteristics are low-performing schools or those with high dropout rates, those in which large percentages of students received free lunches or have historically low numbers of graduates being admitted to the college or university in question.

Neither these outreach/recruitment efforts nor establishing pathway programmes in which, for example, an institution partners with a high school to offer mentoring and summer enrichment boot camps run afoul of the SCOTUS decision.

Moreover, the DoJ says, neither would admissions policies such as the automatic admittance of community college (two-year college) graduates, as is the case in several states presently. For, each of these regimens is designed to increase the applicant pool and not to identify the race of any individual student by ticking off a box.

In his opinion, which argued for race blindness, Justice Thomas derided this bureaucratic shorthand: “What it [the admissions process] cannot do is use the applicant’s skin colour as a heuristic, assuming that because the applicant checks the box for ‘black’ he therefore conforms to the university’s monolithic and reductionist view of an abstract, average black person.”

Such arguments ignore the fundamental role racism has played in American history and how it is baked into many of the nation’s institutions.

“Affirmative action practices have been contested since they were first implemented [in the middle 1960s] because some Americans, including policymakers, do not agree with the use of policy to address, and attempt to repair, the injuries that marginalised communities have endured as a result of past discriminatory policies,” said Bustamante.

“Some Americans believe in the myth that government policy should be race neutral despite the stark reality that American policymaking has a legacy of disproportionately benefiting whites and men and excluding people of colour, women, and those with atypical abilities and gender identities.”

A university takes proactive steps

A month before the Biden administration released its guidance to colleges and universities, Sarah Lawrence College stole a march on the DoJ and DoE. The liberal arts college just north of New York City changed the essay prompt that students applying for admissions in the 2024-25 school year must follow.

The prompt begins by referencing and then citing the SCOTUS decision in SFFA.

“In a 2023 majority decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote: ‘Nothing prohibits universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected the applicant’s life, so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the applicant can contribute to the university’.”

Prospective students are then asked to write an essay: “Drawing upon examples from your life, a quality of your character, and/or a unique ability you possess, describe how you believe your goals for a college education might be impacted, influenced or affected by the Court’s decision.”

According to Bustamante, Sarah Lawrence’s essay prompt aligns with the Biden administration’s view and not with the SCOTUS.

“The court majority has repeatedly affirmed that racial discrimination and marginalisation is not a given – a generalised experience of all people of colour. The Sarah Lawrence and Biden administration perspective is that the court’s ruling means that racial discrimination and marginalisation must be explicitly factored into admissions, and no longer be assumed based on the identification of race alone.”

Source: Dear colleagues: How to achieve student diversity, legally

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Education Dept. Opens Civil Rights Inquiry Into Harvard’s Legacy Admissions

2023/07/27 Leave a comment

Logical result of the affirmative action decision, applying it to class and privilege of legacy admissions:

The Education Department has opened a civil rights investigation into Harvard University’s legacy admissions policy, inserting the federal government directly into a fierce national debate about wealth, privilege and race after the Supreme Court gutted the use of affirmative action in higher education.

The inquiry into one of the nation’s richest and most prestigious universities will examine allegations by three liberal groups that Harvard’s practice of showing preference for the relatives of alumni and donors discriminates against Black, Hispanic and Asian applicants in favor of white and wealthy students who are less qualified.

The Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights has powerful enforcement authority that could eventually lead to a settlement with Harvard or trigger a lengthy legal battle like the one that led to the Supreme Court’s decision to severely limit race-conscious admissions last month, reversing a decades-long approach that had increased chances for Black students and those from other minority groups.

The move by the Biden administration comes at a moment of heightened scrutiny of college admissions practices following the ruling, which has resurfaced long-simmering anger about the advantages that colleges often give to the wealthy and connected.

Harvard gives preference to applicants who are recruited athletes, legacies, relatives of donors and children of faculty and staff. As a group, they make up less than 5 percent of applicants, but around 30 percent of those admitted each year. About 67.8 percent of these applicants are white, according to court papers.

After the court’s decision, President Biden said legacy admission policies expand “privilege instead of opportunity.” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, tweeted that the practice is “affirmative action for the privileged.” Senator Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina and a presidential candidate, called for Harvard to eliminate “preferential treatment for legacy kids.”

At Wesleyan University, a liberal arts college in Connecticut, President Michael S. Roth announced earlier this month the end of legacy admissions at his school, saying the practice was a distraction and “a sign of unfairness to the outside world.” The federal inquiry comes after a formal complaint filed by three groups earlier this month.

Lawyers for the groups — the Chica Project, the African Community Economic Development of New England, and the Greater Boston Latino Network — said Harvard’s practice gives an undeserved leg up to the children of wealthy donors and alumni.

“It is imperative that the federal government act now to eliminate this unfair barrier that systematically disadvantages students of color,” Michael Kippins, a litigation fellow at Lawyers for Civil Rights, said when the complaint was filed.

The Education Department said in a statement that “the Office for Civil Rights can confirm that there is an open investigation of Harvard University under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” Title VI is a part of federal law that prohibits discrimination, exclusion from participation or denial of benefits “on the ground of race, color or national origin.”

Nicole Rura, a spokeswoman for Harvard, said in a statement that the university was already reviewing the way it admits students to ensure it is in compliance with the law after the court’s decision.

“Our review includes examination of a range of data and information,” she said, adding that the university will continue to “strengthen our ability to attract and support a diverse intellectual community.”

Ms. Rura added: “As this work continues, and moving forward, Harvard remains dedicated to opening doors to opportunity and to redoubling our efforts to encourage students from many different backgrounds to apply for admission.”

Harvard’s legacy preferences have been investigated before.

In the 1980s, the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights investigated allegations that Asian American applicants were being discriminated against in favor of white students, according to court papers. The investigation blamed the difference in admission rates on legacy preferences, and found that the university had legitimate reasons for favoring legacies.

The Harvard trial that led to the Supreme Court’s affirmative action decision revealed just how important legacy admissions are to Harvard. The plaintiffs described the final round of admissions, called the lop. Applicants on the cusp of admission or rejection were placed on a list that contained only four pieces of information: legacy status, recruited athlete status, financial aid eligibility and race. Based on this information, the admissions committee would decide which finalists to cut, or lop.

Harvard and other universities have defended legacy admissions.

They argue that giving preference to the children of alumni helps build a valuable sense of loyalty and belonging, and spurs alumni to volunteer their time and give money to the university, which can be used for scholarships. Harvard argued at trial that overall, legacy applicants were highly qualified.

But critics of legacy admissions said the Supreme Court’s affirmative action decision underscores the need to end those preferences as well.

“Let’s be clear — legacy and donor admissions have long served to perpetuate an inherently racist college admissions process,” said Derrick Johnson, the president of the N.A.A.C.P. “Every talented and qualified student deserves an opportunity to attend the college of their choice. Affirmative action existed to support that notion. Legacy admissions exist to undermine it.”

A newly released study by a group of economists based at Harvard found that legacies at elite colleges were more qualified overall than the average applicant. But even when comparing applicants who were similar in every other way, legacy applicants still had an advantage. The study, by Opportunity Insights, which studies inequality, also raised the question of whether, by scuttling practices like legacy admissions, colleges could potentially diversify the leadership ranks of American society.

On Wednesday, Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, and Representative Jamaal Bowman, Democrat of New York, plan to reintroduce legislation that would bar universities from giving preferential treatment to the children of alumni and donors.

A poll released last year by the Pew Research Center found that 75 percent of the people surveyed believed that legacy preferences should not be a factor in college admissions.

In his concurring opinion in the Harvard case, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch took a swipe at Harvard for its legacy admissions.

“Its preferences for the children of donors, alumni, and faculty are no help to applicants who cannot boast of their parents’ good fortune or trips to the alumni tent all their lives,” Justice Gorsuch wrote. “While race-neutral on their face, too, these preferences undoubtedly benefit white and wealthy applicants the most.”

Students for Fair Admissions, the plaintiff in the Harvard case, submitted a statistical analysis in court finding that Harvard could come close to achieving the racial diversity it wanted if it eliminated preferences for children of alumni, donors and faculty, and increased preferences for low-income applicants.

Harvard resisted, saying it would not get the academic caliber it wanted.

About 70 percent of legacy applicants admitted to Harvard are white, according to a 2019 study by Peter Arcidiacono, an expert witness for Students for Fair Admissions.

Edward Blum, the founder of Students for Fair Admissions, sounded a cautionary note on Tuesday. He suggested that however appealing, ending the tradition of legacy admissions might not be as simple as it seemed, given an absence over the years of related litigation brought by organizations representing minority groups.

“Like a significant majority of all Americans, S.F.F.A.’s members hope that colleges and universities end legacy preferences,” Mr. Blum said in a statement.

Officials at the Education Department declined to discuss the possible outcomes of the investigation, citing rules about not commenting on open investigations.

The vast majority of similar cases are resolved by reaching a resolution with the university to address the concerns of the department, according to Art Coleman, managing partner of EducationCounsel, which advises colleges and universities.

If a resolution cannot be reached, the matter can be referred to the Justice Department, which can initiate litigation and follow normal litigation rules. A case may also go to an administrative hearing, with the ultimate potential sanction being withholding all federal funds.

“That almost never happens,” Mr. Coleman said, because it would deprive tens of thousands of students of educational opportunities.

The Office of Civil Rights has an obligation to investigate plausible claims, Mr. Coleman said. “That’s not, as it might be couched, some judgment that’s being made for political reasons,” he said. “O.C.R.’s got an obligation under its regulations to investigate any complaint that states a viable legal claim with sufficient facts behind it.”

Source: Education Dept. Opens Civil Rights Inquiry Into Harvard’s Legacy Admissions

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When it comes to affirmative action, Canada has a long way to go

2023/07/21 Leave a comment

Would be much stronger, as is often the case, were the commentary include more of a historical perspective on changes, progress and gaps. And normal, albeit frustrating, the time lag between increased diversity and it being fully represented in the various institutions.

While I haven’t yet looked at the relevant 2021 Census data for the education field of study, in 2016, visible minorities formed less than 20 percent of those in education, Blacks less than two percent, highlighting some of the “supply side” issues and barriers:

As a Canadian, you could be forgiven if the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down affirmative action has furthered your sense of moral superiority over our southern neighbours.

After all, in contrast to America, Canada’s constitution explicitly allows “any law, program or activity that has as its object the amelioration of conditions of disadvantaged individuals or groups including those that are disadvantaged because of race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability.” But in the four decades since Canada has had constitutionally sanctioned affirmative action, how much progress have we made in addressing racial disparities?

According to the University of Calgary’s Malinda Smith, the primary beneficiaries of these efforts have been white women. Smith argues that “despite four decades of equity policies — corporate boards, the judiciary, and the police continue to be shaped by racial and ethnic segregation, and remain overwhelmingly white and to a lesser extent male, thus maintaining the historic colour-coded ethnic pecking order even across gender and sexual difference.”

Smith has termed this process “diversifying whiteness,” whereby institutions promote their increased diversity (with respect to gender, sexuality, and disability), while comfortably maintaining a predominantly white workforce.

Nowhere is this phenomenon more evident than in our K-12 education systems. It has long been recognized that having school staff that reflect the students and communities they serve can lead to more equitable outcomes.

For example, in a recent report released by the Toronto District School Board’s Centre of Excellence for Black Student Achievement, members of Toronto’s Black communities overwhelmingly state that having more Black teachers, counsellors, and administrators was critical to improving the educational experiences of Black students and their families.

However, the reality is that our schools are largely the domain of white women. An audit of the York Region District School Board found that while racialized people comprise about half of York Region’s population, just under one quarter of school board staff is racialized.

According to data from the Halton District School Board, while half of its students are racialized, racialized people make up only 18 per cent of its staff. Similarly, an investigation into the Peel District School Board found that while 83 per cent of its students were from racialized backgrounds, racialized people comprise only 33 per cent of its staff. In all boards, staff are predominantly white and female.

So how is it that despite decades of constitutionally sanctioned affirmative action, we still have school systems that are mostly white? It is part of an educational trajectory — that starts in elementary and high schools and continues to universities and school boards — where some people are encouraged along certain paths, and others are nudged away. Addressing the racial disparities in our school systems requires disrupting current practices at all points in this trajectory.

This is why the TDSB’s attempts to diversify admissions to its specialty schools is so important. It is also why the Waterloo Region District School Board should be commended for its recent job fair specifically for Indigenous, Black, and racialized individuals. It takes a certain amount of moral fortitude to persist despite the inevitable reactionary backlash that occurs when racial disparities are addressed so explicitly.

Critics have panned both initiatives as divisive and akin to establishing a racial hierarchy. It is as if we do not already have a well-established racial hierarchy, which is what these programs are trying to address.

Opponents of affirmative action programs state that we should just accept the best candidates, irrespective of race. As U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts once wrote, “The way to stop discriminating on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

Yet, decades of studies that continue to show that organizations respond to resumes with white-sounding names at much higher rates than identical resumes with racialized names expose the myth that we are all judged on some objective metric of “merit.” Organizations need to stop pretending that it is complicated. The way to have greater racial diversity is to have greater racial diversity.

Sachin Maharaj is an assistant professor of educational leadership, policy and program evaluation at the University of Ottawa.

Source: When it comes to affirmative action, Canada has a long way to go

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Bernadet: À qui la diversité profite-t-elle le plus?

2023/07/13 Leave a comment

Another column noting the intersectionality of class:

Le 29 juin dernier, la Cour suprême des États-Unis a mis fin aux programmes d’action positive (affirmative action) dans les universités, s’attaquant aux procédures d’admission dans les campus qui prennent en compte la couleur de peau ou les origines ethniques des candidats. Cette décision a relancé la controverse autour des politiques d’embauche dans les établissements québécois, notamment en raison des plans équité, diversité, inclusion (EDI) mis en place par Ottawa depuis 2017 dans le cadre des chaires de recherche du Canada (CRC). Des mesures, il importe de le rappeler, qui trouvent leur origine dans une tradition de l’État fédéral, depuis la commission royale de la juge Rosalie Abella en 1984 et la Loi sur l’équité en matière d’emploi de 1986.

Dans le camp conservateur, des voix soutiennent ouvertement l’avis des juges américains, y voyant un heureux retour au statu quo comme si les inégalités allaient disparaître par miracle, et qu’il était possible de se dispenser de moyens de correction. D’autres s’inquiètent au contraire des possibles retombées de cette décision de ce côté-ci de la frontière. Dans un contexte de racisme et de colonialisme nourri par le « privilège masculin blanc », certains, comme la professeure de philosophie à l’Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières Naïma Hamrouni, dans Le Devoir du samedi 8 juillet, n’hésitent pas à dire que l’action positive est « l’un des instruments possibles d’une déségrégation sexuelle et raciale progressive de notre société ».

Un tel point de vue accrédite évidemment l’idée que le Québec subirait un modèle de ségrégation, une notion au maniement délicat, qui mériterait d’être rigoureusement définie et documentée tant son emploi est inséparable de l’histoire de certaines sociétés, à commencer par les États-Unis et l’Afrique du Sud. Mais on s’étonne surtout de l’efficacité que ce genre de propos prête aux fameux plans EDI. Car un examen un peu attentif de leurs critères en montre aussitôt les limites.

Il importe de souligner que le gouvernement fédéral a introduit les plans EDI par l’intermédiaire du programme CRC, c’est-à-dire en utilisant une fenêtre très étroite, la seule dont il bénéficiait à vrai dire, pour interférer dans les compétences en matière d’éducation des provinces. On peut bien sûr espérer que ces plans corrigent les inégalités du milieu universitaire, ce qui, à ce jour, reste à démontrer. En revanche, on peut douter qu’ils conduisent à des changements plus larges et profonds, d’autant plus qu’ils ne tiennent pas compte des particularités migratoires et démographiques, économiques ou sociales de chaque province.

Des failles

Cette politique de la diversité a été pensée par le haut et non à partir de la base. La justice dont il est question ici concerne avant tout le corps professoral et plus encore un segment limité de ce corps, les titulaires de chaires de recherche. De plus, les plans EDI sont pour l’essentiel centrés sur le genre et la race. Ils passent complètement sous silence les disparités socio-économiques. Leur but avoué est de favoriser le recrutement de personnes issues de groupes discriminés au cours de leur histoire, des mesures provisoires qui doivent être atteintes par les universités d’ici 2029.

Dans l’usage établi depuis le rapport de la juge Abella, il s’agit des femmes, des Autochtones, des personnes en situation de handicap et issues des minorités visibles, auxquels s’ajoute dans la pratique le cas des communautés LGBTQ. Or, aucune de ces catégories ne se situe sur le même plan. « Autochtones » et « femmes » peuvent difficilement être comparés. Bien qu’elle soit très utile, l’idée de « groupe » en particulier ne cesse pas de poser problème.

Par exemple, les femmes forment-elles vraiment un groupe ? Rappelons d’abord, contre les idées reçues, que certaines femmes peuvent être socialement plus avantagées par rapport à des hommes. Ensuite et surtout, les femmes entre elles ne sont pas égales. Elles n’ont pas les mêmes chances d’accéder à un emploi en raison du capital scolaire, culturel ou économique dont chacune dispose.

Un raisonnement similaire peut être appliqué aux minorités visibles. Il est fréquent de dire qu’elles sont sous-représentées au sein des universités, qui ont les outils pour chiffrer correctement ce phénomène. L’argument est même devenu un lieu commun au sein des élites. Il est repris par la classe politique ou dans l’entreprise, spécialement pour les cadres managériaux, les emplois visibles ou à haute responsabilité. On l’entend encore dans les médias et le monde de la culture.

Or, l’économiste Thomas Piketty l’a bien montré, la sous-représentation des minorités visibles dissimule proportionnellement leur surreprésentation au sein des classes populaires. Il n’est donc pas assuré que les politiques d’action positive soient capables de corriger un tel écart dans la mesure où elles ne touchent souvent qu’un pourcentage réduit de personnes au sein des populations visées. Non seulement les injustices raciales ne peuvent être séparées des injustices sociales, mais les unes et les autres exigent une politique égalitaire plus ambitieuse : une politique pour tous et non une justice d’élite.

À qui profitent donc les mesures EDI ? Est-ce aux groupes cibles, ou n’est-ce pas plutôt aux institutions qui promeuvent la diversité ? La question mérite d’être posée et débattue.

Source: À qui la diversité profite-t-elle le plus?

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McWhorter: On Race and Academia

2023/07/06 Leave a comment

Another advocate of class and adversity-based policies, sharing his personal experiences:

The Supreme Court last week outlawed the use of race-based affirmative action in college admissions. That practice was understandable and even necessary 60 years ago. The question I have asked for some time was precisely how long it would be required to continue. I’d personally come to believe that preferences focused on socioeconomic factors — wealth, income, even neighborhood — would accomplish more good while requiring less straightforward unfairness.

But many good-faith people believed, and continue to believe, that it is a clear boon to society for universities to explicitly take race into account. The arguments for and against have been made often, sometimes by me, so here I’d like to do something a little bit different. As an academic who is also Black, I have seen up close, over decades, what it means to take race into account. I talked about some of these experiences in interviews and in a book I wrote in 2000, but I’ve never shared them in an article like this one. The responses I’ve seen to the Supreme Court’s decision move me to venture it.

The culture that a policy helps put into place can be as important as the policy itself. And in my lifetime, racial preferences in academia — not merely when it comes to undergraduate admissions but also moving on to grad school and job applications and teaching careers — have been not only a set of formal and informal policies but also the grounds for a culture of perceptions and assumptions.

I grew up upper-middle-class in Philadelphia in the 1980s. As early as high school, I picked up — from remarks of my mother’s, who taught at a university, as well as comments in the air at my school — that Black kids didn’t have to achieve perfect grades and test scores in order to be accepted at top colleges. As a direct result, I satisfied myself with being an A- or B+ student, pursuing my nerdy hobbies instead of seeking the academic mountaintop. I was pretty sure it wouldn’t affect my future in the way that it might for my white peers.

I have no reason to think affirmative action played much of a role in the colleges I went to for undergraduate and graduate work, as neither was extremely selective at the time. In the latter case, I was told by a mentor, a Black man, that race had been the reason I wound up in the top 20 pile of applicants for graduate study in linguistics in the department where I got my Ph.D. I had minimal experience with linguistics proper, and my G.P.A. was very good but nowhere near perfect. (Those hobbies!) But I have always thought of that as racial preferences the way they should have been, merely additive around the margins. I’d done well on tests like the G.R.E., my grades in language courses were top level and I had written a senior thesis that made it clear I had a linguistics frame of mind.

But things got different later. When I was a grad student in linguistics going on the market for jobs, I was told that I needn’t worry whether I would get bids for tenure track positions because I was Black and would therefore be in great demand. Deep down, to me, it felt like I was on my way to being tokenized, which I was, especially given that my academic chops at the time did not justify my being hired for a top job at all.

I was hired straight out of my doctoral program for a tenure-track job at an Ivy League university in its august linguistics department. It became increasingly clear to me that my skin color was not just one more thing taken into account but the main reason for my hire. It surely didn’t hurt that, owing to the color of my skin, I could apparently be paid with special funds I was told the university had set aside for minority hires. But more to the point, I was vastly less qualified by any standard than the other three people who made it onto the list of finalists. Plus, I was brought on to represent a subfield within linguistics — sociolinguistics — that has never been my actual specialty. My interest then, as now, was in how languages change over time and what happens when they come together. My dissertation had made this quite clear.

At the time I was not very politicized, and I assumed that my race had merely been a background bonus to help me get hired. Only later did the reality become more apparent, when I learned just who else had been on that shortlist. (I will never forget how awkward it was when I met one of them — older than me, with more gravitas in the field — some years later. I sensed that we both knew what had happened and why.) I had been hired by white people who, quite innocently, thought they were doing the right thing by bringing a Black person onto the faculty. I bear them no malice; under the culture we were all living in, I would have done the same thing.

Around this time I gave some really good talks, and some just OK ones; I always knew the difference. But I couldn’t help noticing that I would get high praise even for the mediocre ones, by white people who were clearly gratified to acknowledge a Black academic. And in the meantime, I was hopelessly undercooked for the position I had been hired for. I was not utterly clueless, but I simply didn’t know enough yet — and especially not enough to be in a position to counsel graduate students.

 needed some years of postdoctoral study. They say you don’t really know it till you teach it, and that’s largely true: Having never actually taught a class, I needed to teach some. I needed to hang around linguistics for a longer time in general. There are formative experiences key to being a real linguist that I had not yet had, such as long-term work with speakers of my language of focus, Saramaccan.

The doctoral program I had been in had gone through a phase of allowing students perhaps too much leeway in deciding which courses to take. Many students took this as an occasion to sit at the feet of their mentors and drink in what they knew. But my natural orientation has always been autodidactic, and so I basically went off into a corner and focused like a laser on one issue that particularly interested me — how creole languages form — while developing only a passing acquaintance with linguistics beyond it. With undergrads, I could coast on stage presence, but grad students know the real thing when they see it — and when they don’t. I looked like a fool.

I didn’t like it. But because I am obsessive, I ultimately dedicated myself to boning up and then some. I read and read and read. I spoke closely with as many linguists as I could. I took up new interests within the field. I did intense study of my language of focus. I taught classes outside my comfort zone. That is, I became a normal academic.

But it all felt like a self-rescue operation, an effort to turn myself into a good hire after the fact. That backfilling of needed skills is a lot to ask of someone who also needs to do the forward-looking research necessary to get tenure.

Of course, not everyone endeavors this Sisyphean task, and the culture I refer to has a way of ensuring others don’t have to. There is a widespread cultural assumption in academia that Black people are valuable as much, if not more, for our sheer presence as for the rigor of what we actually do. Thus, it is unnecessary to subject us to top-level standards. This leads to things happening too often that are never written as explicit directives but are consonant with the general cultural agenda: people granted tenure with nothing approaching the publishing records of other candidates, or celebrated more for their sociopolitical orientations than for their research.

I had uncomfortable experiences on the other side of the process as well. In the 1990s, I was on some graduate admissions committees at the university where I then taught. It was apparent to me that, under the existing cultural directive to, as we have discussed, take race into account, Black and Latino applicants were expected to be much more readily accepted than others.

I recall two Black applicants we admitted who, in retrospect, puzzle me a bit. One had, like me, grown up middle-class rather than disadvantaged in any salient way. The other, also relatively well-off, had grown up in a different country, entirely separate from the Black American experience. Neither of them expressed interest in studying a race-related subject, and neither went on to do so. I had a hard time detecting how either of them would teach a meaningful lesson in diversity to their peers in the graduate program.

Perhaps all of this can be seen as collateral damage in view of a larger goal of Black people being included, acknowledged, given a chance — in academia and elsewhere. In the grand scheme of things, my feeling uncomfortable on a graduate admissions committee for a few years during the Clinton administration hardly qualifies as a national tragedy. But I will never shake the sentiment I felt on those committees, an unintended byproduct of what we could call academia’s racial preference culture: that it is somehow ungracious to expect as much of Black students — and future teachers — as we do of others.

That kind of assumption has been institutionalized within academic culture for a long time. It is, in my view, improper. It may have been a necessary compromise for a time, but it was never truly proper in terms of justice, stability or general social acceptance. Whatever impact the Supreme Court’s ruling has on college admissions, its effects on the academic culture of racial preference — which by its nature often depends less on formulas involving thousands of applicants than on individual decisions involving dozens — will take place far more slowly.

But the decision to stop taking race into account in admissions, assuming it is accompanied by other efforts to assist the truly disadvantaged, is, I believe, the right one to make.

Source: On Race and Academia

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With End of Affirmative Action, a Push for a New Tool: Adversity Scores

2023/07/04 Leave a comment

Of interest. Another example of using class-type criteria:

For the head of admissions at a medical school, Dr. Mark Henderson is pretty blunt when sizing up the profession.

“Mostly rich kids get to go to medical school,” he said.

In his role at the medical school at the University of California, Davis, Dr. Henderson has tried to change that, developing an unorthodox tool to evaluate applicants: the socioeconomic disadvantage scale, or S.E.D.

The scale rates every applicant from zero to 99, taking into account their life circumstances, such as family income and parental education. Admissions decisions are based on that score, combined with the usual portfolio of grades, test scores, recommendations, essays and interviews.

The disadvantage scale has helped turn U.C. Davis into one of the most diverse medical schools in the country — notable in a state that voted in 1996 to ban affirmative action.

With the Supreme Court’s ruling last week against race-conscious admissions, the medical school offers a glimpse of how selective schools across the country might overhaul their admissions policies, as they look for alternative ways to achieve diversity without running afoul of the new law.

Last week, President Biden called adversity scores a “new standard” for achieving diversity.

Word has gotten out about the U.C. Davis scale. Dr. Henderson said that about 20 schools had recently requested more information. And there are other socioeconomic measurements, including Landscape, released in 2019 from the College Board, the nonprofit that administers the SATs. That tool allows undergraduate admissions offices to assess the socioeconomic backgrounds of individual students.

But skeptics question whether such rankings — or any kind of socioeconomic affirmative action — will be enough to replace race-conscious affirmative action. And schools that use adversity scales may also find themselves wandering into legal quagmires, with conservative groups promising to fight programs that are simply stand-ins for race.

Over the years, medical schools have made some progress in diversifying their student bodies, with numbers ticking up. But just like undergraduate admissions, wealth and connections continue to play a determining role in who is accepted. More than half of medical students come from families in the top 20 percent of income, while only 4 percent come from those in the bottom 20 percent, according to data from the American Association of Medical Colleges.

There is also a family dynamic. Children of doctors are 24 timesmore likely to become doctors than their peers, according to the American Medical Association. It’s hard to know why the profession passes down from generation to generation, but the statistic drove the association to adopt a policy opposing legacy preferences in admissions.

“That’s a staggering economic gap between medical students and the general public,” said Dr. Henderson, who comes from a working-class upbringing and now serves as associate dean of admissions.

As a consequence, the number of Black doctors remains stubbornly low: About 6 percent of practicing doctors in the United States are Black, compared with 13.6 percent of the American population who identify as Black.

With the Supreme Court decision, “that number is likely to go down,” said Dr. James E.K. Hildreth, the president of Meharry Medical College, formed in 1876 in Nashville to train Black health care providers.

Leaders in medicine say training more Black and Hispanic doctors could help bridge the vast divides in American health care. Research shows that doctors from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups are more likely to work in primary care or in locales where doctors are scarce.

And patients have better outcomes when treated by doctors from similar backgrounds, said Dr. Jesse M. Ehrenfeld, president of the American Medical Association.

The U.C. Davis scale has drawn attention because of its ability to bring in diverse students using what the schools says are “race-neutral” socioeconomic models.

In its most recent entering class of 133 students, 14 percent were Black and 30 percent were Hispanic. Nationally, 10 percent of medical school students were Black and 12 percent were Hispanic. A vast majority of the U.C. Davis class — 84 percent — comes from disadvantaged backgrounds, and 42 percent are the first in their family to go to college.

The overall acceptance rate has been less than 2 percent.

In the Davis scale, first used in 2012, eight categories establish an adversity score for each candidate. Factors include family income, whether applicants come from an underserved area, whether they help support their nuclear families and whether their parents went to college.

The higher an applicant rates on the disadvantage scale, the bigger the boost.

There is no set formula on how to balance the scale with the academic record, Dr. Henderson said, but a simulation of the system revealed that students from underrepresented groups grew to 15.3 percent from 10.7 percent. And the share of economically disadvantaged students tripled, to 14.5 percent of the class from 4.6 percent.

At the same time, scores from the MCAT, the standardized test for medical school applications, dropped only marginally.

Still, it’s not easy to persuade medical schools to upend admissions standards, particularly anything that undermines the value of test scores and grades. Dr. Henderson said he had received pushback from his own colleagues.

“Doctors say their kids got into medical school elsewhere, and they didn’t get in here,” he said.

As the children of doctors, he said, those applicants earned an S.E.D. score of zero.

A number of scholars, including Richard D. Kahlenberg, have promoted using class-conscious preferences, which they say could address racial inequities in education without fostering the resentment often prompted by racially based diversity plans.

And President Biden said on Thursday that his administration would develop a “new standard for colleges taking into account the adversity a student has overcome.”

“The kid who faced tougher challenges has demonstrated more grit, more determination,” Mr. Biden told reporters at the White House, “and that should be a factor that colleges should take into account in admissions.”

He might be talking about someone like Eleanor Adams, a member of the Choctaw Nation, who said that she did not think medical school was an option for her.

“I didn’t grow up with a lot of money,” she said.

But she found mentors who encouraged her, and today she is in her third year of medical school at U.C. Davis, which is in Sacramento. She plans to become an Indian Health Service doctor in Oklahoma — fulfilling one of the school’s goals, Dr. Henderson said, which is to train doctors who will return to their communities.

At schools in other states without affirmative action, such as the University of Michigan, admissions officials have complained that enrolling more socioeconomically disadvantaged students has not significantly increased the share of Black, Hispanic and Native American students.

“Those tools certainly have utility, but they fall short of accomplishing what a race-conscious admission practice does,” said Dr. Ehrenfeld of the American Medical Association.

The socioeconomic rankings could also be legally challenged. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., in his majority opinion on affirmative action, wrote that colleges could consider how race had affected an applicant’s life. But he also warned against using proxies for race.

The Pacific Legal Foundation, a libertarian activist group, has already sued a selective school, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Va., for using economic factors as stand-ins for race in admissions.

Joshua P. Thompson, a lawyer for the foundation, said the legal questions surrounding these disadvantage indexes were complex.

“I think the devil is going to be in the details,” Mr. Thompson said. “The Supreme Court was pretty clear that what can’t be done directly can’t be done indirectly.”

Should it come to that, Dr. Henderson said that his school’s disadvantage scale would be defensible in court.

“Am I worried about it? Yes,” Dr. Henderson said of a lawsuit. “Is it going to stop me? No.”

Source: With End of Affirmative Action, a Push for a New Tool: Adversity Scores

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Here’s what happened when affirmative action ended at California public colleges

2023/07/03 Leave a comment

Useful case study:

For decades, the question of affirmative action — whether colleges should consider race when deciding which students to admit — has been the subject of national debate.

And as the nation’s highest court has grown more conservative in recent years, court-watchers wondered if it would reverse decades-old precedents allowing affirmative action.

This week, it happened: The Supreme Court struck down race-based admissions practices at public and private universities and colleges.

Supreme Court justices ruled that the admissions policies at the University of North Carolina, one of the country’s oldest public universities, and Harvard University, the country’s oldest private university, violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

As college admissions offices prepare to tailor their policies to the Supreme Court ruling, California offers lessons on what may be in store for the rest of the country.

Here’s the upshot: A quarter-century after California banned race-based admissions at public universities, school officials say they haven’t been able to meet their diversity and equity goals — despite more than a half billion dollars spent on outreach and alternative admissions standards.

In an amicus brief sent to the Supreme Court in support of Harvard and UNC’s race-based admissions programs, University of California chancellors said that years of crafting alternative race-neutral policies have fallen short.

“Those programs have enabled UC to make significant gains in its system-wide diversity,” the brief said. “Yet despite its extensive efforts, UC struggles to enroll a student body that is sufficiently racially diverse to attain the educational benefits of diversity.”

The shortfall is especially apparent at the system’s most selective schools, the university leaders said.

An affirmative action ban first caused a huge drop in diversity at top California universities

In 1996, California voters approved Proposition 209, an affirmative action ban at public universities in the state. Before the ban, UC Berkeley and UCLA were roughly representative of the California high school graduate population who were eligible for enrollment at universities, according to Zachary Bleemer, an economist at Princeton University.

The ban first took effect with the incoming class of ’98. Subsequently, diversity plummeted at UC’s most competitive campuses. That year, enrollment among Black and Latino students at UCLA and UC Berkeley fell by 40%, according to a 2020 study by Bleemer. As a result of the ban, Bleemer found that Black and Latino students who might have gotten into those two top schools enrolled at less competitive campuses.

“Black and Hispanic students saw substantially poorer long-run labor market prospects as a result of losing access to these very selective universities,” Bleemer told NPR. “But there was no commensurate gain in long-run outcomes for the white and Asian students who took their place.”

Black and Latino students were also less likely to earn graduate degrees or enter lucrative STEM fields.

“If you follow them into the labor market, for the subsequent 15 or 20 years, they’re earning about 5% lower wages than they would have earned if they’d had access to more selective universities under affirmative action,” Bleemer said.

The ban has in fact acted as a deterrent to prospective Black and Latino students, Bleemer said. His study found that high-performing minority students were subsequently discouraged from applying to schools where minority students were underrepresented.

“Most do not want to attend a university where there’s not a critical mass of same race peers,” said Mitchell Chang, the associate vice chancellor of equity, diversity and inclusion at UCLA. That’s because attending a school made less diverse by an affirmative action ban, “puts them at greater risk of being stereotyped and being isolated,” he said.

These findings “provide the first causal evidence that banning affirmative action exacerbates socioeconomic inequities,” Bleemer’s study said.

A learning curve

Faced with plummeting minority enrollment, admissions offices began a years-long effort to figure out ways to get their numbers back up.

Admissions offices pivoted to a more holistic approach, looking beyond grades and test scores. Starting in the early 2000s, the UC system implemented a couple of initiatives to increase diversity: The top-performing students graduating most high schools in the state were guaranteed admission to most of the eight UC undergraduate campuses. It also introduced a comprehensive review process to “evaluate students’ academic achievements in light of the opportunities available to them” – using an array of criteria including a student’s special skills and achievements, special circumstances and location of high school.

In 2020, the UC system eliminated standardized test scores as an admission requirement, nixing a factor that advocates say disadvantages underserved students.

However, the effort to boost diversity has come with a heavy price tag. Since Prop 209 took effect, UC has spent more than a half-billion dollars on outreach programs and application reviews to draw in a more diverse student body.

It’s taken 25 years of experimentation through race-neutral policies, for UC schools have begun to catch up to the racial diversity numbers lost in the wake of the affirmative action ban, says UCLA vice chancellor Chang.

“There was no magic bullet. Some things worked better than other things. And this is also work that doesn’t happen overnight,” Chang said.

Still, the California schools are unable to meet their diversity goals systemwide. Chang says his school is not where it wants to be. It still enrolls far fewer Black and Latino students than their share of California high school graduates — a problem it didn’t have before the affirmative action ban.

As with the UC system, experts think that across the country, similarly competitive universities will be most affected by the Supreme Court’s ruling.

Gabrielle Starr, president of Pomona College, a small Southern California school that wasn’t subject to the state ban, fears the selective, private university will lose its racial diversity under the nationwide affirmative action ban.

Starr says that being able to consider race has allowed her school to ensure its ability to put together a diverse class.

“Having a campus that looks like the world in which our students will go onto live is really important just as a bedrock value,” she said.

Source: Here’s what happened when affirmative action ended at California public colleges

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Supreme Court Decisions on Education Could Offer Democrats an Opening

2023/07/03 Leave a comment

Interesting take. Welcome return to “class” as a differentiator, although there is intersectionality with race and identity:

Ever since President Bill Clinton advised “mend it, don’t end it,”affirmative action has had an uneasy place in the Democratic coalition, as omnipresent as the party’s allegiance to abortion rights and its promises to expand financial aid for higher education — but unpopular with much of the public.

Now, in striking down race-conscious college admissions, the Supreme Court has handed the Democrats a way to shift from a race-based discussion of preference to one tied more to class. The court’s decision could fuel broader outreach to the working-class voters who have drifted away from the party because of what they see as its elitism.

The question is, will the party pivot?

“This is a tremendous opportunity for Democrats to course-correct from identity-based issues,” said Ruy Teixeira, whose upcoming book “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?” looks at the bleeding of working-class voters over the last decade. “As I like to say, class is back in session.”

Conservative voters have long been more animated by the Supreme Court’s composition than liberals have. But the last two sessions of a high court remade by Donald J. Trump may have flipped that dynamic. Since the court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, energized Democratic voters have handed Republicans loss after loss in critical elections.

Republicans’ remarkable successes before the new court may have actually deprived them of combative issues to galvanize voters going into 2024. Several Republican presidential hopefuls had centered their campaigns on opposition to affirmative action. And the court’s granting of religious exemptions to people who oppose gay marriage, along with last year’s Dobbs decision, may take the sting out of some social issues for conservatives.

In that sense, the staunchly conservative new Supreme Court is doing the ugly political work for Democrats. Its decision last year to eliminate the constitutional right to abortion elevated an issue that for decades motivated religious conservatives more than it did secular liberals.

Friday’s decision to strike down President Biden’s student debt relief plan enraged progressive Democrats, who had pressed the president to take executive action on loan forgiveness. A coalition of Generation Z advocacy groups, including Gen-Z for Change and the climate-oriented Sunrise Movement, said on Friday that the court “has openly declared war on young people.”

But while the Supreme Court made retroactive higher education assistance far more difficult, it may have boosted the Democratic cause of financial aid, through expanded Pell grants and scholarships that do not saddle graduates with crushing debt burdens. Democrats have long pushed expanded grant programs and legislative loan-forgiveness programs for graduates who embark on low-paid public service careers. Those efforts will get a lift in the wake of the court’s decision.

The high court’s declaration that race-based admission to colleges and universities is unconstitutional infuriated key elements of the Democratic coalition — Black and Hispanic groups in particular, but also some Asian American and Pacific Islander groups who said conservatives had used a small number of Asian Americans as pawns to challenge affirmative action on behalf of whites.

“They were using the Asian community as a wedge,” said Representative Judy Chu, Democrat of California, after the decision was handed down on Thursday. “I stand with the unified community.”

But while they have expressed anger and disappointment over the conservative decisions, Democrats also acknowledge their inability to do much to restore affirmative action, student loan forgiveness and the right to an abortion in the foreseeable future, as long as the 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court holds.

“There’s a constitutional challenge in bringing it back,” said Representative Bobby Scott of Virginia, a longtime Democratic leader on the House education committee.

Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic strategist pressing his party to expand its outreach to the working class, said adding a new emphasis on class consciousness to augment racial and ethnic awareness would fit well with Mr. Biden’s pitch that his legislative achievements have largely accrued to the benefit of workers.

Infrastructure spending, electric vehicles investment, broadband expansion and semiconductor manufacturing have promoted jobs — especially union jobs — all over the country but especially in rural and suburban areas, often in Republican states.

“By next year, Democrats will be able to say we’ve invested in red states, blue states, urban areas, rural areas,” he said. “We’re not like the Republicans. We’re for everybody.”

But bigotry, discrimination and the erosion of civil rights will remain central issues for Democrats, given the anger of the party base, Mr. Rosenberg said. The Supreme Court’s siding on Fridaywith a web designer in Colorado who said she had a First Amendment right to refuse to provide services for same-sex marriages cannot be separated from the affirmative action, student loan and abortion decisions.

Mr. Teixeira said Democrats were not likely to see their new opportunities at first.

“If you want to solve some of the underlying problems of the party, this should be a gimme,” he said of pivoting from racial and ethnic identity to class. But, he added, “in the short term, the enormous pressure will be not to do that.”

Indeed, the initial Democratic response to the Supreme Court’s actions was not to elevate economic hardship as a key preference in college admissions. Instead, Democrats seemed focused on striking down other areas of privilege, especially the legacy admission preference given to the children and grandchildren of alumni of elite institutions.

“What we’re fighting for is equal opportunity,” said Representative Joaquin Castro, Democrat of Texas. “If they get rid of affirmative action and leave rampant legacy admissions, they’re making merit a slogan, not a reality.”

Republicans saw a political line of attack in the Democratic response to the court’s decision. Even before 1990, when a campaign ad by Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina featured white hands crumpling a job rejection to denounce “racial quotas,” Republicans had used affirmative action to their political advantage.

Mr. Clinton’s “mend it, don’t end it” formulation came after a 1995 speech before California Democrats in which he said of affirmative action programs: “We do have to ask ourselves, ‘Are they all working? Are they all fair? Has there been any kind of reverse discrimination?’”

A June survey by the Pew Research Center found that more Americans disapprove than approve of colleges and universities’ using race and ethnicity in admissions decisions, and that Republican and Republican-leaning independent voters are largely unified in their opposition, while Democratic voters are split.

After Mr. Biden expressed his opposition to the Supreme Court’s decision, the campaign arm of the Senate Republicans issued a statement calling out three vulnerable Senate Democrats up for re-election in Republican states: Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, Jon Tester of Montana and Sherrod Brown of Ohio.

“Democrats are doubling down on their racist agenda and want to pack the Supreme Court to get their way,” said Philip Letsou, a spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “Will Democrats like Joe Manchin, Jon Tester and Sherrod Brown denounce Joe Biden’s support of racial discrimination and state unequivocally that they oppose packing the court?”

The House Republican campaign arm called Democratic outrage “the great limousine liberal meltdown.”

But the Supreme Court has offered Democrats a way forward with many of its decisions — based on class. The affluent will always have access to abortions, by traveling to states where it remains legal, and to elite institutions of higher education, where they may have legacy pull and the means to pay tuition.

Those facing economic struggles are not so privileged. Applicants of color may have lost an edge in admissions, but poor and middle-class students and graduates of all races were dealt a blow when the court declared that the president did not have the authority to unilaterally forgive their student loans.

Representative Marilyn Strickland, Democrat of Washington, said her party now needs to recalibrate away from elite institutions like Harvard and the University of North Carolina, the defendants in the high court’s case against affirmative action, and “respect all types of education and all types of opportunity,” mentioning union training programs, apprenticeships, trade schools and community colleges.

Mr. Scott agreed. “This is going to cause some heartburn,” he said, “but what we need to campaign on is that we’re opening opportunities for everybody.”

Source: Supreme Court Decisions on Education Could Offer Democrats an Opening

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The Liberal Maverick Fighting Race-Based Affirmative Action

2023/03/31 Leave a comment

Of interest and agree on need for more focus on class issues rather than conflating them with race:

For the college class he teaches on inequality, Richard D. Kahlenberg likes to ask his students about a popular yard sign.

“In This House We Believe: Black Lives Matter, Women’s Rights Are Human Rights, No Human Is Illegal, Science Is Real,” it says.

His students usually dismiss the sign as performative. But what bothers Mr. Kahlenberg is not the virtue signaling.

“It says nothing about class,” he tells them. “Nothing about labor rights. Nothing about housing. Nothing that would actually cost upper-middle-class white liberals a dime.”

Since picking up a memoir of Robert F. Kennedy at a garage sale his senior year of high school, Mr. Kahlenberg, 59, has cast himself as a liberal champion of the working class. ‌ For three decades, his work, largely at a progressive think tank, has used empirical research and historical narrative to argue that the working class has been left behind.

That same research led him to a conclusion that has proved highly unpopular within his political circle: that affirmative action is best framed not as a race issue, but as a class issue.

In books, ‌articles and academic papers, Mr. Kahlenberg has spent decades‌ ‌arguing for a different vision of diversity, one based in his 1960s idealism. He believes that had they lived, Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would have pursued a multiracial coalition of poor and working class people, a Poor People’s ‌Campaign that worked together toward the same goal of economic advancement in education, employment and housing. ‌ ‌

Race-conscious affirmative action, while it may be well intentioned,‌ ‌does just the opposite, he says — aligning with the interests of wealthy students‌ and creating racial ‌animosity.

With class-conscious affirmative action, “Will there be people in Scarsdale who are annoyed that working-class people are getting a break? Probably,” he said in an interview. “But the vast majority of Americans support the idea, and you see it across the political spectrum.”

His advocacy has brought him to an uncomfortable place. The Supreme Court is widely expected to strike down race-conscious affirmative action this year in cases against Harvard and the University of North Carolina. He has joined forces with the plaintiff, Students for Fair Admissions, run by a conservative activist; the group has paid him as an expert witness and relied on his research to support the idea that there is a constitutional “race-neutral alternative” to the status quo.

That alliance has cost him his position as a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, the liberal-leaning think tank where he had found a home for 24 years, according to friends and colleagues. (Mr. Kahlenberg and the Century Foundation said he left to pursue new opportunities and would not elaborate.)

Critics‌ ‌dispute everything from his statistics to his rosy outlook on politics. They say that the concept of race-neutral diversity underestimates how racism is embedded in American life. They say that class‌-conscious affirmative action will bring its own set of problems as universities try to maintain high academic standards. ‌

And they argue that his class-based solution could backfire.

“It may well be where we wake up,” said Douglas Laycock, a law professor at the University of Virginia who has been involved in litigation on the side of universities. “But if you get rid of affirmative action, then you create racial hostility in the other direction.”

Mr. Kahlenberg is unfazed.

“I think people will have to come around,” he said, “because class will be the only game in town.”

The Harvard Legacy

Mr. Kahlenberg’s own life shows the complicated calculus of college admissions.

He grew up in White Bear Lake, Minn., a suburb of St. Paul, where his father was a liberal Presbyterian minister and his mother was on the school board. His father had gone to Harvard, and when he came of age, so did Mr. Kahlenberg. His grandfather paid for his college tuition.

Decades later, he seemed a little defensive about possibly having benefited from the “tip” that Harvard gives to the children of alumni.

“This will sound incredibly insecure or something, but I was gratified that I got into Yale and Princeton, because it made me feel like, OK, it wasn’t just legacy, hopefully,” he said.

Around the time he was accepted to Harvard, he was smitten by a memoir of R.F.K. by the Village Voice journalist Jack Newfield. Mr. Kahlenberg wrote his senior thesis on Kennedy’s campaign for president. And today, a nicked and scratched poster of his idol hangs in his study at home.

At Harvard, Mr. Kahlenberg was surrounded by “immense wealth,” he recalled. “I didn’t feel like an outsider. I was second-generation Harvard, I was upper middle class and a lot of my friends went to boarding school.”

But his roommate, who came from more modest circumstances, “helped educate me on the idea that working-class white people had a raw deal in this country, too,” he said.

Mr. Kahlenberg studied government and went on to Harvard Law School, where he wrote a paper about class-based affirmative action, advised by Alan Dershowitz, his professor, known for defending unpopular causes and clients.

The paper inspired him to write his influential 1996 book, “The Remedy,” which developed his theory that affirmative action had set back race relations by becoming a source of racial antagonism.

“If you want working-class white people to vote their race, there’s probably no better way to do it than to give explicitly racial preferences in deciding who gets ahead in life,” he said. “If you want working-class whites to vote their class, you would try to remind them that they have a lot in common with working-class Black and Hispanic people.”

The book caused a stir, in part because of the timing. California voters adopted a ban on affirmative action in public colleges and universities the same year. Such bans have since spread to eight other states, and California voters reaffirmed it in 2020.

Today, as in the mid-1990s, polls show that a majority of people oppose race-conscious college admissions, even as they support racial diversity. Public opinion may not always be right, Mr. Kahlenberg said, but surely it should be considered when developing public policy.

What has changed, he said, is the political environment. Universities and politicians and activists have hardened their positions on affirmative action.

And the Supreme Court supported them, at least until now.

A Different Measure of Diversity

If Mr. Kahlenberg had his way, college admissions would be upended.

His basic recipe: Get rid of preferences for alumni children, as well as children of faculty, staff and big donors. Say goodbye to recruited athletes in boutique sports like fencing. Increase community college transfers. Give a break to students who have excelled in struggling schools, who have grown up in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, in families with low income, or better yet, low net worth. Pump up financial aid. Look for applicants in towns that do not normally send students to highly selective colleges.

It’s an expensive punch list and requires more financial aid for working class and poor students, which is the main reason, he believes, that universities have not rushed to embrace it.

Meanwhile, elite colleges have become fortresses for the rich, he said. Harvard had “23 times as many rich kids as poor kids,” Mr. Kahlenberg testified in 2018 at the federal court trial in the Harvard case, referring to a 2017 paper by Raj Chetty, then a Stanford economist, and colleagues. 

Mr. Kahlenberg said the civil rights movement has made strides, while overall, poor people have been left further behind. He points to studies that found that the achievement gap in standardized test scores between rich and poor children is now roughly twice the size of the gap between Black and white children, the opposite of 60 years ago.

He said his theories are working in states with affirmative action bans, pointing to his 2012 study that found seven of 10 leading universities were able to return to previous levels of diversity through race-neutral means.

Even the University of California, Berkeley, which was having trouble achieving its pre-ban levels of diversity, has made progress, he said. In 2020, Berkeley boasted that it had admitted its most diverse class in 30 years, with offers to African American and Latino students rising to the highest numbers since at least the late-1980s, without sacrificing academic standards. 

Mr. Kahlenberg’s analysis of Harvard’s outlook is also optimistic.

In a simulation of the class of 2019, he found that the share of Black students at Harvard would drop to 10 percent from 14 percent, but the share of white students would also drop, to 33 percent from percent from 40 percent, mainly because of the elimination of legacy and other preferences. The share of Hispanic students would rise to 19 percent from 14 percent and the Asian American share would rise to 31 percent from 24 percent.

The share of “advantaged” students (parents with a bachelor’s degree, family income over $80,000, living in a neighborhood not burdened by concentrated poverty) would make up about half of the class, from 82 percent. SAT scores would drop to the 98th percentile from the 99th.

Because he is focused on class-based diversity, Mr. Kahlenberg is satisfied with these results, but for many educators, the rise in low-income students does not make up for a drop in Black students.

Harvard, for instance, says it crafts every class carefully, looking for diversity of life experiences, interests and new ideas — and to cultivate potential leaders of society. Fewer Black students make that mission harder.

In the affirmative action trial, Harvard said that Mr. Kahlenberg’s model would produce too little diversity, and water down academic quality. Its actual class of 2026 is 15.2 percent African American, 12.6 percent Hispanic and 27.9 percent Asian American.

Universities should not turn to class-conscious admissions, “under the illusion that it will automatically produce high levels of racial diversity,” said Sean Reardon, an empirical sociologist at Stanford.

“It’s just sort of the math of it,” Dr. Reardon said. “Even though the poverty rates are higher among Blacks and Hispanics, there are still more poor whites in the country.”

Dr. Reardon does not dispute that society should provide more educational opportunity for low-income students. But, he said, “I think in recent years, there’s been much more of a perspective that there’s structural racism in America society. The idea that race and racial differences are sort of explainable by class differences is no longer the dominant idea.”

An Uneasy Alliance

Edward Blum, the conservative activist behind the lawsuits against Harvard and U.N.C., said Mr. Kahlenberg came to his attention when “The Remedy” was published. The focus on class seemed like a powerful bridge between the left and the right, Mr. Blum said.

“If we’re going to agree on one thing,” he said, “it is that colleges and universities should consider lowering the bar a little bit for kids from disadvantaged backgrounds, who are maybe the first in their family to attend college, who come from very modest if not low-income households.”

“I don’t know who could be against that,” he said. “That’s the unifying theme that Rick Kahlenberg — he’s the godfather of it.”

Although the two men have had a long correspondence, Mr. Kahlenberg said they are more strange bedfellows than ideological soul mates, and that his views have been unfairly conflated with Mr. Blum’s.

“If the choice were race-based preferences or nothing, I would be for race-based preferences,” Mr. Kahlenberg said, his delivery more emotional than usual. “For those who think in terms of guilt by association, that point is lost.”

There are those who think that Mr. Kahlenberg is being used by Mr. Blum, who has made a specialty of challenging laws that he believes confer advantages or disadvantages by race. He  orchestrated a lawsuit that led to the Supreme Court gutting a key section of the Voting Rights Act, and was responsible for litigation against the University of Texas, charging discrimination against a white applicant, which failed.

Dr. Laycock, of the University of Virginia, expects that once the Supreme Court rules, conservative groups that are now promoting race-neutral alternatives will claim they are racial proxies and turn against them. “Everybody knows that’s why it’s being used,” he said. (Mr. Blum said his group will not, though other conservative groups could do so.)

In other words, that Kennedy- and King-style multiracial coalition may not come easily.

Since leaving the Century Foundation, Mr. Kahlenberg still consults for the organization on housing. He has a few unpaid gigs at the Progressive Policy Institute and at Georgetown. 

He recently moved from Bethesda, Md., to a modest house in Rockville, now strewn with baby toys from a visiting daughter and grandchild. Mr. Kahlenberg’s wife, Rebecca, works with homeless people.

There is no “We Believe” sign in the yard. But on the living room wall, a sign says, “Live simply, dream big, be grateful, give love, laugh lots.”

In that spirit, his stubborn campaign might be traced to being the son of a pastor whose family could afford to make him a Harvard graduate, twice over. “I do have some measure of class guilt,” he said. “I wish people who are far richer than I am had more class guilt.”

Source: The Liberal Maverick Fighting Race-Based Affirmative Action

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