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Implicit Bias Nonsense: Now at the Department of Justice

6/29/2016

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The other day DOJ stated that it was going to require all 27,000 plus employees to undergo training on implicit bias.  In case you don’t know what constitutes implicit bias, don’t worry--neither does anyone else.  Advocates of IB tell us that it is an unconscious cognitive process that is so damn subtle that we can’t see it or even really understand it but that we know, with certainty, that it is pervasive and powerful.  IB causes cops to profile, causes prosecutors to prosecute, and causes judges to judge......all in a way that disadvantages (pick your favorite minority group and insert here).

​IB advocates also tell us that social science research decisively concludes that this unconscious process is real.  Yes, the very people who can barely measure attachment, informal control, or risk preference can, it appears, measure precisely unconscious cognitive biases.

​To do this they created the Implicit Bias Test.  There are several critiques of the IBT now available and there is also empirical evidence that nobody knows WTF the test actually measures............oh, and that the IBT doesn’t predict anything much.  

​Never mind scientific evidence when ideology is at hand.  IB is now a code word for the left and, now that I think about it, is actually ingenious.  IB ideology has created something that nobody can see, that we can’t measure accurately or reliably, that predicts nada.......and yet it so powerful that it causes racial disparities in the CJ system.  Think about that.  

A concept that cannot be disproven, for which there is no reliable evidence, but is magically omnipotent in its influence..........  if only one were an atheist they could see the parallels.    

Fortunately, we have Loretta Lynch to divine for us the blessings of IB.  She is all too happy to waste God know how many tax dollars and the time and effort of almost 30,000 people.

Ideology is powerful.
 

​

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Speaking of the Diversity Fraud

6/29/2016

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Harvard Business Review just published a piece on why diversity fails.  The article was written by a Harvard sociologist and a professor from Israel so it’s going to be difficult for critics to say this is just a conservative hit piece.  

YOU should read this article and look at the supporting documentation.  There is actual evidence that diversity efforts often MAKE THINGS WORSE.   They trigger biases, cultivate resentment, and make people less charitable.  

The article can be found here: hbr.org/2016/07/why-diversity-programs-fail
 
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UC Now Requires Diversity Statement for New Hires

6/29/2016

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If you don’t believe that diversity has become the state sponsored religion on many campuses, you haven’t been paying attention.  Any bad idea can and will travel through the university bureaucracy if “diversity” is affixed to it.  Take this bad idea:  UC will now require potential employees to submit a “diversity statement” or, if they are applying for an hourly position, to answer a question about diversity.  

​What could go wrong?  

​I have an idea.  Let’s require applicants to swear their allegiance to the diversity God, to tithe 10% of their earnings to diversity scholarships, and, in a true statement of diversity love, elect someone to lose their job so new diversity hires can be made.  Or we could just require them to take a blood oath, Game of Thrones Style, that bounds them by honor to spill blood to protect diversity.

Can you sense my sarcasm?

In all seriousness, WTF does this requirement do to 1) help diversity, or 2) bring in the best faculty.  Something tells me “not a damn thing.”    Of course evidence of effectiveness is something universities and professors require of other people.....and not of themselves.  Some may find this a bit hypocritical ........... so do I.

​Think about how this plays out in the real world....not the world that exists in the limited minds of diversity hacks.  You are a physicist, chemist, botanist, or some other “its” or “ologist.”  You have spent the last 5-10 years in a lab, in an office, attending classes/conferences, writing papers, running experiments, passing exams............... and now the dumb fucks at UC want to know how much you love diversity before they allow you to be employed.

What if you happen to be honest and have no clue about your commitment to diversity because you’ve been working your ass off for several years?  Should you say this on your statement?  Hmmmmmm........

​What if you see diversity as an ideological effort to impose uniform thought and you happen to be a free thinker?  Should you say so on your statement?  Hmmmmmmmm.....

What if you are conservative politically and disagree with many diversity efforts, like affirmative-action?  Should you say so on your statement?  Hmmmmm.......

My recommendation is simple: Lie.  Lie.  Lie.  Lie like a mofo because that is what they are asking you to do.  Give them no reason to eliminate you from  the pool.  Lie like Hillary Clinton.  Be convincing, forceful, and outlandish.  Nobody, and I mean nobody, should be more of an advocate for racial discrimination (I mean diversity) than you.  Lie like your job depended on it.

​Who, BTW, get’s to decide whether a candidate’s diversity statement is acceptable or not?  HR?  A diversity screening committee?  A faculty committee?  What standard should be employed to prevent, you know, discrimination and bias from entering into these decisions?  You can bet your backside that many departments on campuses nationwide already engage in very questionable, if not illegal, hiring practices.  UC has just given them another hammer to use against certain candidates.

This requirement is S-T-U-P-I-D.  It is vague, encourages candidates to lie, is unenforceable, has nothing to do with being a professor/researcher, and it will be used to weed out conservatives, libertarians, and others who object in principle.  It all but invites discrimination in hiring decisions.  

There is also NO evidence that such an approach works.  Of course we are talking about Diversianity so evidence is not required.  Only faith.

My hope is that UC gets sued, soon, and loses.
 




UC to Request 'Diversity and Inclusion' Statements of New Faculty, Staff Job Applicants
As part of its overall recruitment and hiring processes, UC will soon request all applicants to submit Diversity and Inclusion statements as part of applications for faculty and staff positions. 
Date: 6/22/2016 12:00:00 AM
By: M.B. Reilly
Phone: (513) 556-1824
   As of July 1, the University of Cincinnati will request a Diversity and Inclusion statement of all applicants for faculty and staff positions. (Applicants for student-worker positions will not be required to submit such statements for campus-based employment.)

Like a number of universities across the country, the statement is one part of the overall evaluation of a candidate’s qualifications.

And as of July 1, new job postings related to staff openings will also require a Diversity and Inclusion statement.

Specifically:  
  • Faculty and administrative/professional applicants will be asked to submit a personal statement summarizing his or her contributions (or potential contributions) to diversity, inclusion and leadership.
  • All other positions, including hourly positions, will be asked to respond to the following question on UC’s application form:
“As an equal-opportunity employer with a diverse staff and student population, we are interested in how your qualifications prepare you to work with faculty, staff and students from cultures and backgrounds different from your own.”

According to Tamie Grunow, senior associate vice president and chief human resources officer, “This application request recognizes that the university is a diverse environment and signals that diversity and inclusion are important enough that we’re asking applicants about contributions or potential contributions up front. We’re all better off with diversity in our lives, and it’s part of demonstrating our commitment to diversity and inclusion and setting expectations and priorities. ”

The process that led to this expansion of the use of this Diversity and Inclusion statement began in December 2015 when UC President Santa Ono appointed a working group to examine models used at other universities, including the University of California San Diego. 

Requesting the statement for a staff hire was piloted ahead of the July 1 official start date in the university’s recent search for a new police chief and assistant police chief. 

About Jobs at UC
  • At any one time, UC has about 400 job vacancies.
  • Approximately 63,000 applications are made each year for jobs at UC.
  • Apply to UC jobs at: https://jobs.uc.edu/



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An Excellent Essay on the Problems of Normative Sociology

6/24/2016

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A person I follow on Twitter sent the link to this very interesting and informative post on the problems of normative sociology.  I’m reproducing it here and providing the link below.  The post was written by Joseph Heath for In Due Course, a Canadian Public Affairs Blog.  

induecourse.ca/on-the-problem-of-normative-sociology/




On the problem of normative sociology
Last week I did a post complaining about how journalists tend to use the undifferentiated term “political correctness” to describe a complex group of behaviours that one can find in contemporary academia. I was trying to make the case that “classic” political correctness – such as language policing – has been on the decline, but that there were other worrisome trends that continue. This week I would like to pursue the discussion, by talking about another slightly pernicious habit, which those of us who like to classify these things refer to as the problem of “normative sociology.”
The whole “normative sociology” concept has its origins in a joke that Robert Nozick made, in Anarchy, State and Utopia, where he claimed, in an offhand way, that “Normative sociology, the study of what the causes of problems ought to be, greatly fascinates us all”(247). Despite the casual manner in which he made the remark, the observation is an astute one. Often when we study social problems, there is an almost irresistible temptation to study what we would like the cause of those problems to be (for whatever reason), to the neglect of the actual causes. When this goes uncorrected, you can get the phenomenon of “politically correct” explanations for various social problems – where there’s no hard evidence that A actually causes B, but where people, for one reason or another, think that A ought to be the explanation for B. This can lead to a situation in which denying that A is the cause of B becomes morally stigmatized, and so people affirm the connection primarily because they feel obliged to, not because they’ve been persuaded by any evidence.
Let me give just one example, to get the juices flowing. I routinely hear extraordinary causal powers being ascribed to “racism” — claims that far outstrip available evidence. Some of these claims may well be true, but there is a clear moral stigma associated with questioning the causal connection being posited – which is perverse, since the question of what causes what should be a purely empirical one. Questioning the connection, however, is likely to attract charges of seeking to “minimize racism.” (Indeed, many people, just reading the previous two sentences, will already be thinking to themselves “Oh my God, this guy is seeking to minimize racism.”) There also seems to be a sense that, because racism is an incredibly bad thing, it must also cause a lot of other bad things. But what is at work here is basically an intuition about how the moral order is organized, not one about the causal order. It’s always possible for something to be extremely bad (intrinsically, as it were), or extremely common, and yet causally not all that significant.
I actually think this sort of confusion between the moral and the causal order happens a lot. Furthermore, despite having a lot of sympathy for “qualitative” social science, I think the problem is much worse in these areas. Indeed, one of the major advantages of quantitative approaches to social science is that it makes it pretty much impossible to get away with doing normative sociology.
Incidentally, “normative sociology” doesn’t necessarily have a left-wing bias. There are lots of examples of conservatives doing it as well (e.g. rising divorce rates must be due to tolerance of homosexuality, out-of-wedlock births must be caused by the welfare system etc.) The difference is that people on the left are often more keen on solving various social problems, and so they have a set of pragmatic interests at play that can strongly bias judgement. The latter case is particularly frustrating, because if the plan is to solve some social problem by attacking its causal antecedents, then it is really important to get the causal connections right – otherwise your intervention is going to prove useless, and quite possibly counterproductive.
This is something I had been thinking about a lot when writing about consumerism, in The Rebel Sell. One of the things that Andrew and I tried to show in that book is how the left had latched on a particular theory of what caused consumerism, basically buying into Marx’s old idea that capitalism is subject to crises of overproduction, then seeking to explain the various phenomena associated with consumerism (advertising, planned obsolescence, perpetual dissatisfaction, etc.) as an attempt to manage the problem of overproduction. Over time, an elaborate edifice was constructed on the basis of this one, slender claim, which not only had never been tested empirically, but didn’t even make sense upon closer analysis. People just really wanted to believe that capitalism had this built-in ‘contradiction’. As a consequence, an enormous amount of energy was being wasted by activists, trying to change things that in fact bore no relationship to the problem they were trying to solve – or in the case of consumerism, promoting “solutions” that were in fact exacerbating the problem.
Because of this, I was really struck by this passage in Robert Frank’s book, Choosing the Right Pond, in which he complains about precisely this tendency on the left:
Critics on the left see the market system through a much less flattering lens. In the marketplace, they see first a system in which the strong exploit the weak. Firms with market power take unfair advantage of workers whose opportunities are limited… Critics from the left also see the market system as promoting, indeed almost depending on, the sale of products that serve no social need. They see manipulative advertisements that cajole people into spending their incomes on gas guzzling cars with retractable headlights, while the environment decays and children lack good books to read. These critics see, finally, that the market system’s rewards are no in proportion to need or even to merit. People whose talents and abilities differ only slightly often earn dramatically different incomes. And reward bears almost no relation to the social value of the work that is done: The lawyer who helps his corporate client exploit tax loopholes takes home several hundred thousand dollars annually, while the person who struggles to teach our eight graders algebra is paid a pittance. (162)
So far so familiar. Then it starts to get more interesting:
Most people, of course, are at neither extreme of the political spectrum. Those in the middle presumably see the real truth about the market system as lying somewhere between the views offered by the extreme camps. In this chapter, I argue that the most fruitful interpretation is not to think of the marketplace as being some convenient middle ground between these two extremes. The marketplace I portray here has both the positive qualities put forth by its defenders as well as the catalogue of ills for which it has been attacked. I will argue, however, that the left has in almost every instance offered the wrong reasons for why market outcomes go awry. (162-3)
He concludes the chapter with a triumph of masterful understatement:
Having identified real problems, but having ascribed them to spurious causes, the left has found it difficult to formulate policy remedies. (177)
I recall marvelling at how seldom I had heard this idea expressed: that the left consistently gets it right when it comes to identifying problems, but then gets the explanations wrong (and often clings to those explanations long after they have proven problematic), and so is practically ineffective.
I think that “normative sociology” has a lot to do with this. From casual observation (by which I mean having spent hundreds of hours listening to people criticize various sorts of social problems), I can see four major variants of normative sociology.
1. Wanting a policy lever. Many of our outstanding social problems remain outstanding because they occur in areas that are outside the immediate jurisdiction of the state: either because they occur in the private sphere (e.g. the gendered division of labour within the family), or because they involve an exercise of individual autonomy, (e.g. students dropping out of high school). As a result, there is no obvious “policy lever” than can be pulled to solve the problem, because the state simply lacks the authority (and sometimes even the power) to intervene directly in these areas.
As a result, when people who would like to see these problems solved analyze them, there can be an enormous temptation to believe that they are causally connected to some other area, in which the state does have an effective policy lever. The case in which I have seen this most clearly is the tendency to overestimate the causal effects of inequality – because the distribution of wealth is something that the state does have the ability to control. So if “intractable social problem A” can be shown to be caused by “poverty of group B,” then that gives the state leverage over the intractable social problem, because it can always redistribute wealth to B.
To take a concrete example, one hears a lot these days about the “social health gradient” — basically, the strong correlation between various health outcomes and SES (“socio-economic status”), which remains surprisingly strong despite the relatively egalitarian distribution of health care resources. Now SES is an explicitly hybrid concept, designed to represent relative inequality of wealth and social status. But of course, while the state can quite easily redistribute wealth, social status is a much trickier thing, and the state’s ability to intervene, much less modify, these status hierarchies is pretty close to zero (except perhaps indirectly, by redistributing wealth, but even then that often backfires, as the recipients of those transfers find themselves losing status precisely for being in receipt of those transfers). So to the extent that the social health gradient is related to inequalities of status, there is practically nothing the state can do about it. As a result, I can’t count the number of presentations on public health I’ve heard that start out talking about SES and then just subtly shift toward talking about wealth inequality, in order then to recommend some form of income redistribution.
2. Worrying about “blaming the victim.” The most common confusion between the moral and the causal order occurs when people start thinking about responsibility. There is an enormous tendency to think that if person X caused A to occur, then X is responsible for A. As a result, when people don’t want to hold X responsible for A, they feel a powerful impulse to resist any suggestion that X’s choices or actions might have caused A. This is, of course, a confusion, since whether or not X caused A is just a factual question, which doesn’t really decide the question of responsibility. And yet I’ve often heard academics being challenged, after having made an entirely empirical claim about the source of a particular social problem, by people saying “aren’t you just blaming the victim?” One can see here a moral concern intruding where it does not belong. If we follow this line of reasoning, we wind up talking about what we would like the cause of problems to be, rather than what they actually are.
Just to explain this a bit: A causal relationship to an outcome is typically a necessary but not sufficient condition for an attribution of responsibility. That is because of the phenomenon of “too many causes.” If I throw a beer bottle out my window, and it strikes a pedestrian below, it is clear that I have caused an injury to this person. But that person also caused the injury, by deciding to take a walk and to pass by my house at that precise moment. And who knows, many others may have contributed as well, by allowing that person to go for the walk, or by selling me the beer, and so on. Thus the question of who is responsible is really a separate question from the question of causation. So it should be possible to have a conversation about what causes what that is completely separate from the question of who is to blame for what – it is perhaps a prelude to the latter conversation, but definitely concerns that arise in the latter should not be allowed to intrude into the former.
To pick just one obvious example of this, there is an enormous reluctance to believe that underdevelopment could be largely due to domestic conditions within poor countries. There is a pressing need to treat this poverty as some kind of harm inflicted upon the poor by rich countries, or else a consequence of past harms (e.g. a “legacy of colonialism”) — not so much because any of the mechanisms being posited seem all that persuasive, but rather that doing anything other involves “blaming the victim,” or treating the poor as somehow responsible for their condition.
3. Picking one side of a correlation. This is a more subtle one. Statistical analysis often reveals a correlation between two things, but as we all know, correlation does not imply causation. If A tends to go hand-in-hand with B, it could be that 1) A causes B, or 2) B causes A, or 3) A and B are mutually reinforcing, or 4) there is some third thing, C, that causes both A and B. It is, however, very very common for statistical correlations to be reported as causal ones. (This is, for instance, a huge problem in health care reporting. Growing up, my mother was afraid to cook with aluminium pots or use anti-perspirant, because of studies reporting the presence of aluminium in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients. But even if true, there was no reason to think that exposure to aluminium was causing the disease, could be that the disease caused the accumulation of aluminium, or that some other thing caused both.) Because this sort of sloppy thinking happens all the time, it’s not so difficult for people who would like to believe that A causes B to respond to evidence of correlation between the two as confirmation of their view.
The debate over the so-called “culture of poverty” provides some great examples of all three of these tendencies. It has certainly not escaped anyone’s notice that poverty is (statistically) associated with a large number of behaviour patterns that are, shall we say, self-undermining (petty crime, teenage pregnancy, broken families, drug addiction, domestic violence, etc.) The stereotypical conservative looks at this and says “see, no wonder they’re poor, it’s because of all the bad choices they are making.” The stereotypical liberal looks at it and says, “no wonder they’re making such bad choices, it’s because they’re so poor.” In many of these cases, some kind of mutual reinforcement story seems like the most likely account, but the more common ideological response is to pick out one direction of causation and to focus on that.
(One can see as well in the liberal response the desire to have a policy lever. The thing about “culture of poverty” explanations is that no one has any idea how to change this culture – the idea that listening to Christians moralize about it is going to change anything being not very persuasive. Money, however, can be redistributed. And finally, there is an obvious desire to avoid “blaming the victim” — for some reason positing a pernicious cultural trend is somehow seen as compatible with individual blame, in a way that the actions of anonymous economic forces is not.)
4. Metaphysical views. I mentioned this above, but often there is a sense that the moral awfulness of some action or episode requires that it have enormous consequences. This can easily lead to the view that anyone who denies the causal effects is in some way minimizing or downplaying the moral awfulness. (Now if everyone were a moral consequentialist, then this would all make sense, since the awfulness of an action would be determined entirely by its effects, and so minimizing the effects would be minimizing the awfulness. But most people are not consequentialists.)
A good example of this in contemporary debates involves attitudes towards rising inequality. Many people think this is very bad. And yet, there is also a desire to believe that, if it is very bad, then it must also cause a lot of other bad things. (Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s book The Spirit Level is an example of this tendency, as is Joseph Stiglitz’s The Price of Inequality.) There is also a common desire to think that political unrest and revolutions are caused by poverty and inequality, whereas the preponderance of evidence suggests that they are not (rising expectations are more important). And yet, anyone who denies that inequality has these effects is liable to stand accused of seeking to makes excuses for it (notice, for example, how Paul Krugman, in this interesting comment on Stiglitz, goes out of his way to emphasize that he is still condemning inequality).
Edit: Thanks for all the eyeballs, Alex. Two things: First, some sociologists have been getting all tetchy about this. Just to clarify — this has nothing to do with how actual sociology is practiced. The “sociology” thing is just part of the joke: “Sociologists are people who study the causes of social problems [i.e. funny stereotype], so normative sociologists are people who study what the causes should be [even funnier].” When I use the term, it’s primarily applied to people in philosophy and political theory, not to actual social scientists. Second, for all those who are saying “he doesn’t provide any evidence to support his claims,” all I can say is “dude, it’s a blog post.” If you’ve never seen anyone doing normative sociology, then congratulations — you must attend better conferences than I do.



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The Supreme Court Reaffirms Racial Discrimination

6/24/2016

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Picture
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​I’ve followed the court for a long time and have a deep interest in and respect for the institution.  If you think about it, it is truly remarkable that we extend so much legitimacy to a group of unelected judges.  Take the ruling that allowed gay marriage, for example.  The court ruled on a very controversial issue and, literally overnight, the debate ended.  Five unelected judges overturned thousands of years of tradition and accepted law.  There were no protests after the ruling, no armed insurrections, and no efforts to recall the 5 majority judges.  We simply accepted their ruling.  Think about that and think about the various other cases the court has ruled on that we, as citizens, have simply accepted as a consequence of living in a republic.

To be certain, there have been rulings that I’ve disagreed with and in each of those cases I’ve read the majority and the dissenting opinions.  Most of the time I could understand the legal reasoning on both sides and could follow their logic as they moved through the constitutional issues involved.  Most of the time.

Unfortunately, the recent ruling allowing universities to take race into account in admissions decisions was not one of those times.  In prior cases the court established that race-based admission and other affirmative action efforts had to pass strict scrutiny.  Think of strict scrutiny as establishing very narrow boundaries around a practice or policy and requiring the entity to be able to justify why those boundaries were set where they were.  Applied to affirmative action, prior SC rulings essentially said that race could be used as a factor in admissions but that its use had to be justified and narrowly tailored.  By the way, in prior decisions the SC stated that it aimed eliminate affirmative action in about 25 years.........

​Yesterday’s ruling on a case from Texas, however, seemingly turned legal precedent on its head.  The court ruled that the University of Texas’ system of racial preferences was constitutional and that it did pass strict scrutiny.  

​The problem, however, was that the majority didn’t require the UT to define what it meant as a “critical mass” of black students, nor did it require UT to provide ANY evidence that their efforts HELPED black students or students in general.  According to the majority, the UT system was justified in using race in admissions because doing so allowed for “the destruction of stereotypes,.. the promotion of cross-racial understanding.”  These, the majority ruled, were “concrete and precise goals."

​Writing for the majority, Kennedy stated “ A university is in large part defined by those intangible qualities which are incapable of objective measurement but which make for greatness......”  He goes on to say "Considerable deference is owed to a university in defining those intangible characteristics, like student body diversity, that are central to its identity and educational mission.”

Even if you are a supporter of affirmative action, shouldn’t this bother you?  

**The court essentially ignored its very recent rulings concerning the use of race in these decisions.  

**The court accepted that “intangible qualities” that "cannot be measured" are now acceptable legal standards.

**The court stated that administrators should be give broad deference in obtaining undefined and unmeasurable  goals.

**And apparently the court now believes that universities exist, in part, to destroy stereotypes (Sssshhh, don’t tell them that affirmative action CAUSES racial stereotyping).

Whoa.  

So, if you are fine with this standard of legal reasoning please be willing to accept it in other areas.  Maybe police, for instance, should be given greater deference because  policing requires a recognition of intangible qualities that cannot be measured?  I assume you would be fine with this.

Ask yourself what the consequences are when strict scrutiny means a business, a university, or a police department can make vacuous statements about undefined and allegedly unmeasurable goals and then translate those beliefs into a practice that OPENLY discriminates against your favorite group.  I mean seriously, didn’t the court reject the arguments about gay marriage for similar reasons?  Undefined social goals.....not easily measured......openly discriminatory......deference to states rights, tradition, custom, and religion?

​Alito’s 51 page dissent is worth reading.  He excoriates the legal reasoning behind the majority opinion .

Alito:     

To the extent that UT has ever moved beyond a plea for deference and identified the relevant interests in more specific terms, its efforts have been shifting, unpersuasive, and, at times, less than candid. 
UT has never shown that its race-conscious plan actually ameliorates this situation. The University pre­ sents no evidence that its admissions officers, in adminis­ tering the “holistic” component of its plan, make any effort to determine whether an African-American, Hispanic, or Asian-American student is likely to enroll in classes in which minority students are underrepresented.  
UT either has not crunched those numbers or has not revealed what they show. Nor has UT ex­ plained why the underrepresentation of Asian-American students in many classes justifies its plan, which discrim­ inates against those students. 
UT has claimed that its plan is needed to achieve a “critical mass” of African-American and His­ panic students, but it has never explained what this term means. 
This is a plea for deference—indeed, for blind deference—the very thing that the Court rejected in Fisher I. 
Notwithstanding the omnipresence of racial classifica­ tions, UT claims that it keeps no record of how those classifications affect its process. “The university doesn’t keep any statistics on how many students are affected by the consideration of race in admissions decisions,” and it “does not know how many minority students are affected in a positive manner by the consideration of race.” 
Accordingly, UT asserts that it has no idea which students were admitted as a result of its race-conscious system and which students would have been admitted under a race-neutral process. UT thus makes no effort to assess how the individual characteristics of students admitted as the result of racial preferences differ (or do not differ) from those of students who would have been admitted without them. 
But to this day, UT has not explained in anything other than the vaguest terms what it means by “critical mass.” In fact, UT argues that it need not identify any interest more specific than “securing the educational benefits of diversity.” 
The majority acknowledges that “asserting an interest in the educational benefits of diversity writ large is insuf­ ficient,” and that “[a] university’s goals cannot be elusory or amorphous—they must be sufficiently measurable to permit judicial scrutiny of the policies adopted to reach them.” Ante, at 12. According to the majority, however, UT has articulated the following “concrete and precise goals”: “the destruction of stereotypes, the promot[ion of] cross-racial understanding, the preparation of a student body for an increasingly diverse workforce and society, and the cultivat[ion of] a set of leaders with legitimacy in the eyes of the citizenry.” Ibid. (internal quotation marks omitted).
These are laudable goals, but they are not concrete or precise, and they offer no limiting principle for the use of racial preferences. For instance, how will a court ever be able to determine whether stereotypes have been ade­ quately destroyed? Or whether cross-racial understanding has been adequately achieved? If a university can justify racial discrimination simply by having a few employees opine that racial preferences are necessary to accomplish these nebulous goals, see ante, at 12–13 (citing only self- serving statements from UT officials), then the narrow tailoring inquiry is meaningless. Courts will be required to defer to the judgment of university administrators, and affirmative-action policies will be completely insulated from judicial review.

By accepting these amorphous goals as sufficient for UT to carry its burden, the majority violates decades of prece­dent rejecting blind deference to government officials defending “ ‘inherently suspect’ ” classifications.  


Most troublingly, the majority’s uncritical deference to UT’s self-serving claims blatantly contradicts our deci­sion in the prior iteration of this very case, in which we faulted the Fifth Circuit for improperly “deferring to the University’s good faith in its use of racial classifications.” Fisher I, 570 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 12). As we empha­ sized just three years ago, our precedent “ma[kes] clear that it is for the courts, not for university administrators, to ensure that” an admissions process is narrowly tailored. Id., at ___ (slip op., at 10). 

I’m not in favor of affirmative action and find it demeaning to minorities.  Having worked in higher education for over 20 years, I’ve also witnessed how “diversity” has become a destructive ideology that has all the trappings of a state sanctioned religion.  

That said, I’m much more concerned about soundness of this ruling than I am about the use of race in admissions decisions.  Universities will always find a way to subvert the law when it comes to this issue.  

Something much worse, however, has occurred.  By granting wide deference for universities to achieve undefined goals and by removing the burden that they have to be able to show actual evidence that their practices are narrowly tailored, the Supreme Court has just given the green light to university administrators and diversity warriors to say and to do just about anything in the name of diversity.  

The consequences of gutting strict scrutiny requirements and the burdens they impose, of accepting lofty goals that are vague and undefined, of vacating the need for statistical evidence or evidence of any kind, of arbitrarily reversing RECENT precedence, and granting broad deference to state actors is worse, much worse, than allowing race to be used for college admissions.  What this signals is that the current majority will, in matters that appeal to them the most, go to great lengths to make the law conform to their political views.

This has never worked out well for our country, regardless of which side was involved.  Unfortunately, this is a consequence of putting judges on the bench based in part on the ideology of whoever happens to be president at the time.  How else, after all, do you explain Justice Sotomayor?


The ruling is attached below:  
      





14-981_4g15.pdf
File Size: 318 kb
File Type: pdf
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NASCAR Driver and His Family Attacked and Beaten

6/21/2016

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Mike Wallace and his family were attacked by three men after attending a concert in North Carolina.  Wallace was beaten unconscious and kicked and stomped while laying helpless on the ground.  His daughter was also assaulted.

Wallace had this to say:  “What’s worse is three of the guys that beat my family up were arrested and out of jail before we were out of the hospital."

All I can say is “Go Figure.”  www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2016/06/20/nascar-veteran-mike-wallace-daughter-brutally-attacked-after-rascal-flatts-concert.html?intcmp=hpbt4


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Another Example of Over-Representation

6/21/2016

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The College Fix, a website that covers various issues in higher education from a “right” of center approach, recently examined the voter registration records for over 1,300 faculty at UNC-Chappel Hill.  Guys what they found?

Although they were unable to ascertain the political affiliations of every faculty member, they did find a disparity of 12:1 democrat to republican.  In 16 departments not a single republican could be found.  Women’s Studies, African-American Studies, Asian Studies, Art, Anthropology, History............

Voter records are imperfect indicators of affiliation.  Even so, these data converge with every other study to further document the political disparity found on US campuses.

www.thecollegefix.com/post/27896/    

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Academics are Sometimes Petty, Clannish, Rude, and Ugly

6/21/2016

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I tell my Ph.D. students that everything we do is public and thus open to criticism.  We are evaluated by 18 year old undergraduates who can barely write and by administrators who have never been academics.  Our research/writing is subject to unprofessional and anonymous attacks during the peer review process and, of course, our lives as scholars sometimes become the focal points of conflict.  Everything, and I mean everything, is subject to criticism.  

Many academics simply cannot handle this level of scrutiny or the nastiness often embedded in it.  They often withdraw, stop writing, stop teaching about certain issues, and some leave the academy.

This is the side of the academy that few on the outside get to see.  Only rarely does it make the news and only rarely are people called to account. 

I’m currently writing a paper on academic deviance and have found little written on the topic.  A few studies have examined academic bullying and academic mobbing but overall, very little empirical work exists documenting this part of our academic lives.  Interesting, to say the least.......

To show you how petty some academics are, read the following story published in the Chronicle of Higher Ed.  A female scholar published an essay about balancing an academic life with family life and the newspaper ran a picture of her, her husband, and her adorable baby.  True to form, she was roundly criticized and publicly attacked by other academics.  Everything, as I said, is subject to criticism.

Read about it here:  chronicle.com/article/When-Fellow-Academics-Make-Fun/236774/?cid=VTKT1


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Zero Tolerance for Bias Response Teams

6/21/2016

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​Data from national surveys tell us that the vast, vast majority of college students, faculty, and staff find their campuses open and welcoming places.  Very few report incidents of bias, hate, or general incivility.  This is a good thing.

Unfortunately, universities rarely use data when making decisions.  Think about that.  Just like everyone else, they collect tons and tons of data, generate an ungodly amount of paperwork and reports, and then make decisions rooted too often in emotion and political expediency.

Bias Response Teams (BRT’s) are an excellent example of an idea that was never fully vetted and that was never supported by data.  Few professors even know what they are, that they exist, or that they exist on their campuses.  Yes, UC has a BRT.  No, I have not (yet) been contacted by them.

Here is how it works:  Let’s say that an easily offended student doesn’t like the fact that I discuss sex differences, genetic influences on behavior, or the color of my shirt.  The student can now file a complaint with a BRT.  The BRT will document the alleged offense and contact the professor.  

Why are BRT's a serious threat to academic freedom, you ask?  Simple.  Students now have a mechanism to make complaints over the silliest of things and the university now has a tool to police the content of what is taught.  

Here is an excellent example:  The University of Northern Colorado’s BRT kicked into action when it received a complaint from a student concerning what was being taught in a class.  The class examined a series of controversial topics--topics that some students apparently thought should never be discussed.  The BRT contacted the professor and “had a conversation.”  The professor was told to avoid such topics in the future.

BRT’s are the outgrowth of two forces:  The administrative desire to placate minority groups and the leftist desire to root out anything that conflicts with their dogma.  These joint forces are responsible for much of what you see on campuses today as efforts to control speech and the dissemination of ideas continue to multiply.  

I never thought I would see the day when faculty rolled over and capitulated on such issues and, subsequently, gave away their academic freedom.
   

​Read about what happened here:  heatst.com/culture-wars/an-inside-look-at-how-one-college-is-censoring-classroom-debate/?mod=sm_tw_post




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Two Videos on the Differences Between Liberals and Conservatives

6/21/2016

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Here are two videos on the differences between liberals and conservatives and why these differences matter. Although I don’t agree with the assessment of Prof Saltz, as I believe her descriptions are a bit too fundamental, you can still see where some of this research is going.  The other video by Jonathan Haidt is excellent. You can tell that he has given this issue serious thought.

​As you listen to each account, think about how these differences influence our personal lives and our views on public policy.  Conservatives, as a general rule, favor social order and social stability while liberals score higher on measures of “openness to experience.”  You don’t have to be a rocket scientists to forecast how these differences will create conflicts around crime policy ect...

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    John Paul Wright and Matt DeLisi

    Professors of Crime and Criminology

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