@satchelsf: just because a paper has a citation list, doesn’t mean the paper stands as peer reviewed. I can self-publish a paper that states the moon is made of green cheese and cite 20 articles published by Nature in my write up. That still doesn’t give any credence to my scientific findings. Once again – self published works are NOT science.
As for the review process in the social sciences, that is rapidly evolving. At this point many authors are agreeing to increase transparency. Some journals require that the data be available for review.
Yes, @psycholing, I understand the academic review process fairly well. The Nieli piece is an essay, with footnote citations to various works, including books and academic articles that themselves went through peer review processes. I guess I called it a paper, but I never meant to imply that it was a scientific exploration of the topic.
The Rothman article was based on their own research, which was submitted to, and published in, a peer reviewed journal.
Your point about social scientists making their raw data available is well taken. In fact, it is one of the biggest criticisms that has been leveled against the status quo defense of affirmative action and diversity, The Shape of the River, written by the former presidents of Harvard and Princeton. They steadfastly refused to make their data public, as noted most prominently by Professor Thernstrom in his critiques.
The basic point is that no one really believes the diversity justification for affirmative action. Least of all the universities themselves. It was always just an ad hoc rationalization after the Bakke decision explicitly disallowed any attempt to justify affirmative action on the basis of past discrimination.
You are being kind. Lee Jussim is probably the world’s leading authority on stereotypes. This is what he has to say about stereotype research, and social science research in general.
Well I guess we can agree to agree on the need for transparency in data. That is something.
With regard to the above study you mention, Rothman et al., it appears to be based entirely on correlation. Last I checked, we still were teaching in SS majors that correlation is not causation. Now of course, correlation also doesn’t prove a lack of causation, either. I understand that previous research in favor of diversity also used a survey methodology. But here’s what I will offer as someone in the field of social science research – if a survey is written in a carefully constructed way as to bias the reader, one get just about anything to correlate with anything. So research based on this type of methodology typically will NOT hold up over time.
Now personally, I am in favor of a diversity initiative for colleges because I VALUE a diversity of viewpoints in the classroom. When there is only one perspective in a social science class, it makes for brief and boring discussions. In my experience, students learn more when engaged, and they are more engaged when there are a plethora of viewpoints to consider, analyze, and debate. I have found that it is often returning students, slightly older, sometimes with children and employment experience, who have the most provocative views. They have experienced enough to have an opinion. On the other hand the sheltered, white, upper SES students rarely have something new to add to classroom discussions, unless they happen to be divergent thinkers, or people who have had a more colorful background than appearances suggest. I do find that students from less represented cultures, from rural areas, from other countries, or who are native speakers of other languages, tend to be part of this philosophical diversity that I endorse. Also people with disabilities, such as being non “neurotypical” can be a great asset in the classroom. Sometimes these individuals will ask me questions that I never thought of before. I love to be intellectually challenged by my students.
So to summarize, I am in favor of doing whatever it takes to get students in the classroom who are not all clones of one another.
I think it benefits the target audience of most elite colleges - the upper SES (full pay) white students who learn a lot by interacting with lower SES, non-white students - knowledge (and dare I say management skills) they carry with them to Wall St or government or wherever they go after college.
One might argue that diversity initiatives are mainly to benefit THEM, if one were a cynic.
The only problem OHmom is that diversity as you describe is illegal. The law doesn’t care if some people think it provides some vague unmeasurable benefit. Besides you seem caught up in a time warp from a generation long gone. SES(full pay) white students interacting with lower SES non-white students. Did you really write that? Where exactly do the Asians fit into your categories? How exactly does this benefit the Asians?
@SAY The diversity itself is not illegal. The way that colleges are currently going about trying to create diversity is what I believe will be found illegal, which is an important distinction to me. I believe there is a way to create diversity without looking at race at all (I detailed a portion of my thoughts on how a few pages back). My daughter has definitely benefited from going to a diverse high school (42% White, 24% Black, 16% Asian, 13% Hispanic, 4% Mixed Race, and 1% Native American). I have spent years watching those kids interact with one another and the stereotypes of different races and classes have fallen apart. When one of my daughter’s best friends speaks Mandarin on her cell phone, or another speaks Spanish in a causal conversation in the school hallways, it opens up kids to the possibilities of others differences and experiences. It has been stunning the amount of things my daughter’s friends have brought to her life and she has brought some of those same things to theirs. Using race as a preference is not just illegal for me, but a moral failure as well and should not be done. But arguments against diversity itself feels like an overreaction to a policy failure that has negatively affected your people. If you truly think that we have nothing to teach one another, that would be sad for me because my own evolving thoughts on this topic have come from seeing how hard Asian Americans work for the American Dream in my own diverse community.
No reason to apologize for a misunderstanding on my part. You have good reason to be passionate about removing racial preferences from my own point of view (you are on the right side of history).
@SAY “It is the use of race to create diversity that is illegal.” → “It is the use of race to create diversity that is illegal for some universities, and I hope it will become illegal for all universities that receive federal funding in the future.”
Scup that decision was very narrow, limited, and they left open a path to end AA very soon. Besides I suggest you see who was the lead author of the 4-3 majority opinion. I’ll give you a hint it begins with a K. Surely you have been watching the battle going on in DC. This entire discussion is based on the new composition of the court. Those 9 with the newly seated justices decide what is the law of the land. What happened in Fisher is ancient history.
SCOTUS doesn’t decide the laws, Congress (elected representatives) does, a ruling is final yes. However note that Congress could overrule scotus with an amendment, but that needs 2/3rds vote in both houses, so not likely.
^ In the U.S. legal system, SCOTUS and other courts do decide the laws, it’s called case law. Congress makes statutory law, which is also a part of the U.S. laws.
No matter what may, may not, or is likely to happen in the future or could have happened in the past, race based diversity promotion in college admission is largely legal at the moment.
Scup you misunderstand the Fisher decision. UT used a number of objective criteria besides race which the SCOTUS at the time accepted narrowly as being legal. Today the exact same decision would be 5-4 the other way. As in most things CA leads the way and as everyone knows Asians make up close to 50% of the students the top UC’s rather than 20% as in the Ivies. Asians have already reached a critical mass of political power in CA such that even the super majority Democratic Legislature bends to their will on this issue. Even those in favor of AA on this thread admit that it discriminates against current Asian students in favor of mostly non-poor URM’s. The Harvard Case will begin deliberation next months with other cases to follow. Harvard will be forced to reject all public funding or to stop discriminating against Asians. If Kavanaugh is confirmed the outcome is certain which is why the battle is raging in DC as we speak.
I love the description of your D’s HS, @ChangeTheGame , and it illustrates what I’m saying (not my cynical thing about diversity being mainly for white benefit), I truly believe it benefits everyone.
But your HS is an anomaly, K-12 in the US is very segregated on the whole.
A few elite colleges looking at race isn’t going to change that reality, but I believe it does provide a benefit to those students who get to know students from other races, SES, city/rural, nations for the first time. At the elite colleges we are discussing (as the others don’t consider race because they have to take the best stats they can get who can pay), these students live/eat/study/work/play together, to varying degrees. Even if they self-segregate in certain social ways, as some do, they still get the benefit of classrooms discussion and clubs and issues on campus. You’d have to dig a pretty big hole to bury your head in to be unaware of the issues and concerns of people different from you in college. And many kids DO immerse themselves socially in racially/ethnically diverse groups as well.
So this is part of the experience an elite college offers its students, the opportunity for interaction with different types of people. It is a huge part of their marketing campaigns, this aspect, so clearly it is valued by enough potential students to be emphasized.
It’s always amazing to hear people talk about the importance of diversity in the abstract and then the exact same people say it’s no problem that the elite colleges are totally devoid of diversity in opinion where it really counts. 95% of profs and administrators plus 80% of the students have an identical ideology but somehow a person’s skin color provides “huge hidden value” even though they all represent a view that ignores 50% of the country. The URM’s friends my kids met at HSYP were almost entirely elite and heavily connected in some way. Nice kids but to pretend this provides some important lessons in life is pretty silly. And 40% are foreigners. Down the chain the mix is different but at the top schools these students provide less diversity than would be achieved admitting more lower class Asians or whites.
I agree with OHMomof2 about @changethegame’s daughters HS being a bit of an anomaly (mine was the same way) and also agree that the diversity on the elite campuses helps everyone.
I think it works both ways, too. I am the opposite. I came from a racially diverse high school and ended up at a pretty elite and very white and Catholic college. Both my high school and college were chock full of amazing people from amazing families and backgrounds. Many of my friends from college grew up in a bubble…it wasn’t their fault, but they were clueless and definitely not used to being around people of color or even Jewish people for that matter. It was just as eyeopening for me to see this.
I felt more worldly than my friends in college, and many of them are still my good friends. I am grateful that I had the exposure to diversity that I had at such a young age which is why I am in support of AA (although I completely agree with the need for it to be more socioeconomically based than it is now). But to do away with it altogether would be a huge mistake, IMO.
Ironically, my lily-white-blond-haired-porcelain-skinned roommate from Lake Forest, Illinois (elite suburb of Chicago) is the reason I am a liberal. She used to pull me aside and used to explain things to me that were going on that I needed to be aware of in the world and, among other things, showed me that while I didn’t think I was a feminist, I truly was. She was brilliant both academically and in her social awareness and through her education and personal passion (sociology major) she acquainted herself with many realities that many children that grow up in the elite suburbs never do.
College, and life for that matter, is a learning experience for everyone and we can all learn something from each other, not matter what our background, skin color, ethnicity, etc. We just have to be willing to learn from and listen to all types of people.