[quote]hspder wrote:
I’m not naive enough to think such a study would even be possible, at least not a study that would rise up to my standards, i.e., exhaustive and credible. I could have done it myself it that was my field of study, but I know people who tried and paid for even trying. [/quote]
It would be a very difficult study – the main problems being: 1) racism is basically an undefined concept as far as measuring it directly as a variable (though it should be possible to do an indirect measurement if you completely controlled for other factors); and 2) the self-reported data problem.
[quote]hspder wrote:
So, I speak of empirical evidence - my experience as an observer (and of getting in trouble when I tried doing something about it) and many testimonies from friends and colleagues from diverse backgrounds. And I can tell you that Yale and Harvard, for example, are much worse now than Stanford or Berkeley are. They are truly white-boys clubs. [/quote]
That’s interesting – I would love to know the department to which you’re referring, because the stats for their professional schools (med, law, business) belie that point.
BTW, Berkeley doesn’t practice affirmative action - and hasn’t been able to do so since Prop 209 passed back in 1996, nine years ago - and Harvard and Yale do.
[quote]hspder wrote:
Of course. I’m willing to believe that some students that get in “thanks to AA” shouldn’t be there. Some. I’m just trying to tell you that you are not necessarily right in assuming racism has no part in the results you saw, and that AA has negative net effects. [/quote]
I don’t know that racism doesn’t have any role – and you don’t know if it does have any role. It’s an assumption on your part that it does – and that its effect is so strong as to create the measured efffect in both of the studies I referenced (the law school study, which I linked, and the UC Berkeley undergrad study, which I cannot find (it was essentially pre-internet, or at least pre-big-time internet)).
[quote]hspder wrote:
Look, I’m not saying racism IS THE root cause. [/quote]
You’re saying it’s the cause. The only critique you have so far of the law-student study – and I cannot tell whether you actually looked at it or not – is that it doesn’t account for racism as a cause for the measured effect. What else are you claiming other than that racism “IS THE root cause”?
It seems that not only are you claiming it’s the root cause, but the paradigm that you want in place is that it should be assumed to be the root cause unless someone can specifically disprove that this immeasurable quantity is the root cause.
BTW, I don’t know how much you know about regression analysis, but they do a pretty good job of controlling for extraneous variables and seeing whether certain inputs are causal or correlated. The author of the study is a law prof at UCLA with ph.D. in economics from Northwestern University. He got comments and edits prior to publication from some of the top legal academics around, like Bernard Black from Stanford, Jim Lindgren from Northwestern and Eugene Volokh from UCLA. Several other researchers have also replicated the results of the study without reporting methodological flaws or data errors.
So if you have some specific methodological critiques on why the study is flawed, I would love to hear them, but I haven’t seen anything yet in terms of why you think the study is flawed.
For your convenience, here’s a link to the article again:
http://www1.law.ucla.edu/~sander/Documents/Sander%20FINAL.pdf
In case you wish to read this, here is the author’s response to an article critiquing his study:
http://www1.law.ucla.edu/~sander/Documents/CCKL%20Critique.pdf
[quote]hspder wrote:
I’m saying I have seen a lot of situations where racism had a very negative impact on the ability of college students to succeed, and hence it can discredit in great part the results the study you mention show.[/quote]
How would it discredit the study?
BTW, this is what I mean about setting up the paradigm in which racism must be discredited as “the reason”, even though it’s an unproved assumption.
As another BTW, it is very interesting that the paradigm you want must include racism, but does not seem to want to include the fact that people with lower LSATs and GPAs would be predicted to have the precise sorts of problems the study is set up to measure if they had to compete for achievements against people with higher LSATs and GPAs on a fixed curve, which is what happens in law schools (and in undergrad, at least in certain majors).
And a final little note, you’ll see if you read the article carefully that the author makes the conclusion that the overall harm suffered by whites because of affirmative action is de minimus, and that the author has previously considered himself a proponent of affirmative action and has endorsed racial preferences to fix other areas, such as banking.
The simple conclusion of the study is that the overall costs of affirmative action preferences exceed the overall benefits to blacks as a group by a significant amount.
The median 1st-year GPA for blacks in law school overall is between the 5th and 10th percentile of white GPAs. It rises somewhat after that because those who are doing the worst simply drop out. The gap is the same in legal writing as in classes with timed exams. Are you going to tell me that effect is do mostly to racism? Even when it is precisely what would be predicted by the gap in admissions credentials – and it’s not a little gap either, given that, on a 1000-point academic scale based upon GPA and LSAT, the average admitted black student had an index 170 points (17%) lower than the average admitted white student.
[quote]hspder wrote:
Basically I’m saying that the study you mention is flawed because it doesn’t dig into that. At all. And if their excuse was that digging into that was impossible (because of backlash) they should not bother to put out a flawed study out. [/quote]
Actually, the best measure of a “racism effect” I could think of for a study like this would be a test to see whether black students underperform their credentials – in other words, figure out a predicted performance based upon the admissions index of LSAT and GPA, then forecast average performance based on a competitive environment against others with higher numbers (the affirmative action gap) and see if they perform even worse than projected.
I don’t know of any well designed, accuratae studies that point to this effect. Maybe you could do one.
[quote]hspder wrote:
Again, you over-simplify and are being naive. Professors don’t need to give lower grades to black students to have an impact. Just the way professors look at you or interact with you can have a negative effect. I don’t know how law school is, but when I was studying I needed constant interaction with professors - ask them questions, ask for advice, ideas, input. The fact that professors were so willing to interact with me had a dramatic positive effect on my achievements. [/quote]
Yes, I realize that most non-professional graduate school programs are basically periods of indentured servitude to professors, and professors – especially thesis advisers – can have profound effects on students.
In professional school, professor interaction is also important, but is not so crucial.
I cannot back up a claim that racism does not exist – but you can’t back up a claim that racism is such a powerful effect based on anecdote and self-critiqued observations.
I will say that in my experience in law school, I never saw a professor refuse to answer students’ questions or refuse to see students in office hours. Some profs were pricks, but they were pricks to everyone. Others were cool to everyone.
In fact, the only claim I ever heard about racial bias at law school was some info one of my black friends (yeah, imagine that – I have black friends – and Asian friends, and Tongan friends, and Hispanic friends, etc., etc.) told me about a certain black professor who was known to favor black students on exams. The students felt that they were supposed to include stuff on an exam answer to the effect of, “from my perspective as a black person, blah blah blah.” and they would get better marks. Thus, blind exams were defeated, at least to the extent they were race blind.
[quote]hspder wrote:
Since you’re so crazy for “proof”, here’s my testimony.
The way I’ve seen them treat black students was dramatically different - and if I tried and helped them (by answering their questions as I could) after class, I had to sneak and not let a professor see us or I’d get “punished” next time and not get my answers either (because now I was “with them”).
Yes, this was in America, in the SF Bay Area, not so long ago.[/quote]
Actually, this captures the essence of the self-reporting data problem. Did you ever ask the professor whether he disliked those students? Or, assuming he did, find out why? Do you really know he would “punish” you for associating with them, or is that your projection on the situation? Perhaps the professor had a reason to dislike them that had nothing to do with race (like they were loud in the library one day while he was doing research or something)? We can only make conjectures, unless somehow you “know” what the professor was thinking and why he was thinking it.
[quote]hspder wrote:
“Other solutions”? Do you call what they “experimented” with “other solutions”? Is just another band-aid, “other solutions”? [/quote]
No, I don’t, but you’re missing the point. The point was about whether there was a political will to do something if affirmative action were taken away, and those “other solutions” prove the existence of the will to try other things out in the absence of the affirmative action option. It has nothing to do with the relative merit of the “other solutions.”
[quote]hspder wrote:
I give up. You’ll never get it. You prefer to rely on a flawed study just because it claims to be scientific. Fine. Maybe one of these days, when I’m bored I’ll come up with another “scientific” study saying the exact opposite. Apparently it does not need to be exhaustive or credible for you to believe. [/quote]
Feel free to undertake the one I outlined above, but please credit me in the introduction.
[quote] BostonBarrister wrote:
The problem is an education system that underserves the poor. Education in poor white areas sucks. Education in poor Hispanic areas sucks. Education in poor Asian areas sucks. Education in poor black areas sucks. And education in poor racially diverse areas sucks.
From what I can see, part of the problem is funding, part of the problem is finding motivated teachers and part of the problem is the will and/or legal ability to impose proper discipline on the students. Each of these areas needs to be addressed.
hspder wrote:
You sure do like to oversimplify, don’t you? Only if it were that simple…
[/quote]
Please, o great sage, explain to poor, simple, naive me the great complexities of your thinking. I’ll try hard to keep up, but please use little words, and pepper it with lots of references to my naivette and simplicity.
BTW, as a side note, I really dislike the “it’s not that simple” argument with nothing else added on to it. If you’re going to make a contention, the least you can do is back it up.
Anyway, just about anything can be made simpler or more complex depending on your goal. If I want to know what time it is, I can look at a watch and get the time without having to know how to build the watch, or without having to grasp the complexity of Einsteinian Special Relativity. Not that knowing how to build a clock or understanding Einsteinian Special Relativity are bad things, but their complexity is completely unrelated to the goal of knowing what time it is.