The Chronicle of Higher Education reports today that advocates of racial preference have urged Texas to amend its top 10% admissions policy "to reflect recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions supporting the practice...." Michael Olivas, a law professor at the University of Houston, criticized Texas A&M; for refusing "to employ Grutter." by re-instituting race preferences.

In what sense, I wonder, does the Texas policy (however wise it might or might not be as educational policy) not "reflect" what the Supreme Court has held, especially since the Texas plan was often cited as a commendable race-neutral alternative to preferences. Under that plan the number of entering minority freshmen at the flagship Austin campus has risen "from 17.5 percent in 1995 to 20.6 percent in 2003."

How many times must it be repeated that the Supremes did not command race preferences? It allowed them subject to certain limitations. The Supremes have also allowed municipalities to provide school vouchers. Do the preferentialists believe that every city, town, and hamlet must now rush to provide vouchers in order to make their policies "reflect" Supreme Court "support" for them?

ADDENDUM

Maybe it's just me, but I also find it quite interesting that the press release of the Equal Justice Society about this matter reveals that Norma Cantu, one of the advocates for a return to racial preferences, is a professor of education and law at the University of Texas.

Why, you might ask, is this interesting? Well, as this reprinted article from the Chronicle of Higher Education reveals, in the not so distant past Ms. Cantu was an assistant secretary in President Clinton's Dept. of Education, where she put forward some, er, novel legal opinions.

In a series of letters to state officials in Texas last month [March 1997], Ms. Cantu, the Assistant Secretary of Education for civil rights, contended that a year-old federal appeals-court ruling barring the University of Texas law school from using race as a factor in admissions did not prohibit other colleges in the state from doing so.

That conclusion clashes with the view of many legal observers and -- most important to the college officials -- the formal guidance of the Texas Attorney General, Dan Morales, who has declared that the ruling of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in Hopwood v. State of Texas prevents all public colleges in the state from taking race into account in decisions about admissions and financial aid.

Ms. Cantu also suggested in her letters that the federal government could cut off aid to Texas colleges if an impending desegregation review by the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights finds vestiges of past discrimination in the Texas higher-education system and if the state -- citing the Hopwood decision -- refuses to use racial preferences to correct it.

The University of Texas discriminated against blacks for generations, and it obviously regrets and resents that the Fifth Circuit barred it from discriminating against whites and Asians for a few more generations. Now that the Supremes have given the green light to such discrimination, one can understand its eagerness to resume it, and even to hire someone like Norma Cantu.

According to a fascinating front page article in today's New York Times, it has begun to dawn on Lani Guinier, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and other preferentialists at Harvard and elsewhere that you'd better be very careful what you subsidize, for you'll certainly get more of it ... and it may not be exactly what you had in mind.

One of the dirty little secrets of racial preferences, now beginning to leak out, is not only that most of the beneficiaries are middle class or actually rich -- that has been known if not advertised for a good while -- but that most are not even American, or if they are American they are of very recent origin. 8 percent of the undergraduates at Harvard are black (still "underrepresented," says Guinier), but "the majority of them — perhaps as many as two-thirds — were West Indian and African immigrants or their children, or to a lesser extent, children of biracial couples." Moreover,

Researchers at Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania who have been studying the achievement of minority students at 28 selective colleges and universities (including theirs, as well as Yale, Columbia, Duke and the University of California at Berkeley), found that 41 percent of the black students identified themselves as immigrants, as children of immigrants or as mixed race. [Editorial Aside: Has the NYT lost its copy editors? The comma after "... Berkeley)" should not be there. If the Times were not as foolishly opposed to the serial comma as it is to President Bush, it should be after "Duke."]

"I just want people to be honest enough to talk about it," Professor Gates, the Yale-educated son of a West Virginia paper-mill worker, said recently, reiterating the questions he has been raising since the black alumni weekend last fall. "What are the implications of this?"

The president of Amherst College, Anthony W. Marx, says that colleges should care about the ethnicity of black students because in overlooking those with predominantly American roots, colleges are missing an "opportunity to correct a past injustice" and depriving their campuses "of voices that are particular to being African-American, with all the historical disadvantages that that entails."

In any event, other preferentialists do not think the "underrepresentation" of American blacks is a problem.

Even among black scholars there is disagreement on whether a discussion about the origins of black students is helpful. Orlando Patterson, a Harvard sociologist and West Indian native, said he wished others would "let sleeping dogs lie."

"The doors are wide open - as wide open as they ever will be - for native-born black middle-class kids to enter elite colleges," he wrote in an e-mail message.

Oh well, I suspect I'm not the only one who is confused. Lee Bollinger, for example, seems to me to be almost schizophrenic on this issue.

"I don't think it [nationality] should matter for purposes of admissions in higher education," said Lee C. Bollinger, the president of Columbia University, who as president of the University of Michigan fiercely defended its use of affirmative action. "The issue is not origin, but social practices. It matters in American society whether you grow up black or white. It's that differential effect that really is the basis for affirmative action."

And what, pray tell, is that "differential effect" of growing up black in the U.S. that this new Bollinger thinks is "the basis" for affirmative action? He doesn't say, but others are not so reticent.

Mary C. Waters, the chairman of the sociology department at Harvard, who has studied West Indian immigrants, says they are initially more successful than many African-Americans for a number of reasons. Since they come from majority-black countries, they are less psychologically handicapped by the stigma of race. In addition, many arrive with higher levels of education and professional experience. And at first, they encounter less discrimination.

"You need a philosophical discussion about what are the aims of affirmative action,'' Professor Waters continued. I would be tempted to ask where she has been, but then she's been at Harvard. Has Harvard really not had such a discussion, or has she simply been unaware of it? In any event, here's her dramatic philosophical contribution:

If it's about getting black faces at Harvard, then you're doing fine. If it's about making up for 200 to 500 years of slavery in this country and its aftermath, then you're not doing well. And if it's about having diversity that includes African-Americans from the South or from inner-city high schools, then you're not doing well, either.

But maybe there are seeds of progress in that surprise. Maybe some among the preferentialists will finally stumble upon the perception, trying so hard now to sprout through the layers of rhetorical muck that have been so thickly spread for the past generation, that race is not a valid or even reliable proxy for diversity.

Roger Clegg has an interesting article in NRO celebrating the first anniversary of the Grutter decision. Well, not exactly celebrating it, but at least noting that after a year things aren't as bad as we feared they would be and that there are even some grounds for guarded optimism.

Along the way he makes a nice point about preferentialists struggling mightily to hold on to an image of themselves as the good guys.

Their insistence on racial balance, and their recoiling from its absence, have at the end of the day only weak rational explanations, and so must also reflect something psychological. For them there is a deep-seated appeal, to both their social aesthetics and their social-engineering instinct, to classrooms that all look like America.

Or perhaps it is a mixture of atavism and nostalgia: A desire to be, or pretend to be, Atticus Finch or Thurgood Marshall. The fight against Jim Crow was a moment of glory, and who can blame people for wanting to re-enact it? We have Civil War re-enactors, and Civil Rights re-enactors. The former are mostly harmless; the latter are mostly not.

I have posted before (here and here) on the problem of achieving "diversity" at the over-achieving Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax County, Virginia. For a more extensive discussion of that interesting school, take a look here.

[I have just posted my first entry on the "Working Group" section of the new Right on Race blog. Although I reproduce that post (or most of it) below, you may want to check over there after a while in case it receives any Comments. In any event, you'll want to check that blog regularly.]

What do admissions officers do when they "consider race" (as "only one of many factors," of course)? Exactly how do they consider it? When push comes to admit, what does "considering race" really mean?

Gratz invalidated rigid point bonuses, but are there any limits to the leeway allowed by Grutter (aside, I mean, from the recommendation to consider non-preferential methods of boosting "diversity")? Is there any bar to Michigan et. al., unleashed by Grutter, giving more consideration to race now than they did with bonus points?

Take, for example, two hypothetical applicants, one minority and one not. Under the old point system, the minority candidate was boosted with a gift of 20 points, but (presumably) he or she would still not have been admitted if the non-minority applicant wound up with more points. But under the no-points-but-one-of-many-factors system approved by the Supremes, couldn't that minority applicant now be admitted? That is, couldn't the admissions committee take a look at the two candidates, recognize that under the old system even the 20 point bonus would not have been sufficient to catapult the minority candidate ahead of the other, but, "considering race," admit him or her now anyway?

One under-appreciated benefit of the 20 point bonus may turn out to be that it was only 20 points.

UPDATE

See Roger Clegg's reply here.

I've been making a good bit of fun of San Francisco during and since our recent visit there. (And why shouldn't I? The little south Alabama town where I grew up had much more diversity [note the absence of quote marks] of opinion than, apparently the entire swath of California that stretches from Mendocino to Sacramento to Carmel. And yes, San Francisco, Berkeley, and Palo Alto, that includes you.)

But it's not fair of me to say that the whole region is of one mind. Helene and I did spend a little time with a delightful fellow, Rick Palmer, who doesn't fit the San Francisco mold. Of course it's no accident, as we conspiracy theorists say, that Rick is a Discriminations reader, which is in fact how we met him (and how we met Joanne Jacobs on previous trips, who also doesn't fit the mold). Indeed, one of the nicest benefits of blogging (it certainly beats the pay) is the opportunity to meet readers and fellow bloggers.

Although Rick seems perfectly happy, he is stranded in a sea of blue and thus needs some company. Accordingly, I encourage you all to stop by from time to time and take a look at his blog, Endnote. His recent post on "Conversations With My Sister" is a nice discussion of, and analysis of, the sort of conversations we've all had with family members or close friends who look at and listen to the world through the eyes of the New York Times and the ears of NPR.

After that, scroll down a post or two and look at his truly eloquent picture (with pictures) of Memorial Day on the Presidio.

ADDENDUM

Well, now I'm feeling a little guilty. I think all of us, Reds and Blues alike (I know that at least some Blues lurk here, and I encourage others to do so and even speak up) ... all of us need to fight against the tendency to stereotype and even demonize the other side. Thus I should have said that although the Greater Bay Area (that "swath" I described above) does seem to be strikingly of one mind, those minds can be quite sharp and some of the people to whom they are attached quite nice. I had a nice visit last June with one of them, Andy Lazarus, who does speak up quite effectively in comments here, and I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to see him this time. Alas, he has a day job.

Joanne Jacobs discusses a movement afoot in San Francisco (where else?) to allow non-citizen parents of public school students (including illegal aliens) to vote in school elections.

But this seems awfully short-sighted and parochial, even Bay-centric. Why not embrace true universalism and extend the franchise to non-residents as well? Why should all those who, through no fault of our own, are forced to live elsewhere be excluded from participating in the affairs of this ostensibly welcoming city? If it were felt necessary to hold the numbers down, perhaps this extended non-resident franchise could be limited to those who are not citizens and hence who (presumably) are not already voting elsewhere.

Tom Wood, one of the co-authors of California's Proposition 209, has started an important new blog, Right on Race, to accompany his indispensible mailing list, Americans Against Discrimination and Preferences.

Reader Bruce Sandys sends word of an incredible howler in the Detroit News.

The headline of a Sunday article boldly proclaims, "Poll Suggests Slim Majority of Michiganders Favors Anti-Affirmative Action Proposal," referring to the effort to place a Proposition 209-like ban on racial preferences on the ballot in Michigan.

After several long quotes from preferentialists, however, the article reports:

But a January poll suggests a slim majority of Michigan voters support a ban on affirmative action in admissions and state hiring. A Detroit News poll conducted Jan. 7-12 of 400 registered voters found 64 percent of respondents favored a ban on affirmative action; 23 percent were opposed.

UPDATE

See this important discussion of polling results in Michigan, which demonstrates the mendacity of organizations supporting preferences.

Loyal Reader Linda Seebach has a superb column in the Rocky Mountain News about the notorious diversity-indoctrination game known as "Brown Eyes, Blue Eyes."

Read it. It'll make your eyes water.

Deception?

According to Dick Polman's front page review of Bill Clinton's book and appearance on 60 Minutes ("On TV, Clinton Evokes '90s Pain and Glory"), Clinton reminds us of "the relative innocence of the 1990s" when "a presidential deception was about sex."

Unless I misread, Polman is not so subtly implying that our current president's deception is not so innocent. I'm just passing through Philadelphia, so I might have missed it. Perhaps the Inquirer itself, or Dick Polman in an earlier interpretive news story, might have provided some evidence to support the accusation that President Bush has lied to the American people. But there was certainly no such evidence in Polman's article today, and indeed I am not aware of any elsewhere.

I am of course aware that some Democrats have accused the president of lying about Iraq, but I'm sure that unsubstantiated partisan accusations never find their way into your news articles. So, where is the evidence?

UPDATE

Dick Polman has responded by email, pointing out that he never said Bush lied; that he, like many other well-informed journalists, has reported that "the administration has engaged in deceptive claims about Iraq"; that the facts are too numerous for him to mention; and that I wouldn't believe them anyway.

I have just sent the following to him in reply:

I am of course aware that some administration claims (echoing claims of the Clinton administration and others) about Iraq have proven not to have been accurate. I am not aware of convincing evidence that such claims were "deceptive." I do admit, however, that the distinction you attempt to draw between deception and lying does elude me, especially since almost everyone now recognizes that Clinton lied and you clearly imply that the only difference between Clintonian and Bushian deception/lying/misrepresentation/fibbing/whatever is that the former concerned relatively trivial matters of a personal nature.

In an editorial this morning on "Guns and the Gipper," the New York Times claims that criminals favored assault weapons.

A decade ago, when the proposal to create a federal ban on military-style assault weapons was teetering between Congressional passage and defeat, Mr. Reagan personally lobbied Republican House members to take what he called the "absolutely necessary" step of outlawing the bullet-spraying semiautomatic guns favored by criminals.

The most extreme claim I could find after an admittedly brief search was from the anti-gun Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, which wrote that in 1994 "assault weapons accounted for more than 17% of fatal shootings of police." Another group puts that number at "roughly ten percent." Aside from police homicides, here's what that latter group found:

Assault weapons are not the weapons of choice among drug dealers, gang members or criminals in general. Assault weapons are used in about one-fifth of one percent (.20%) of all violent crimes and about one percent in gun crimes.... [R]ifles of any type are involved in three to four percent of all homicides....

There are close to 4 million assault weapons in the U.S., which amounts to roughly 1.7% of the total gun stock.

If assault weapons are so rarely used in crime, why all the hoopla when certain military-style-semi-automatic weapons were banned by the Crime Control Act of 1994? A Washington Post editorial (September 15, 1994) summed it up best:

No one should have any illusions about what was accomplished (by the ban). Assault weapons play a part in only a small percentage of crime. The provision is mainly symbolic; its virtue will be if it turns out to be, as hoped, a stepping stone to broader gun control.

Less than four percent of all homicides in the United States involve any type of rifle. No more than .8% of homicides are perpetrated with rifles using military calibers. (And not all rifles using such calibers are usually considered "assault weapons.") Overall, the number of persons killed with rifles of any type in 1990 was lower than the number in any year in the 1980s.

summarizes the findings of forty-seven such studies, indicating that less than 2% of crime guns were assault weapons (the median was about 1.8%). According to Bureau of Justice Statistics, (Criminal Victimization in the United States, 1993, May 1996) offenders were armed with a firearm in 10% of all violent crimes. That would mean less than .20% (one-fifth of one percent or 1 in 500) of violent crime offenders used an assault weapon(1.8% X .10% = .018%).

"If Samuel P. Huntington's new book is right," Paul Starr writes in his recent New Republic review (subscribers only) of Huntington's WHO WE ARE: THE CHALLENGES TO AMERICA'S NATIONAL IDENTITY, "the United States is at grave risk of cracking apart."

That may be true, but it also appears that merely considering the possibility that Huntington may be right has pushed Starr himself to the edge of cracking up. To his credit, Starr tries to be fair, but he simply can't restrain his invective. He writes that "[t]his book is not an intemperate rant.... [I]t is always interesting and often insightful." But (you knew there would be a "but")...

But it is also distorted in its judgments, exaggerated in its fears, and disingenuous about its intentions. It is the work of a serious man gone seriously wrong.

I do not write here to defend Huntington's book. First, I haven't read it. More importantly, I probably disagree with it, which is to say that I actually agree with some of Starr's criticism. According to this and other reviews, Huntington argues that our national identity is rooted fundamentally in a rapidly disappearing cultural homogeneity. His "central theme," as Starr puts it, is that "Anglo Protestantism is the 'core' of American national identity." Huntington rejects the arguments of those who believe that "America is defined solely by a set of principles, the American Creed." "A creed alone," he says, "does not a nation make."

I don't know about "solely," but I do believe that "a set of principles" -- call them the American Creed -- lie much closer to the core of American identity than English ethnicity and religion. But (and you probably suspected this "but" was coming as well) it is precisely because of my belief in the fundamental, identity-providing nature of those core principles that I ultimately disagree with Starr as much as I do with Huntington. (That sentence is interestingly ambiguous: I both believe in those core principles myself, and I also believe that they are core principles, a fact [if it is a fact] independent of my personal belief in them).

Starr's views are interesting, I think, because they represent what may be the prevailing view among liberals today, which should not be surprising inasmuch as Starr is co-editor of The American Prospect. Consider the following:

[Huntington's] attack on the whole panoply of policies aimed at encouraging greater social inclusiveness--such as affirmative action and changes in school curricula to reflect the contributions of African Americans and other minorities--is based on the premise that these policies undermine national identity and loyalty. But social and cultural exclusion is far more likely to have that effect.

For many people "diversity," "inclusion," even proportional representation have become the essence of a new sense of fairness, a new principle, if you will, that they find preferable to the old principle of non-discrimination, but it is not clear that Starr agrees with them. At least here, "diversity" is justified on much more pragmatic than principled grounds. Thus:

In the recent University of Michigan affirmative-action case, the Supreme Court received amici briefs from a variety of groups, including military officers, saying that affirmative action was necessary to make their institutions work because without it their leadership would not enjoy legitimacy. Diversity, these officers were saying, strengthens patriotism.

Indeed, Starr not only disagrees that Hispanics and other immigrants are a threat to the cohesiveness of American culture; he also maintains that they share our traditional "civic ideals."

America's cultural integrity is scarcely in jeopardy. From one end of the country to the other, Americans shop at the same stores, listen to the same music, follow the same sports, read about and watch the same celebrities--and largely honor the same ideals.

Starr doesn't confront this problem. Instead, he falls back on another common pragmatic argument. "Huntington's vision of America," Starr writes, meaning among other things his rejection of "special privileges" based on race and ethnicity, "would be deeply divisive."

Does Starr not see that the state's playing favorites among races and ethnic groups is also, among other bad things, "deeply divisive"? In fact, I believe it is much more divisive than holding all groups and individuals to the same standards regardless of their race.

The pragmatic argument in favor of Starr's position, in short, is as weak as the principled argument against it is strong.

Of course, anyone for whom an absence of divisiveness is the highest virtue would have had a hard time supporting the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Thus perhaps Starr, in supporting racial prefernce and thereby rejecting the non-discriminatory principle embedded in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, is only being consistent.