Thank Goodness For Sociologists (And Their Sycophantic Reporters)

Thank goodness for sociologists. Without them, who would gather the evidence, as these intrepid researchers assembled at the convention of the American Sociological Association did, demonstrating that minority students who attend a selective campus of the University of California are more likely to have attended an academically strong high school than an academically weak one. (On the other hand, who else but a sociologist would state that the research culminating in this conclusion “was designed to counter the ‘blaming the victim’ mentality in which he said people assume black enrollment declines suggest a lack of merit by black students”?)

[New York University Assistant Professor of Education Robert T.] Teranishi’s research focuses on California high schools and the relationship between attending high schools with certain characteristics and enrolling at a University of California campus. He started by noting that while California is famous for its ethnic and racial diversity (in statewide totals), 88 percent of high schools have a racial majority of one group. Of those schools, he said, 44.7 percent have a white majority, while 43.4 percent have a black or Latino majority. But among new University of California students, 65.3 percent come from white majority schools and only 21.7 percent come from black or Latino majority schools.

From there, Teranishi presented data showing educational inequities in the different kinds of schools, such as studies showing that the greater the proportion of black and Latino students in a high school, the fewer Advanced Placement courses that are likely to be offered.

The cumulative impact of these inequities is such that minority students who are admitted to top University of California campuses are more likely to have attended white majority schools than other schools. At Berkeley, for example, 48.9 percent of the underrepresented minority students admitted attended white majority high schools, while 33.6 percent attended high schools that were black or Latino majority and 17.5 percent attended high schools without a racial majority. At the University of California at San Diego, the percentage of new black and Latino students coming from white majority high schools is 52.6 percent.

Teranishi said that such data should shake up people who think that some pure idea of merit is at play in selecting the best students for top colleges. Is it fair to tell black and Latino students, he asked, that to have a good chance at getting into UCLA or Berkeley, “they need to attend a white school”?

No, but it may be fair to tell them that selective campuses require advanced placement classes, and it certainly would seem to be not so much unfair as nonsensical to tell selective campuses that they cannot give admissions preferences to students with stronger academic backgrounds.

Still, insofar as sociologists are the weathervanes of liberal thought, we should pay careful attention to these arguments. How else would we know, for example, that apparently “diversity” has moved beyond it original meaning emphasizing the presence of different points of view, or of groups that are thought to embody different points of view, beyond even its frequent meaning today as simply a synonym for “black,” to a new understanding that “diversity” now means that no identifiable group can be in a majority? Thus California, allegedly “famous for its ethnic and racial diversity,” obviously doesn’t deserve this fame since 88% of its high schools have a majority of one group or another.

Again, thank goodness for sociologists. Without them, we might have to rely on fiction, fantasy, or our own imaginations to come up with arguments like these.

ADDENDUM

I should add (and what better place to add something than in an ADDENDUM?) that this cutting edge sociology was reported by editor Scott Jaschik in InsideHigherEd as activist research of the highest order. Jaschik’s lede:

Advocates for black students have long turned to social scientists for help. Think of Kenneth Clark’s experiments with children and black and white dolls, work that was cited in Brown v. Board of Education. More recently, social scientists were mobilized to file briefs (with some success) on behalf of landmark Supreme Court decisions in 2003 that upheld affirmative action in public college admissions in some circumstances and (without success) in this year’s Supreme Court decision rejecting two school districts’ use of race in school assignments.

With voters and the courts increasingly skeptical of affirmative action in college admissions, scholars gathered at the annual meeting Sunday of the American Sociological Association presented new research designed to shift the debate. The scholars, all supporters of affirmative action, said that they recognized that arguments were being shot down if based only on the lack of diversity that would result from the elimination of affirmative action. If voters are warned that ending affirmative action will result in sharp drops in black and Latino enrollments, voters (or at least white voters) will go ahead and abolish affirmative action, speakers said.

Readers with good memories will recall that I described Jaschik, in Egregious Media Bias At InsideHigherEd, as often sounding like “a shrill shill for ‘diversity.’” As related there, Jaschik offered to coach diversity officers, off the record, on how to argue their case against the critics of racial preferences. I wonder if he coached these sociologists.