More Special Treatment For Those Who Need It Least

[NOTE: ADDENDUM added Feb. 27]

One of the criticisms of affirmative action acknowledged even by many liberals — see, for example, Richard Kahlenberg — is that the preferential treatment it bestows tends to benefit those who need it least. It is hard to imagine a group of minority students less in need of special, career-enhancing assistance than graduate students in STEM fields at Stanford, Caltech, UC Berkeley, and UCLA, but as I discuss in an essay on Minding The Campus, “‘Role-Model’ Affirmative Action: Not Needed, Not Legal,” those institutions have received a $2.2 million grant from the National Science Foundation to provide special programs for them and eventually minority STEM students at other institutions.

ADDENDUM

As edited, the following paragraph in my essay linked above is left making an assertion that is unsupported:

An unusually thin role-model justification was offered by Jeremy Brown, a Ph.D. student in geophysics at Stanford and one of the four Alliance-benefitting students featured in a Berkeley News Center article. Brown is planning a career in energy exploration in the private sector, but he claims that “it would have made a big difference if I’d had professors who were minorities…”

The problem is that there is nothing at all unusual, much less “unusually thin,” about Brown’s statement that having a minority role model along the way might have made a difference. In the Berkeley News Center article (unlinked in the paragraph as it appears), Brown makes the implausible claim that having minority mentors might have led him to choose an academic career, but, not having any, he chose to go into private industry, not heretofore known as hosting a critical mass of black geophysicists.

Here is my pre-edited paragraph:

An unusually thin role model justification was offered by Jeremy Brown, a Ph.D. student in geophysics at Stanford and one of the four Alliance-benefitting students featured in a Berkeley News Center article. Brown is planning a career in energy exploration in the private sector, but he claims that “it would have made a big difference if I’d had professors who were minorities, and if I’d had a mentor as an undergrad, or even in high school, to point me toward an academic profession, and that I’d seen someone in that profession who was a minority.” Presumably Brown’s research has uncovered a previously unseen critical mass of black geophysicists in private industry.