Click on WORD or PDF for full content
The Islamic terror attacks in Paris and CA have crowded out news about campus unrest so perhaps we can spend some time on that subject.
Stuart Taylor has written a good examination of the detritus left on college campuses by racial admissions preferences. This was published in American Spectator November 23th. Yes, even during this hiatus Pickerhead has been paying attention.
Why are some of the most privileged students in the nation plunging into a racial grievance culture and upending their campuses as though oppressed by Halloween costumes they don’t approve, imagined racial slights, portraits of Woodrow Wilson, a tiny handful of real racial epithets, and the like?
The reasons are of course multifaceted. But one deserves far more attention than it has gotten: Many or most of the African-American student protesters really are victims — but not of old-fashioned racism.
Most are, rather, victims of the very large admissions preferences that set up racial-minority students for academic struggle at the selective universities that have cynically misled them into thinking they are well qualified to compete with classmates who are, in fact, far stronger academically.
The reality is that most good black and Hispanic students, who would be academically competitive at many selective schools, are not competitive at the more selective schools that they attend.
That’s why it takes very large racial preferences to get them admitted. An inevitable result is that many black and (to a lesser extent) Hispanic students cannot keep up with better-prepared classmates and rank low in their classes no matter how hard they work.
Studies show that this academic “mismatch effect” forces them to drop science and other challenging courses; to move into soft, easily graded, courses disproportionately populated by other preferentially admitted students; and to abandon career hopes such as engineering and pre-med. Many lose intellectual self-confidence and become unhappy even if they avoid flunking out.
This depresses black performance at virtually all selective schools because of what experts call the cascade effect. Here’s how it works, as Richard Sander and I demonstrated in a 2012 book, Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It: …
Some of the legal background for the diversity disaster is provided in a National Review OpEd.
In Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265 (1978), Justice Lewis F. Powell introduced into constitutional law the well-intentioned canard that race-based affirmative action is permissible in higher education — despite race being a “suspect classification” under the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment — because the presumed benefits of a “diverse” student body constitute a “compelling state interest.” This unsubstantiated rationale was based on Powell’s approval of Harvard’s use of race as a “plus factor” in admissions. Explicit quotas would not be tolerated, but more nuanced consideration of race by college and university admissions officers would pass muster if necessary to achieve “a diverse student body.” Thus was the current model of affirmative action in higher education launched and legitimized. In Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003), the Court narrowly affirmed the vitality of Bakke, in a shaky 5-4 decision written by the now-departed Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. …
… Racial preferences in higher-education admissions are a failed social experiment. The current campus unrest throughout the nation is undeniable evidence that “diversity” does not improve the learning environment at colleges and universities. Taylor concludes that racial preferences — and the resulting “mismatch” — go “a long way toward explaining the over-the-top demands now roiling our campuses for still more racial admissions preferences; more preferentially-hired, underqualified professors; more grievance-focused courses and university bureaucrats; more university-sponsored racial enclaves; and more apologies for ‘white privilege.’”
In Fisher II, the Supreme Court will have the opportunity to revisit Grutter, and Bakke. It is time to lay to rest, once and for all, the myth that affirmative action improves higher education. All across the country, we are witnessing the opposite.
If you’ve ever wondered how America’s intellectuals know so much that is not true, Andrew Ferguson’s piece from the Weekly Standard will help you understand. The title is Making It All Up.
One morning in August, the social science reporter for National Public Radio, a man named Shankar Vedantam, sounded a little shellshocked. You couldn’t blame him.
Like so many science writers in the popular press, he is charged with reporting provocative findings from the world of behavioral science: “. . . and researchers were very surprised at what they found. The peer-reviewed study suggests that [dog lovers, redheads, Tea Party members] are much more likely to [wear short sleeves, participate in hockey fights, play contract bridge] than cat lovers, but only if [the barometer is falling, they are slapped lightly upside the head, a picture of Jerry Lewis suddenly appears in their cubicle . . . ].”
I’m just making these up, obviously, but as we shall see, there’s a lot of that going around.
On this August morning Science magazine had published a scandalous article. The subject was the practice of behavioral psychology. Behavioral psychology is a wellspring of modern journalism. It is the source for most of those thrilling studies that keep reporters like Vedantam in business.
Over 270 researchers, working as the Reproducibility Project, had gathered 100 studies from three of the most prestigious journals in the field of social psychology. Then they set about to redo the experiments and see if they could get the same results. Mostly they used the materials and methods the original researchers had used. Direct replications are seldom attempted in the social sciences, even though the ability to repeat an experiment and get the same findings is supposed to be a cornerstone of scientific knowledge. It’s the way to separate real information from flukes and anomalies.
These 100 studies had cleared the highest hurdles that social science puts up. They had been edited, revised, reviewed by panels of peers, revised again, published, widely read, and taken by other social scientists as the starting point for further experiments. Except . . .
The researchers, Vedantam glumly told his NPR audience, “found something very disappointing. Nearly two-thirds of the experiments did not replicate, meaning that scientists repeated these studies but could not obtain the results that were found by the original research team.” …
… For one thing, the “reproducibility crisis” is not unique to the social sciences, and it shouldn’t be a surprise it would touch social psychology too. The widespread failure to replicate findings has afflicted physics, chemistry, geology, and other real sciences. Ten years ago a Stanford researcher named John Ioannidis published a paper called “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.”
“For most study designs and settings,” Ioannidis wrote, “it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true.” He used medical research as an example, and since then most systematic efforts at replication in his field have borne him out. His main criticism involved the misuse of statistics: He pointed out that almost any pile of data, if sifted carefully, could be manipulated to show a result that is “statistically significant.”
Statistical significance is the holy grail of social science research, …
… Publication bias, compounded with statistical weakness, makes a floodtide of false positives. “Much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue,” wrote the editor of the medical journal Lancet not long ago. Following the Reproducibility Project, we now know his guess was probably too low, at least in the behavioral sciences. The literature, continued the editor, is “afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance.”
Behavioral science suffers from these afflictions only more so. Surveys have shown that published studies in social psychology are five times more likely to show positive results—to confirm the experimenters’ hypothesis—than studies in the real sciences.
This raises two possibilities. Either behavioral psychologists are the smartest researchers, and certainly the luckiest, in the history of science—or something is very wrong. …
… Behavioral science has many weaknesses unique to itself. Remember that the point of the discipline is to discover general truths that will be useful in predicting human behavior. More than 70 percent of the world’s published psychology studies are generated in the United States. Two-thirds of them draw their subjects exclusively from the pool of U.S. undergraduates, according to a survey by a Canadian economist named Joseph Henrich and two colleagues. And most of those are students who enroll in psychology classes. White, most of them; middle- or upper-class; college educated, with a taste for social science: not John Q. Public.
This is a problem—again, widely understood, rarely admitted. College kids are irresistible to the social scientist: They come cheap, and hundreds of them are lying around the quad with nothing better to do. …
… Behind the people being experimented upon are the people doing the experimenting, the behavioral scientists themselves. In important ways they are remarkably monochromatic. We don’t need to belabor the point. In a survey of the membership of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, 85 percent of respondents called themselves liberal, 6 percent conservative, 9 percent moderate. Two percent of graduate students and postdocs called themselves conservative. “The field is shifting leftward,” wrote one team of social psychologists (identifying themselves as “one liberal, one centrist, two libertarians, two who reject characterization,” and no conservatives). “And there are hardly any conservative students in the pipeline.” A more recent survey of over 300 members of another group of experimental psychologists found 4 who voted for Mitt Romney. …
… Aping the forms and methods of physical scientists, crusading social scientists are bound to produce a lot of experiments that are quasi-scientific. They will resist replication if only because an experiment is just a one-off, a way to agitate and persuade rather than to discover. Scientists themselves speak of “confirmation bias,” an unnecessary term for a common human truth: We tend to believe what we want to believe. …
… Even before the Reproducibility Project, direct replications failed to find evidence for many other effects that the social psychology literature treats as settled science. “Single-exposure conditioning”—if you’re offered a pen while your favorite music is playing, you’ll like the pen better than one offered while less appealing music plays. The “primacy of warmth effect,” which tells us our perceptions are more favorable to people described as “warm” than to people described as “competent.” The “Romeo and Juliet effect”: Intervention by parents in a child’s romantic relationship only intensifies the feelings of romance. None of these could be directly replicated.
Perhaps most consequentially, replications failed to validate many uses of the Implicit Association Test, which is the most popular research tool in social psychology. Its designers say the test detects unconscious biases, including racial biases, that persistently drive human behavior. Sifting data from the IAT, social scientists tell us that at least 75 percent of white Americans are racist, whether they know it or not, even when they publicly disavow racial bigotry. This implicit racism induces racist behavior as surely as explicit racism. The paper introducing the IAT’s application to racial attitudes has been cited in more than 6,600 studies, according to Google Scholar. The test is commonly used in courts and classrooms across the country.
That the United States is in the grip of an epidemic of implicit racism is simply taken for granted by social psychologists—another settled fact too good to check. Few of them have ever returned to the original data. Those who have done so have discovered that the direct evidence linking IAT results to specific behavior is in fact negligible, with small samples and weak effects that have seldom if ever been replicated. One team of researchers went through the IAT data on racial attitudes and behavior and concluded there wasn’t much evidence either way. …
Almost as a companion piece to Ferguson’s article above, Ricochet published a Media Narrative Chart that helps explain how the media march in lockstep. Here’s how the chart works; If a police officer shoots a black the narrative will be police brutality. No matter what the facts are. And if a black person shoots a cop, the narrative will be “reaction to police brutality. You will see how simple it can be for simpletons with agendas, or as Glenn Reynolds said when looking at media bias, “The media are simply Democrat operatives with bylines.”