Getting around bans on racial preferences
Betsy's Page
Heather MacDonald takes an in depth look at all the ways that California has twisted and turned to get around obeying the measure passed 10 years ago to ban racial preferences in university admissions.
<<< In 1996, Californians voted to ban race and gender preferences in government and education. Ten years later, the chancellor of the state-funded University of California at Berkeley, Robert Birgeneau, announced a new Vice Chancellorship for Equity and Inclusion, charged with making Berkeley more “inclusive” and “less hostile” to “underrepresented minority . . . groups.” This move is just the latest expression of the University of California’s unrelenting resistance to the 1996 voter initiative, in every way possible short of patent violation. Stasi apparatchiks disappeared more meekly after the Soviet Empire’s collapse than California’s race commissars have retreated after voters tried to oust their preference regime.
The last decade in California shows the power, and the limitations, of the crusade for a colorblind America led by Ward Connerly, architect of the 1996 anti-preference initiative. Without a doubt, Proposition 209, as that measure is called, has cut the use of race quotas in the Golden State’s government. But it has also exposed the contempt of the elites, above all in education, for the popular will. “Diversity”—meaning socially engineered racial proportionality—is now the only official ideology of the education behemoth, and California shows what happens when that ideology comes into conflict with the law. >>>
They are so eager to manipulate admissions to get the "right" mix of students that they're willing to twist everything around and get rid of any objective standards that do not end up producing the desired result. The minority students who are admitted to places like Berkeley and UCLA who have test scores substantially below their peers are assumed to be ready for the elite schools simply by having come from disadvantaged backgrounds. In other words, coming from a poor background and going to a bad high school trumps high SAT scores. The fact that these students often fall behind and are not ready for the situation they have been admitted to doesn't matter to these diversity police as long as the numbers look right. And if those students fail at Berkeley rather than going to UC Riverside and succeeding, what does that matter? At least Berkeley got better diversity numbers.
Read her article. The details are eye-opening and dismaying. The contempt that the school officials have for the vote of the people in Proposition 209 is palpable. But they are determined and if they can't have racial preferences the old-fashioned way, they're prepared to concoct all sorts of maneuvers to get the racial mix they desire.
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