http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/ en Copyright 2010 Thu, 02 Sep 2010 15:59:21 -0500 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss By Russell K. Nieli On average black students do much worse on the SAT and many other standardized tests than whites. While encouraging progress was made in the 1970s and early 1980s in improving black SAT scores and reducing the black/white test score gap, progress in this direction came to a halt by the early 1990s, and today the gap stands pretty much where it was twenty years ago. Whereas whites and Asians today average a little over 500 on the math and reading portions of the SAT, blacks score only a little over 400 -- in statistical metric a gap of a full standard deviation. Only about one in six blacks does as well on the SAT as the average white or Asian. This state of affairs is well known uncomfortable though it may be to bring up in public. Less well known is what in the scholarly literature is called "the underperformance problem." Once in college blacks with the same entering SAT scores as whites and Asians earn substantially lower grades over their college careers and wind up with substantially lower class rankings. This gap in grade performance, moreover, is not reduced by adding high school grades or socio-economic status to the criteria for matching students. Blacks equally matched with whites or Asians in terms of their entering scholastic credentials and socio-economic backgrounds simply do not perform as well as their Asian and white counterparts in college. And the degree of underperformance is often very substantial. This is contrary to what many people have been led to believe. Standardized tests are "culturally biased," it is said, and do not fairly indicate the abilities or promise of racial minorities growing up outside the dominant white, middle-class, Anglo-Saxon culture. Often this claim is bolstered by reciting items on long outdated verbal tests asking for the meaning of words like "regatta" or "cotillion" that only upper-class whites are likely to know. The implication is usually that those from minority cultures will do better in college in terms of grades than their test scores would predict. The "cultural bias" argument, however, is not only questionable on its face -- since the clearly non-Anglo Saxon Asians do better than whites on most standardized tests of mathematical abilities including the SAT, while the equally non-Anglo Saxon Ashkenazic Jews outperform everyone else on tests of English verbal ability -- but fails to account for the fact that in terms of grade performance blacks in college consistently do worse, not better, than their standardized test scores would predict. Standardized tests such as the SAT and ACT overpredict, not underpredict, how well blacks will do in college, and in this sense the tests are predictively biased in favor of blacks, not against them.]]> http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/09/the_underperformance_problem.html http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/09/the_underperformance_problem.html Thu, 02 Sep 2010 15:59:21 -0500 By J. M. Anderson Dear Assistant Professor: Congratulations on your new job! Whether you're a visiting professor or on the tenure-track, consider yourself among of the lucky. As someone who ran the academic treadmill for eight years---I taught at a community college, at two four-year liberal arts colleges, and at a state university until I landed a permanent position at a private university, where I am also Director of General Studies---I can appreciate your accomplishment more than most. Like many in the profession, I went to graduate school bushy-eyed and idealistic (a real-life Mr. Smith goes to Washington) so that I could become a professor and continue thinking about important questions. I wanted to inspire others to think about big ideas and to experience the transformative power of liberal education, as my professors had done for me. Imagine my disappointment when I discovered that teaching is not that important. It won't get you a job, and it certainly won't get you tenure or promoted, even at most so-called "teaching colleges." Chances are that it will not be as intellectually stimulating as you expect, and that after doing it for a few years you will become frustrated if not disillusioned or burnt out. Most college students believe that education is an entitlement and only care about grades and getting a degree. They are indifferent to courses that don't bear on their majors or won't help them get a job or into graduate or professional school. Having been coddled by parents at home and by teachers in grade school and high school, they are demanding, think they have a right to your total attention, and believe that you must always be there for them. Most of your colleagues will see undergraduate teaching as a burden to escape from whenever possible, but one that must be endured because it's their bread and butter, their meal ticket to do research, which is what they really care about. Research leads to publications, and publications to tenure and promotion and to advancement and recognition in the profession. No one ever gets rich or famous being a teacher. So they exploit the system and resent their students for not taking their courses seriously and interfering with their work. No college or university today, let alone any department, would proclaim what the University of Chicago proudly proclaimed at the beginning of last century: "We come to teach." Professors who come to teach today do so at their peril. Unfortunately academics don't seem to care how this attitude affects undergraduate teaching and liberal education as a whole. It was, I think, William James who first warned about its corrosive effect more than a hundred years ago. In his essay, "The PhD Octopus," James describes how a brilliant student of Philosophy in the Harvard Graduate School took a job as a teacher of English Literature at a sister-college. When the governors of the college discovered that he didn't have his PhD, he was told that he must get the degree or the appointment would be revoked. The quality of the man and his ability to teach literature meant nothing to the school; the PhD meant everything. The college wanted to see those three magical letters behind the young professor's name. James understood that the PhD, relatively new in his day, was created to stimulate original research and scholarship proper; but he also understood that the fetish for this "sacred appendage" was a "Mandarin disease" that would lead to "academic snobbery" in the profession. "Will any one pretend that its possessor will be successful as a teacher?" The whole thing, he adds, "is a sham, a bauble, a dodge whereby to decorate the catalogues of schools and colleges."]]> http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/08/an_open_letter_to_new_professo.html http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/08/an_open_letter_to_new_professo.html Mon, 23 Aug 2010 14:28:48 -0500 By Jackson Toby In his recent speech at the University of Texas in Austin, President Obama expressed deep unhappiness that the United States is no longer the country with the highest percentage of college graduates in the 25 to 34 age bracket. By 2020 he wants us to regain the top position we enjoyed ten years ago before South Korea, Canada, and Russia forged ahead of us. According to the latest report of the College Board, the United States is now 12th among the 36 developed nations whose college graduation rates the Board tabulated. Should the President have been unhappy? Only if he believes that our lower rate of college graduation reflects a lower rate of genuine educational achievement. If President Obama simply wants bragging rights, the United States can become first very quickly. All that is needed is to reduce graduation requirements or to increase grading inflation in college courses. (Or to give a college degree to every baby born in the United States along with a birth certificate.) The issue is what students with a college degree should know, not whether they have a piece of paper in exchange for all the time and money spent on a campus. It is troubling that only 40 per cent of Americans 25 to 44 have college degrees. It is even more troubling that of the 70 per cent of our high school graduates who enroll in college, only 57 per cent graduate within six years. One rather remote possibility - given studies that show how little American college graduates know - is that American colleges are maintaining high standards and that these high standards necessarily produce higher dropout rates and lower rates of college completion than President Obama would like. Unfortunately high standards do not appear to be the explanation. Here is how one reader of the Wall Street Journal reacted to an article reporting the President's call for more American college graduates:]]> http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/08/why_remediation_in_college_doe.html http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/08/why_remediation_in_college_doe.html Thu, 19 Aug 2010 19:53:38 -0500 By Charlotte Allen Only a federal bureaucrat could come up with an oxymoron this laughable: "Feasibility of Including a Volunteer Requirement for Receipt of Federal Education Tax Credits." A "volunteer requirement"? Come again? But that's what the Treasury Department said in a call for comments issued this spring on the idea of making community service--volunteer work for charity--mandatory for college students seeking to qualify for a higher-education tax credit made part of the $800 billion economic stimulus bill that Congress passed in 2009. Fortunately, it turns out grammatical sticklers aren't the only ones who hate the notion of mandatory community service at the post-secondary level. So do many college administrators, who approve of community service and welcome the tax credits that may make their institutions more affordable but adamantly oppose combining the two. The problem is that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 requires the Treasury and Education departments to study the feasibility of forging exactly such a link. The tax credit in question works like this: Students enrolled in college or some other form of post-secondary training can receive a credit for up to 100 percent of tuition, fees, and course materials up to $2,000 plus 25 percent of the next $2,000, for a maximum credit of $2,500 for each of four years of education. For those students who are too poor to pay income taxes, 40 percent of the credit is refundable. There is a phaseout of the credit for students whose adjusted gross income exceeds $80,000 ($160,000 for married couples).]]> http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/08/the_mess_of_mandatory_voluntee.html http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/08/the_mess_of_mandatory_voluntee.html Sun, 15 Aug 2010 21:34:33 -0500 By Stefan Kanfer In full-page newspaper ads, the Kindle displays the first page of an e-book. Its opening is famous: "I am an invisible man." Or is it famous anymore? How many high school seniors---or for that matter college undergraduates---can identify Ralph Ellison's novel? True, the author was an African-American, but he was a male African-American, hence of lesser importance than, say, Maya Angelou or Alice Walker in the PC world of American education. Say the words "invisible man," to most students, and odds are that they'll speak of H. G. Wells's fantasy, or even more likely, that perennial TV favorite, The Invisible Man, a 1933 movie starring Claude Rains in the title role. Or its cinematic sequels, The Invisible Man Returns (1940), The Invisible Woman, (1940), Invisible Agent (1942), The Invisible Man's Revenge (1944) or Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992). This ignorance is part of a general myth, aided by programs like "Mad Men" and such twisted accounts as Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States. According to these shows and books, the 1950's was a decade of American rapacity, sexism, war-mongering, profiteering and mindlessness. In fact, that decade saw a flowering of literary talents that has not been equaled since. J.D. Salinger, Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Philip Roth, John Updike published important books in the 1950's, and in 1952 Ellison put himself on the map with his own Invisible Man, a powerful narrative delivered by a black man who calls himself invisible because he walks unnoticed through the white world. ]]> http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/08/is_this_book_invisible.html http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/08/is_this_book_invisible.html Thu, 12 Aug 2010 11:42:48 -0500 By Charles Schwartz Higher education in America is in financial crisis. In constant dollars, the average cost of tuition and fees at public colleges has risen almost 300 percent since 1980. Our best public research universities, like my own University of California (UC), are wracked with doubt: will they be able to continue their historic role as institutions with a vital public mission, or will they become "privatized," demanding ever higher tuition and therefore inevitably serving a more elite clientele? Let me note some pointed comments by citizens outside the campus. A letter to the editor in the San Francisco Chronicle last March 9th said: "What the public college students (and their parents) in this state must understand is that the days of the taxpayers subsidizing their higher education are over, sad as that may be. ...The costs at all colleges and universities have risen dramatically over the last few years (much higher than the cost-of-living-index). ... Those of us in California who are taxpayers are having a difficult enough time paying our mortgages and for the education of our own children. It simply is not sustainable to expect that there will be free or substantially below-cost education provided on the backs of the state's increasingly dwindling number of taxpayers. ..." A similar complaint is voiced in an article published by the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, July 5, 2010: "As California faces an unprecedented budget crisis, students at California colleges have been asked to pay a greater share of the total cost of their education, most of which is still borne by taxpayers. ...[T]axpayers pay 60-70% of the cost of ... UC students' education, without even counting financial aid."]]> http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/08/who_pays_the_hidden_cost_of_un.html http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/08/who_pays_the_hidden_cost_of_un.html Mon, 09 Aug 2010 03:47:12 -0500 By Ward Connerly More than thirteen years ago the people of California voted to end discrimination and "preferential treatment" on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity and national origin, in the public arenas of contracting, education and employment. The margin of the vote on the ballot initiative (Proposition 209) that enshrined the principle of equal treatment in the California Constitution was not a squeaker; it was a decisive 55%-45% margin. In the years since that vote, most Californians have accepted the verdict of the majority and have adapted to a life of equal treatment without preferences for anyone. That is as it should be in a nation for which the principle of equal treatment is the centerpiece of our civic values system, and for which the "rule of law" is one of our most valued ideals. But, there are some who refuse to take "no" for an answer. Instead, they have used every means at their disposal to bureaucratically circumvent, legally challenge, or flat-out disregard the initiative's simple command of equality. This week the California Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the law, 6-1, in a response to a lawsuit by white contractors against the city of San Francisco. Along the way, the court noted and dismissed various stratagems employed by the city to avoid the clear meaning of the law. ]]> http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/08/by_ward_connerly_more_than.html http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/08/by_ward_connerly_more_than.html Thu, 05 Aug 2010 09:36:55 -0500 By Andrew Kelly This past Monday, the Department of Education proposed "gainful employment" rules that will regulate postsecondary vocational programs, primarily those offered by for-profit colleges, on the basis of their graduates' ability to pay back their federal student loans. Proponents of higher education reform should welcome this move, but not because it targets unscrupulous actors in the for-profit sector. More importantly, the initiative makes a rhetorically significant shift: it places postsecondary institutions and the economic value of the education that they provide at the center of discussions about student loans and college costs. It also adds a new and necessary dimension to the outcome data that the federal government can link directly to individual institutions of higher education. The problem is not, as some critics would have it, that the gainful employment regulations overreach, but that they do not reach far enough. The current proposal singles out one set of postsecondary institutions for intense scrutiny and leaves the rest to operate as they have, feeding on federal loan dollars without having to show much in return, other than keeping their two or three-year default rate under a certain threshold. For these institutions, students who carry excessive debt and/or default after a three-year window are mainly the government's problem, not theirs. As a result, prospective students looking to choose a college do not have access to even the most basic facts about how their future income or debt burden may vary depending on the institution that they choose. To change that, federal and state governments should embark on a broader effort to link students' post-graduation success to the institutions that they attend, to make that information public and accessible, and to attach institution-level sanctions and rewards to performance on these indicators. In short, policymakers should take the pro-accountability ideas underlying "gainful employment" and super-size them. Extending the effort to cover all colleges and universities that receive federal student loans would provide consumers with much-needed information about institutional quality and return on investment. The question is whether the latest foray into "gainful employment" regulations will remain a shortsighted attempt to bring greater accountability to one small sector of the postsecondary world. If the past is a guide, it could prove to be the proverbial camel's nose under the tent flap that accountability proponents have been looking for. ]]> http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/08/post_65.html http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/08/post_65.html Sun, 01 Aug 2010 11:20:22 -0500 By Daphne Patai About fifty undergraduates from around the country gathered outside of Philadelphia, on the campus of Bryn Mawr College, between July 15 and 17th, to discuss the struggle for free speech on American campuses. The event was the third annual Campus Freedom Network (CFN) conference organized by FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. Teaching as I do at the University of Massachusetts flagship campus in Amherst, affectionately known by some as the People's Republic of Amherst, I considered it a rare treat to encounter in one place so many impassioned and curious young people eager to defend their First Amendment rights against the encroachment of overzealous college administrators and others. Horror stories were recounted (about which more anon), but laughter, outrage, smart comebacks, and strategizing were in ample supply. Since FIRE's founding in 1999 by Alan Charles Kors and Harvey A. Silverglate, co-authors of the 1998 book The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America's Campuses, the non-partisan non-profit organization has battled speech codes and other assaults on First Amendment rights on campuses from coast to coast. More interested in suasion than in litigation (which, when necessary, is done by FIRE's many lawyer friends and allies), FIRE is by now a well-established outfit with headquarters in Philadelphia, a satellite office in Manhattan, and a total staff of 17. It has been remarkably successful in bringing sunlight and good sense to blinkered administrators, as can readily be attested by a glance at its website, which archives the organization's activities, including its blog, The Torch, its constantly growing list of schools whose speech codes and policies FIRE has rigorously analyzed and classified, and offers free downloads of its five short "Guides to Student Rights on Campus" -- each book focusing on one crucial area: free speech, religious freedom, due process, student fees, and first-year orientation/thought reform efforts on campus]]> http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/07/how_to_fight_for_free_speech_o.html http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/07/how_to_fight_for_free_speech_o.html Wed, 28 Jul 2010 14:00:51 -0500 By Herbert I. London This is the slightly edited introduction to the author's new collection of essays, Decline and Revival in Higher Education ( Transaction Publishers ). Dr. London is president of the Hudson Institute, one of the founders of the National Association of Scholars, and the former John M. Olin Professor of the Humanities at New York University. When I entered Columbia College in 1956, the college had a deep commitment to liberal opinion. Father and son Van Doren (Mark and Charles), the recently appointed Dan Bell, my adviser named Sam Huntington, the legendary Lionel Trilling, and a brilliant lecturer named Amitai Etzioni graced the campus and, more or less, leaned left at the time, albeit over the years several had their political orientation change. Yet there was one constant: These professors eschewed orthodoxies, notwithstanding the fact that in a poll of faculty members Adlai Stevenson won the 1956 presidential sweepstakes hands down. Different views were welcome. Controversy was invited. "Political correctness" had not yet entered the academic vocabulary, nor had it insinuated itself into debate and chastened nonconformists. I was intoxicated by the sheer variety of thought. For me this smorgasbord of ideas had delectable morsels at each setting. It was at some moment in my senior year that I became enchanted with the idea of an academic career.]]> http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/07/the_sad_transformation_of_the.html http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/07/the_sad_transformation_of_the.html Mon, 26 Jul 2010 14:50:48 -0500 By Charlotte Allen The letter, dated June 17 and addressed to U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, made serious allegations of wrongdoing in the already controversial for-profit education sector: that representatives of career colleges were trolling for students at homeless shelters, loading education debt onto a problem-beset population with poor prospects for academic success in order to funnel federal loan funds into for-profit coffers. Now it turns out that the letter was orchestrated by, and its very language prepared by a Dallas woman, Johnette McConnell Early, who was being paid to investigate for-profit colleges by an investment firm that might be hoping to turn its own profits by short-selling the colleges' securities. Signed by Neil J. Donovan, president of the National Coalition for the Homeless, and 19 administrators of homeless shelters across the country, many of them church-affiliated, the June 17 letter contained strong language essentially urging Duncan to tighten its regulation of the for-profit sector (the department has been considering severe restrictions on federal loans to career-college students that would peg total debt to the average entry-level earnings in the job for which the students are training). The wording of the letter was ominous: It described recruiting at shelters as "a growing problem." It continued: "For-profit trade schools and career colleges are systematically preying on our clients," the letter continued, accusing the schools of "predatory conduct" in enticing shelter residents to run up un-repayable debt that ruined their credit ratings, turned off potential employers, and rendered the defaulting debtors ineligible for further federal student aid. The 20 signers pledged their "unequivocal support" for heavier government regulation of career colleges. Exactly one week later, on June 24, the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee held the first of several planned hearings on the for-profit sector, which receives 23 percent of federal student loan funds although it enrolls only 10 percent of the nation's college students, and has been marked by high levels of loan default and relatively low graduation rates. The letter to Duncan from the shelter administrators, which circulated widely and was posted on the PBS show Frontline's website, seemed yet more red meat for a Democratic Congress and presidential administration that already seems to regard with suspicion the idea of making a profit from higher education.]]> http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/07/the_shortselling_of_forprofit.html http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/07/the_shortselling_of_forprofit.html Thu, 22 Jul 2010 15:43:47 -0500 By Anthony Paletta In the epilogue of a new compendium volume, Mark Bousquet notes that, "In July 2007, the American Sociological Association reported that one-third of its members felt their academic freedoms were threatened, a significantly higher figure than the one-fifth ratio recorded during the McCarthy years." Sounds dire, doesn't it? Well not if you've spent the prior 500 pages learning just how fantastical the contributors' conceptions of academic freedom are. The book is Academic Repression: Reflections from the Academic Industrial Complex, edited by Anthony J. Nocella, II, Steven Best, and Peter McLaren. It's a bad sign when the appearance of Bill Ayers, Ward Churchill, and Howard Zinn as contributors on a book cover leaves one still unprepared for how unfathomable its premises are. Academic Repression purports to demonstrate how corporatization and right-wing assaults have marginalized academic freedom and genuine liberal thinking at our universities. Really? It's not at all unusual to see hand-wringing from the left over the state of academic freedom; it is unusual to see an essay collection that "asks whether the concept of academic freedom still exists at all in the American University system"(itals mine). ]]> http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/07/by_anthony_paletta_in_the.html http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/07/by_anthony_paletta_in_the.html Book Reviews Free Speech Politics Mon, 19 Jul 2010 15:06:50 -0500 By Frank J. Macchiarola Tales of the modern-day college president were reported by the Washington Post in a July 12th article, "College Presidents Taste Life Outside Their Offices," by James Johnson and Daniel de Vise. The president, we were told, is more accessible and easy to talk to, less formal and willing to do things with students unheard of just a few years ago, including joining in a student snowball fight on campus. Many of them have transformed themselves from authority figures to buddies and big siblings as they show their human side. It is something that many parents and students have come to expect as they pony up tuitions that continue to grow even as their resources do not. The presidents want to show their respective publics that they know their students and their needs and will make a great effort to satisfy them. The trend toward more effective marketing of the campus leader comes at the same time that colleges are offering greater creature comforts to their students - health clubs, new labs and classroom buildings, better appointed living quarters and increasing variety in campus dining. Thus, the accessible college president is like the concierge in a first-class vacation resort. In addition, the college can make contacts for students off campus - internships, study abroad programs, joint degree programs, new majors, distance learning and enhanced placement services for graduates. It strives to be "the college for all seasons." Although the article did not suggest it, the reality is that colleges are falling in line with other institutions in a transformation of major parts of American culture. They are putting extraordinary emphasis on what the consumer would like to have. In some significant ways, the institutions are becoming what the market expects of them. Their actual mission statement begins to describe what will sell. These institutions surrender the sense of self and the understanding of core values that traditionally represented who they were and what they were doing. In many respects they believe that their survival requires them to cast their lot with the future rather than the old past. In this way the accessible, genial, folksy college president is a beloved figure. In many respects, the new college president represents an improvement over the indifferent and aloof administrator. But if all we have is a change in style then we are not offered much in terms of what really matters. Indeed, the cost of satisfying more of what the public wants rather than what it needs is, in the long run, unsustainable. In the universities, these creature comforts mean higher tuitions and increased student debt to meet the costs of attendance. There is a real limit to this kind of accommodation as tuitions and fees consistently exceed cost of living indicators for other needs as the cost-benefit analysis piles up heaps of benefits, some of them unnecessary. A day of reckoning may soon be at hand.]]> http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/07/your_college_president_is_your.html http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/07/your_college_president_is_your.html Miscellaneous Professors and Tenure Thu, 15 Jul 2010 15:41:28 -0500 By Russell K. Nieli When college presidents and academic administrators pay their usual obeisance to "diversity" you know they are talking first and foremost about race. More specifically, they are talking about blacks. A diverse college campus is understood as one that has a student body that -- at a minimum -- is 5 to 7 percent black (i.e., equivalent to roughly half the proportion of blacks in the general population). A college or university that is only one, two, or three percent black would not be considered "diverse" by college administrators regardless of how demographically diverse its student body might be in other ways. The blacks in question need not be African Americans -- indeed at many of the most competitive colleges today, including many Ivy League schools, an estimated 40-50 percent of those categorized as black are Afro-Caribbean or African immigrants, or the children of such immigrants. As a secondary meaning "diversity" can also encompass Hispanics, who together with blacks are often subsumed by college administrators and admissions officers under the single race category "underrepresented minorities." Most colleges and universities seeking "diversity" seek a similar proportion of Hispanics in their student body as blacks (since blacks and Hispanics are about equal in number in the general population), though meeting the black diversity goal usually has a much higher priority than meeting the Hispanic one. Asians, unlike blacks and Hispanics, receive no boost in admissions. Indeed, the opposite is often the case, as the quota-like mentality that leads college administrators to conclude they may have "too many" Asians. Despite the much lower number of Asians in the general high-school population, high-achieving Asian students -- those, for instance, with SAT scores in the high 700s -- are much more numerous than comparably high-achieving blacks and Hispanics, often by a factor of ten or more. Thinking as they do in racial balancing and racial quota terms, college admissions officers at the most competitive institutions almost always set the bar for admitting Asians far above that for Hispanics and even farther above that for admitting blacks. ]]> http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/07/how_diversity_punishes_asians.html http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/07/how_diversity_punishes_asians.html Diversity Quotas and Preferences Mon, 12 Jul 2010 17:10:40 -0500 By Donald A. Downs We now have a long and fascinating report by the campus police review board on last fall's disruptive protests at the University of California, Berkeley. The 128-page document, entitled "November 20, 2009: Review, Reflection, and Recommendations," released in mid-June, is the product of months of yeoman work garnering volumes of evidence. It chronicles and evaluates responses to the events sparked by resentment over tuition increases and cutbacks in the wake of California's financial debacle. Berkeley deserves credit for thoroughly investigating the situation. And the report is worth reading for many reasons, one of which is because it casts light on a dilemma that Berkeley and many other schools have been unable to resolve since the famous Berkeley "Free Speech Movement" of 1964 launched decades of illegal student protest: how to balance students' passions for social justice (and sometimes other motives) with the rule of law. ]]> http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/07/what_happened_at_berkeley_in_n.html http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/07/what_happened_at_berkeley_in_n.html Costs and Tuition Politics Thu, 08 Jul 2010 01:21:27 -0500