From the Orange County Register:
A professor who said he suspects UCLA is cheating to illegally admit black students resigned today from its admissions committee, saying the university refused to provide him the data he needs to investigate his suspicions.
Prof. Tim Groseclose's "Report on Suspected Malfeasance in UCLA Admissions and the Accompanying Cover-Up is available online. Groseclose also attaches letters from three other (nonvoting) committee members, including two student members, that support his view that the university has not been sufficiently willing to allow possibly critical examination of the underlying data.
Naturally, if there's a formal response to Prof. Groseclose's allegations, I'd love to link to it, and the Register article notes that "Campus officials deny the accusations and say they're following the law. Privacy concerns prevented the university from giving Groseclose the data he wanted, officials said." (Groseclose spends some time in his report arguing that these privacy arguments are not sound.)
Congratulations on the scoop to Marla Jo Fisher at the Register.
Related Posts (on one page):
- The L.A .Times on Prof. Groseclose's Allegations of Possible Malfeasance in UCLA Admissions:
- UCLA's Short Response to Prof. Groseclose's Allegations:
- UCLA Faculty Member Resigns from Admissions Committee, Alleges Possible Violations of the Law by UCLA:
Wouldn't the UCLA admissions committee people be surprised at all the somewhat under qualified light skinned applicants they admitted ??? LOL.
If an applicant's essay recited various types of community service and volunteer work actually performed but merely changed the name of the charitable organizations for which they did this volunteer work to ones with more black sounding names and objectives could the University hold it against them later if they found out the application described real work actually done but the organization for whom the work was done was misleading or even deliberately incorrect?
After all if the University was following the law then the actual name of the charitable organization shouldn't make any difference whatsoever.
Says the "Dog"
Even though it has nothing to do with legal analysis (at least up to page 10, which I'm on), law students could learn much about marshaling evidence from reading that report. Wow.
The same policy has continued since, except that the discriminatory intents have evolved. The "Jewish problem" is no longer a problem. Today, the concern is the over-representation of Asians, Indians and Whites. Originally, the admission essay was where the applicant communicated his WASP heritage and social connections. Today the admission office selects for a different racial group, but nothing has really changed.
Simon asks: "How would you avoid mentioning your own race on an admission essay about a personal subject?". I would answer: "You cannot avoid mentioning your own race in the rubric where the university asks for it to be mentioned".
Ah. That is more accurate.
Simon asks: "How would you avoid mentioning your own race on an admission essay about a personal subject?". I would answer: "You cannot avoid mentioning your own race in the rubric where the university asks for it to be mentioned".
In addition to distorting my comments gratuitously, this misses the mark. Mention of race, ethnicity, religion, or culture may be perfectly relevant to an essay about a person's life, values, and character. The only reason I can imagine to prevent the Hutu from writing about surviving genocide is that your personal biography is boring, regardless of race, ethnicity, culture, or religion, and you are afraid of losing to someone with a more compelling narrative.
I wrote about personal biography, values, and character. There is more to an educational mission than ability to crunch numbers. Not to mention if academic success were all that mattered, legacies would not exist and Ivy League schools would be 99.9% Asian and Indian.
I think you have the situation backwards. The applicant's "life, values, and character" are mostly of interest to the extent that they reveal what the admission office really wants to know: the applicant's race. This is why these essays were introduced originally; today they are still are used for this purpose. Mentioning the ethnicity is not merely "relevant" or "difficult to avoid" -- mentioning the ethnicity is a crucial point, the main reason the essay is written at all.
Simon: The problem is not me misrepresenting you (I quoted your question word-for-word) -- it is you misunderstanding mine. I was not and am not objecting to the mentioning of ethnicity or any particular detail in admissions essays, or suggesting that applicants should somehow sanitize their writings to hide particular details. That would be at the same time impossible and pointless.
Rather, I believe you are engaging in the wrong debate. The problem is not whether applicants can, should, or will reveal or hide their ethnicity when writing their essays, or which life experiences they should discuss. The problem is the existence of the essays themselves.
By making admission crucially depend on such subjective and ill-defined notions as "character", the universities have created for themselves the freedom to arbitrarily admit and reject applicants based on irrelevant agendas (such as racial quotas) while maintaining the facade of an objective admission process where they took "the best applicants".
Good. Because such an argument would be ridiculous.
By making admission crucially depend on such subjective and ill-defined notions as "character", the universities have created for themselves the freedom to arbitrarily admit and reject applicants based on irrelevant agendas (such as racial quotas) while maintaining the facade of an objective admission process where they took "the best applicants".
I think you are a cynical person. I think character is real and that it matters.
Is it just me, or do others also find this statement racist?
First of all, we all know that it is not true that among the top students in the country only one in a thousand is not Asian. For all your "yellow menace" talk, Asian-Americans are a small minority (less than 5%) and are a minority even at the top (though there they comprise more than 5%, of course).
More importantly, why should Ivy League schools care about the ethnicity of their students? A University's mission should be to educate individual students, not ethnic tokens. Whoever is best prepared and has the best aptitude should get in.
By the way, the simplest fix to the "declining grade school standards" complaint is to return to merit-based university admission. If getting into university required actually learning something in high-school (for example, learning enough to pass an entrance exam) then high-schools would have no choice but to raise their standards.
I never suggested that Asians and Indians are a "yellow menace." My point was that purely merit-based admissions would result in mostly Asian and Indian student bodies at the top ten universities. Unlike you, I don't have a problem with that, but I don't think that evaluating character with essays is incompatible with merit. A person without character or values is not meritorious: how that is a racist assertion I find difficult to understand.
The universities themselves decide what preparedness and aptitude means. I imagine that surviving genocide may entail a level of maturity, depth of insight, and strength of character that admissions boards are looking for. I'm not sure how you talk about escaping ethnic cleansing without mentioning ethnicity. Nor am I sure why you think such an applicant would be a token, rather than a meritorious admit. It sounds like you're the racist here.
[W]hy should Ivy League schools care about the ethnicity of their students? A University's mission should be to educate individual students, not ethnic tokens. Whoever is best prepared and has the best aptitude should get in.
The universities themselves decide what preparedness and aptitude means. I imagine that surviving genocide may entail a level of maturity, depth of insight, and strength of character that admissions boards are looking for. I'm not sure how you talk about escaping ethnic cleansing without mentioning ethnicity. Nor am I sure why you think such an applicant would be a token, rather than a meritorious admit. It sounds like you're the racist here.
Now also consider the fact that the "lack of character" that got the better students rejected is usually a codeword for "not of the desired ethnicity". In the 1920s is was acceptable to base admission policy on the idea that grade-grubbing Jews didn't have proper character as exemplified by athletic "gentleman's C" Protestant Anglo-Saxon boys. Today you can't say such things out loud about the Jews, but it is sure acceptable to say the same things about Asians.
Whatever universities say it does. It's their admissions process. Not yours.
Today you can't say such things out loud about the Jews, but it is sure acceptable to say the same things about Asians.
You're the one arguing that Indians are a "yellow menace" -- ironically both racist and color blind; I am the one arguing that Asians and Indians are underrepresented in elite institutions. The only person making vile comments about Asians here is you, Mr. Yellow Menace.
Could you explain what escaping ethnic cleansing has to do with academic ability? with academic preparation?
It is surely the case that those who escape ethnic cleansing are sufficiently atypical that the usual methods for predicting college success might not work for them. But such students are the rare exception, not the rule. They need to be judged individually anyway. For almost all applicants their grades and SAT scores are pretty good predictors of academic success.
Here's a simpler test of character than the fuzzy one currently in use: those students who are serious about going to university but didn't get a good enough high-school education can take an extra year or two to catch up -- in community college, by themselves with textbooks, or in some other method. They could then apply to university based on actual academics.
You seem to think that universities set their mission to simply having students recapitulate lecture notes. They do not set their missions so narrowly. Your argument is akin to arguing the Earth is flat.
Here is an example of a school's mission statement. Note that Attitudes is a section. Have a nice day.
Did you actually read what I've been writing? Do you actually know the statistics? In fact, Asian-Americans are over-represented in elite institutions (see, for example, here), compared to their proportion in the population. Were it not for affirmative action their representation would be even higher. Moreover, you were the one asserting that merit-based admissions would lead to 99.9% Asian representation, clearly implying that would be a bad thing, while I was saying that admitting the best students of any ethnicity would be a great idea.
My point is that Asians and Indians are underrepresented in elite institutions compared to their merit.
Moreover, you were the one asserting that merit-based admissions would lead to 99.9% Asian representation, clearly implying that would be a bad thing
There is no implication that is a bad thing. You are the one who thinks it would be bad. That is why you called it a "yellow menace".
According to the "one drop" rule, tens of millions of lily white Americans really are black. Perhaps 100 million "whites" could plausibly claim blackness through genealogical research or DNA evidence (and supporting expert affidavits) in an ex parte proceeding at a county court or state agency level to correct one's birth certificate.
No one need know, nor would they know since the decisions are at the agency or county court level (depending upon the state). How many county courthouses do you want to visit? How many state agency FOIA requests do you want to pay for? Westlaw is no help. Search Westlaw for "birth record error" and tell me what you find.
As long as reporters don't get involved and raise a stink, most county court judges or state agency bureaucrats really don't care (being racially orthodox and not thinking outside the box they are more puzzled than anything else).
Other than a handful of reporters, why would anyone else involved even care to look?
After all, who in their right mind would change one's race to black?
There really is nothing to gain by being black, is there? We all know that.
Why, just think of the discrimination against blacks by UCLA, by Fortune 500 companies, by lenders like Countrywide who redline minority purchasers, by leading law firms, by faculty hiring committees, by tenure committees, and by all those state troopers who just love to raise their black arrest statistics in mandatory reporting states.
There are compensating benefits for some of you, though. Take for example the Sephardic Jew, thrown out of Spain in 1492, who who asserted his Hispanicity in order to get a minority set-aside piece in some big FCC auction.
It might work with UCLA admissions.
I would beg to disagree. As long as one's ne plus ultra is a globalist economic meritocracy, perhaps you are right.
In the real world, however, it is taxpayers that give tax rebates and citizens who fund the colleges and universities. They do it to help their nation and pass on their culture, generally.
Harvard was chartered to "educate English and Indian youth" in Christian service (among other things). See http://hul.harvard.edu/huarc/charter.html.
Wisconsin was founded to serve the people of Wisconsin.
See http://scifun.chem.wisc.edu/WisIdea/WisIdea.htm.
In Israel, your national homeland, Hebrew University fulfilled a long-held dream to be a Jewish University.
While it might be nice the scour the globe for the best and the brightest, many leading colleges and universities have different goals, and ones that are quite different from a global meritocracy.
The only exception is in the case of the medical school, and is quite recent. "Personality tests" and interviews were added to the admission process -- with the express purpose of denying admission to some Arab students in favor of other Jewish students.
The University of Wisconsin was founded to serve the people of Wisconsin. Thus residents of Wisconsin are given preferences in admission and in the tutition rates. But what has this got to do with the different ethnicities of those residents?
Until these root causes are addressed, trying to get the right racial balance to appease ethnocentric politicians via changing admissions criteria is doomed to failure.
His request seems odd and creepy. If the Admissions Committee process warrants investigation, why should the responsibility be his and his alone? At this point, he's hardly impartial, because he would surely want to prove his point. Let the Dean appoint an investigation committee to get to the bottom of it.
In a mini-mall near me is an SAT cram school. They post the names of their students and the schools that they will attend on paper flowers. The names are almost all East Asian, with a few South Asians.
I don't see how having been "taught to the test" increases their individual merit. Further, kids whose parents spend money on things other than SAT cram school are at a disadvantage.
SKardner, given that the conversion to holistic review was openly advocated as a means to increase minority enrollment, I don't think it's particularly cynical to view the use of subjective criteria as a means to make race-based decisions. Also, since the university belongs to the citizens of California, and the state passed a constitutional amendment to avoid affirmative action, I don't think you can just shrug off criticism with "It's their admissions process. Not yours."
[Important Note to Helpful Readers: If we have confusing typos and especially ugly formatting errors, such as an unclosed underline or bold tag, we'd love to hear from you about them -- but please e-mail the author about this, rather than leaving a comment. We often won't read the comments for a while after the post, and if there's a glaring formatting error, we'd see it quickly when we revisit the post, even without the comment; and in any event the comment likely isn't going to be that helpful to your fellow comment readers. So please e-mail us directly about glitches like this. Thanks!]
Comment Policy: We'd like the posts to be civil, of course (no profanity, personal insults, and the like), but we're also hoping that people try to be as calm, reasoned, and substantive as possible. So please, also avoid rants, invective, substantial and repeated exaggeration, and radical departures from the topic of the thread. Sticking with substance -- and staying on-topic -- will make the comments more helpful to other readers, and more pleasant.
As editors, we reserve the right to delete posts, and even to kick out posters, though we hope that both of these will be exceptional events. (We also reserve the right to be busy with other things, and therefore (1) not remove all the posts that might merit removal, and (2) ignore demands such as "You should remove A's posts, because they're just as bad as B's!")
Here's a tip: Reread your post, and think of what people would think if you said this over dinner. If you think people would view you as a crank, a blowhard, or as someone who vastly overdoes it on the hyperbole, rewrite your post before hitting enter.
And if you think this is the other people's fault -- you're one of the few who sees the world clearly, but fools wrongly view you as a crank, a blowhard, or as someone who overdoes it on the hyperbole -- then you should still rewrite your post before hitting enter. After all, if you're one of the few who sees the world clearly, then surely it's especially important that you frame your arguments in a way that is persuasive and as unalienating as possible, even to fools.
Our goal is to provide an interesting and pleasant environment that can help inform readers. To do that, we'll occasionally have to exercise our editorial discretion. Think of this as an in-person discussion group, where having different voices is critical to a great conversation -- but where sometimes the leader has to deal with cranks who sour the conversation more than they enliven it.
Naturally, there's always a risk that this discretion will be used erroneously, no matter how well-intentioned the editor. But discussion groups (especially on the Internet, but also off it) generally need an editor who'll occasionally make such judgments.
And, remember, it's a big Internet. If you think we were mistaken in removing your post (or, in extreme cases, in removing you) -- or if you prefer a more free-for-all approach -- there are surely plenty of ways you can still get your views out.