Dec 17^th

On Dec.12^th we examined Justice Scalia’s obviously racist comment about the dis-service minority students get by being admitted to universities whose academic demands might overwhelm them. Mona Charen has today supported Justice Scalia in a column titled “The liberal ‘Festival of Smugness.’” She claims that “Liberal smugness follows any comment by a conservative public figure that can be twisted into a racial slight.” Unfortunately for Mona’s point, Justice Scalia’s comment required no twisting at all to be considered a racial slight. He talked specifically about African-American students being poorly served by attending elite schools where they do not do well.  Charen says that Scalia perhaps should have said “some” students do not do well. No, neither she nor Scalia understands the problem.

Scalia could have avoided being pegged as a racist if he had said that many poorly prepared students admitted to elite colleges do not do well. This is true whether or not the students are minority students. Poor preparation doesn’t mean just mediocre high school grades. If you aren’t interested in learning what is assigned then you’ll have a problem and that problem will have nothing to do with minority status. There are plenty of non-minority students whose academic credentials don’t entitle them to admission to elite colleges but who get in anyway. Some of these are legacies, students with an important relative who graduated previously. Maybe George W. Bush fits into this category. Some applicants have a special skill perhaps the 6’ 2” seventeen year old women’s basketball player has the coach writing to the admissions committee to make an exception in spite of her 500 SAT scores..

Every college, even the truly elite schools, have students falling in the bottom quarter of their test score and grade distribution. So is Scalia suggesting that these students should go somewhere else?  Charen cites a controversial book by Stuart Taylor Jr. and Richard Sanders titled “Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help and Why Universities Won’t Admit It.” The authors are an economist and a journalist. When the case of Fisher vs the University Of Texas came to the Supreme Court this book was placed in evidence. There were about a dozen members of the National Academy of Science who filed a friend of the court brief demonstrating the various difficulties the authors have understanding basic statistical methodology. Charen cites this book as if its characterization of affirmative action was not at all controversial.

There is another problem: the racism that continues to exist in many colleges and universities, even those considered to be elite. We’ve seen that recently in the racist insults scrawled on dormitories at the University of Missouri. Michelle Obama, when a freshman at Princeton, had a roommate who insisted that she did not want to room with a black girl. Do you honestly believe that this kind of in your face racism would have no effect on a minority students’ academic performance?