OK, that’s enough of you in THIS section…
This is an example of how diversity and affirmative action ideology brings devotees to madness.
In an effort to create a more positive experience for underrepresented-minority students,
The University of California Berkeley School of Law has instituted what it calls a new “critical mass” policy. As in many law schools, first year students are divided into smaller sections, or “mods,” in which first-year law students take their classes. This year, the administration juggled the composition of the mods to have more underrepresented-minority students in all but one, in order to create a “critical mass.” To reach critical mass in the other mods, one mod had to be stripped all of black students. Berkeley Law Dean Sujit Choudhry sent an email to the law school community explaining that the policy is intended to create a more positive experience for underrepresented minorities by grouping them together to create that critical mass.
In setting political districts, this technique is called gerrymandering, and is widely considered racist. Removing all the black students from one section and placing them all in another, super-comfy, all-black section would be called apartheid. Yet this ultra-liberal university has convinced itself that manipulating class composition by race is a benign policy.
Wow.
What else have they convinced themselves of? Let’s see:
- That removing natural diversity from one set of classes—segregation—is justified by diversity in other classes.
- That race and ethnicity is so divisive that minorities can’t feel comfortable in a room full of whites.
- That young minority adults are such sensitive plants that they have to be in little gangs to feel safe—in a law school class.
- That respecting minority students requires infantilizing them.
- That segregation means integration, the diversity required apartheid, that night is day and compost is candy.
Dean Choudhry explains that the school adopted the policy after some minorities complained last year that they felt isolated when they were the only members of their racial group in a class. Thus he adopted this mind-twisting exercise in discrimation by race rather than tell the minority students complaing to grow the hell up. According to Choudhry, the critical mass system “can help dispel stereotypes that others may hold because people see that not everyone from a particular group is alike.” You know, Dean, students cal learn that on their own. You run a law school, not a race sensitivity encounter group.
This kind of political correctness-meets-Orwell policy demonstrates that the law school is run by shallow-thinking fools. It also shows why it is time to stop allowing race, gender or any other characteristic unrelated to legal skills to have any significance in school admissions, class distribution or anything else. When a well-meaning policy begins dictating contradictory and confounding applications like this one, it has run its course.
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Sources: ABA Journal, TaxProf Blog
Ethics Alarms 
Treating race as an intractable problem that needs to be managed by elites is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more of this nonsense that happens, the more of a perception that it is needed.
Well put.
But then what will these self-appointed elites do? I mean, look at their skill set and qualifications. How can they justify a $750,000 government salary based on their skills? They need to be paid that much because they are RIGHT! The meritocracy is racist.
This looks to me like a disguise for a grading policy. All classes are graded on a curve to some extent. The curve will be lower in classes with a affirmative action students, higher in classes without. For the same work, grades will be higher in the former classes, lower in the latter.
It’s for your own good, so shut up and dance.
Dean Choudhry ought to take a few minutes and listen to MLK’s “I Have A Dream” speech and think about it. But he’s probably too busy creating diversity through segregation.
Separate but equal is clearly making a comeback in public education.
They brought it about the first time – their arguments have shifted, but the goal is still the same. If it’s for their own good, who can complain, after all?
I am just afraid of what happens when their schemes come to fruition. They demand female-only classes and minority-only classes, but classes with white males must have a racial and gender composition similar to the population as a whole.The logical answer to this paradox is to not allow white males go to college.
Restricting who may attend a class based on ethnic descent violates both the U.S. and California constitutions, and restricting classes to one sex violates the latter.
So? We have several cases (one before the Supreme Court right now) where it has been successfully argued that is it OK to infringe on a Constitutionally guaranteed right if there is merely a perception that it makes things better. You are under the mistaken impression that the courts feel that it is wrong to violate the Constitution. The current courts have ruled that it is fine, even if you can prove that it won’t even do what it says it will do, as long as it is for the right reason. Being on the correct side of the issue makes it all right.
Which cases are these?
And here we have Affirmative Action…well…in action.
This is not new. My own law school did this 30 years ago, but without any public acknowledgement of what they were doing. The student body was 12% black, but my first-year section had no blacks. In fact, I went my entire three years without ever sitting in a classroom with a black student, since there were also no blacks in any of the business-oriented classes that I took in my second and third years.
How do you know that IS what they were doing? I had no blacks in my section either. but there weren’t a lot to circulate.
I had several conversations at the time with two of my professors who were on the admissions committee. They told me that’s what they were doing. It was part of their effort — successful — to reduce the black drop-out rate.
They weren’t violating any confidence by telling me. The school didn’t lie about it; they just didn’t say anything publicly. It was widely assumed, or at least suspected, by students that the school was doing it. We had a fairly large number of blacks, so statistically the odds of a random selection resulting in a section with no blacks was small.
I bet if the school gave them automatic A’s and indentured all the white students to them for housecleaning and errands, they would have reduced the dropouts even more.
And I mean, what great preparation for a real career in law! Just think, all society needs to do is organized in properly segregated mods and commit crimes at exact proportional rates based on the color of their skin! What could go wrong?
You might be surprised; statistics, like quantum physics and quite a bit of economics, is an often counter-intuitive area in which common sense is treacherous (your description doesn’t tell us enough to analyse it even with the proper tools, as we don’t know how many sections there were and their sizes). For instance, Simpson’s paradox comes up in just precisely the area of how much representation probably occurs in university classes, though it isn’t a precise match for this particular scenario (and, of course, you have separate information that it wasn’t random when you encountered it anyway).
Thanks for reminding me about another aspect of this kind of separate (did anyone from Berkeley say “equal?” I didn’t hear it). I have been thinking about this since a commenter on the yoga class situation talked about the formation of the Foreign Legion: same outcome, different purpose.
I work in a building several floors of which are home to a school that TOEFLs (teaches English as a foreign language) to international long-term visitors, students, and workers. When I hear them chattering in elevators (very slow elevators from very high floors) or outside in bunches, they are never speaking English nor so far as I can tell any language other than their primary tongue with fellow speakers. I asked the time of one young woman I had seen coming to the school for more than three months: she lifted her wrist to show me the face of her watch.
The fastest, most thorough, most effective English (and other language) learning I ever experienced was teaching something called “Situational Reinforcement” way back in the 60s for The Institute of Modern Languages in Washington, DC. New entries were always assigned to classes — and to seating — which always placed them, like it or not, beside or between people who did not speak a language they knew. The result, after initial discomfort (and refunds to those who didn’t really want to learn in the first place), was that the students spoke only the language they were learning in class, spoke it on break, to their teachers, in the lunchroom — day classes were five hours, nights were four, including the mealtime (provided or bring-your-own; if the latter, you had to explain the contents to the class) — and finally outside, fumbling and bumbling at first, correcting one another, then easily and fluently. They went in pairs or threesomes on ‘field trips’ on their own: shopping expeditions, getting somewhere and back again, to an event they would report on to the class, all in their new common language from Day One.
I heard from many students for a long time afterward, at least two of them over forty years later who were still in touch with their classmates back in their own countries (in one case, countries which had been and were still deadly enemies), mentioning how they all continued to use the same technique teaching their own children, or in business learning the other guy’s lingo, or teaming up with a willing stranger for a day at a time to talk his talk and walk a new walk. One who stopped and visited on his way through to an architecture job in Canada said the experience had made him unafraid to learn anything.
I finally went into the offices of the school in the building where I work and talked to an assistant to the Assistant Head about the IML experience. She didn’t need a moment’s thought, but immediately told me these were “different times” and that neither students nor teachers would “stand for it.” She also told me SR was available in many languages in book form. Somehow, that didn’t seem like the same idea. . . .
I am not seeing anything good coming from the self-referrent racism and separatist attitudes. Coupling it with uber management multiplies the tragedy — there’s a trickle-down effect from the Oval Office, from CNN and MSNBC and Fox, from monster universities like Berkeley, — especially knowing that the decision to implement this stupidity is student-mandated (believing that the median age for law school entrants is 24 — I wonder how much law they think they know better than their professors!). It’s sort of like the passengers on one side telling the pilot to fly the plane somewhere else because the sun’s in their eyes. Eventually, the plane will crash. This is a massive dilemma for the Left. To fight it means to go against the flow and still be a part of it which means swimming upstream, trying to change minds as you pass by fighting the current of your erstwhile peers. No, that doesn’t work. To go with the lemmings, on the other had, is to join the suicide run. The Right can sit on the banks (no pun intended) and jeer for awhile, until The Donald goes extemporaneous on his Oath of Office and swears to finish wrecking the country.
So I’m going to tack this on, because I believe that taking this kind of fight to university level is useless. I’m no ethicist; I’m barely in on understanding how to evaluate much less behave in a securely ethical manner, but I do know this absolutely: you don’t start learning right and wrong thinking and behavior as a grownup — you modify what you know, sure, but not the basic principles. It’s early childhood that requires the attention. This goes against the grain with those who see affirmative action in any guise as a bad thing; I just think it’s totally misplaced. It belongs with an age group, in the pre-schools, down before the class — not race, class — discrimination begins, (yeah, pre-school. Head-Start-Extra-Plus): mandatory, comprehensive early childhood education, health, nutrition, and parent involvement services for all. Without the pot there is nothing to melt. Without getting the children together, providing those elemental advantages for all (hey, it’s way cheaper than having a large percentage of citizenry undereducated, underprivileged, underemployed, backward-looking, other-cultured, and unintegratable), there is no merit society. Without a majority who are able to forge ahead by merit as well as desire — there are alternatives to the academic school, more needed than ever — we continue fudging affirmative action like U of Texas’ 10% Plan and so many others or jumping to insane schismatic actions such as Berkeley Law is up to. Top-down needs to start bottom-up… and I don’t mean voting into office a really bright four-year old I know. Though, come to think of it . . . .
SP, you are dead on with this. That’s why the ages 1-6 are called “The Formative Years”. Basically, the personality is being formatted and installed, but if there is nobody there to do the formatting and/or installing, you wind up with self-absorbed narcissists (like our current President). Unconstrained and untutored children turn into savage, barbaric animals.
Did everyone in the white mod get to act as if they were in Animal House? Did all the women wear white gloves and pearls while the men smoked pipes and wore tweed jackets with patches on their elbows? Maybe they sat around and watched “The Graduate” and re-enacted the Berkeley on-campus scenes.
http://kron4.com/2015/10/16/video-san-francisco-middle-school-refuses-to-tell-winners-of-election-students-say-principal-believes-winners-are-not-diverse-enough/
This is a clear violation of both the federal and state constitutions’ equal protection provisions..
Given state law, the only way that such action can even be countenanced is if it was a remedy for past racial discrimination by the school. See See e.g. United States v. Paradise, 480 U.S. 149 (1987)
I read about this on another site before jumping over to Ethics Alarms…half expected to see a post about it here too. If that doesn’t teach the kids a lesson on the realities of progressivism, nothing will.