In “Pulp Fiction,” leading up to the film’s memorable twist scene with John Travolta and Uma Thurmond tripping the light fantastic for a prize at Jack Rabbit Slim’s, Uma notes how great it is to visit the rest room at a resturant and come back to your table to find that your order has arrived. Now in my case, I find it similarly wonderful to wake up bleary-eyed with my brain in second gear to find a qualified Comment of the Day waiting for me.
That was the case today with DaveL (one of Ethics Alarms’ five regular commenters) depositing on my metaphorical Ethics Alarms table an excellent debunking of the DEI “sales pitch,” as he described it, in the fake “Calvin and Hobbes” cartoon above.
DaveL uses facts to rebut Calvin. The wokeness-crippled progressives who approvingly post such garbage on my Facebook feed are, in contrast, just insisting they are certain of their warped world view because they have willed it so. I have given up arguing with such people: I used to link Ethics Alarms essays (and sometimes comments) on Facebook, but all that accomplished was losing “friends” and having the posts ignored. People don’t like having their faith challenged by ugly reality. They wouldn’t consider the post and went off somewhere to sing “Imagine.”
Sigh.
Get well soon, my friends.
Here is DaveL’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Discovered While Researching ‘Trump Derangement'(And Seeking A Cure)…”
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What Calvin says in the comic strip, like the words that DEI stands for, are the sales pitch. Just as there wasn’t a whole lot of genuine Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité to go around in the early years of the French Revolution, these slogans are a lie.
This is perhaps most plainly seen anywhere you have a years-long, multi-stage selection process. Take for instance the admission of new lawyers to the bar. There’s the SAT and undergraduate admissions, undergraduate performance and graduation, the LSAT and law school admissions, law school graduation, and finally the bar exam. What do these show us? That at every stage, DEI philosophy prioritizes the passing of low performers from favored demographics over higher performers from disfavored demographics.
To illustrate the first step, we need look no farther than the recent Students for Fair Admissions v Harvard case. It came out there that Asian students at the top academic decile were being admitted at a rate just below African-American students in the fourth decile.
DEI apologists try to claim this is because standardized tests are biased against the latter, but if that were true we should expect to see AA students perform as well as Asians in their undergraduate years. This is not the case, AA students once admitted are more likely to require remedial courses and less likely to graduate.
This pattern continues in Law School. AA students score lower on the LSAT but get admitted with those lower scores regardless, then proceed to struggle and drop out at a higher rate….
When they graduate, they pass the bar at a lower rate. The usual objection to these mountains of data is that the whole system is racist, from top to bottom. To this hypothesis I raise three objections, the first two of which are observational, and the third philosophical.
First, as can be seen above, Asians, though a racial minority, do as well or better than the whites for whose advantage the entire racist system is supposed to have been contrived by almost every measure. The construction by white supremacists of a system benefiting some racial minority would be an oddity defying explanation, which is why DEI apologists will typically mumble something about a “model minority myth” without ever addressing the substance of the question or its implications.
The second point is that these claims of bias against standardized tests have been going on for some half a century. In that time, academia has minted a great many scholars from various races, including quite a few specialized in psychometry, statistics, and pedagogy. It is to be wondered why none of them have produced a test that predicts future performance as well, but without the racial bias.
The third point is a matter of Popperian philosophy – namely that the top-to-bottom, “systemic” racism hypothesis is unfalsifiable. What test can we devise to measure performance that DEI apologists will agree is unbiased if it does not show all demographic groups performing equally well?
Ethics Alarms 
Excellent commentary. The link to Karl Popper was appreciated as I had not been exposed to his work previously – and I should have been given my undergrad studies in Economics.
For that link in particular, I am indebted to our host, and the effort he put into cleaning up my humble offering.
Popper is great. A good introduction to him is his autobiography Unended Quest. He summarizes all his major works better than anyone else could, and it’s a good story, too.
Great comment! I remember Popper from philosophy lectures at my alma mater about the philosophy of science when I was a student. Popper’s philosophy is anti-dogmatic, and he chastised the philosophical systems of Marx and Hegel, and psychological theories of Freud and Adler as dogmatic and therefore as unscientific. DEI, Critical Race Theory fit right in here as a set of dogmas instead of theories that advance understanding and science.
Jack: “one of Ethics Alarms’ five regular commenters“
For all the mileage you are getting out of that comment, you can hardly ban the commenter; that would leave you with only four commenters remaining.
-Jut
Yes, I am forced to agree. That was a productive comment after all.
All hail the “five regular”! It’s like an elite club now…. Perhaps they should have special little emblems by their names (like those *top contributor* flags in Facebook groups)…. (imagine laughing face emoji here)
There are any number of commentators claiming to be amongst the esteemed “five regular”; perhaps the talented Marisa might elaborate with a definitive roster/starting lineup?
It’s a good post, but while there are many problems with affirmative action in admissions, it’s hard to propose what should be done instead. As noted by two Ivy League presidents in “The Shape of the River” an excellent book on affirmative action by two architects of its implementation at major universities, if the Ivy League did not have it, schools might have as few as 1% African American. This impoverishes the educational experience for everyone, and also, given the role of these schools in selecting leaders in industry, politics, culture, and so on, it presents future dilemmas as well. The same issue is present at UVA, at all leading institutions across the country. As in our long discussion of the wealth gap, we have to think through why there are such low test scores, and then…ask ourselves what is to be done about that gap? I’m very open to the idea that we should get rid of AA in admissions, but we should understand what bathwater will accompany the baby as we throw it out the window. There’s a book I’ve mentioned before, the New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander on mass incarceration, and she recommends that the leadership of Black America negotiate (ha!) away AA in return for prison reform. Her central point is that AA helps mostly middle and upper income Blacks, who need the least help, and does nothing for the impoverished struggling Blacks in rural and urban environments. Does admitting the child of a wealthy black celebrity to Harvard help civil rights? And yes, I’m familiar with the high fail rate argument–that Harvard takes students who would have been competitive at UVA, and then UVA takes students who would have been competitive at JMU, and on down and down. I very much liked the solution that UTex was forced into. They could no longer take race into account…so they gave special preference to the top students at any high school in TX. Given the massive segregation in the public and private schools of TX, this was a very good way to mitigate the downside impact of ending AA, and also rewarding merit in context. And also to acknowledge that the deck is stacked against the poor and particularly poor minorities. Some high schools have SAT prep classes, most do not (I used to teach test prep–the stuff WORKS). Others have 25 AP courses offered, while some have none. The quality of your elementary school teachers is going to affect your SATs down the road.
To be sure, the % Black and Hispanic at UT Austin did go down, but not nearly by as much as it would have if they had removed AA and replaced it with nothing.
jd, the problem is with affirmative action as a rigid policy, enforced by the government or any other authority. I agreed with the theory of affirmative action as a limited term necessary exception to help address the harms inflicted by slavery and Jim Crow.. But a perpetual thumb on the scale can’t be defended, and the human tendency not to want to surrender a benefit once it has been in place made affirmative action a problem in a meritocracy. I lost a job, as I have written about here, that would have changed the whole course of my life due to affirmative action, and I was told directly that the policy was the only reason what had been represented as a sure thing never came to pass. I accepted that without rancor at the time. I also practiced affirmative action as an executive and as a stage director on a case by case basis—and I still would under the right conditions.
well said. This is a tough issue.
“I lost a job, as I have written about here, that would have changed the whole course of my life“
Which may have prevented the advent of Ethics Alarms, which would have invariably altered the lives of its five (5) commentators…
PWS
Indeed. As one of the five, you should be grateful to the DC US Attorney’s office for deciding that I was the wrong skin shade to be an AUSA. I tend to think, though, as Robert Frost’s poem suggests, that a different road would have led me to the same, strange place.
Also, when I taught at Georgetown, I heard from someone in admissions that the largest preference given, even larger than alumni children, was to…applicants from very small population states that GU didn’t have any students from, or were about to graduate the last one from. If we had two applicants from Wyoming, and no current students, the pressure to admit one of them was huge. by contrast, applicants from the greater NYC area, DC, etc, had to be substantially better than applicants from the Mountain West. I also remember the Dean of Admissions at Brown, my alma mater, saying that if wanted to, he could admit a class entirely made of Jewish females from the greater NYC area, and it would be the best GPA, best test scoring class in Brown’s history…but neither those admitted, nor the institution, nor the nation, would be well served by that decision. Race, sex, class…these things matter already in admissions in so many ways. And they should.
While the educational value of exposure to diverse perspectives and life experiences sounds at least plausible, it’s been a good long time since I could accept this as a good-faith argument for DEI in higher education.
First, while the fact that unqualified students are being admitted, and even graduated, is evident from multiple lines of evidence, I’m not seeing much demonstrating that students are being exposed to diverse perspectives. It seems that every day we hear about this it that college shutting down dissenting viewpoints, especially conservative ones, while tolerating leftist agitation even to the point of violence. Our national media, drawn largely from the graduates of such schools, demonstrate an at-times stunning parochialism. I can’t recall the number of times I’ve seen news stories speak of a suburban community as being “20 miles East of downtown Chicago”, or of some gunman wielding a “223mm assault rifle”. I recall reading an opinion piece in a major paper, where a young journalist expressed his surprise to find culture in the Midwest (Chicago. He discovered Chicago existed).
Perhaps institutions of higher education are the wrong vehicle entirely for this sort of learning. I question just how much one learns from gathering a few students from Wyoming or Uganda into the dorms at Harvard. Instead, I recommend travel for such purposes. There was a time when travel was part of the standard education of the upper class (the same class that could attend university). Even among humble tradesmen, there was the tradition of the Wanderjahre, who having completed his apprenticeship, was allowed to ply his trade anywhere except in his hometown for three years and a day.
“The second point is that these claims of bias against standardized tests have been going on for some half a century. “
I wonder if there is any relation between the aversion against standardized tests, and the book “The Bell Curve” from Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray.
The main theses of this book are that:
The book puts a strong emphasis on how to measure intelligence such as standardized tests and metrics such as IQ. The book is considered heretic in academic circles due to its discussion of intelligence and race, and the genetic and environmental factors contributing to average intelligence differences between groups.
Due to the controversial nature of the book a thorough academic discussion about the book is difficult. Charles Murray’s lector at Middlebury College (VT) in 2017 was shouted down, and the lector was effectively chased from Middlebury College. The incident sparked a broader debate about free speech versus disruptive protest, with some alumni arguing Murray’s work was not worthy of debate, while the college president vowed to promote free expression.
Based on practices such as DEI I wonder how many college administrators deep in their heart believe in Murray’s theses about the relation between intelligence and race. Assuming that Murray’s theses are correct, would a pure meritocracy with admission and hiring based on standardized test not automatically lead to a caste society, with members of genetically disadvantaged groups structurally ending up in the underclasses? Is that what we are willing to accept?
My hypothesis is that affirmative action and DEI are based on race based assumptions about the average group intelligence, combined with a refusal to accept a cast society along racial lines. Hence the emphasis on equity in DEI.
However openly admitting the race based assumptions of DEI is of course socially unacceptable and career ending, as in our society racism is seen as one of the ultimate wrongs. In order to deal with this dissonance psychological defense mechanisms need to be deployed, namely reaction formation and projection.
Reaction formation is a psychological defense mechanism where an individual consciously expresses the opposite of their true, often unacceptable, feelings, sometimes to an exaggerated degree. It’s a way to cope with anxiety by replacing an impulse with a behavior that is diametrically opposed to it, such as being excessively kind to someone you secretly dislike or acting aggressive to mask insecurity (source: Google AI).
Projection is a defense mechanism where individuals unconsciously assign their own unacceptable feelings, thoughts, or impulses onto another person. It’s a way to avoid confronting their own flaws and instead blame or attribute them to others. For example, a person who is feeling jealous might accuse their partner of being the jealous one instead of facing their own feelings (source: Google AI). Similarly somebody wo harbors racist assumptions might accuse political opponents of racism.