Saturday, May 7, 2016

Rational Thought about Race on Campus

This morning in the Wall Street Journal Jonathan Haidt and Lee Jussim offer some rational thinking about race on campus. It is good to see them shedding more light than heat on the problems.

What have the student activists been demanding? Haidt and Jussim summarize:

After all, much of the students’ agenda was simply an amplification of what American colleges have been doing for decades: They demanded increased affirmative action, more diversity training, more funds to support scholarship and teaching about race and social justice. What harm could it do?

They suggest that this agenda is doomed to fail:


Now, they add, if universities admit even more underqualified minority applicants this will increase the gap between them and the rest of the campus, thus making race a clearer indication of inferiority and reinforcing the prevailing opinion:

As a result of these disparate admissions standards, many students spend four years in a social environment where race conveys useful information about the academic capacity of their peers. People notice useful social cues, and one of the strongest causes of stereotypes is exposure to real group differences. If a school commits to doubling the number of black students, it will have to reach deeper into its pool of black applicants, admitting those with weaker qualifications, particularly if most other schools are doing the same thing. This is likely to make racial gaps larger, which would strengthen the negative stereotypes that students of color find when they arrive on campus.

Students tend to self-segregate by academic achievement. Those who fall into a category that has received special treatment will be treated as less capable. Recent minority student agitation has made minority students appear to be a force for disruption, a force opposed to good order, campus discipline and a peaceful learning environment. This tends to draw more attention to the fact that they were admitted by different standards:

And racial gaps in classroom performance create other problems. A 2013 study by the economist Peter Arcidiacono of Duke University found that students tend to befriend those who are similar to themselves in academic achievement. This is a big contributor to the patterns of racial and ethnic self-segregation visible on many campuses. If a school increases its affirmative-action efforts in ways that expand these gaps, it is likely to end up with more self-segregation and fewer cross-race friendships, and therefore with even stronger feelings of alienation among black students.

One should add that if new diversity quotas force the hiring of more minority faculty, students will conclude that minority faculty members are less capable. Thus, classrooms and majors will also be segregated by race.

Diversity training is obviously not the solution. Haidt and Jussim report:

The evaluations that have been done are not encouraging. A major 2007 review of diversity training in corporations concluded that “on average, programs designed to reduce bias among managers responsible for hiring and promotion have not worked.” A review of diversity interventions published in 2014 in the journal Science noted that these programs “often induce ironic negative effects (such as reactance or backlash) by implying that participants are at fault for current diversity challenges.”

As I mentioned yesterday in my post about sexual harassment, these programs are long on blame and short on cooperation. The same applies to what is now called microaggression training:


Again, it is worth underscoring that imposing an oppressor-victim narrative creates ill-will, suspicion and intergroup conflict. Microaggression training forces students to self-censor when they are around anyone who belongs to an aggrieved minority. Thus, they will naturally avoid any situations that comport danger. This creates an oppressive atmosphere on campus and inhibits free inquiry and open discussion:

Students are encouraged to report any instance when they witness or suffer a microaggression. It is the “see something, say something” mind-set, transferred from terrorism threats to conversational blunders and ambiguities.

But such systems make it far more important to keep track of everyone by race. How would your behavior change if anything you said could be misinterpreted, taken out of context and then reported—anonymously and with no verification—to a central authority with the power to punish you? Wouldn’t faculty and students of all races grow more anxious and guarded whenever students from other backgrounds were present?

Academic administrators are married to the oppression/victim narrative and ignore reality. Most especially, they have never thought to examine an institution that solved its racial diversity problem. That would be the U. S. Army.

It did so without lowering standards. (One adds that it has currently been lowering standards for women.) More importantly, the Army also promoted the value of cooperation and of pride in service and pride in country. And it promoted uniformity and conformity, with the same rules applied, regardless of race. It was anything but multicultural.

Haidt and Jussim report:

In their book “All That We Can Be” (1996), the sociologists Charles Moskos and John Sibley Butler describe how the U.S. Army escaped from the racial dysfunction of the 1970s to become a model of integration and near-equality by the time of the 1991 Gulf War. The Army invested more resources in training and mentoring black soldiers so that they could meet rigorous promotion standards. But, crucially, standards were lowered for no one, so that the race of officers conveyed no information about their abilities. The Army also promoted cooperation and positive-sum thinking by emphasizing pride in the Army and in America.

If we want to look for the source of the contention on college campuses, we would do well to take a lesson from the Army and to see that undermining national pride and promoting dissension and conflict has produced problems that we are not even close to solving.

The solution, Haidt and Jussim point out, lies in civic virtue, not in dialectical struggle:



Ignatius Acton Chesterton OCD said...

What is the observable, measurable desired outcome of diversity training? What do we get?

"Micro-aggression" is such a fascinating word. It's as sophisticated as it is contrived (no doubt a correlation). Don't know if you heard, but the Justice Deoartment is coming up with all kinds of complex, multi-word euphemisms to change the words "criminal" and "felon." I wonder why...

Sam L. said...

If you have to complain about the most trivial thing, because it's all you have to complain about, YOU are the PROBLEM.

priss rules said...

PC is like physics.

Physics searches for the smallest unit of matter, and PC searches for the smallest unit of 'aggression'.

Maybe they should build a Hate Collider to find it. Take an atom from a white male and shoot it through a mile long tube against another atom from a white male and examine the result: the quarKKK.

Anonymous said...

Among the many steps taken by the Army, one with a substantial impact was adding a simple yes/no check box to the
officer evaluation report. "Does this officer support Army Equal Opportunity goals?"

Harold said...

Day 1 of boot camp in 1973 us raw recruits were bluntly informed that none of us were black or white or Christian of Jewish or anything else but- Navy Blue. Marines got the same lecture but for Marine Green. And I'm sure Army, Air Force and Coast Guard got the same. And everyone learned how to work together as a team regardless of ethnic, racial, religious or educational background or social status. Boot camp takes people with widely varying backgrounds and throws them together. And forces them to work together and become a team.

That's how you get rid of discrimination and prejudice. Not by isolating groups and emphasizing differences. But by throwing them together and making them another, bigger and better group with the same goals and ambitions. You don't give up all your background to become part of that bigger group; but you recognize that that background doesn't make you any better or any worse then anyone else in that group.

Every student at Harvard should be indoctrinated from Day 1- "Hey, I'm a Harvard student. Destined to do great things if I apply myself, along with all my classmates!" And it should be true. "Should be" if Harvard was selecting for academic success only, which it isn't... If it were, all those students would have similar academic preparation and the same chance of success. And could be thrown together to become one Harvard Team devoted to Harvard ideals.

Sam L. said...

Rational thought is VERBOTEN on campuses, and protested/rioted against when the thought or possibility of it arriving on campus.

Ares Olympus said...

Jonathan Haidt offers some hope for good sense, if the Left can listen.

Sam L. said...

AE, they CAN, but they WON'T. They know they are smarter than anyone else.

PaleRider1861 said...

Nothing like quoting that black womanizer/plagiarizer/Commie-loving/anti-White hero MLK to make my day, and destroy credibility of the author. I guess he really took the irreverent Reverend at his word about his "ability and skin color" nonsense.

Discrimination and prejudice exist because they are natural human responses to the environment, and they exist within and without race.

So in order to create this wonderful harmonious society all we have to do is make college more like the Army...problem solved!

Marxism has never really been about equality --- it is about destroying meritocracy, and using a fake message to undermine society and advance their vision of utopia.

You can't 'make' people equal for the simple reason that the very act of 'making' them equal means that they're not equal, and never can be. We each have abilities that are less than some and more than others---inequality is as natural as it is ubiquitous, and we should enhance it, not suppress it.

Finally, the all-powerful Federal Government violates its own laws against discrimination by discriminating based on race through affirmative action...where is the justice?