It’s the family, everyone

Role models? Having observed dozens of educational boards and hundreds of students — this is what the boards don’t get:

If any child has been essentially abandoned by parents and family — the amount of government aid required to overcome that problem is very large.

It takes committed, dedicated people to bring enough interpersonal focus to support a child’s needs. Volunteers can try to help — it is an enormous, time-consuming amount of work.

Is the Public School Monopoly, with its civil service, tenure, and union rules, and Big Government capable of that mission? Well — consider this:

http://www.editorandpublisher.com...isplay.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001845403

It’s the family, everyone.

Bob A., at 5:50 am EST on January 19, 2006

Personal Responsibility

After reading this column, it is further evidence that Thomas Sowell has it right in in new book of a lifetime of research: “Black Rednecks and White Liberals".

If you dare... Read it!

Edward, Business Professor (reluctantly retired), at 8:12 am EST on January 19, 2006

Keep affirmative action!

Of course the “role model” business is baloney—but it is not the real rationale for affirmative action which is to counteract ongoing discrimination against women and minorities, most of which is innocent and unintentional.

Criteria for hiring and promotion in most jobs are in part subjective. You don’t just hire on the numbers and test results but interview the applicant, make a subjective judgment about how they rank vis-a-vis other applicants with comparable qualifications and consider highly subjective factors like “institutional fit.” Even with the best of intentions, these judgments are colored by prejudices and assumptions that put women and minorities at a disadvantage. Affirmative action is a counterweight to this disadvantage.

Where it’s feasible to hire blind these disadvantages don’t figure. When orchestras started auditioning applicants behind screens suddenly and dramatically the percentage of women hired jumped. This shows the extent to which such assumptions and prejudices colored hiring decisions against the will of those in charge of hiring who, in hiring for orchestral players really, really wanted the most technically proficient instrumentalists. (vide e.g. Barbara Bergmann In Defense of Affirmative Action.

It isn’t feasible to hire for most positions, including faculty positions, behind a screen. The hiring process, without affirmative action is emphatically NOT color-blind or gender-blind and the purpose of affirmative action is to counteract that.

H. E. Baber, Professor at University of San Diego, at 10:11 am EST on January 19, 2006

A Racist, Neocon article

“Center for Equal Opportunity” is typical right-wing dishonesty. A more honest name would be “Center for Preserving Racism.”

There has been racist discrimination against minorities — especially Blacks and Latins — for centuries in the US. One very modest way of redressing this is to make strong efforts to hire employees from historically discriminated groups.

Along comes the CEO to tell us: “Wait — that’s RACIST. Let’s just be ‘color-blind’ as of today.”

The purpose is to try hard to pit whites against non-whites — to convince whites that now _they_ are the group “discriminated against.”

This is the zero-sum game on which white supremacy — the KKK / Jim Crow system of terror in the South — was based after the Civil War. Convince whites that anything gained by blacks (in this case) would be _lost_ by whites, and you have a recipe for “divide-and-rule.”

It’s worked for the Republican Party since the Civil Rights Laws of the ’60s, after which the gutter racists just flipped from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party, and have stayed there. Without racism and the “Solid South,” the Republican Party would never win a national election.

So building racism by convincing whites that Affirmative Action is “unfair” and “bad for them” is a very important goal for racist “conservatives.”

And that’s the work the “CEO” is created to do. Check out this page for some data on them:

http://rightweb.irc-online.org/org/ceo.php

Bradley, US English, Linda Chavez, Coors (Castle Rock) — hard-core, conservative Republican racist groups.

Here are the URLs for a couple of essays exposing why “conservative” racists oppose Affirmative Action:

* http://chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/affactn.html

* http://chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/affactltr.html

And here’s an essay on what “conservatives” like these racists are really up to:

http://chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/conservatives1.html

Grover Furr

Grover Furr, at 2:02 pm EST on January 19, 2006

of back-burners

prof robrtson...would you care to explain just what is page 60 in an on-line publication? and would you care to explain how it’s back-burner when we can see a link to the mlk viewpoint story on the main page of IHE, not in a back-page? do you know the difference between the IHE function of providing news items (your so-called peripheral issues) for quick consumption and the more in-depth viewpoint pieces like clegg’s fine essay?

that you care deeply about minority issues is without doubt and admirable. but your passion for the issues seems to leave you with no objectivity or ability to see the forest for the trees.

bs detector, at 2:04 pm EST on January 19, 2006

Role models, and quality.

Amen, to hiring on any basis other than quality.

To Jason: I’m a liberal (look up the definition in the dictionary, by the way, before throwing the word around as a pejorative) and I agree with the author of this article. In fact, my experience is that the neocons are the worst offenders when in comes to hiring for race and gender — I worked for Reagan when he was gov and when he was Pres, and he was the first to hire by type in our agency in CA. More recently, the Busch government has placed a new black female in charge of our local national forest — she has no background in forestry. This seems pretty typical of how the neocons hire, in the Busch government, Jason.

As to role models: I actually received a letter from a female teacher thanking my agency for sending a male to speak to her students. She pointed out that most of the teachers were female, and most of the kids were being raised in single-parent— ie female-run — families, and that these facts made life terrible for young boys. They had NO male role models, did not know how to act or what was expected of them and therefore did very poorly in both scholarship and behavior. The letter, by the way, was not appreciated by my agency, which was on a Republican jihad to downplay white males.

(Think I’m kidding? Here’s a homework assignment, one worthy of a PhD. Analyze corporate state publications for the past twenty-five years — government and corporate brochures, magazines, etc. Count the number of white males that appear in the illustrations. You can chart the disappearance of the white male in these publications over the past quarter century to the point that this type seems to have died out. What will future scholars think?

But I also agree that the family role is important, and that the family needs to be strengthened in the role model business.

Keep up the good work. Intellectual advance comes through spirited, but scholarly debate.

DMScott, at 2:12 pm EST on January 19, 2006

Check the data

Here’s a homework assignment, one worthy of a PhD. Analyze corporate state publications for the past twenty-five years — government and corporate brochures, magazines, etc. Count the number of white males that appear in the illustrations. You can chart the disappearance of the white male in these publications over the past quarter century to the point that this type seems to have died out.

Okey doke—here’s an assignment for you: check the Bureau of Labor Statistics data and see if white males have disappeared from the ranks of management and the professions, whether wage gaps have closed, whether sex segregation in employment has gone away and whether the percentage of women and minorities employed in various occupations reflects the percentage of women and minorities who’ve gotten through the pipeline.

Since when do we, as scholars, rely on promotional literature and glossy brochures to make inferences about stuff like this?

H. E. Baber, at 2:43 pm EST on January 19, 2006

An old Affirmative action/diversity technique is to have an job application form with biographical information which is removed for the shortlisting. It is intriguing how we struggle not to assign gender when we’re discussing the applicants and how much energy is devoted to guessing their backgrounds.

JC, at 7:34 pm EST on January 19, 2006

Does any critic of Clegg’s position have a word to say about his central point on “role model nonsense"?

mark, at 11:24 am EST on January 20, 2006

Private AA requirements

Here’s an interesting article on an AA requirement:

How to Increase Diversity at Law Firms in Four Steps

The National Law Journal

In the wake of Wal-Mart firing one of its outside law firms for not meeting recruitment and retention goals for minority and female attorneys, diversity has grown beyond a moral imperative and become a business necessity. It’s no longer enough to commit to amorphous, if noble, goals of creating an inclusive environment, according to Day, Berry & Howard’s Edgardo Ramos and Lynn Anne Baronas, who offer four steps to increase diversity at your own firm.Visit Career Center

http://www.law.com/jsp/law/careercenter/index.jsp>

JMG, at 11:27 am EST on January 20, 2006

mark’s question

To first qualify my answer to Mark, yes, I have observed search committees making offers to the C+ Ecudoran woman over the top of their class White Males.

All other things being equal is the way it is supposed to play out, but with all the pressure to diversify — let’s call it hiring inflation. Entire search processes have been cancelled and the search committees re-selected when the hiring pool wasn’t “diverse enough” to suit some VP or the president.

Not only are candidates with lesser education and experience often selected, but institutions pay a premium to get them to campus (pipeline issues, as someone else wrote above so astutely) before another university hires them.

Faculty hires are not so off-balance as are staff diversity hires; look around your college, university, or law office.

and as for Mark’s answer? What do you think it does for role modeling, when women or students of color interact with a diversity hire?

Law schools have found that admitting unqualified women and minority candidates creates a higher failure rate.

and puh-leeze; racism & sexism? Exactly WHERE is the state involved in supporting that type of discrimination? When the state bends over backwards to diversify and when the issues can’t even be discussed without donning pseudonyms. . .

Dr. F. Gump, at 8:17 pm EST on January 20, 2006

Affirmative action candidates are not underqualified

Quality. Hmmm. Let’s see. When we do a search for an entry level tenure-track position we get between 200 and 350 applicants, depending on how narrowly the specialty area we want is defined. All are PhDs or ABDs from reputable graduate programs. None are inarticulate Ecudorean women with C averages. Most have gotten publications or at least read papers at conferences—and we read their papers, their teaching evals, and all their stuff. About half have letters of recommendation stating that they are the best grad students of their cohort or the hottest properties ever.

If there is some clear, mechanical method for ranking such applicants according to quality from 1 to 350 with every number in between I’d appreciate knowing about it.

Let’s talk about the real world. (1) For most jobs, including faculty positions, there is no uniquely best qualified applicant. (2) Applicants hired after a process in which affirmative action considerations figured have not performed less well on the job than white males who were hired.

In fantasyland you can spin yarns about ham-fisted diversity-hired brain surgeons botching operations or incompetent diversity hires embarrassing women and minorities who interact with them, but that is not the way it works in the real world where affirmative action de facto simply counteracts the advantages of being white and male. And that is all it should do because the serious aim of the program is not either to produce role models or to compensate members of disadvantaged minorities for past injustices but to ameliorate ongoing discrimination.

H. E. Baber, at 10:15 pm EST on January 21, 2006

Doin’ The Diversity Shuffle

Clegg’s arguments are lucid and straightforward. Do not pay attention to skin color or gender among faculty candidates. I totally agree.

As a proud black man it galls and insults me to read the patronizing, liberal racist trash by so many guilt-ridden white folks here. Who the hell you think you are anyhow?

Judge people by their achievements, the prior records and the evidence of their disciplined scholarship and teaching effectiveness. Nothing else. Not this role model baloney or the need for diversity. What rot.

At first, I wasn’t in favor of the MCRI on the Nov. 2006 ballot in Michigan but after reading the snide and vicious attacks on Mr. Clegg, I am now a supporter of MCRI.

Chuck, at 6:31 pm EST on January 22, 2006

Affirmative action supports merit-based hiring

I’m still waiting for that recipe for ranking our job applicants from 1 to 350 and every number in between. How about it? This could save us a lot of time and stress as we evaluate them.

It’s something of a bore to look through these canned screeds replete with the usual malarkey about liberals patronizing minorities and making noises about “neocons,” “KKK” and victimization. Funny I hadn’t noticed remarks like this from supporters of affirmative action in this discussion. I guess this is some kind of form letter material that Adversity.Net, Inc. and other such groups crank out.

I’m arguing for merit-based hiring, insofar as we can reasonably discern merit—which is usually not straightforward. I argued that affirmative action policies on the grounds that it facilitated merit-based hiring by neutralizing the effects of non-merit factors like being white and male. I’m very persistent and aggressive (for a girl—or for anyone) and I’ll just keep coming back here, hacking at you lads and holding your feet to the fire until you address my argument, until you respond to data that prima facie shows that discrimination remains a fact of life, and cite some compelling evidence to show there is no discrimination and that absent affirmative action pressures the best qualified applicants will be hired. I’m a philosophy professor and that’s my job.

H. E. Baber, at 4:20 am EST on January 23, 2006

There is discrimination

There IS discrimination — against white, heterosexual males. In fact, against males, period. No one disagrees with that.

Anecdote one — A family friend, female, last-name hispanic, was wooed by every major university in the west, and by several disciplines. She was offered scholarships, other special perks to attend. Wonderful for her — especially considering that she was an awful student, who struggled to get C’s. She finally applied to UC Berkeley, who accepted her with open arms. Since then, she’s failed the Bar 3 times.

Anecdote Two — the former Director of NASA Goddard, Al Diaz, is now the Vice Chancellor for Administration at UCR. He has no PhD. How do you think he got his job?

Anecdote Three — the new Associate Administrator for Education for NASA is Angela Phillips Diaz. Yes, she is Al Diaz’s wife. She has no degree in education; her background is in business. How do you think she got her job?

After 30 years in public service, in education, parks, and so on, I have a book-full of such anecdotes. The disappearance of white males from government and corporate publications — the emasculation of those publications — is a similar trend. If you indeed are a philosopher, you should have the ability to see a pattern here.

The Way it Oughta Be: One of the finest people I worked with in the national parks, an hispanic male who ran the outreach program for women, native americans, and hispanics, put it better than anyone: “If you hire on the basis of quality, you will necessarily get diversity. If, however, you hire on the basis of diversity, you will not necessarily get quality.” This country, for the same political reasons that Chicage set up the Ward-heelers, has chosen the second pathway.

Anyone who turns a blind eye to this problem is not a lover of wisdom, nor of truth.

And, as I pointed out to the right-winger earlier, I am a liberal. Look up the definition in the dictionary. People of liberal temperament do not favor discrimination for any reason. I spent years marching for civil rights, was spit upon, yelled at, threatened. But that was a just cause. Now I am fighting — as any liberal, or any lover of wisdom and truth should — the rampant discrimination against males, especially white heterosexual males.

Finally, HEB, a caution: Be careful — you might get the world you think you want...

Scotty, at 1:25 pm EST on January 23, 2006

Marks

Low and high marks are relative to each other. If all your candidates or even all your finalists have the same or nearly the rating then you need a better rating system, not an injection of social justice race baiting. I realize that many schools use a recommendation system lacking any numerical component, but the sorting of candidates should be sufficiently well designed that everyone should not end up with the same level of approval. If necessary, bring in other evaluators (like junior faculty from the department or the dean of another college at your university) to break the deadlock. In short, if you have to resort to flipping coins or stating “well, he’s black so he’s in” then your system isn’t very good.

While some of my fellow students are reveling in their drunken stupor, I very much enjoy retaining my sobriety and rational thought. Please don’t assume that we’re all raging alcholics.

Kevin, Undergraduate, at 9:20 pm EST on January 23, 2006