Webloggin » Lower Standards And Diminishing Returns Courtesy Of The Diversity Police

Earlier this week I discussed the efforts of liberal minded educators who are seeking ways to circumvent affirmative action bans that were put on the books in three states by voter ballot initiatives. This frantic effort is a byproduct of attitudes held by the higher echelons of the nation’s elite ‘thinkers’ that regard the majority of Americans as obtuse self absorbed racists who can’t comprehend the need to give black and Hispanic students an artificial advantage over their white and Asian counterparts.

Not content to accept the various laws of the land and various court decisions that sustained the ballot initiatives, the nation’s elite have decided to come up with various schemes that give the appearance of racially blind admissions while achieving the spirit of affirmative action.

Heather Mac Donald detailed these efforts and their deleterious affects in a scathing City Journal report that profiles the uphill battle that anti-preference citizens face in California’s uber-liberal social engineering sandbox.

When Prop. 209 passed, a few politicians, such as San Francisco mayor Willie Brown, loudly vowed to disobey it. Most public officials, though, were more circumspect. Doubtless they counted on a highly publicized lawsuit, filed the day after the election, to eviscerate the new constitutional amendment before it affected their operations. A coalition of ethnic advocacy groups and big labor, represented gratis by some of the state’s top law firms, had sued to block the amendment from taking effect. The plaintiffs argued, remarkably, that requiring government to treat everyone equally violated the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

The plaintiffs could not have found a more sympathetic audience than Judge Thelton Henderson, one of the federal bench’s most liberal activists. He quickly issued an injunction against Prop. 209, on the grounds that American society is so racist and sexist that only special preferences for minorities and women could ensure their constitutional right to equal protection.

Henderson’s 1996 ruling was the high point of the preference racket’s reception in the courts. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed Henderson the next year, declaring that Prop. 209’s ban on discrimination and preferential treatment was fully compatible with the Equal Protection clause—a point evidently not obvious to the crème of the state’s lawyers.

From then on, both state and federal judges would show an admirable respect both for voter intent and for the plain meaning of the state’s new constitutional amendment. Not so California’s bureaucrats and pols….

This is exactly right. From that point on liberal minded educators have been focusing on the various schemes that emanated from ground zero in Berkeley to use as a model for their own assaults on affirmative action bans. The schemes are clever in design but ultimately illegal in implementation and have thus been defeated at various stages in the challenge, regroup and scheme again game. But there are exceptions as Heather Mac Donald notes.

California’s university system is a different matter entirely. That diehard center of race and gender obsession has managed to stay out of court (except for one sweetheart suit brought by pro-preference advocates) through fiendishly clever compliance with the letter of the law, while riding roughshod over its spirit. In doing so, university officials have revealed a fatalism about the low academic achievement of blacks and Hispanics that they would decry as rankest bigotry in a 1950s southerner.

Heather then notes the damaging affect this has had on the school systems at the expense of white and Asian students who are often discarded despite better grades and academic acuity.

The median SAT score of blacks and Hispanics in Berkeley’s liberal arts programs was 250 points lower (on a 1,600-point scale) than that of whites and Asians. This test-score gap was hard to miss in the classroom. Renowned Berkeley philosophy professor John Searle, who judges affirmative action “a disaster,” recounts that “they admitted people who could barely read.”

These figures are similar to the ones noted by Roger Clegg in numbers he obtained through a Freedom of Information request regarding the same schemes going on at the University of Michigan. One should ask why the University had to be dragged into releasing these figures.

I encourage you to read both Heather Mac Donald’s and Roger Clegg’s articles in their entirety. They demonstrate how the nations schools are held hostage to liberal elitists whose charge of educating the nations best and brightest is thrown to the wayside in preference of intellectually bankrupt racial policies that are intricately tied to vote buying politicians, race based lobbyists and race baiting liberals.

Original Webloggin Story: NY Times Details Efforts to Circumvent Affirmative Action Bans