University Diversity, Affirmative Action, Unlawful Cheating

Book Review

Cheating: An Insider’s Report on the Use of Race in Admissions at UCLA
by Tim Groseclose
Dog Ear Publishing
212 pp.
$24.99

[From Review]
Higher education is in free fall. At college campuses around the nation, protestors veto mainstream commencement speakers, students receive “trigger warnings” when exposed to uncomfortable ideas, and trendy radical dogma regularly displaces classics in the curriculum. It’s becoming increasingly clear that the higher education system has been taken over by left-wing zealots who will resort to extraordinary measures—including violating the law—to achieve their policy objectives, which include multiculturalism, identity politics, and “racial justice.” The latest example of academic politics run amok can be found in political scientist Tim Groseclose’s exposé of racial discrimination in admissions at the University of California at Los Angeles. The UCLA administration, with the active complicity of faculty members, violated the law by considering race. Groseclose blew the whistle on UCLA’s admission practices, which he chronicles in Cheating.
[. . .]
Proposition 209 requires that admission decisions at all public universities be race-neutral. Applicants must be evaluated on criteria such as grade-point averages and SAT scores. This sounds simple enough. Trouble is, the competition among applicants is so great at highly selective University of California campuses, and the qualifications of African-American and Latino applicants are so comparatively poor, that a purely meritocratic admission process would produce a disproportionately white and Asian entering class. The number of black students at UC’s most prestigious campuses declined each year after affirmative action was outlawed.
[. . .]
UCLA administrators were circumventing Proposition 209 to favor black applicants. The mechanism they used to do this was a “second-chance” review built into the “holistic” process. Administrators submitted a disproportionate number of African-American applicants to the second-chance pool and then granted them admission at three times the rate of admission for Asians in the same category. Ironically, the “holistic” process did not result in the admission of more socio-economically disadvantaged students. UCLA’s subterfuge was designed to increase the number of black students, period. This had the perverse effect of reducing the number of more disadvantaged Latinos and Asians.
[. . .]
“racial justice” is even more important than all the other leftwing causes, including things like a clean environment, collective bargaining rights for workers, world peace, or making the rich pay “their fair share” of taxes. To them, racial justice is also more important than old-fashioned virtues, such as politeness and honesty. Consequently, to them, it is sometimes immoral not to lie about things such as race in admissions. That is, if a lie helps to increase racial diversity, then in their minds it is noble.
[. . .]
“[T]he problem is a symptom of . . . a culture of dishonesty that pervades American universities,” and which includes wealthy donors and politicians in addition to academic administrators. The admission scandal unfolding at the University of Texas is one example.

Link to story about investigation of President of University Of Texas
http://enoughroom.blogspot.com/2014/07/university-of-texas-president-charged.html 

http://www.city-journal.org/2014/cjc0707mp.html

MARK PULLIAM
Affirmative Action Antics
“Diversity” trumps honesty and the rule of law at UCLA.
7 July 2014