Nevada Democratic Senator wants racial and gender quotas for hiring staff

Should hiring be based on merits or race?  Should the balance be for each Senator's office or by party or for the Senate as a whole?  Will Asians not be a protected class?  If you think that there should be quotas for staff, should we have quotas for the Senators?  From Fox News:

One of the U.S. Senate's newest members is proposing to shake up the chamber by mandating "diversity" quotas for everything from staffs to committees. 

A proposal by Nevada’s freshman Democratic senator, Catherine Cortez Masto, could mimic efforts in corporate America. Large companies across the country, particularly those in Silicon Valley, have been under intense pressure to hire more minorities. 

Cortez Masto thinks it should be a Congressional priority, too. 

“We should be mandating diversity in our committees, mandating diversity in our hiring practices, mandating diversity throughout the United States Senate,” Cortez Masto told the podcast Women Rule. “You just have to walk in the room and look at the Senators that are there — the 100 Senators, right? You could see the lack of diversity.” . . . 

“This is obviously the outgrowth and natural conclusion of what’s going been on for a long time outside Capitol Hill,” said Professor John Eastman of Chapman University. “This is exactly what the 1964 Civil Rights Act said we cannot do, but we know that this is the way the law has nevertheless been applied throughout the rest of the country. So, why not hold the Congress to the same rules that apply to everyone else so the politicians can see the absurdity of it?” . . .

"UCLA prof says stats prove school's admissions illegally favor blacks"

This article by my son Maxim was written about my friend Tim Groseclose.  California public universities might be barred by law from explicitly discriminating on the basis of race in admissions, but Groseclose shows what everyone knows is true: they are still discriminating using race.  The sad thing is that putting students in schools that are too difficult for them does no favor for the student.  Others also are hurt by moving them to lower level schools.  Asians are a particularly aggrieved group that is obviously harmed by this policy.

From Fox News:

Public universities in California are barred from using race as a factor in admitting students, but a UCLA professor who once served on its admissions oversight team says he has proof they do it anyway. 

While the first round of admissions consideration is handled fairly, African-American students are nearly three times as likely to make it out of the "maybe" pile than equally-qualified white students, and more than twice as likely as Asians, according to Tim Groseclose, a political science professor at the school and author of a new book titled, “Cheating: An Insider's Report on the Use of Race in Admissions at UCLA.” 

“UCLA is using racial preferences in admissions,” Groseclose, who made his case using data from 2006-2009, told FoxNews.com. 

After a first look results in most applications being either accepted or rejected, a handful of senior university staff sift through those marked for further consideration, according to Groseclose. That’s where the alleged bias happens. He found black applicants were accepted at a  43 percent rate in the second round, while whites were accepted at a 15 percent rate and Asians at an 18 percent rate. . . .

Tim is apparently leaving UCLA to go to George Mason University in Virginia. 

Pressure on Marines to change standards so that women can qualify for infantry?

The same thing happened with police.  First women were allowed to be patrol officers, but because so few made it through the training, the training standards for women were set differently than those for men.  The results were fairly troubling.  From the New York Times:

. . . Last fall, the first two female volunteers failed to complete the course. One, a distance runner, was dropped on the first day, known as the Combat Endurance Test. The second, a soccer player, endured for over a week before instructors pulled her out because of a stress fracture in her foot. Both are now training for non-infantry jobs. 

In Quantico, concerns run deep among some staff members that pressure to accommodate women will lead to a softening of the Marine Corps’ tough standards. Col. Todd S. Desgrosseilliers, commander of the Basic School, which includes the Infantry Officer School and the Basic Officer Course, said that would not happen. 

“They are gender-neutral now,” he said of the standards. “They aren’t hard to be hard. These are the things they need to be able to do to be infantry officers.” 

The 86-day Infantry Officer Course, which was started in 1977 by Vietnam combat veterans, is viewed with special reverence within the corps, the most infantry-centric of the armed services. Though its students tend to be top performers in basic officer training, more than one in five are dropped during the infantry course. Some are allowed to try again, but most find other jobs in the corps. . . .

UPDATE: A reader points out to me that the strength requirements for men and women in the Marines are already quite different.  The information for men is available here and for women here.
On the flexed-arm hang for women, the criteria is met as long as there is some bend in their elbows.  "Marines are authorized to drop down below the bar, however, some degree of elbow flexion must be maintained with both arms. Once a Marine's arms are fully extended or the Marine drops off the bar, the clock will stop."
Compare the requirement for men: "The intent is to execute a vertical 'dead hang' pull-up. A certain amount of inherent body movement will occur as the pull-up is executed. However, the intent is to avoid a pendulum-like motion that enhances the ability to execute the pull-up. Whipping, kicking, kipping of the body or legs, or any leg movement used to assist in the vertical progression of the pull-up is not authorized. If observed, the repetition will not count for score."
There was a time when I was in my teens and twenties that I was able to do 20 pull-ups.  Now I can do five (I suppose that I could do more if I actually worked at it regularly).  So right now at age 54, I can score a 25 for men, but I just tried it and I was able to hang for 90 seconds with bent elbows so I had no trouble scoring a 100 on the test for women.
Women can also take about 17 percent longer to run 3 miles.  Only sit ups have the same requirements for both men and women.

Summary of Arguments in University of Texas at Austin v. Fisher case, the case that could "finally put an end to racial preferences in university admissions"

Mention of recent research that I co-authored on the so-called "critical mass" claim upon which the Supreme Court's decision in Grutter was determined.  In University of Texas at Austin v. Fisher, the Fifth circuit court directly referenced the term "critical mass" 69 times.  The Weekly Standard has a rough summary of the case available here.  The discussion on my work is here:

Fourth, the University of Michigan hornswoggled the Supreme Court in 2003 by insisting that its law school never used numbers or percentages in preferring minorities, but was seeking nothing more than “a critical mass” of minority students. It was a clever and successful dodge. Chief Justice William Rehnquist, in his Grutter dissent, examined the numbers closely and demonstrated, with a clarity that ought to have embarrassed my university, that this position was an outright “sham.” Now in the amicus briefs in Fisher the “critical mass” theory gets a solid drubbing. Twenty-two distinguished scholars of economics and statistics from many universities join in one brief arguing that empirical evidence simply does not demonstrate “that minority students are benefited by a ‘critical mass’ of minorities in the classroom.” Indeed, they conclude, “No reliable empirical evidence known to [these] amici supports the critical mass theory.” 

They go on to present, in a detailed appendix, sets of comparisons of the performance of blacks and whites in classrooms of different sizes with different numbers of each. The “critical mass” theory is statistically demolished. . . .

The briefs filed in the Fisher v. Texas Affirmative Action case are available here

The University of Texas provides the briefs here.  17 Amicus briefs were file to support the petitioner (those opposing affirmative action).  71 Amicus briefs support the University of Texas.

Obama administration's policy to make the military more hospitable to women

So much for the tradition of drill sergeants yelling at recruits.  From ABC News:

Part of the drill sergeants' evaluation focused on what they would do if a trainee refused to do as they were told. One drill sergeant tackled the scenario by simply saying "let's talk" and listening to the recruit and then providing mentoring. . . .

Liberals say that it has been OK to classify yourselves as a minority if you have "one-drop" of minority blood

I guess that I missed the memo that it was OK to classify oneself as a minority with "one-drop" of minority blood.  I really get the impression that this is just trying to cover liberal's tracks on Elizabeth Warren and give her cover.  It seems that if I had done that (and I am 1/32nd American Indian), there were be few claiming that was the right rule to use.  Here is a piece that refers to the "one-drop" rule.  Had I heard of the "one-drop" rule?  Sure, but I thought that this rule was surely objectionable to liberals.  Apparently, I was completely wrong.

Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren used to be listed as white, but changed it to native American after she became an academic

Why would she classify herself as white through law school and starting at the University of Texas and then classify herself as Native American after that?  Could it be that she learned how to play the affirmative action game?  From the WSJ:

Democratic Senate hopeful Elizabeth Warren listed herself as white in personnel records at the University of Texas and declined to apply to Rutgers School of Law through a minority program, records show.
Ms. Warren, a Harvard Law School professor, is in a tight race with Republican Sen. Scott Brown, who has criticized her for listing herself as a minority in a professional directory from 1986 to 1995 and this week called for her to produce employment records.
. . . . a genealogy expert has said she is at least 1/32 Cherokee [ERROR: he said that she was 1/32nd, but this assumes that the Cherokee was 100% Native American].
The Brown campaign and GOP operatives have raised questions over whether she claimed to be a minority to boost her career.
The University of Texas at Austin, where Ms. Warren worked from 1983 to 1987, released documents showing Ms. Warren listed herself as white on employment records.
In her application to Rutgers Law School, she marked "no" when asked if she was applying as a minority, according to documents obtained by The Wall Street Journal. . . .
Harvard University had touted Ms. Warren as a minority in 1996 when the school came under fire from critics who accused it of being too white and too male. The university has declined to say why it designated Ms. Warren a minority.
Meanwhile, a second school, the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where Ms. Warren taught from the late 1980s through the mid-1990s, designated her as a minority in a 2005 diversity report that is available online. . . . .

Is Elizabeth Warren serious about her explanation for why she classified herself as an American Indian in Law School Directories?

The reporter's question here is such a softball.  I have a hard time believing that the reporter is at all serious.  How does someone with 1/32nd American Indian ancestry really list enroll as being a member of a tribe?  How do they list themselves as being an Indian?  Warren's claim that she didn't expected any affirmative action gain from her listing and that she just did it to meet other people with tribal roots is bizarre.  Again, I am 1/32nd American Indian and it has never crossed my mind to list myself down as American Indian.

In the youtube videos below a couple of points have come out.  1) That she is 1/32nd Indian may be questionable because the ancestor was apparently not in the Cherokee census. 2) Warren used to claim that she was a descendant from the Delaware tribe, not Cherokee.



From the Boston Herald:

Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren, fending off questions about whether she used her Native American heritage to advance her career, said today she enrolled herself as a minority in law school directories for nearly a decade because she hoped to meet other people with tribal roots.
“I listed myself in the directory in the hopes that it might mean that I would be invited to a luncheon, a group something that might happen with people who are like I am. Nothing like that ever happened, that was clearly not the use for it and so I stopped checking it off,” said Warren.
The Harvard Law professor argued she didn’t use her minority status to get her teaching jobs, and slammed her Republican rival U.S. Sen.Scott Brown for suggesting otherwise. . . .

As to her attacks on Scott Brown, all he has done is say that he isn't going to get involved in all this.

Some other videos
James Taranto on the issue.

High cheek bones?

This is her answer after 5 days?

Apparently it isn't clear that she is 1/32nd Indian.  Apparently, Warren originally claimed that she was part of the Delaware tribe, not Cherokee.

An analysis of the situation.

Ignoring a reporter's questions

More on Elizabeth Warren claiming to me a Native American Minority

The claim is that new research claims that she is 1/32nd American Indian.  In fact, I am 1/32nd American Indian, but I never, ever thought for a second of putting it down that I was a minority American Indian because of that.  With her listing herself as a minority in the law professor directory and having listed that at the University of Texas, University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard, does anyone possibly believe that she didn't know that universities were making a big deal about having a very rare American Indian on their faculty?

Why are there different strength tests for men and women at the FBI?

From ABC News:

A male employee of the Federal Bureau of Investigation is suing the agency for gender discrimination, claiming that a physical fitness test to become an FBI agent is biased against men. Jay Bauer, a Ph.D. graduate of Northwestern University from Mount Prospect, Ill., said he missed the fitness test by one-push up, completing only 29 push-ups instead of the minimum 30 required for male trainees, which disqualified him from becoming a special agent. The test, administered at the FBI academy in Quantico, Va., has different physical minimum requirements for female and male trainees. Bauer argues in the complaint that the FBI violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He also alleges a trainee who failed to pass the female standards of the physical test was given a second chance. . . .

Baylor Law admissions data leaked

See Ted Frank's discussion here.

But Baylor itself does see a big disparity in another metric. I sorted the 431 students with "LSAT Index" scores. (An LSAT Index adds the LSAT to 10 times the GPA.) The top quartile is above 202 (e.g., 3.9/163 or 3.5/167); the median in 199 (e.g., 3.3/166 or 3.8/161), the bottom quartile is below 197 (e.g. 3.6/161 or 3.3/164). Baylor did not vary from the LSAT index often, only 2% of the class was below 193 and the lowest index was 189. In the top quartile (and stretching down to the top 128 admittees), there was a single African-American. So it's not accurate to say affirmative action makes little difference. The 4.0/170 white with a 210 Index gets a full scholarship to Baylor Law. The 4.0/170 black with a 210 Index might get the same offer, but doesn't accept the full scholarship to Baylor Law: she presumably has better options available to her. One would expect a 4.0/170 African-American to end up at a top-14 law school. Moreover, the 3.7/167 African-American generally isn't accepting the offers to attend Baylor Law, either. If we expect the top 10% of the class and the editorial board of the Baylor Law Review to be much more likely to come from the top quartile of applicants, African-Americans are going to be even more underrepresented than that 3%. If nothing else, larger bumps of affirmative action are having an effect on Baylor Law's diversity. But the real difference was in the scholarship money. Though non-Asian minorities had slightly lower Index scores on average, they averaged $24,231 in scholarship money; whites and Asians averaged under $20,000. It's unclear to what extent Baylor Law considers financial need in scholarship money, but it's clear that merit makes a big difference. Over 90% of students with Index scores above 206 got full scholarships (the three who didn't were white); less than 3% of students with Index scores below 202 got full scholarships, and all seven were African-American or Hispanic. . . .

By two-to-one Americans oppose affirmative action for college admissions

From Rasmussen Reports:

The U.S. Supreme Court last week agreed to hear a case involving the use of race as a factor in college admissions. Most voters oppose the use of so-called affirmative action policies at colleges and universities and continue to believe those policies have not been successful despite being in place for 50 years.
The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 24% of Likely U.S. Voters favor applying affirmative action policies to college admissions. Fifty-five percent (55%) oppose the use of such policies to determine who is admitted to colleges and universities. Twenty-one percent (21%) are undecided.  (To see survey question wording, click here.)

A real cost of female employees (in at least one area?)?

Should women who are just as good as men get the same wage if they are more costly to employ? I would assume not. In the UK they are having to recognize a real cost of female employees. If you need to give workers more flexibility for sudden changes in their schedules, you have to hire more employees to cover possible gap times that might arise. Of course, government is the last place that would actually recognize different costs from hiring different types of employees. From the BBC:

The NHS should make flexible working more available in order to respond to the increasing number of female doctors, a medical group has said.

The Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh (RCPE) said the move was necessary to maintain patient care.

It said the number of female doctors in the UK had risen by 37% since 2001.

But the RCPE warned there was a "real threat" that women may be unable to continue in their chosen career once they had young children.

The Royal College said 42% of all doctors were women - 28% of hospital consultants and 47% of GPs.

It said that traditionally a higher percentage of women doctors had worked as GPs, due to the more flexible working arrangements available.

But there were now 46% more female doctors registered in their foundation year training in 2010 than males.

The RCPE said this could have significant implications for the NHS if greater emphasis was not placed on adjusting working patterns and career structures. . . .

WBAL on Illegal Immigrants Get Special Treatment At University Of Maryland

You can listen to Maxim's interview here.

Obama administration forces Dayton Police Department to lower its testing standard for police recruits

Even the NAACP thinks that the Obama administration is going to far in pushing affirmative action policies.

The Dayton Police Department is lowering its testing standards for recruits.

It's a move required by the U.S. Department of Justice after it says not enough African-Americans passed the exam.

Dayton is in desperate need of officers to replace dozens of retirees. The hiring process was postponed for months because the D.O.J. rejected the original scores provided by the Dayton Civil Service Board, which administers the test.

Under the previous requirements, candidates had to get a 66% on part one of the exam and a 72% on part two.

The D.O.J. approved new scoring policy only requires potential police officers to get a 58% and a 63%. That's the equivalent of an ‘F’ and a ‘D’.

“It becomes a safety issue for the people of our community,” said Dayton Fraternal Order of Police President, Randy Beane. “It becomes a safety issue to have an incompetent officer next to you in a life and death situation."

“The NAACP does not support individuals failing a test and then having the opportunity to be gainfully employed,” agreed Dayton NAACP President Derrick Foward.

The D.O.J. and Civil Service Board declined Dayton’s News Source’s repeat requests for interviews. The lower standards mean 258 more people passed the test. The city won't say how many were minorities.

“If you lower the score for any group of people, you're not getting the best qualified people for the job,” Foward said. . . .

One third of Atlanta's new police have criminal records

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has this:

Keovongsa Siharath was arrested in Henry County on charges he punched his stepfather.

Jeffrey Churchill was charged with assault in an altercation with a woman in a mall parking lot.

Calvin Thomas was taken into custody in DeKalb County on a concealed weapons charge.

All three are now officers with the Atlanta Police Department.

More than one-third of recent Atlanta Police Academy graduates have been arrested or cited for a crime, according to a review of their job applications. The arrests ranged from minor offenses such as shoplifting to violent charges including assault. More than one-third of the officers had been rejected by other law enforcement agencies, and more than half of the recruits admitted using marijuana.

“On its face, it’s troubling and disturbing,” said Vincent Fort, a state senator from Atlanta. “It would be very troubling that people might be hitting the streets to serve and protect and they have histories that have made them unqualified to serve on other departments.”

But Atlanta police say it’s not so simple. Officials have been trying without success for more than a decade to grow the department

to 2,000 officers, an effort hurt by this year’s budget crisis. With competition for recruits intense among law enforcement agencies, Atlanta has had to make concessions. . . .

University of Colorado at Boulder setting aside money specifically to hire a conservative academic

The Denver Post has the article here:

Mr. Peterson's quest has been greeted with protests from some faculty and students, who say the move is too — well, radical.

"Why set aside money specifically for a conservative?" asks Curtis Bell, a teaching assistant in political science. "I'd rather see a quality academic than someone paid to have a particular perspective." Even some conservatives who have long pushed for balance in academia voice qualms. Among them is David Horowitz, a conservative agitator whose book "The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America" includes two Boulder faculty members: an associate professor of ethnic studies who writes about the intersection of Chicano and lesbian issues, and a philosophy professor focused on feminist politics and "global gender justice." While he approves of efforts to bolster a conservative presence on campus, Mr. Horowitz fears that setting up a token right-winger as The Conservative at Boulder will brand the person as a curiosity, like "an animal in the zoo." We "fully expect this person to be integrated into the fabric of life on campus," replies Todd Gleeson, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.

Boulder is far from the only campus to recognize a leftward tilt to the ivory tower. National surveys have repeatedly shown that liberals dominate faculties at most four-year colleges.

Anne Neal at NRO notes:

Universities should never hire faculty members on the basis of their beliefs. They should always make hiring decisions on the basis of candidates’ professional qualifications.

That is a fine thought, but that is in fact what universities do all the time. How do you get schools away from this bad equilibrium that they are in? I don't think that was is proposed for Colorado would do that because you need to hire people who are in a department, that is where other hiring will be occurring.

Stunningly bad results for African-Americans on state bar exams

"Currently only about one in three African-Americans who goes to an American law school passes the bar on the first attempt and a majority never become lawyers at all," says UCLA law professor Richard Sander.

In an article published in the Stanford Law Review, Sander and his research team concluded several thousand would-be black lawyers either dropped out of law school or failed to pass the bar because of affirmative action.

This is really distrubing.

Empirical results questioning some benefits from Affirmative Action in Law Schools

Mark Ramseyer and I have a new paper that might be considered somewhat controversial.

Peer Effects in Affirmative Action: Evidence from Law Student Performace

Abstract:
In the Grutter case, Justice O'Connor suggested that universities could justifiably try to enroll a critical mass of minority students. Enroll fewer than that critical mass, reason some observers, and minority students will feel too marginalized to perform at their highest levels. In this article, we test whether minority students perform better with other students from their ethnic group in a class or school. To do so, we assemble data on the ethnicity and performance of each student in all classes at two law schools - for three years at one, and for sixteen years at the other. We find no consistent evidence that having additional students from one's ethnic group raises a student's performance. Instead, we find some evidence that having additional ethnic peers lowers performance - albeit by a very small amount.