BlogWonks

Given the title and the study, there is gonna be trouble. Didn’t they learn from what happened to Watson (or L. Summers of Harvard for that matter)?

I was cruising along taking in tons of stuff as usual, when I came across this post at Discriminations blog. The whole commentary and such can be found here.

What they were covering was the information in this article:

Scholars Mount Large-Scale Effort to Study Affirmative Action’s Effects—Bad and Good

A national consortium of about 30 professors and graduate students has been quietly gathering student data from colleges and law schools to examine the effect of affirmative-action policies on their intended beneficiaries.

The subjects the consortium plans to study include one that has already been a key focus of Mr. Sander’s: how the performance of minority students on bar examinations correlates with the caliber of the law school they attended and the degree to which their law school granted affirmative-action preferences in admissions.

The consortium also plans to examine whether minority students granted admissions preferences are disproportionately likely to drop out of undergraduate science programs, whether or how admissions preferences affect undergraduate retention rates, and how the use of affirmative-action preferences affects social interactions on campus. The group plans to use data from California before and after that state’s voters banned the use of affirmative-action preferences by public colleges to see if the ban helped eliminate gaps in the academic performance of different racial and ethnic groups.

Given the results of Watsons comments, and the results of L. Summers comments at harvard, not to mention how this subject is a favored canard of leftist, socialist, communist type people, its going to be interesting how things unfold.

However the person running the study has had his share of controversy.

The principal investigator heading up the effort is Richard H. Sander, a professor of law at the University of California at Los Angeles. He stirred controversy as the author of a 2004 study concluding that the use of racial preferences by law schools hurts black students by placing them in environments where they struggle academically.

Given that he has done the PC thing setting it up (a good tactic):

In an interview last week, Mr. Sander said most of the researchers involved with the new consortium “are advocates of affirmative action” but “think we need to avoid doing things that are harmful.”

He shows that he is a bit more savvy than the other scientists who have decided to tell the truth outright, which goes against the reporting of the main stream media does, and then get baked for it, wouldnt you say?

To show how savvy, take the fact above, and see what it does to leftist detractors.

Charles E. Daye, a professor of law at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who has harshly criticized Mr. Sander’s past research as biased against affirmative action, expressed suspicion that Project Seaphe had some sort of agenda. “I am not going to characterize the study,” he said, but “I can tell you they have a project that is on a mission.”

Despite his misgivings about Project Seaphe, Mr. Daye has agreed to provide the consortium with the findings of his own pending study on diversity on law-school campuses. Although he is not yet ready to release his results, he said, he is obliged to share such information under the terms of the Law School Admission Council grant financing his research.

So whats happened and waht has a peek of the data provided?

So far, the University of Michigan law school has provided data related to bar-examination passage rates of its graduates for three of the 11 years sought by the center: 2004, 2005, and 2006. In a written statement submitted to the court in October, Mr. Sander said the data show “very large disparities in bar passage rates across racial lines,” with black graduates of the law school being about eight times as likely as white graduates of the law school to fail state bar examinations on their first attempt.

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