Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood

That's T.J. Rodgers, founder of Cypress Semiconductor. As CEO of a Silicon Valley enterprise, Mr. Rodgers has spent his career thinking about how to attract the best people of whatever background and get them to be their best. Now he is hoping to bring that expertise to a place he believes is sorely in need of a lesson: academe.

I hope he gets on that board! Don't expect the road ahead to be easy, though. On the positive side, BTW, good efforts like that behind Rodgers are starting to happen in several states.

The following filed briefs in favor of "affirmative
action" in the Michigan "Grutter v. Bollinger"
(Michigan University) case. Be sure to save the
list of corporations below for later reference.

American Bar Association

American Council on Education, et. al.

Civil Rights Project of Harvard University

Clinical Legal Education Association

Fortune 500 Corporations that filed briefs in favor
of "affirmative action" for Michigan University

3M
Abbott Laboratories
American Airlines
Ashland
Bank One
Boeing
Coca-Cola
Dow Chemical
E.I. Du Pont De Nemours
Eastman Kodak
Eli Lilly
Ernst & Young
Exelon
Fannie Mae
General Dynamics
General Mills
Intel
Johnson & Johnson
Kellogg
KPMG
Lucent Technologies
Microsoft
Mitsubishi
Nationwide Mutual Insurance
Nationwide Financial
Pfizer
PPG
Proctor & Gamble
Sara Lee
Steelcase
Texaco
TRW
United Airlines

General Motors Corporation

Law Deans of Columbia, Cornell, Duke, Georgetown, Harvard, New York and Yale University, and
University of Pennsylvania

Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights under Law

Michigan Attorney General

Michigan Public Officials

National Asian Pacific American Bar Association, et. al.

NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund

Ohio State University

Thirty-six Faculty Members of The Ohio State University College of Law

UAW (International Union, United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110004878
From the WSJ:
On Regents and Reality
A university's overseers try to stifle a colleague's dissent on racial preferences.

Sunday, March 28, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST

Californians probably think racial preferences in college admissions ended in 1996 when voters approved Proposition 209. But John Moores, chairman of the Board of Regents of the University of California, says some UC administrators have been manipulating the system and defying the law for the past eight years. Mr. Moores's fellow regents voted 8-6 to censure him for expressing these views in a recent Forbes magazine opinion piece. A medal is more like what the man deserves.

In his article, Mr. Moores details how Berkeley, the UC system's flagship school, is admitting hundreds of blacks, Latinos and Native Americans with SAT scores as many as 400 points below the whites and Asians who are being rejected. This is because the liberals who run Berkeley, and their enablers on the Board of Regents, all worship at the altar of "diversity."

They're more interested in some ideal racial mix on campus than in matriculating students who are best prepared to do the work and most likely to graduate. In the real world, Mr. Moores had the temerity to write, this idealism translates into "kids who struggled with eighth-grade math hav[ing] to compete with kids who aced advanced-placement calculus."

A Gray Davis appointee, Mr. Moores notes that university administrators are perpetuating discrimination against high-achieving whites and Asians through a policy known as "comprehensive review," which plays down such objective criteria as grade-point averages and test scores.

Instead, the emphasis is placed on highly subjective "measurements," such as an applicant's background and experiences, which mainly serve as proxies for race and ethnicity. The result, writes Mr. Moores, "is an admissions system that is impossible to audit and that offers a cover for university administrators who don't want the media hounding them over declining minority enrollment."

Enrollment of "underrepresented minorities" did fall off at Berkeley after Prop 209 passed, but it rose at other campuses within the UC system, such as Riverside, Irvine, Santa Cruz and elsewhere. By 2002 more of these minorities were attending University of California institutions than before the referendum passed. Moreover, because minority students are now choosing schools suited to their academic abilities, they are better able to compete and less likely to drop out.

Mr. Moores's efforts to expose Berkeley deserve praise, and the attempt by his colleagues to silence him is all too typical of the closed liberal mind. Racial bean counters are using taxpayer dollars to circumvent the law and the will of the voters. And in the name of political correctness, they're also doing a disservice to many college-bound minorities.

Here's the Forbes piece written by the head of the California board of regents...

http://www.forbes.com/business/forbes/2004/0329/040.html

College Capers
John Moores, 03.29.04

Defying voters, UC, Berkeley is admitting kids with low SAT scores

and rejecting high achievers.

When Governor Gray Davis appointed me to the Board of Regents of the University of California in 1999, I recognized the university's responsibility to extend the opportunity for academic achievement to as many capable students as the resources of the nation's premier public university allow. Sadly, today's UC admissions policies are victimizing students--not just those unfairly denied admission but also many with low college entrance exam scores who were admitted and can't compete.

The California electorate voted to stop racial preference in college admission in 1996. Since then UC administrators have been manipulating the admissions system and, I believe, thwarting the law. (Although I have been the board's chairman since 2002, I'm just one vote.) UC, Berkeley, the top school in the UC system, is admitting "underrepresented minorities" with very low SAT scores while rejecting many applicants with high SAT scores.

Prompted by many complaints from parents whose high-scoring children were rejected by Berkeley, I started probing admissions records. I learned that 359 students with combined SAT scores of 1,000 or less were admitted to Berkeley in 2002, accounting for 3% of the 10,905 students admitted that year. (The national SAT average is about 1,000.) Of those 359 students, 231 were from underrepresented minorities--meaning blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans. Only 19 of the low scorers were white. Some 1,421 Californians with SAT scores above 1,400 applying to the same departments at Berkeley were not admitted. Of those, 662 were Asian-American, while 62 were from the underrepresented minorities.

How did the university get away with discriminating so blatantly against Asians? Through an admissions policy with the vague term "comprehensive review." The policy includes factors like disabilities, low family income, first generation to attend college, need to work, disadvantaged social or educational environment, difficult personal and family situations. This means that a student from a poor background whose parents didn't go to college is given preference over a kid raised by middle-class, educated parents--all other things being equal.

Nobody believes that the SAT is a perfect predictor of academic success, but it's silly to pretend that very low scoring applicants should be admitted to one of America's premier universities with the expectation that somehow these students will learn material that they missed in K-12.

Needless to say, there is no hard weighting system at Berkeley for any of the fuzzy factors mentioned above. The result is an admissions system that is impossible to audit and that offers a cover for university administrators who don't want the media hounding them over declining minority enrollment.

The university is saying it is tilting the balance in favor of disadvantaged students as opposed to merely engaging in racial discrimination. Whatever the truth of that assertion, any good that comes from giving disadvantaged kids a leg up is undone if the tilting goes too far. It goes too far when kids who struggled with eighth-grade math have to compete with kids who aced advanced-placement calculus.

Another disappointment is the many "outreach" programs that were funded post-1996 to create more diversity at the university. As I see it, hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on encouraging poor, often minority, high school students to apply to UC even if they have very low SAT scores. But the outreach programs have had perverse consequences. The victims are the kids who should have gone to one of California's outstanding community colleges, where they might have had the possibility of success and a chance to grow intellectually.

California's public higher education is the best in the world. UC should ensure that its policies are consistent with its well-deserved reputation. The university's admission process should be legal and fair, and the criteria for admission should be transparent to the public. Students should understand that the path into UC is pretty straightforward: Work hard, take demanding courses and demonstrate academic success.

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