Posted on 08/26/2013 7:12:52 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
The Los Angeles Times recently published a devastating case study in the malign effects of academic racial preferences. The University of California, Berkeley, followed the diversocrat playbook to the letter in admitting Kashawn Campbell, a South Central Los Angeles high-school senior, in 2012: It disregarded his level of academic preparation, parked him in the black dorm — the “African American Theme Program” — and provided him with a black-studies course.
The results were thoroughly predictable. After his first semester, reports the Times:
[Kashawn] had barely passed an introductory science course. In College Writing 1A, his essays — pockmarked with misplaced words and odd phrases — were so weak that he would have to take the class again.
His writing often didn’t make sense. He struggled to comprehend the readings for [College Writing] and think critically about the text.
“It took awhile for him to understand there was a problem,” [his instructor] said. “He could not believe that he needed more skills. He would revise his papers and each time he would turn his work back in having complicated it. The paper would be full of words he thought were academic, writing the way he thought a college student should write, using big words he didn’t have command of.”
His grade-point average was 1.7, putting him at risk of expulsion if he didn’t raise it by the end of the year. The one bright spot in his academic record? Why, African American Studies 5A, of course! Kashawn had received an A on an essay and a B on a midterm, the best grades of his freshman year:
Kashawn reveled in the class [a survey of black culture and race relations], in a way he hadn’t since high school. He would often be the first one to speak up in discussions, even though his points weren’t always the most sophisticated, said Gabrielle Williams, a doctoral student who helped teach the class.
He still had gaps in his knowledge of history. But, Williams said, “you could see how engaged he was, how much he loved being there.”
Did Kashawn’s good grades in African American Studies 5A mean that he had suddenly learned how to think and to write? Not at all. He was advancing little in his second go-round at expository writing: “On yet another failing essay, the instructor wrote how surprised she was at his lack of progress, especially, she noted, given the hours they’d spent going over his ‘extremely long, awkward and unclear sentences.’”
His (to him) unforeseen academic struggles took a psychological toll:
He had never felt this kind of failure, nor felt this insecure. . . . Each poor grade [was] another stinging punch bringing him closer to flunking out. None of the adults in his life knew the depth of his pain: not his professors, his counselors, any of the teachers at his old high school.
He tries to rally his spirits with heart-wrenching pathos: “‘I can do this! I can do this!’ he had written [in a diary]. ‘Let the studying begin! . . . It’s time for Kashawn’s Comeback!’”
A counselor in the campus psychologist’s office urged him to scale back his academic ambitions. “Maybe he didn’t have to be the straight-A kid he’d been in high school anymore,” the counselor advised him. This “be content with mediocrity” message is hardly a recipe for future success, but it sums up the attitude that many a struggling affirmative-action “beneficiary” has adopted to get through college.
The black-themed dorm and student center also operated exactly as one would expect, confirming their members’ belief in their own racial oppression:
“Sometimes we feel like we’re not wanted on campus,” Kashawn said, surrounded at a dinner table by several of his dorm mates, all of them nodding in agreement. “It’s usually subtle things, glances or not being invited to study groups. Little, constant aggressions.”
Of course, the only reason that Kashawn and many of his fellow dorm mates are at Berkeley is because the administration “wants” them so much, regardless of their chances of success. It is unlikely, however, that African American Studies 5A discussed the academic-achievement gap in Berkeley’s admissions between black, white, and Asian students. That gap, not racism, explains why Kashawn is not a sought-after addition to study groups. (Kashawn came to Berkeley through one of the University of California’s many desperate efforts to evade California’s ban on governmental racial preferences: an admissions guarantee for students in the top decile of their high school classes, regardless of their test scores or the caliber of their school.)
Kashawn is on tenterhooks waiting to learn if his second-semester grades will allow him to continue into sophomore year. Which course gave him an A–, to pull his GPA over the top? Hint: It wasn’t College Writing.
The Times could not have written a more resounding confirmation of mismatch theory if it had tried. (The paper’s motivations for the story remain mysterious, since the Times is conventionally liberal on race matters.) Mismatch theory, most recently expounded by Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor, is the most powerful critique of affirmative action yet developed, demonstrating empirically that students admitted to academic environments for which they are ill prepared learn less, and are less likely to pursue rigorous majors, than had they been enrolled in schools where their peers shared their level of academic preparation.
But the Times story conveys a subtler point as well: Racial preferences are not just ill advised, they are positively sadistic. Only the preening self-regard of University of California administrators and faculty is served by such an admissions travesty. Preference practitioners are willing to set their “beneficiaries” up to fail and to subject them to possible emotional distress, simply so that the preference dispensers can look out upon their “diverse” realm and know that they are morally superior to the rest of society.
— Heather Mac Donald is a contributing editor at the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal and the author of Are Cops Racist?
Imagine going through life as orangello
(And: “My friend’s brother is an emergency room doc and he swears...” doesn’t qualify as proof.)
“Two years at a JC probably could have better prepared him for a four year state college, which is not as demanding as a UC.”
UC is a state college.
I think he meant something like “Cal State ______” as opposed to “University of California at ____”.
As a speechwriter for GWB, Michael Gerson coined the phrase "the soft bigotry of low expectations." Your observation is exactly what that phrase means. The do-gooders are destroying these kids by never letting them hear the words "that's not good enough".
It’s 2013 and there is a black dorm at Berkeley?
Oranjello is indeed a fictitious name...invented as far as I know, by a Comic character Named Shirely Q. Liquor
“she” also claims to have a daughter named Gyno-Lotrimin!
“The black guy who didn’t do so well reminds me of a couple of white guys I met in college, who were just educated beyond their mental abilities. They wrote similar types of papers full of big words with no clear concepts behind them.”
The term for them is ‘legacy admission’.
In that case, it proves a mathematical (statistical) phenomena - reversion to the mean.
One of the top theoretical physicists in the world was a journeyman plumber before he found his true calling.
I’ve made the IQ argument before. I’ve stated if IQ didn’t mean anything, we could go to NASA or other space centers and find rocket scientists with average IQs or worse. I don’t think we’d find that.
Not really. One of the guys I have in mind wanted to be a literary intellectual. He was very enthusiatstic, had read Northrup Frye and Wayne Booth in high school, and had a huge bookshelf full of advanced literary criticism. He was a Jewish guy from Long Island, went to a top high school and did very well, with high test scores.
But he was only moderately bright, so he just didn’t have the mental horsepower to actually understand the concepts. You really needed to be brilliant to do this stuff. All of the genuine literary intellectuals made fun of him behind his back.
He was replaced by his Asian counter-part who had excellent grades and was a capitalist.
Ka-Ching!
Jacques Barzun used to write about the decline of western civilization, and he cited intellectualism as one of the causes.
He was talking about the needless obfuscation of mostly scientific concepts that kept ‘ordinary’ people from supporting its advance. Von Braun enlisting Walt Disney to get ordinary tax payers excited about putting a man on the moon was an example of how to link very hard problem-solving to the imagination of the people who’d likely benefit the most.
When you talk about ‘literary criticism’, and having the real horsepower to do it, what exactly are we talking about, and how does you 11th grade high schooler who may want to do the same thing benefit?
And I would add "possession of a Nobel Prize" to that list.
Berkeley is so left-wing that it encouraged blacks to live in a blacks-only dorm in the name of identity politics, and then Kashawn and his dorm-mates wonder why they feel isolated!
Hello?
Don't confuse the Nobels given for "peace" and "literature" to those given for the science fields. Those are still very much given on merit. He who possesses a Nobel in chemistry, physics, medicine, etc. probably "is" a genius.
I agree. She is one of my few ‘must read’ writers. The takedown of AA encroachment in this article is priceless:
www.city-journal.org/2011/cjc0714hm.html
I do agree with you there; and had the second thought after I posted, but didn't post a correction. Thanks for bringing it up.
You sir, have hit the nail squarely on the head.
After 4 years of college, I have used the education I received in a myriad of ways.
Most notably, winning many games of Trivial Pursuit, and astounding my wife with my well-rounded education whilst we watch Jeopardy.
About the only thing that impressed potential employers was that I made it through The Citadel. Which is a wonderful place to be FROM and a miserable place to be....for most people.
Far be it from me to say that I was raised in a strict household with a career Army MP officer for a father....but my faculty advisor at The Citadel remarked to me that I was the only person he had ever seen who looked upon it as a party school.
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