Make the institution look good


The real priority of progressive, collectivist compassion
I've been trying to finish up my global warming FAQ the last couple of days. But there is an article in City Journal that is worth your time. The piece deals with the end-run around the voter initiative that some of the "elites" have been trying, but this bit practically jumped out and thumped my head. Emphasis added.

Even though preference beneficiaries often chose the easiest majors—there were, and still are, virtually no blacks and Hispanics in the most competitive engineering and computer science majors, for example—graduation rates also reflected the qualifications gap. The average six-year graduation rate for blacks and “Chicanos” (California-speak for Mexican-Americans) admitted from 1991 to 1997, the last year of preferences, was about 20 percent below that of whites and Asians. The university always put on a happy face when publicly discussing the fate of its “diversity” admits. Internally, however, even the true believers couldn’t ignore the problems. A psychology professor at UC San Diego recalls that “every meeting of the faculty senate’s student affirmative-action committee was a lugubrious affair. They’d look at graduation rates, grades, and other indicators and say, ‘What we’re doing is failing.’ ”

Yet for the preference lobby, a failing diversity student is better than no diversity student—because the game is not about the students but about the self-image of the institution that so beneficently extends its largesse to them. Thus, when “underrepresented minorities” accepted at Berkeley dropped by half in 1998, the first year that Prop. 209 went into effect, and by nearly that much at UCLA, the university sprang into crisis mode. Never mind that the drops at other campuses were much smaller. Berkeley’s then-chancellor, Robert Berdahl, came to Berkeley’s Boalt Law School, recalls a law professor, and demanded that the faculty increase its shrunken minority admissions. When another professor asked how Boalt was supposed to do that consistent with 209, Berdahl responded testily that he didn’t care how they did it, but do it they must. UCLA law professor Richard Sander was on a committee to discuss what could be done after 209. “The tone among many of the faculty and administrators present was not ‘How do we comply with the law in good faith?’ but ‘What is the likelihood of getting caught if we do not comply?’ ” he says. “Some faculty observed that admissions decisions in many graduate departments rested on so many subjective criteria that it would be easy to make the continued consideration of race invisible to outsiders.”

Here it is, the classic "feel good solution." The objective is not to solve the problem or even to address the needs of the minority, but to make the institution look good.

Does this sound familiar? Maybe it should. I made this entry back in June of 2005.

Since intentions matter often matter more than results, solving the problem isn't as important as either defining your victimhood or showing the proper concern and sympathy. Whenever possible, the problem shouldn't be solved (and should be prolonged) just so people can stay victims or show compassion.

This introduces yet another politically elite class who derive their social worth by defining the victimhood of others.

If someone can define you as an oppressor, a person who either personally benefited from making victims of others or a member of a class who benefited from the unwilling exploitation of an underclass, you have no moral worth whatsoever. An oppressor can only redeem themself by sacrificing everything they possess for the oppressed.

Sadly it seems that for some, the appearance of compassion has replaced the reality.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Wed - January 31, 2007 at 11:29 PM  Tag


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