Oh, lord, can you imagine the new dimension this would add to gaming the rankings? But
"The deans care dearly about where they rank," said Craig Holden, a partner at Lewis Brisbois Bisgaard & Smith and the chairman of the council, which is spearheading the proposal. "The rankings are a real driver for change — everybody recognizes that — and when you make diversity a sidebar rather a component of the rankings, you're sidelining the issue."
A real driver for change... as if law schools don't already strive for racial diversity!
Making diversity a factor in the rankings would create a solid incentive for law school administrators to bolster their diversity efforts, Holden said...
Diversity for the sake of U.S. News Rankings? I don't remember Grutter v. Bollinger accepting racial decision-making for the purpose of climbing in the U.S. News rankings.
Williams presented issues progressing on campus and others that have remained the same or regressed. One of those issues progressing is the university's undergraduate enrollment of minorities, but Williams will not be happy until UW-Madison is the "national champion."
Nearly a hundred students showed up to hear that and to be put in small groups to come up with specific ideas on assigned diversity subtopics like academic success and campus climate.
Students proposed ideas including giving social action leaders college credit for their volunteer work and changing ethnic studies classes to be purely discussion.
Writes Penelope Trunk, the Brazen Careerist blogger, who married a farmer. The link post is actually about remodeling the farmhouse, or that's the factual context anyway. It's titled "How to cope with diversity." There's a list of 7 tips for coping with diversity, all explained in remodeling-the-farmhouse stories.
Here's the story, about a mural that some citizens complained about because it depicted "a black guy" or 2.
I'd like to see a "before" picture, showing the entire mural, because there's some complexity about what it meant for the artist to be told to "lighten" the faces in the painting. The school officials said "to make the kids look like they were 'radiating with happiness,'" so there might be some issue of them conveying the wrong mood. "Lighten" is an ambiguous word — lighten up! — but it's also highly inflammatory to say "lighten" with respect to the skin tone of the faces in the mural.
And then there's City Councilman Steve Blair who had — he's now fired — a local radio talk show, who's been saying things like: "I disagree with the whole perspective that you would have a black guy painted on two sides of that building when the history of Prescott never had a culture issue." You do now.
Speaking of painting, Arizonans are being painted in the media as racists. With the hot national issue about immigration enforcement, any little thing like this will be picked up and used to propagate the meme. You may think you've got a local issue and be willing to engage in loose talk and feel sure you're not really a bad person, but you will look like hell when it's picked up nationally. I've seen a lot of bad murals around town, using big looming faces to convey "progressive" political messages, and I can imagine someone who wasn't a racist at all bitching about them in words that would look quite awful quoted in the national press.
I deplore racism — don't we all? — but can we also talk about the atrocious murals that get slathered onto the walls of our towns? The "diversity" theme is so common in these monstrosities, and I'd hate to see accusations of racism work to silence criticism of artwork that needs to complained about.
IN THE COMMENTS: lemondog links to what I think are pre-alteration photos of the mural, and it's hard to detect a surly, hostile, or aggressive look on the faces. They are already "radiating with happiness." How ecstatic do you want kids to be about going green? I dislike government propaganda murals (and anti-government propaganda murals), but the idea of lightening the faces is bad.
A painting, from a slide show of paintings, supported by this essay by Roberta Smith that argues that the art form known as painting still lives. The essay is flabbier than the ass depicted in the painting. It contains lines like: "And something else greatly reduces the chances of the death of painting: too many people — most obviously women — are just beginning to make their mark with the medium and are becoming active in its public dialogue."
America's primary race problem today is our new "sophistication" around racial matters. Political correctness is a compendium of sophistications in which we join ourselves to obvious falsehoods ("diversity") and refuse to see obvious realities (the irrelevance of diversity to minority development). I would argue further that Barack Obama's election to the presidency of the United States was essentially an American sophistication, a national exercise in seeing what was not there and a refusal to see what was there—all to escape the stigma not of stupidity but of racism....
Mr. Obama won the presidency by achieving a symbiotic bond with the American people: He would labor not to show himself, and Americans would labor not to see him....
I think that Mr. Obama is not just inexperienced; he is also hampered by a distinct inner emptiness—not an emptiness that comes from stupidity or a lack of ability but an emptiness that has been actually nurtured and developed as an adaptation to the political world.
A truly tragic flaw, which we will read and think about for the rest of our lives.
... Mr. Obama always knew that his greatest appeal was not as a leader but as a cultural symbol. He always wore the bargainer's mask—winning the loyalty and gratitude of whites by flattering them with his racial trust: I will presume that you are not a racist if you will not hold my race against me....
It was much more than just "you will not hold my race against me." It was you will invest my race with a special, amorphous goodness — and I will not laugh at your foolishness. I will not doubt myself and you will assume I know what I'm doing.
***
Much more at the link. Steele writes an excellent essay — providing a great starting point for the self-examination that will be required of us in the years to come as we ask ourselves how this charming young man became President of the United States.
[H]igh self-esteem doesn't improve grades, reduce anti-social behavior, deter alcohol drinking or do much of anything good for kids. In fact, telling kids how smart they are can be counterproductive. Many children who are convinced that they are little geniuses tend not to put much effort into their work. Others are troubled by the latent anxiety of adults who feel it necessary to praise them constantly.
... [A] lot of well-meaning adult nostrums—"we're all friends," "we're all equal"—pass right over the heads of young children. Attempts to increase racial sensitivity in older students can even lead to unintended consequences. One researcher found that "more diversity translates into more divisions between students." Another warns that too much discussion of past discrimination can make minority children over-reactive to perceived future slights. As for trying to increase emotional intelligence, the education fad of the 1990s, it doesn't seem to promote "pro-social values" either. It turns out that bullies use their considerable EQ, as it is called, to control their peers.
And 2 Jews. Only 1 Protestant (the elderly Justice Stevens). Isn't that strange! Now, much as I think that's a problem, I don't think it's a problem you can suddenly get exercised about at the very point of the first Hispanic nominee on the Court. Otherwise, all those previous Catholic appointments that we didn't talk about would block the one Hispanic appointment.
ADDED: Rick Hansen predicts that Obama will pick 7th Circuit judge Diane Wood. Read his 5-point analysis at the link. Read the whole thing, but here's #5:
The president is likely to resist the temptation to go bold. Going bold is choosing someone like Pam Karlan, who is brilliant and outspoken. Pam hasn't trimmed her sails in what she's said, and there would be plenty of those YouTube moments to be dissected by 24-hour cable news and a Senate Judiciary minority led by Senator Sessions. As with Sotomayor, Karlan likely could be confirmed to the Court with a big push by the President. This would be the nomination progressives would love. But my thinking is the president wants to preserve some of his capital for everything else, and with Wood he gets an excellent choice at very little cost.
Hansen links to this YouTube clip of Karlan, which I think deserves any effort it might take to vigorously defend:
Diversity is usually discussed in terms of gender, race, and ethnicity. But for the Supreme Court, other elements of diversity are also important—geography, educational background, and life experiences. In those respects, the Supreme Court today is less diverse than it has ever been in its history, and it is the poorer for it.
As to geography, seven of the nine justices come from the eastern seaboard....
[In the mid-1950s o]ne justice came from each of the following states: Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, Alabama, Texas, California, and Washington....
Six of the nine [current] justices are graduates of Harvard Law School. Rather than suggesting that this results from a search for quality, it suggests attention to too narrow a pool of prospects. It resembles the “old boy network,” or an “elitist” approach, especially combined, as it is, with an over-concentration on East Coasters....
[A]ll nine justices came to the Supreme Court from a U.S. court of appeals. In this respect, it is the least diverse Court since 1789...
[In the mid-1950s, there were] U. S. senators (one of whom had been a big-city mayor), a state governor, an attorney general, and a solicitor general....
More than three-fourths of this country lies beyond the Appalachians. We have 189 fully accredited law schools and more than a million lawyers. If only 1 percent were deemed qualified for the Supreme Court, that would provide a pool of some 10,000....
