He voted with the liberal wing of SCOTUS on the Az. immigration law and ACA. Curiouser and Curiouser.

No one should be fooled by Roberts. He's NOT on our side.

Bake

He's just trying to keep republican hot-button issues alive until after the election. The repubs cannot allow their base to " win " on issues like abortion, immigration , healthcare, anti-gay rights, (et al) before the election. They need these issues to be open so that they can exploit their bases' faith,fear and hatred. This is the only way they can get their high turnout numbers.

They can't win with just the 1% vote; they have to have their base terrified that the "Mexicans,Blacks,Jews, Gays,Socialist,Communists,Baby-killers and\or Kenyans are coming to get them.

If you look around, you can see this all over. Temporary victories for the Dems that are engineered to create ways for the GOP to motivate its base in the coming election. So while we are all high-five'ing like the cast of Heartbreak Ridge, they are scaring the crap outta their turnout machine to get it to produce the numbers. Its gonna be much closer than you think.

but it sure makes sense.

share material economic problems, into identity politics, which was then further exploited by "family values", abortion, bussing, and a bunch of other fragmenting concerns that did not bear directly upon the class war that was being waged by economic measures that affected ALL of the different identity sub-sets. Cowie et al also pretty much say that White males were bribed into assisting this "divide and conquer" strategy, by becoming addicted to the perks of wages and benefits offered to them to do so, and then ultimately, like everyone else, became victims of it too.

Chapter 5 Section III here:
http://books.google.com/books/about/Stayin_Alive.html?id=h9acQrZmpmAC

I have seen a great deal, no, . . . an astoundingly high percentage of mediocrity out there. No wonder authoritarian perspectives are soooooooooooooooooooo powerful.

ses. Autonomous. Comprehensive. Rationally valid and reliable. Deming -esque in that such processes are then systematically integrated with other enterprise wide processes by shared orienting points, benchmarks, semantics/definitions etc.

y.

which is usually to force administrators to look at people of color whose record is just as good as white applicants but who without AA would not be considered for college admission or for the job or for the loan.

There is no lowering of standards unless you consider looking at applications from minority applicants "lowering".

People don't really get how real that is. I do because my Latino background prevented anyone at my very white high school from even asking if I wanted to go to college and at the time, the family had no money. Two strikes. When I went back to school, AA helped me get into Cal because it induced someone to look at my application. That's all they had to do, look.

In academia it was a lowering of standards and the results were predictable. Not in all cases, but it certainly set up some minorities to fail since they were admitted into environments they were not prepared to handle.

because in my 10 years at Berkeley, I never met one.

Compare minority graduation rates vice admissions during that timeframe. Its a clear indicator

There is a vast disparity between high schools. A graduate from Punahou even with a lower GPA is going to be better prepared than one from some public high schools in CA, particularly back in AA's heyday in higher education. The latter graduate may do better at a CSU or CC environment to bring themselves up to the level of competition seen at UC or Ivy League schools. The key is the lack of adequate preparation.

And yet, I never met one, not in class with me at Cal nor in the classes I taught there.

I'm done here.

went on to prestige schools and is now President of the United States

Charles? Charles Murray, is that you?

The point was that some schools (like Punahou) prepare their students for college better than others, demonstrating that GPA alone is not always a useful determinate of future success.

If you read other posts in the thread, I benefited from affirmative action in that time frame, since I am also black

and went on to be the best educated bricklayer I know. lol

Punahou as I recall at at one point over represented in the Ivy League, military academies, Standford, and UC. Not sure that is still true today.

If institutions knowingly accepted students who weren't prepared for the environment -- and the institutions made insufficient efforts to remediate that lack of preparation-- those failures aren't a limitation of Affirmative Action. It's an institutional failure.

Affirmative Action increased diversity in academia. That was the goal, not graduating every student brought in under AA plans.

Last edited Mon Jul 2, 2012, 07:59 PM - Edit history (1)

What was the goal for affirmative action in academia is still open to debate. There were and are widely divergent views on that. For example was it reasonable to expect equal results in addition to equal opportunity? There were some arguing for it at the time.

You are right about the institutional failure. Some schools were more concerned about their stats than the students. The failures seemed more pronounced in the classes with decimal points, but that is anecdotal on my part.

In the UC system we are still trying to address equitable access since due to Prop 209 our hands are tied in many ways. Just look at the stats at Berkley.

There is no easy answer. I clearly benefited from it at the time. However, I saw other minority students who were clearly in over their heads allowed to sink. Today there seems to be less "overplacement", but still a disproportionate share of minority students IMO are under prepared IME.

....logically.

Like the USSC said, race can be considered as A...A ONE factor for historical reasons alone...

You can't throw the other factors out, select someone who's black and then say that's AA....

That's the racist right wing meme on AA...not the true intention of the initiative

I am discussing what was happening at the time in academia as one who was there and benefited from it.

The USSC decision is more recent than what I am discussing.

It's about graduation rates. AA students graduated at much lower rates from my alma mater, for example (as do lower income students.)

http://sitemaker.umich.edu/obpinfo/files/umaa_ug_grdrts_11.pdf

Another thread on DU3 today it pointed out that less that 3% of returning veterans are graduating.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1002893029

So to say "not everyone is qualified" begs the question. Precisely WHAT is "not everyone qualified" for? Let's remember while answering that recent college grads have a 50% unemployment rate.

No university, in the US or abroad, teaches life skills. its not their mission.

Universities had a suggested minimum entrance criteria. Back then it was GPA and test scores. However, much of their student body did markedly better that the minimum criteria. Those admitted at the minimum were at a disadvantage and it often showed. Minority graduation rates compared to admission rates showed a vast disparity. If those same students had decided to go a less prestigious school, they would have been more competitive and a much better chance of graduating.

harmful to many who are churned under the bottom of the system.

Tell a white kid growing up in Norwayne, Michigan about starting positions. Economics really matter to outcomes.

I support it in general, but I've also seen it HUGELY abused.......to give one example, when I was in college I had a close working relationship with the head of the neuroscience department -- I TA'd for her for 3 years. She had an absolute FIT when a mediocre student, who was part of a rich & privileged white family, applied to medical school and was accepted over a couple of outstanding white students in his class.....and she knew he was accepted due to AA. Huh? He claimed Native American ancestry. He had about a drop of NA blood in him, as I'm sure many thousands of Americans do (I'm one of them -- I'm descended from Pocahontas). He manipulated that to make it appear that it was a much more significant part of his heritage than it was. And it worked. This very liberal prof was LIVID! I agreed and still do. And I've seen a few more instances of that. But as far as I know, those instances are relatively rare. I remain in support of AA and would just love to see the loophole I described closed.

...intention of AA was known and it's not to make things "equal"

that thesis doesn't make sense to me. To my mind, the reactionary split came later when the Republicans began overtly to use race as a recruitment tool, i.e., in the later 60s.

that included Affirmative Action.

My weak spots in support of AA have to do with: if merit is the criteria, well then what do we do about historical financial inertia built upon mediocrity and advantage that robbed a bunch of people of their merit? The appx. 240 years of wealth transfer, the transfer of real value/merit by some strong powers of considerably less than real value, which occurred before some of those "identities" were emancipated and/or acquired Civil Rights.

To me, this problem suggests that we need new, more person-specific, ways of delivering affirmative action, more creative ways of affirming merit.

perspective sketched in #2 above.

The basis of my agreement is from being around the Occupy. Our experience was that the different issue and identity groups completely missed what horizontal empowerment is because each subset was so deeply and automatically placing their specific difference way waaaay ahead of anything that they did in fact share with everyone else. Apparently, people thought all they had to do was come there and convince others to _____________________ and everyone would eventually co-operate as one and when that didn't happen, the couldn't deal with the complex reality. Eventually they all got tired of coming and proposing activities, and allowing everyone else to critique, "suggest", and change anything and everything that the proposal intended, and all of that coming from people who NEVER intended in the first place to do it anyway, never intended, because ___________________ was not _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ .

Oh we did go ahead and do a bunch of marching on the banks and several other pretty good sized activities, but it cost the organizers of those activities a great deal, as there got to be more and more hold-outs, not only because of whatever disagreements on that specific issue, but also because of issues going on in the larger group.

All of this seems to me to be similar to what American workers experience with Affirmative Action.

A color blind society is the goal.

I hate to see it spread at DU, but at least it gives the opportunity to set the record straight.

I would prefer that it focus on socio-economics, rather than race or gender.

between socio-economics and identity-politics that prioritizes appropriately with certain agreed upon indicators.

....poor and go to the worst schools and have the worst infrastructure around us.

Come on

But in addition, you would open up affirmative action to poor and disadvantaged whites as well, such as students from Appalachia.

I want affirmative action to help that people that are disadvantanged, regardless of skin color or ethnicity, and I don't want it being used by people that aren't disadvantaged, regardless of skin color or ethnicity.

Bully Bloviators attempting to mislead us or something.

His writing of the majority decision should confirm this.

he speaks with a fork tongue. His overall goal is complete corporate domination.

Step two: That's it.

It's called the "Roberts doctrine".

The ACA decision isn't going to change how any other justice decides on affirmative action.

If the Roberts Court starts to narrow how the Commerce Clause can be used, a whole lot of things are going to change, not just those.