Just stopping through with, well...some kindling, I suppose:
http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/ ... says_it_coUniversity of California at Berkeley’s law dean is explaining his school’s “critical mass” policy that left some of its first-year sections without any black students.
Berkeley Law Dean Sujit Choudhry sent an email to the law school community explaining that the policy is intended to create a more positive experience for underrepresented minorities by grouping them together to create a critical mass, the Daily Californian reports. His email comes after a critical post at Above the Law Redline, which said the policy appeared to be segregating black students.
Redline explains how the policy worked: Berkeley divides its law classes into nine sections, called “mods,” in which students take most of their mandatory classes together. Each mod feeds into one of three “super mods.”
Four of the mods have a critical mass of black law students and some have none, though all of the mods have students of color, including Hispanics and Asian-Americans, Choudhry told Redline. That has left one “super mod” without any African-American students, according to Redline and the Daily Californian.
Choudhry says the school adopted the policy after some minorities complained last year that they felt isolated when they were the only members of their racial group in a class. In his email to the law school community, Choudhry said the critical mass system “can help dispel stereotypes that others may hold because people see that not everyone from a particular group is alike.”
The UC Berkeley chapter of La Raza Law Students Association supports the critical mass policy, according to the Daily Californian. The group cites studies finding that being the only member of a racial or ethnic group places pressure on that person to perform well as the representative of their group and creates fear that poor performance will confirm negative stereotypes. The group calls for greater diversity and inclusion at the law school.
Redline author Elie Mystal wrote that he has been in many classrooms where he has been the only black kid. “You feel like you are unfairly tasked with speaking ‘for your race,’ when you really just want to zone out and play spider solitaire like everyone else,” he writes.
1. I think this is a useful social experiment and should probably be replicated. I say that knowing it will happen, but in the worst way, supervised by suits in cooked controlled trials for results that point towards their sponsors product/solution. But still, it's an interesting question: how much does racial balance become a distraction in that context? From there you can work on how to mitigate and defuse that. The problem is you can also work on...a lot of other things. Jeff Bezos has questions.
2. I think it is telling that the closing complaint I quoted is about being able to
ignore the substance of their education in peace. 3. Howard appears to be proof that ethnically homogeneous meritocracy works. Then again, Yale.
4. Strange how the article frames the problem as "classes without black students" -- which implies the problem is not racial quota formulas per se, just their particular composition -- a bias towards quantitative
equality at the expense of all else.