Fisher Letter Boston Globe Refused to Print
The Boston Globe recently printed an opinion column entitled ‘Mismatched’ black students pay the price of affirmative action. Jeff Jacoby was either grossly ignorant of the facts or simply racially prejudiced.
Here is the letter I wrote responding to Jacoby:
The columnist neglected to mention important data that would better inform Globe readers in his column ‘Mismatched’ black students pay the price of affirmative action. Jacoby continues the insecurity and insidiousness of racial prejudice that has unfortunately permeated our society for centuries. Jacoby assumed that African Americans and Latina/os gained admission to UT-Austin at the expense of Abigail Fisher. He is wrong. Jacoby neglected to mention that Abigail Fisher was a very average student (See Entitlement by “race”: What Abigail Fisher didn’t tell you…). The facts are that Abigail Fisher did not finish in the top ten percent of her high school class, which would have automatically qualified her for admission to any public university in the state. Second there were five black students who were denied admission that had better scores and grades than Abigail. Third, there were 42 white students who gained admission that had worse test scores and grades.Jacoby’s second failure was to follow Justice Scalia’s most recent judicial missteps by citing mismatch theory— which is racism parading as scholarship. In the latest Fisher arguments, Scalia sweepingly suggested that Blacks should just go to “slower track” universities. The social science world has extensively discredited the racialized ideas underlying mismatch theory. The data from Texas also discredits Scalia and Jacoby’s assertions.
When I was a professor at the University of Texas at Austin we published a paper in the Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy that showed that, controlling for ability, students who attended the Texas’ flagship institutions actually graduated at much higher rates. So, in essence, Black students of the same ability, if they attend lower tiered institutions had much lower graduation rates.In sum, the actual data from Texas is mismatched with Scalia, Jacoby and Fisher’s highly racialized and wrong assertions.
Why is this even an issue? I wrote in the post Fisher v. Texas: Another civil rights movement on the way? that it’s because African American and Latino students continue to be severely underrepresented in our nation’s selective institutions— including UT-Austin.
Diversity in these institutions is again under attack in the Fisher v. Texas case currently being re-decided in the US Supreme Court. For past attacks see Bakke, Hopwood, Grutter and Gratz. Considering that Grutter upheld race as one of many factors under a decade ago, conservatives Fisher Letter Boston Globe Refused to Print | Cloaking Inequity: