The Three Myths of Reverse Racism in College Admissions

Twenty-five years ago, I was sitting in the tiny teacher's room of the little parochial school where I taught, talking to a few other people about the news. The principal's administrative assistant said something about affirmative action letting unqualified black students into Harvard, and I asked her if she thought that was a real worry. She actually gasped. "Don't you?" she asked, in shocked disbelief that I could not be concerned, nay scandalized, about such a well-known social problem.

But I had just graduated from Harvard the year before, and I had never seen these unqualified African-American students that everyone was always talking about. Was Harvard secretly running another secret campus, where they hid all these unqualified minority students people kept mentioning? Or, if the people I had met in college were the supposedly unqualified minority students, why had they kept kicking my ass in chess? It made no sense.

Where I'd gone to college didn't make any difference to my co-worker, who knew what she knew. After all, everybody knew it. The Unqualified Black Harvard Student was a truth universally acknowledged, something everyone accepted as a proven fact, at least among white people who had never been to Harvard.

Now it seems the Trump-and-Sessions Justice Department is planning to investigate American colleges and universities for their alleged racist crimes against white applicants. So the Myth of the Unqualified Minority College Student is going to get official government backing, reality be damned.

This changes the game from the past decades of anti-affirmative lawsuits, which have been brought by private individuals and have traditionally had a plaintiff problem, in that the applicants suing whatever school always turn out to be marginal candidates at best. We can call this the Myth of the Wronged White Genius, a necessary companion to the Myth of the Unqualified Minority. The implication is that there are a number of brilliant white students, who would obviously be accepted immediately into whatever school they apply to except that they have been done wrong by by those Unqualified Minorities. Everyone knows about these people, too: unmistakable stars who would be open-and-shut, slam-dunk admissions cases. But somehow when it's time to sue a college these applicants, the Wronged White Superstars, never show up.

Instead, the plaintiffs in affirmative action lawsuits are people who either would, at best, squeak in at the bottom of an admitted class (as in the case of Allen Bakke) or, as in the absurd case of Abigail Fisher, a student whose own lawyers had to admit she would not get into the university of her choice even if race were not an issue. Bakke v. California did eliminate quotas; UC Davis Medical School was setting aside 16 of its 100 med-school berths for minority applicants, in a system not terribly different from set-asides schools had reserved for veterans and other favored categories. So even in Bakke's best case for his argument he would be, at the very best, in the bottom 16% of the entering class.

Now, we have only Allen Bakke's own word that he would have gotten in if not for those 16 slots. He was convinced this was true. But even so, that makes Bakke at the very best 85th out of a hundred. And Bakke would only be 85th if  every single minority applicant were less qualified than Bakke on paper, an assertion with neither facts nor probability on its side. So the heart of Bakke's own claim is that, by his own lights, he should be in the bottom tier of admitted applicants, the 90-something best applicant out of 100.

Plaintiffs like Bakke (or Grutter, or Gratz) tend to be bubble applicants. Anti-affirmative-action lawsuits, by their basic logic, are about contesting the last slot admitted to a particular program. The argument is, and has to be, that the plaintiff has been done wrong by offering any affirmative action, because the affirmative action applicants booted the plaintiff out of that last available space. So the plaintiff is by definition someone whose best realistic hope was just barely to squeeze under the wire.

That means even the best anti-affirmative-action plaintiff is someone who might or might not get into a school or program any given year, depending on who else applied. The 96th-best applicant one year might be the 106th-best next year, because every year a different batch of people apply. And we should add that rankings like this don't work out transparently, so that one admissions officer might rank an applicant the 95th best and another admissions officer, equally qualified and equally well-intentioned, might rank the same person 105th.

The argument isn't just "If not for affirmative action, I would have gotten into medical school." It is, and has to be, "If not for affirmative action I would have just barely made it into medical school." That's not the world's most rousing chorus.

Lately, anti-affirmative action groups have tried to resort to finding Asian-American plaintiffs, as in this recent piece from the New York Times. Of course, the NYT piece leads off with an apparently very qualified student who is not actually suing Harvard, as the NYT only admits near the bottom of its story. The Times also mysteriously fails to mention that this is not the first time Harvard has been sued over accusations that it should admit more Asian-Americans; we actually know a good deal about Harvard's admissions processes because of discovery from that previous lawsuit. Oh, and Harvard won that earlier lawsuit about this issue, so that might have been something the Times story mentioned, too.

But in any case, the Asian-American-plaintiff gambit doesn't really advance the case that affirmative action is discrimination against whites. The heart of that argument is that colleges are allegedly depressing the number of Asian-American students, and that someplace like Harvard should be 40% Asian-American instead of a mere 20 to 25%. That would lead to fewer white students, not more. This argument is basically that so-called liberal schools are already discriminating in favor of white applicants.

Now, the new Department of Justice is going to go for the gusto and claim anti-white discrimination. This may get around the problem of white plaintiffs with mediocre test scores by making the federal government itself the plaintiff and rendering all of the issues more abstract. Instead of arguing in court for a real but not-overwhelmingly-qualified white person, they can make the case about the imaginary wrongs done to all white people and bring the strictly imaginary Wronged White Geniuses, who would be academic stars if not for those pesky minorities, back into the conversation.

The strongest anti-affirmative-action cases have been against public universities, which are arms of the government. The case that an outside party can dictate the policies of a private university, like Harvard or Yale or your local small liberal-arts college, is a lot murkier. Also, anti-affirmative-action suits have generally, although not always, done better in cases of law or medical school applications instead of undergraduate admissions. This is because professional schools look at a smaller and more quantifiable set of qualifications and leave out murky questions like "character" and "promise."

That brings us to the third big anti-affirmative action myth, the Myth of the Clear Ranked Order. This is the assumption that every stack of college or grad-school applications can clearly be sorted in order of quality, from #1 to #103 to #19,346. But it never works like that. No healthy college admissions pool is going to have an applicant who is clearly and unambiguously better than everyone else in the pool. (That would be a sign that your school is getting an application from a student it usually couldn't land, so you're probably having recruiting trouble already.) And there's never, ever a clear line demarcating the last applicant who gets in from the first applicant who doesn't. That's always a judgment call, and another committee another year might swap around who just made it and who just missed.

The more accurate way to think about applicants is in groupings. There's a group you'd be very happy to have, another group that will clearly get in. There's also a group, which you'd always like to be small, of people who have no hope at all of getting in, and a group of people who are okay but who you are clearly not going to find the space for considering who else is in the pool. But these groupings will never coincide perfectly with the number of spaces available. If you have 100 spaces, or 2000 spaces, or 4000 spaces, you are never going to get exactly 100 or 2000 or 4000 applications from people you obviously want to admit and then a sharp drop off to much less qualified people. There will always be a batch of people who might have made it in and might not have.

This is most obviously true when schools are looking like character, leadership, originality, and so forth, and when they are judging things like extracurricular activities, letters or recommendation, and personal essays. Those things have to be judged qualitatively. Are all those clubs the student is in just resume-padding, or is there something real and interesting going on? In the school orchestra because you think colleges would like that, or because you're really interested in music? That has to be a judgment call, but every admissions office also has to make it.

But this is also true of academic qualifications. If selective colleges reduced everything to a question of GPAs and scores, they would not be happy with who they got. They would believe that they'd let in some people who weren't actually as smart as many of the people they turned away. (There are colleges, of course, where it is just about grades and scores, but those are schools who aren't finding enough students they want at all; they are simply screening out people who are likely to flunk, and taking everyone else.) Take it from a white kid, with no legacy or athletic preference, who got into Harvard without straight As. Harvard took me over kids with better GPAs, including my own valedictorian and class president, for essentially academic reasons. Now, they may have been mistaken, and you don't have to agree with them. But other admissions offices made a similar mistake about me that year, and there's no sign of any nefarious motive. They just thought I would be a good college student.

This is all to say that suing a school like Harvard over alleged discrimination against white kids will get murky very fast.  It's not just grades and scores. It's also the classes the students took, the rigor of the school they go to, what their letters of recommendation say, the quality of their essays. You are not going to find that mythical Clear Ranked List running from 1 to 1600 or 1 to 2000. It just does not exist. Now, Harvard and schools like this certainly exploit the murkiness of this process to do what they want with admissions, including giving advantages to athletes and legacies, and even giving special preferences to academically undistinguished children of major donors. (Hint: rhymes with "Mar-ed Bushner.") But they also use that messy, murky process in pursuit of intellectual and academic excellence.

Now, my high school had a long drought during which we didn't get any applicants into Harvard at all, for something like 25 years, which really stings when you're a school in Massachusetts. It wasn't just my year's valedictorian that they turned down. They turned down years and years of our valedictorians. (I'm happy to say that my old high school now places some students at the Big H every year or two.) So, the year before I got in, some people decided that the only hope was ... affirmative action. A lot of hopes got pinned on one of the school's few (at that time) African-American students, someone whom I will call "Edward." Edward wasn't going to be valedictorian or salutatorian, but he was in the Honors Society, and ... you see where this was going. Some teachers and administrators, and some students, reasoned that although our white A students couldn't get in, a black A- student would. It was the Myth of the Underqualifed Minority, put into practice with the best intentions in the world. Everyone involved genuinely liked him, thought he was smart, and wished him the best.

Some people believed, as a totally self-evident fact, that Edward's race would make him a lock for admission. Once, when he was fretting about whether or not he'd get in, I heard his best friend tell him, in a get-real-already tone, "Edward. You're black." That simple. (The assumption baked into the Myth of the Unqualified Minority, of course, is that Harvard has to take A- students as the only way to reach its affirmative action goals. I mean, how many black A students could there be in America? No one at my school would have accepted that premise had it been presented to them explicitly. But that's what the Myth of the Unqualified Minority implies.)

Edward did not get in, of course. He went to another very good school, but he may never have been in serious competition for Harvard. But because so many people around him, including adults, had bought into the Myth of the Underqualified Minority and sold it to him, Edward was set up both for deep disappointment and, worse still, for guilt. After he got rejected, I literally heard him say, "I feel like I let everybody down."

You didn't let us down, Edward. It was the other way around.

cross-posted from Dagblog. All comments welcome there, not here.

What Is a "Good" College? Two Tentative Answers

Sometimes, because of my job, people ask me advice about choosing colleges. It's always nice to be helpful, but talking about college reputations can be a minefield. Obviously, you learn quickly that you should never put any college or university down, but that's not enough. People can also get very prickly when you don't praise a particular college enough. Saying it's a good school may not satisfy them; they sometimes want to hear that School X is much better than School Y, or that School X is just as good as School Z, and will feel insulted unless you tell them what they're looking to hear. Then your choices are 1. giving people helpful practical advice that will offend them, or 2. being polite but misleading.

Before you can say anything useful about college choices, or analyze those choices in a clear-headed way, you have to get past the "good school" problem. People do want to know which colleges and universities confer the most advantage on their graduates, which are "better," but they do NOT want to hear anyone say that any college they already have a connection to is not a "better" than another. What is a "good school?" That's the problem right there.

The first half of this problem is that we talk about "good schools" and "bad schools" as if we were talking about educational quality, which is extremely hard to judge from outside an institution and which can vary widely for different students at the same college. Students don't get exactly the same education at the same school; they all take a different series of classes with a different mix of teachers and they each bring different things to those classes, so the range of educational outcomes at each college or university can be wide. What we're really talking about when we discuss "good schools" is the perceived quality of the education. That perceived quality obviously has some relationship to how well educated the students are, but that's only one factor and not necessarily the biggest. Mostly the discussion of "good schools" is about schools' reputation and prestige. That's fine. In fact, I prefer to frame the "good schools" question in terms of reputation, which is a fuzzy concept but still a thing we can measure in the world, rather than in terms of educational quality.

But the question of reputation is the second half of the problem. Because once you have a connection to a school, you have some stake in its reputation yourself. It is better for you if people think better of your alma mater. If your alma mater's reputation declines, that is at least slightly bad for you. And saying that School X is better than School Z does not just convey an opinion; it is a concrete act, an attempt (however slight), to build up School X's reputation. After all, a school's reputation is just what people say it is, so if enough people start saying that School X is better than School Z, School X will eventually have a better reputation than School Z. Conversations about college reputations are never just impartial discussions about the facts. They are part of a complex social interchange, perhaps better explained by an anthropologist, in which participants try to promote (or protect) the reputations of schools in which they have some reputational stake of their own. This is one of the reasons why talking about college reputations at all risks making you sound like a jerk, because actual jerks do spend a lot of time bragging about where they went to school (or where they send their kids to school), and putting down other colleges. But even if you're not trying to be a jerk, the project of talking honestly about colleges' reputations is always at cross-purposes with the people's desire to move the needle a bit in their old school's favor.

How can you evaluate colleges, then? How to have any rational conversation that doesn't slide into boosterism or hurt feelings? I would propose two things that we CAN talk about, as bottom line issues. One is strictly objective and factual. The other is still a bit of a judgement call, but as close to objective as such a question can get. Instead of talking about educational quality or reputation, I prefer to break things down to the questions of Resources and Reach.

What I call "resources" is the basic question of how much money a school spends on teaching its students. How well a college spends its money, and how much educational bang its professors provide for the college's buck, is impossible to know, except perhaps until you have spent four years at of your life at the school and the question has become moot. But how much money a college has to spend, and what it spends it on, are questions with concrete answers.

The cheapest proxy for resources is to look at the college or university's total budget. But that's not the approach I'd suggest. Universities spend their money on many different things, and what matters if you're applying to schools is how much they are going to spend on educating you. A university that contains many different schools (say a business school and a medical school and a school of dentistry) may have an impressive overall budget but the slice that goes to teaching undergraduates may be much smaller. Any university that operates a hospital or medical center is going to have a whale of a budget, but that doesn't mean the budget for teaching undergraduates won't be pinched. And even if you manage to find the budget for just the undergraduate college, schools can spend on many things beside teaching: they might build fancy new buildings, or put in some sweet amenities that attract students. In fact, the standard college visit is about impressing prospective students with all the money that's going to be spent on them, with the shiny new dorms and the big sports stadium and the rock-climbing wall in the state-of-the-art workout center. All of that is designed to communicate affluence and the sense that the student is going to be treated well, but it isn't necessarily connected to how much the college is spending in the classroom. At some places, students get to enjoy the new jumbotron in the football stadium but don't get to meet many full-time faculty for their first two years.

My preferred quick-and-dirty method of evaluation is to look at a few departments where you think you might major and see how many faculty those departments have. I also usually recommend subtracting out people with titles like "Instructor" or "Lecturer," not because people with those titles are not good teachers (they're usually hired only for the high quality of their teaching), but because those are usually lower-paid jobs (usually teaching intro classes) and that indicates something about the amount that the school is spending on educating that particular set of majors. Is this the whole story? Or course not. But it is one real and important part. If you want to major in, say, history at a small liberal-arts college, and one school you're thinking about has five history professors while another school, with the same number of students, has fifteen history professors, that is telling you something that you should not ignore.

Sometimes ask me if College A or University B would be a good place for their son or daughter to study Shakespeare. Getting into the general quality of the schools is like getting into quicksand. But I can say, perfectly factually, that University B only has one professor who teaches Shakespeare. That's not the whole story, of course (and, full disclosure, for years I was the only professor teaching Shakespeare in my department). But it's not none of the story, either, and it's the easiest part to get your hands on.

I also suggest looking at the lists of classes offered over the last four or five semesters: not just the list of courses in the catalog, which sometimes includes courses not taught for years, but the actual classes the department has taught over the last two or three years. And if you are at all interested in going on to graduate school after college, I'd advise searching for all of the books, articles, etc., that the professors in each department have published in the last ten years. There are great teachers who don't publish much, or don't publish much anymore, but a department where no one is producing new scholarship can have trouble placing its students in graduate schools.

The second issue you should consider, "reach," is simply how far a school's reputation stretches. Where does graduating from that particular school give you an advantage? The question of how good a reputation a school has opens up impossible questions and risks hurting feelings. The question of how far a reputation extends is much closer to an objective question.

There are schools which have a local reputation: people in the immediate area of the school (say, in a particular city and its suburbs) are likely to be more impressed by you for graduating from that school. But in the rest of the world, people either have not heard of that school or have no particular opinion, for good or ill, about it. They may recognize the school's name, but not think much more about it than, "Oh, yes. That is actually a college." But in that school's city, having gone to that school may actually be an advantage when you are looking for a job.

There are also schools with regional reputation. People have heard of that school, and think well of it, across an area of several states. A degree from such a school might give you some competitive advantage across the South, for example, or across the Northeast.  Then there are a smaller number of schools with national reputations: having a degree from that school is a good thing on your resume anywhere in the country. Obviously, a school with a good national or regional reputation often has an even better local reputation. A school that's respected throughout the South might be considered a very big deal in its home city. Then there are a few American colleges with international and a tiny handful with global reputations. When a school actually has a global reputation, people recognize its name anywhere in the world. If you have to explain what, or where your school is, it doesn't have a reputation where you are.

Think of it this way: how many British universities can you name? And how many can you say are impressive? Almost every educated person in America has heard of Oxford and Cambridge. And you know that those schools are supposed to be big deals. You may have heard of the University of London, or St. Andrews. They have international reputations, at least. Oxford and Cambridge have truly global reputations. There are a number of other excellent universities in the UK, but I will confess that I cannot distinguish between the reputations of most of those colleges. Is the University of Hull more or less prestigious than the University of Kent? Is Manchester "better" or "worse" than Nottingham? Other than my regard for individual British Shakespeare scholars at those places, I have no idea. Those are schools with national, regional, or local reputations. On this side of the Atlantic, they are hard to tell apart.

Likewise, when you move to a new city in the US, you will hear for the first time about a number of local colleges that are considered fairly prestigious. Those schools have local reputations. It is much harder to realize that this or that college from your own home town, which some of your high school friends dreamed of getting into, is basically unknown where you live now. (Just today I had to explain to my spouse, a professional academic herself, the reputation that a particular Boston-area university has in Boston. That school's reputation is regional at best.) There are, however, a few colleges that have specialized reputations within a particular field: largely unknown to the general public, but well known for people in a particular business. Think of a school with an incredibly strong meteorology program, whose meteorology majors have a national advantage when competing for meteorology jobs, but no one who majored in anything else gets any advantage outside the local area.

The important point here is that local and regional reputations are not illusions. It is not that your new neighbors in your new town are wrong about how good some local college is. The college really does have the reputation they think it has. It just doesn't have that reputation in other places. If you graduate from the college in greater Boston my spouse was asking about today, that degree will serve as an advantage to you in the Boston area, and likely throughout New England. It simply won't give you that advantage anywhere else. Outside the New England states, that's not a "good" school or a "bad" school, but simply a school. HR staff will look at your resume and see that you went to college. If you move to say, Chicago the week after graduation, you will likely lose any edge that the degree might give you in Massachusetts.

How much the question of reach matters in choosing a school depends on what you want to do after college. If you are planning to move after graduation, to enter a profession that will likely require you to move, or to apply to graduate or professional schools outside your area, you are better off if your college has a national reputation. If you plan to live your days happily in or around your hometown, a school with a local reputation might be more than enough. You can go to the Boston-area school my wife hasn't really heard of, settle down on the South Shore, and be just fine. But if your lifelong dream is to go on to, say, medical school at UCLA, then trying to get into UCLA from a school that's only a big deal in Boston is not the best plan. In fact, there are other Boston colleges that might, inside Boston, seem no better than Nameless Boston-Area College, or even have slightly less local cachet, but whose cred travels further. This is when you need some candid expert advice.

The question, both in terms of resources and reach, isn't how good the school is in some abstract way. It's what the college is going to offer you.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

Rachel Dolezal and the De-Professionalized University

Rachel Dolezal, currently this week's Object of Public Shame on the Internet, has apparently been fired from her job teaching at Eastern Washington State. Or rather, I learn from today's New York Times, they didn't have to bother firing her. You see, Dolezal was what's called an "adjunct instructor," someone who teaches on a course-by-course basis for low pay without any security for the next semester. There are more adjunct teachers than normal salaried professors in American universities today. So, EWU didn't have to fire her. She's just not hired for any classes for next fall. And they can tell the newspapers that she is "no longer employed" by Eastern Washington. Not fired, mind you. Just no longer employed. It was harder to take her off the Department web page (which happened sometime in the last four days) than it was to end her employment.

Now, you may think Dolezal deserved to be fired. I'm not going to argue the general Rachel Dolezal Situation, because frankly I don't think it gets us anywhere. Singling out one person's weird behavior  is not useful, and it's already very clear that no one is going to learn anything of from l'affaire Dolezal, because nothing about the case is changing anyone's mind.

But whether Dolezal had given EWU just cause to fire her or not doesn't matter, because EWU doesn't need just cause. And that I do want to talk about.

If you think Dolezal had it coming, ask yourself this: how did Dolezal get hired to an Africana Studies department in the first place? How did she get on that department web page? Didn't anybody check this person out? Probably not, actually, because of the terms of her employment. When you're hiring someone for zero job security and next to zero money, the search process is a lot more laissez-faire. And after all, the whole point of replacing permanent, full-time faculty jobs with short-term, allegedly part-time jobs is to save money.  There isn't money or time to do extensive vetting. So Eastern Washington had someone they didn't know much about in their classrooms. But they aren't the only ones. Most universities are employing a large number of teachers whom the school knows relatively little about.

Adjunct faculty and full-time faculty aren't necessarily different in terms of talent or skills. But the two hiring processes are incredibly different. The decision to hire a full-time, salaried college teacher, tenure-track or not, is typically made a year and a half before that new employee starts the job; many college administrations decided in March or April 2015 which job openings they would announce for a fall 2016 starting date. The job application process will take most of the 2015-16 school year, from official advertisements in the early fall to final decisions sometime in the spring, and then the lucky job-seekers will move to their new jobs in new towns over next summer.

That search process involves multiple rounds of interviews with several different interviewers; several letters of recommendation; a number of elaborate professional documents, typically including statements of teaching philosophy and one or more scholarly writing samples; and day-long visits to campus by the finalists for formal presentations, more interviews, and often a teaching demonstration, sometimes guest-teaching a class. Each of these job searches costs the deans thousands of dollars just to fly two-to-four people to campus and put them up in hotels. And of course all of the finalists' references get double-checked with phone calls from the hiring institution. Someone like Dolezal, who's not being entirely straightforward about parts of her background, might slip through that process anyway. But it would be much harder and rarer to do.

Adjunct hiring decisions are much less elaborate. The jobs aren't necessarily posted at all, and a department chair or program director might be hiring people to fill gaps a week or two before the semester starts. It's a local search, and not a national one. There's a resume and an interview with the program director or chair. There aren't necessarily letters of reference, certainly not in the numbers and detail that full-time jobs require. And that's about it; anything else is often up to the person doing the hiring. Certainly, references don't always get called. The most likely reason no one from Howard University told Eastern Washington about Rachel Dolezal's earlier self-presentations is that no one from Eastern Washington called anyone from Howard.

This difference between the two application processes is only getting sharper, as the pressure of the terrible job market for full-time jobs keeps raising the bar higher and higher. In an insanely competitive environment, applicants keep trying to get an edge by doing more (I've started to see job ads stipulate a maximum number of letters of recommendation, at least three but no more than five or six) and universities keep adding hoops because they can (one of the current debates at places like the Chronicle of Higher Ed is whether it's ethical to call references whom applicants didn't list). And the more adjuncts a department hires, the simpler that process has to be.

This two-track application process does a disservice to the people being hired on the low-paying track. Many adjuncts don't need to be educated about the tenure-track job search; they're fully qualified applicants for those jobs who have simply been crowded out because there are so few jobs to go around. Some adjuncts aren't interested in the qualifications for tenure-line work, because they have MAs instead of PhDs or because they aren't interested in doing research. But there are a number of people on the adjunct track who are interested in switching to the tenure track but aren't entirely clear how. Those people are not at all served when the process for picking up some classes for the semester bears almost no resemblance to the process for getting the full-time job they crave.

And in some places, sorry to say, there is little in the way of supervision or training for adjunct faculty. There is a mind-set, not everywhere but in too many places, that says that people being paid so little should be just left alone to do whatever they like in the classroom, because how much can you ask of someone you're paying two hundred bucks a week?

Many adjunct professors are wonderful and admirable professionals. But from the university's point of view, that's just luck. The universities themselves didn't do anything to foster that professionalism. They didn't seek it out, and they certainly don't reward it. When you de-professionalize an occupation, when you take away the salary, the benefits, and the job stability that go with being a middle-class professional, you undermine the professionalism of your own workplace. Most adjunct faculty do the right things the right way, because those things are right and not because they get any reward. But if you don't reward good behavior, you have to expect pockets of unprofessionalism or weirdness.

Eastern Washington University has a flood of publicity it doesn't want this week, because one of its many casual employees, whom it has only casually overseen, turns out to be fairly weird. But the real truth is that could have happened to almost any school in the country, and they would never see it coming.

cross-posted from, and comments welcome at, Dagblog

Why Fraternities Are Out of Control

College fraternities have been in the news for the last two weeks, and not in a good way. First, the SAE chapter at the University of Oklahoma got videotaped singing a cheerful little fraternity song about keeping blacks out of the frat and hanging them from trees. (No, seriously.) Then a frat at Penn State turned out to be keeping a private Facebook page full of photos of unconscious naked women (not to mention pictures of hazing and drug dealing), prompting an anonymous frat bro to give a local magazine an insanely self-righteous defense of the page. (Because getting young women to pass out and then photographing them naked in sexual situations apparently isn't wrong, but objecting to that behavior is somehow flagrantly immoral.) And now a frat at North Carolina State turns out to keep a pledge book filled with endorsements of BOTH raping women AND lynching black people. Good times.

Are American fraternities out of control? Of course. They are designed to be out of control. I don't mean they all behave badly. Some of them are great. I mean that frats are designed so that there is virtually no way for anyone outside the frat to control the behavior inside the frat. What happens in the frat house is largely whatever the kids in the frat house decide will happen. As things are currently organized, there's not much anyone else can do about that.

I don't mean to say that fraternities are bad. Many people I respect have testified to their healthy and positive experiences in Greek organizations, and I believe them. The sanest and most reasonable of my forty-odd cousins was president of his fraternity in college; he's definitely not the kind of person who starts a singalong about lynching. The positive stories are real. So are the horrifying stories. The truth is, no one's personal fraternity experience can tell you what American fraternities are like, because every fraternity house becomes its own little enclosed world.

First of all, fraternities aren't actually part of the colleges and universities where the fraternity brothers (or sorority sisters) live. They're independent organizations, franchised at various schools around the country. The original point of fraternities was to be outside the jurisdiction of the college authorities, and they still pretty much are. At many places the only thing a school can do is withdraw recognition from the frat, meaning the local chapter is no longer an official student organization. But that can backfire; the frat will still be there, the students will still join it, but because it's not an official university organization the school can't even threaten to discipline it any more.

The basic structure of a fraternity is that there are local chapters at each school, which elect their own leadership; there's a national office led by alumni, which maintains fiscal oversight and takes care of things like publicity and branding; and there's the network of other alumni across the country, who have no official role to play but can still exert a powerful influence.

The chapters are largely self-governing on a day-to-day basis. There's not always a lot of adult supervision. This means that every fraternity chapter becomes a lesson in small-group dynamics. Dominant personalities can exert a big influence on the rest of the group. And, just as the psychology textbooks explain, the group starts to define its members' sense of what is normal and not.

The racists singing their racist group song at the University of Oklahoma had obviously gotten to a point where singing the words, "hang him from a tree" (to the tune of "If You're Happy and You Know It") seemed like a totally normal thing to do. (I don't propose group psychology as an excuse; everyone involved knew better.) While they had to know that what they were doing is not morally acceptable, they put the group's customs ahead of general American mores. And what's striking is not that they didn't see what they were doing as wrong, but that they didn't see it as weird. In fact, singing that song together, in front of their dates, is a very, very strange thing to do. Maintaining a Facebook page full of pictures of unconscious naked women is a weird, serial-killeresque behavior that one group of fraternity brothers came to view as totally normal. Frat houses create their own sense of reality. Sometimes the reality inside the house is pretty normal, because the people setting the tone in the house are normal, and life inside is basically like life outside but with more male bonding. But sometimes the frat house drifts away from the outside norms, and once that drift starts there's an echo-chamber quality that can intensify it. Maybe the initiation rituals turn into progressively more dangerous hazing. Maybe the misogyny or racism becomes toxic. Maybe the drinking culture gets to a place where the hard-core alcoholics are defining the norms. Maybe some of the frat brothers are dealing serious drugs.

And a fraternity chapter isn't necessarily the place that alumni, even recent alumni, remember it being. Remember, the whole membership turns over every four years.  The frat you belonged to might be a very different place five years after you graduate, and you wouldn't necessarily know it.

If a chapter comes unmoored from reality, no one on the outside is going to know until it's too late. The national organization doesn't micromanage what goes on or monitor the dynamic inside the house. The college doesn't have much oversight role at all. The adults on the outside won't know that anything's wrong, and the kids on the inside won't be able to see that anything's wrong. The problem only becomes visible when it becomes public, because something terrible - a rape, a drunken accident, a hazing death - becomes impossible to hide.

What happens then? At that point, the national fraternity shuts down the chapter, expels individual frat brothers, or both. This is partly, as Caitlin Flanagan has pointed out in The Atlantic, to make the national fraternity impossible to sue and thereby to protect its assets. If a student is exposed to a lawsuit, that student is cut loose so that the fraternity itself is not exposed to the lawsuit. And on paper, national fraternities do set up rules, sometimes improbably strict rules, that allow them to expel almost anyone they like. They simply don't put much effort into enforcing those rules until after there's been a scandal. (National frats can be like Claude Rains in Casablanca: Shocked! Shocked, to find out that partying is going on!) This certainly happened at the U of Oklahoma, where the chapter was immediately decertified by national and the two students who could be seen (on video) leading the segregationist sing-along were immediately booted from the frat.

That looks like accountability, but it isn't. For many fraternities, the point is to preserve student control of the chapter itself, and not to interfere until the kids have obviously blown it. National fraternities will disown their members. What they won't do is supervise them.

And the national organization's authority, even if it wanted to use it, can be undermined by individual alumni, who operate in a completely decentralized way. Sometimes alumni who have become important donors for their old school run interference for their old fraternity chapter. And sometimes ugly behaviors that have been eliminated at one campus can reappear, because new members have learned them from older alumni or from brothers on other campuses. A frat with a tradition of dangerous hazing, for example, might reform but then have the old practices sneak back in with legacy pledges who've heard stories from fathers, uncles, or older brothers.

The racist song that the Sigma Alpha Epsilon boys were singing is clearly not unique to the U of Oklahoma chapter; there are independent reports, some older than the SAE video itself, of SAE members singing exactly the same words at other campuses. But I doubt it's heard at every SAE chapter at every college. Every chapter, even of the same frat, is its own thing, but chapters of the same frat are also part of a social network that passes traditions and practices back and forth.

I also suspect the SAE segregation/lynching song is fairly old; if I had to guess, I'd say it dates either from the period when Southern universities were being desegregated by court order or from the slightly later period when all-white frats were forced to desegregate. But the U of Oklahoma chapter certainly hasn't been singing the lynching song uninterrupted since the 1960s; they did have an African-American brother in that fraternity house, who graduated ten years ago (and who has blogged eloquently about the pain and shock today's SAEs have given him). Obviously, the lynching song died out at that chapter (or had not yet been introduced there), and then came back, brought in through contact with SAEs at other schools or with SAEs who had graduated years earlier. National SAE would certainly not have been dumb enough to try to keep that song alive. But National SAE isn't fully in charge. No one is.

A fraternity is basically a system designed to carve out a largely unregulated space for college boys, generally aged 18 to 22, to live together in groups free from adult control. Obviously, that system is going to lead to an enormous range of results. In a good chapter, that freedom is going to teach responsibility, maturity, and the exercise of independent judgment. If there's no adult in charge, you have to step up and be the adults. A bad chapter can turn into Peter Pan and the Lost Boys with too much alcohol or, in the most extreme cases, into The Lord of the Flies with access to credit cards. How many fraternity chapters are good, how many are bad, and how many are ugly? There's no way to know. The only fraternity house that you can ever really know about is the one you're in, and even then you only really know while you're in it. But even if the bad chapters are only a small percentage of the total, there's no adult around to apply the brakes once things go bad.

(Of course, students in other clubs, teams, and organizations can also go Lord of the Flies. There are hazing cases involving sports teams, clubs, marching bands -- you name it. The difference is that those organizations are clearly and fully under the school's control, there's nearly always a faculty or staff member assigned as an official adviser, and when things go wrong the school has some straightforward remedies.)

It's not clear to me how much longer frats will continue to have this kind of autonomy. For the last couple of years, the Department of Education has been leaning on every college and university in the country to strengthen their rules about sexual assault or else be ruled out of compliance with Title IX. The federally-recommended changes, which just about every campus is enacting, specifically hold the schools responsible for behavior by their students OFF-campus. How can that be? That can be because the Department of Education no longer wants to hear colleges saying that this or that terrible incident happened in an off-campus frat house and so the college can't do anything about it. The federal government has put every college on notice that they WILL be held responsible for what happens to their students at off-campus frat houses. That means, sooner or later, schools are going to have to demand more control. If they're going to be held accountable for what fraternities do, then they will have to hold those fraternities accountable. They can't afford not to.

Fraternity brothers and alumni (and sorority sisters and alumni) aren't going to like that. If colleges take a greater hand in governing their Greek organizations, it will take away the independence and the freedom from academic governance that Greeks most value. But the most important element of a good fraternity experience, the independence, is exactly the thing that can lead to the biggest disasters. Fraternities are designed to be out of direct adult control, but the stakes have grown too high for colleges to leave them unsupervised. What happens to fraternities next is a mystery.

cross-posted from (and comments welcome at) Dagblog

Why Colleges Mishandle Sexual Assault

My first week of college, someone passed along some time-honored undergrad wisdom: "If you're going to get arrested," we were told, "and you see a campus cop coming one way and a city cop coming the other, run to the campus cop." I've been thinking about that advice lately, as the news brings more scandals about sexual assault at American colleges. This week the Department of Education named 55 colleges and universities being investigated for mishandling sexual violence complaints. Fifty-five. The school where I was told to run to the campus police is one of them. That advice is part of the problem: completely backwards for victims of sexual violence. If you've been the victim of a crime, you should run away from the campus authorities. You need the actual police.

The advice to choose the campus police presupposed that I was going to be arrested, for drinking or some other college-boy misdemeanor. And while I managed to get through college without needing it, that advice was sound. Getting arrested by the college police is a better deal. College authorities don't want their students in serious trouble, and they look for ways to let them off easy. Getting arrested by the campus police could still have real consequences. But you can be sure you will face the fewest consequences your actions permit.

But if you are the victim of a crime and only go to the college authorities, that means your attacker will face the fewest consequences possible. Not might. Will. If you are assaulted or raped and you only go through the school's judicial process, you are keeping your attacker safe in the hands of the people most reluctant to punish him.

Colleges don't especially want to punish crimes of any description. Not petty drug and alcohol beefs, not iPad swipes or bicycle theft, not anything. The individual people who make up the school naturally believe, in the abstract, that crimes should be punished. But the organization itself is not interested in crime or punishment. A university will, if you push it far enough, punish you for a crime. But you have to give it no other choice.

I work as a college professor. I was raised by a police officer. Those two things are nothing alike. Police departments and universities obviously look different. But they are actually even more different than they look. The differences are pervasive and profound, shaping the outlook of everyone inside either institution. Cops and deans, simply because they are cops and deans, see the world in radically different ways.

What colleges want is for their students to succeed. Schools are willing to suspend students, expel them, or flunk them out when a particular case seems hopeless. But those are always considered bad results. Flunking and expelling people is not the general goal. What schools want is for as many students as possible to do well and graduate.

That means if one student has assaulted another the school will hope, deep in its institutional heart, that there's some way that things can work out for both students. They will try to mediate a solution that, at least in the mediators' minds, keeps everyone happy. That comes, originally, from a benign place. But the how-can-this-work-out-for-everybody mindset becomes insanely inappropriate when one person has committed a crime against another. It is a ghastly response to sexual assault.

Police and prosecutors are not concerned about everything working out for all parties involved. They're not worried about the long-term future of people accused of serious crimes. The police, by their nature, take sides. The accused can get his own damn lawyer. If someone has assaulted you, go to the people who will treat you as a victim and your attacker as a potential criminal. Do not go to people who view you and your attacker as equally valued members of the community.

Sexual assaults aren't the only crimes that colleges mediate in this wrongheaded way. If you're in college and another student causes you serious harm or does major property damage, you will not get full satisfaction from the school authorities, because they are not a court of law. I cannot tell any specific stories here, but if you have been a victim colleges are not set up, or legally empowered, to give you genuine restitution. And universities' approach to adjudicating crimes can be grotesquely Solomonic. If you go to them about a stolen baby, they will often propose cutting the baby in half. (In the original story, of course, Solomon only proposes the baby-splitting to smoke out a malefactor, because anyone okay with cutting a baby in half is no damned good.) This leads to the kind of Mickey-Mouse discipline often given out to young men who have sexually attacked their classmates. Colleges don't treat rape as a crime because colleges have trouble thinking of their students as criminals.

Even worse, precisely because universities are not courts of law, they have generally become skittish about being sued in real courts of law by the parents of students who misbehave. When a student does get suspended or expelled, they sometimes turn up with parents and lawyers arguing that the punishment is too "extreme" and that the punished student didn't get due process and the school is ruining this young man's bright future and so on and so on and so on. So, the Mickey-Mouse nature of the college discipline process not only means that serious crimes get only Mickey-Mouse punishments, but means even those lame, inadequate punishments are vulnerable to challenge on the grounds that the whole procedure was Mickey-Mouse. After the panel gives the victim half a baby, lawyers show up demanding that the criminal be given three quarters of the baby.

Many school have apparently been conditioned by this process to bend over backwards trying to avoid lawsuits by the families of the very students that the school has slapped on the wrist for serious crimes. Schools have faced legal expenses and jeopardy over taking crimes too seriously. They have not been sued, until just the last few years, for not taking crimes seriously enough. The recent spate of lawsuits, and the investigation by the federal government, is a needed and long-overdue corrective.

What is completely inexcusable, and what I hope the recent lawsuits and investigations and bad publicity will finally end, is colleges' practice of deliberately steering young women away from pressing charges. Colleges, whose self-interest dictates that everything stay in house, tell victims of sexual violence that staying with the college's in-house disciplinary procedure is in the victim's interest. That is a scandal. It is a terrible thing to frighten a young woman fresh from a traumatic experience of sexual violence with stories of how scary it would be for her to go to the police. But traumatized young women are frequently told that going to the police will be much worse for them than staying with the college's in-house procedures. That is a lie. Nothing is worse for victims than a college's in-house procedures.


Whenever someone is telling you how horrible going to the police would be for you, that's usually a sign that you should go to the police right away.  And if someone is urging you not to go to the police, ask yourself why your going to the police scares them.

Worst of all, discouraging women from going to the police when they have been raped or assaulted discourages them from understanding what has happened to them as a crime. And if you have been victimized you must never, ever let go of that basic truth. What has been done to you is not a misunderstanding or a discourtesy or a violation of some pissant code of conduct. It is a crime, and no one who treats it as something else cares about your welfare.

If you are a college or university, the best way to protect yourself from litigation over how you've handled felonies on your campus is not to fool around trying to adjudicate felonies. You're not set up for it, and you're not good at it. Bring in the police as soon as you can; dealing with crime is their thing. And never, ever try to protect one student from the police by leaving another unprotected.

If you are a victim, don't walk to the police. Run. If you can get to the police without telling any campus authorities, do it. You can go to the deans after the police report has been filed. Asking that your attacker be moved out of your dorm will have a lot more bite if you're pressing criminal charges. And that charge will change the deans' sense of the situation's magnitude. They'll be less likely to tell you that moving your attacker to another dorm for a semester is a sufficient final punishment.

A crime is a crime no matter where it happens. If you want to learn about Platonic philosophy, don't go to a police lieutenant. If you've been a victim of a serious crime, don't go to a dean.