Here John McWhorter and I address the recent racially driven controversies at the law schools of the University of Illinois-Chicago and Georgetown. There, law professors are being investigated or driven from their jobs for having said or written things their students judged to be racist (mistakenly, in our view).
John and I discuss how these cases reflect a dangerous tendency for race activism to displace and devalue the vital intellectual and disciplinary training that goes on at these institutions. And as John recounts, this attitude has been lingering in the nation’s elite universities for decades.
MCWHORTER: Let's think about the sort of racism that Black law students are on record as attesting to. We have this University of Illinois-Chicago case where n-asterisk-asterisk-asterisk-asterisk-asterisk is on an exam question, and a certain group of Black law students are so appalled to see even that euphemized word on the exam that they seek to essentially destroy professor Jason Kilborn's life. You know, one of them claiming that they had heart palpitations, et cetera. Is that the racism that these people are encountering? Because that racism is invalid. If they can't stand it, what they need is very careful and loving psychiatric counseling. They're faking it.
And so basically the question is, where is the racism these people are encountering day to day? You walk across the campus, you go somewhere, you get a soda, you do some emails, you're sitting out on a bench, you have a passing exchange with a professor, the sum of what life is. Is it really so racist that we couldn't expect you to engage in the close reasoning about often rather anodyne topics that legal training consists of?
And what you're mentioning, which is that the LSAT is basically just close reasoning about topics of a certain abstraction. It's not about you as a person. It's not about identity. It's not about feelings. It's not about attestation. You just have to basically do the math. There are an awful lot of Black students who have not been given that experience in any really serious way, especially with the way modern universities often encourage students to explore themselves in their work rather than just do work, especially if they're not in STEM subjects.
For all sorts of reasons, that sort of thing can throw a Black student. It can throw a student from various kinds of backgrounds. Not all Black students, but a lot of them. But the main thing is that yes, there's a certain kind of performance that's expected on the LSAT. There's nothing biased about it. They're not asking you what wine goes with chicken, they're not talking about skiing. It's just, sit there and answer the questions. And if there is a performance gap, then one, there are reasons for it that have nothing to do with anybody's IQ.
But two, the question is, do you place Black students in schools where the school is going to teach faster and on a higher level than anything that they're likely to excel in, out of a sense that they are a diverse presence and that that somehow is more important than whether or not they're truly prepared to excel at that school? Because a lot of the administrators who pretend to think that diversity is more important need to consider that this is what happens.
What actually happens is that these students are extremely uncomfortable for reasons that all of us would be. And as a result, you get fake protests like this, or useless protests like this, empty claims that it is racist to point out the discrepancy, which is a fact that everybody knows. When really, there is evidence based on Sander’s work which has not been refuted to my knowledge.
You know, people are still writing against it to this day. Ten minutes ago. I read something against him every couple of years. I've never seen a deep six. You know Peter Arcidiacono better than I do, but the Duke University economist who has written about the mismatch, where it's not a matter of just saying Black students don't do well. If that's all it was, I would find something else to say. The issue is if you take students like that, and you put them in solid second tier, maybe even sometimes third tier schools, they do better. And they go out into the world and make careers faster and better.
That's what the evidence says. But in our current climate, we're supposed to ignore and resist what studies like this say and instead sniff out ways of telling people that they're racists, because that's more important, because that's a higher kind of wisdom. But it ends up leaving Black students who deserve better in the dust, insecure in universities where, frankly, they're underqualified, just as legions of white and Asian students are, who therefore were not admitted to those universities.
It harms Black people in the name of the charisma of running around deciding who's a racist and who isn't. It's utterly disgusting. And yet it's been frozen for about 20 years.
LOURY: Yeah, I want to push back a little bit, John. I'm very sympathetic to what you said. But I think some of this stuff is not as clear cut. Arcidiacono calls it the quality-fit trade-off. You talked about the mismatch problem, which originated with Richard Sander. He and Stuart Taylor had a book about it, but Sander did the groundbreaking research based on data from the early 90s. I think the paper's from the early 00s or the late 90s.
But in any case, the thing is kids get matched to schools. The tougher the competition at the school, the less good it is for a kid if the kid is not up to the competition. On the other hand, going to a good school, a Stanford instead of a UC-Davis, going to a better school is valuable in the marketplace. So there's a trade-off.
You might be less likely—if you're a Black kid and you're mismatched at a Stanford instead of a UC-Davis—you might be less likely to finish the course or to pass the bar when you finish, which Sander finds. But should you finish and pass the bar, you might be more valuable in the marketplace with a Stanford degree than a Davis degree. You got to put some value on that. And then it's an empirical question of the relative weights of these two different things. And you can imagine arguments about that empirical assessment. Those arguments don't refute the mismatch effect as much as they say it might be worth it, even though we know it's there.
Arcidiacono is finding that at Duke, kids who come in—Black kids with relatively modest performance on the admissions exams—tend to drop out of the STEM fields and switch back into softer disciplines. But if you compare Black and white kids who have the same test scores coming in, there's no real difference in the likelihood of them dropping out.
Exactly.
So that's all going on there. But I want to back up a bit, because there are people who are going to deny the existence—you say, everybody knows it, and you and I know it, but not everybody knows it—they're going to deny the existence of the difference in the first place.
Do you know, as I read, Georgetown Law is going to monitor or take a look at past grading by Sandra Sellers because of the presumption that she might've been biased against kids of color in the past? And so they want an audit of the history of her grading? So the suspicion of racial bias and grading has been raised.
On that Roland Martin podcast that I was telling you about, another set of facts that were put forward, if you want to call them facts, was that implicit bias experiments have found that when you take a paper, the same paper, and you put it before the professor and the professor is cued that the student is white or Black, you get a different evaluation. They give a lower grade, they find more spelling errors if they're told that the student is Black, and that's taken as evidence of the fact that what would appear to be a difference in qualification is in fact a reflection of racism.
And people even go so far as to say, even if you are right that the performance is different, the failure is not that the students come in unequal to the task, but that the pedagogy is not well-adapted to meet them where they are and bring forth their full potential. So no matter which way you turn, either you're denying the difference or, to the extent that you're acceding to its existence, you are attributing the cause of it to factors other than the ill preparation of the student.
You know, that's interesting. Because this is another one of those things where you're supposed to resist your natural impulses. And of course, part of being an engaged person is that you don't just give right in to any little intuition you might have.
But in this case, that intuition is correct, which is that stereotype threat, the idea that existing under the stereotype can lessen the quality of your performance, that's now 35 years old. Shelby Steele's brother Claude is one of the initiators of that whole idea. When somebody hears what you just said, they think, okay, that is certainly a factor, but is it enough to explain the particular disparity that we're talking about? Anybody would think it. And that's this case. I am aware of evidence that yes, that kind of implicit bias is there. But it doesn't explain the degree of divergence between, I hate to say, white/Asian and Black performance here.
And actually Richard Sander demonstrated it. Because Sander had his paper, and then there was a very interesting issue of the Stanford Law Review where they had really good people responding. You don't even need to wonder how they all felt about what he did. And then Sander does a riposte. And frankly, he leaves them all a smoking ruin, including that argument about stereotype threat, which is the most prominent of the rebuttals, the one that got around the most. It just doesn't explain the degree of the gap.
And, you know, Glenn, it's interesting. Talk about going back. I remember when I first got a sense that there was something a little off about this idea of campuses being racist. It's been long enough now that I think I can tell it. This is over 30 years ago.
When I went to Stanford as a grad student, I, for reasons that need not bore us, spent the first year living in a law school dormitory. I didn't do well in the housing lottery, so I didn't get a nicer dorm, and I didn't live off campus because I didn't have a car. See how boring that is? But that meant that I spent ‘88-’89 living in a law school dormitory. And so you're in a dormitory, you get to know people. I ate with some of them. I had an eating plan, so I would eat with these law students. You're in there, you get to know them. There were like a hundred law students at Stanford University. Made friends with some of them. They were of all colors.
And then, of course, I knew these people socially, and so I knew some of them for the next two years that they were at the school. Still know some of them, on Facebook with some, some of them who are Black I knew. And I didn't go to class with them, but I hung around with them, I ate with them, went out with them, drank with them. So I had half a foot in Stanford's law school for definitely that first year.
And yet, I know that there was some sort of Black day, there was some sort of Black Stanford Law alumni day. This was probably in ‘89, ‘90. Various Black Stanford Law School alumni came, of various ages. You know, ones who are now graying, who were in the early classes, et cetera. I forget why I was there for the afternoon of this.
So I was sitting there, and I didn't really have much to say, because it wasn't my place. But I remember the conversations that the ones my age were having with the old heads. And there was this presumption that there was a problem. Like the old heads were saying, “Well, we wrote a letter to the dean complaining that etcetera.”
And you can imagine that in 1971, there would have been some real problems. The Stanford Law School faculty, most of them, probably by our standards, were racists. They were bred in the early 20th century. But here we were in 1990. And I knew what these students' lives were. Like, I knew the classes were full of diversity this and diversity that. I couldn't help thinking, “Why are you so upset?” There was a good contingent, not all of them, but there was a good contingent of Black Stanford Law students then who thought, “This is a racist institution. It's a racist law school.” And I remember thinking, “Where is the racism? What are you talking about?”
And I thought there must be some things that happen in the classrooms that I'm not seeing, because that's where I never was. But whenever I would kind of try to get it out of them—What? What are you so angry about here in 1990 on this resort of a campus where the sun is shining 27 hours a day, and there's diversity this and diversity that, which is there to catch you when you fall? What are you so angry about?—I can tell you, I never got a coherent answer. And that was when I thought, “This is a posture. This is something that gives them a certain sense of validation. It's not based on something happening to them.”
I think you're wrong about that actually, John, although there is posing and theatricality going on. No, I'm remembering Derrick Bell resigning his tenured chair at the Harvard Law School because the law school had yet to appoint a tenured Black female professor to its faculty.
Okay. Now that was said to be a reflection of the institutional racism of the law school. I don't know that that's all that different from one of these Stanford Law students going to a contracts class and having a law and economics-type professor—you know the ones that were wearing the bow ties and have the crew cuts—in 1991 get up there and make some abstract argument about property rights which trump somebody’s identitarian claim, and then in the classroom feeling that they were having a neoliberal, racist, segregation-supporting ideology foisted on them because somebody had questioned whether or not you needed affirmative action in electoral districts being drawn for political representation, had made arguments about the implications of affirmative action in admissions like Richard Sander might have made had it, you know et cetera.
The criminal law, where the rubber meets the road; mass incarceration is taking off like a rocket. You got law professors defending cops, saying that testimony should be admitted even though the circumstances under which it was acquired might have violated somebody's rights because of whatever.
Sure, they had plenty. If Derrick Bell could throw a fit because a Black woman had not been made a tenured professor of the law school, when there are perfectly sound arguments about why you may or may not want to attend to the sex and the race of a law professor to be appointed. But it's so widely shared as an assumption that that question of a Black woman representation on the faculty was a fundamental issue of justice. I mean, this is what people were thinking. This is what people still think. So they will understand it as racism. You and I might not understand it as racism.
I looked at some of the Twitter chatter from the Black law students at Georgetown in the aftermath of this incident. They're saying, “I'll never recruit another Black student to come to this racist institution to study.” They're saying things like that. That they feel like they're doing service to Georgetown when they have their recruiting fair, because the African-American students whose LSATs may not be as high as the Asian students' LSATs, but are high, are sought after by all the law schools in the country.
So the Georgetown Black law student who's an incumbent regards themselves as doing a favor to the institution by trying to persuade other Blacks to come there. Because if they don't go to Georgetown, they could go to Northwestern. And if they don't go to Northwestern, they could go to Yale. And if they don't go to Yale, et cetera. And they're declaring now contra-institutional loyalty. "I'll be damned. if I try to get another Black person to come here to this racist law school."
You think they don't really think the school is racist? They've been made to feel uncomfortable. The school has faculty members, and what are they saying? They're saying, if they talk like this when the recorder is running, what do you think they say when the recorder is not running? Well, what they say is what's actually their experience, which is that y'all are not pulling your weight in the classroom. That's what they say.
You're jogging my memory. Because, yeah, that was one of the issues circa 1990, especially that there was a cadre of white, mostly male, hardcore Republican students. And they would express their views. They were in love with Reagan, et cetera. I knew some of them, too. They were interesting. I ate with them. There was a small group who ate, and they were, for some reason, overrepresented among the people who ate in the dining hall across the street.
I learned from them that Republicans are human, because of listening to them talk every night. And they actually liked Ronald Reagan. I remember thinking, some of these guys actually can make sense. Like, I can see that ideologies can differ and yet be morally legitimate. It was a very valuable experience.
There were people who felt, and it wasn't only Black people, but that if one of those guys sounded off in class, it had been a racist class. They were experiencing racism, hearing this defended. And, you know, I get where those students come from. But I think it sounds atherosclerotic to me, this notion that there are certain views which are just so unquestionable that for anybody to say anything else is racist.
I'm sorry, I'm going to do a little bit of Glenn, that's not thinking. Those students were misled—and it goes that far back, they were children of Stokely Carmichael—into thinking that they are thinking in learning what views to reject out of hand, that that’s thinking. No. That's not thinking. But they didn't know that. And nobody was going to tell them that. Yeah, that was part of it. It's a racist institution because there's a Federalist society, and such and such yesterday was in class defending John Tower. Yeah, the idea was, this is a racist institution. I know what they mean, but I don't get it, and that is clearly what their heirs are now doing at Georgetown.
By the way, let me just note, the stakes are very high. Because the modern-day instantiation of that is they're defending capitalism and therefore they're racists. They're defending heteronormativity, and therefore they're bigots. They're defending the family, they're defending faith, and therefore they are beyond the pale.
In other words, this sphere of argument, or the lack thereof, where people feel that it's enough simply to, in an identitarian kind of move, dismiss someone if they hold those views—if they're pro-life, you know what I'm saying? If they're pro cop— has expanded, so that it includes climate, it includes what's your view about the U.S. military?
There is a script here about what a decent person, without argument, without the need to actually justify belief, should affirm and what views we have not to take seriously. And it is capacious, the script. It covers an awful lot of ground. The threat here is to reasoned deliberation about public life altogether.
Is racism "rampant" at US universities?
Love the dialog, very interesting. Meritocracy is the only way to go in all arenas. Anyone notice how derogatory racial slurs against blacks are totally absent on Basketball and Football fields? Why would that be? I'd say because it would be ridiculous. Blacks have achieved unquestioned competence (if not supremacy) in these areas. The same analogy applies to other areas (Asians in math and Physics, etc.). These are only stereotypes, sure. But stereotypes work in both directions. The point I'm making is that in these contexts there isn't even the conversation about racism because Meritocracy has reined supreme. Want to achieve diversity in a given subject? Encourage all your kids to be the best in those areas. If blacks encouraged their kids to be the absolute best, bar none in a given subject...I don't doubt they could achieve it. But this PC "woke" culture is a quantum leap in the wrong direction!
Hi Glenn, from Slovakia. This is yet another great talk, especially your pushback on how some papers are downgraded by implicitly biased Professors when told they are by Black students, rather than White, and about how some Black Law students do feel uncomfortable. Fantastic last sentence: "The threat here is to reasoned deliberation about public life altogether."
Arnold Kling's Fantasy Intellectual Teams is to reward better reasoned deliberation!
v2 is about ready to start May 1, replacing v1, where you've been doing great. He's listed you, among others including John, as a fine example of intellectuals chosen by the v1 owners to follow and request points for.
https://arnoldkling.substack.com/p/who-is-in-my-tribe
Instead of mostly steelman arguments, there will be 7 additional ways for Thinkers such as yourself to score points.
Advocs = interview questions that play Devil's Advocate
Bets = putting odds on a proposition
Caveats = acknowledging a factor that goes against one's position
Debates = engaging in a formal debate
Kickoffs = a discussion kicked off by something one put forth previously
Opens = keeping an open mind about a specific issue
Research = evaluating research on a proposition
Steelmans = articulating the opposing point of view as well as one's own.
Cheers, Tom Grey, Sam-I-Am