Say What?
And so on this afternoon, an unsubstantiated charge was made by an apparently 10-minute old group called “the Alliance for Equal Opportunity in Education.” The makeup of the group is “African American religious, civic, alumni and student leaders.” The buzz words in the vague title make them sound like an overlubricated gathering of underemployed liberals. It does not matter whether the group has earned any status or that it is a crowd from the street corner. Their claim fits the Times’ agenda. Therefore it is deemed newsworthy. Not one instant of evidence of the charge — which may be valid — is offered. Just inflammatory rhetoric. The undemanding Mr. Silverstein, being an incurious reporter, ignored that gem. Although Mr. Silverstein characterized them as important people, he only identified one by name, and she probably is unknown outside of her family.
Why Their Claim Is Dubious
It should be a safe presumption that if this Alliance of nobodies possessed a single damning fact to buttress its charge, the fact would have been held high and waved like a flaming purple salami. The president of the UCLA Black Alumni Assn. said the Alliance judges the U.C. regents and UCLA’s administration as guilty for “denying highly qualified African American students who have achieved some of the highest levels of academic achievement (and) personal achievement, and have overcome some of the greatest life challenges of any group of students the African American community has ever produced.”
This isn’t a dance class. Show me the grades. The young woman spoke gobblydegook. The last time a debate on curricula for black students made the newspapers, the main argument was that the history and philosophy of hip-hop should be taught.
By Golly, He Blew It Again
Mr. Silverstein, the reporter, skillfully skated around the central claim of the Alliance, that black students should be admitted because they are black, regardless of grades. This is the affirmative action crowd arising from the grave again. The director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center on the UCLA campus admitted as much: UCLA’s admission procedures “fail to fully account for the obstacles low-income black students often face compared to affluent students who have more opportunities.” My father drove an older car than the more affluent residents of our neighborhood. But the Times did not live in my town. So I could not call a press conference and claim discrimination. What ever happened to academic standards?
They Soil the Ground for Others
These kinds of clownish charges, reliably enabled by the Times, contribute to communal fatigue when valid charges of bias are brought forward. Comes the Monday morning edition of the Times, and a Letter to the Editor showing that dentists elsewhere can possess questionable judgment. One Steve Underwood of Fountain Valley identified himself as a 20-year member of the Dental School Admissions Committee at UCLA. His explanation for the small number of black applicants: “The failure exists in our inability to prepare many of our children for a rigorous college application process.” Forget “application.” He is partially correct. The failure lies in not preparing them for the rigor of college. Further, Mr. Underwood betrays his anti-academic squishiness in an earlier passage: “(On the Admissions Committee) we were always trying to have a diverse student body to serve all Californians.” It is sad that liberals value cultural diversity over rigorous intellects. Only Ward Connerly, a black man fired by the regents because he would not hew to the Victim Party line, gets it. He says there are few black students at UCLA because there is only a small pool of high performing black students coming out of high schools.