W. Lee Hansen

November 5, 2011
Wisconsin State Journal

What is the dollar value of the resources devoted to promoting racial and ethnic diversity at UW-Madison?

Though campus administrators regularly extol the educational benefits of diversity, they say little about the costs of achieving those benefits.

How substantial are these costs? The quick answer is they are large and exceed the official published figures.

What little information has been released on these costs is quite incomplete. The annual UW System Minority and Disadvantaged Student Report admits it “reflects only a portion of the expenditures for programs and activities designed to support academic success for historically under-served students.”

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November 1, 2011
Isthmus The Daily Page

In September, the Center for Equal Opportunity’s reports documenting “severe discrimination” favoring blacks and Hispanics in UW-Madison undergraduate and law school admissions came as no surprise. This discrimination has been well known to a few of us and long suspected by many students and the general public.

How did the UW-Madison react to the CEO reports? Rather than ignoring them, two senior campus officials portrayed these reports as threats to diversity. They apparently encouraged a group of students to protest at the Sept. 13 press conference scheduled to announce the results of these reports. There the protesters occupied the Doubletree Hotel’s lobby, disrupted its business, and ultimately closed down the press conference.

More recently, the legislature’s College and Universities Committee held a hearing that featured testimony from the Center for Equal Opportunity. It also gave Provost Paul DeLuca and Admissions Director Adele Brumfield an opportunity to explain how the admissions process works. There they defended the use of race and ethnicity to promote a more diverse student body.

Let me demonstrate how UW-Madison does give targeted minority applicants preferential treatment in admissions decisions. The data used here came from former Chancellor John Wiley. At the request of a legislative committee in January 2006, he provided data I was then able to access on freshmen admissions by race and ethnicity for 2005-06 applicants who were identified by high school class rank and ACT scores. In summer 2008 he provided me with similarly classified data on enrollees who graduated within six-years.

Two important findings emerge. First, approximately two-thirds to three-fourths of targeted minority applicants would have been admitted under the “competitive” standard, meaning they were as well prepared academically as virtually all non-minority applicants who were admitted. In other words, these students gained admission based on their academic records and had no need for any preferential treatment.

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October 21, 2011
National Association of Scholars

“Whatever may be the limitations which trammel inquiry elsewhere, we believe that the great state University of Wisconsin should ever encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found.” (Taken from a report of the Board of Regents in 1894)
Memorial, Class of 1910.

Summary

This is an account of the September 13, 2011 visit to Madison Wisconsin by Roger Clegg, President and General Counsel of the Washington DC based Center for Equal Opportunity (CEO). Clegg came to Madison to unveil at an 11 a.m. press conference in the off-campus DoubleTree Hotel the results of two new CEO studies that document “severe discrimination” in undergraduate and law school admissions at UW-Madison. A group of more than 100 protesting students who objected to the findings of these studies mobilized outside the hotel, burst into the hotel lobby, invaded the meeting room, interrupted the press conference as it was winding down.

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October 19, 2011
The Badger Herald

Exactly how are minority applicant admissions decisions made at the University of Wisconsin? At Monday’s Legislative Assembly committee hearing, Provost Paul DeLuca and Admissions Director Adele Brumfield described the process. They also dismissed the Center for Equal Opportunity study of UW undergraduate admissions that reported “severe discrimination” favoring African Americans and Hispanics.

DeLuca began by stating, “No student is admitted simply because of race or any other factor alone. Academics are the most important factor in our admission process. We also have a desire to create a diverse academic community.”

But nobody contends that targeted minority students are admitted solely because of their race or any other single factor. What most people don’t know is a great many targeted minority applicants are academically competitive and would be admitted without regard to their race, ethnicity or national origin.

UW’s preferential admissions policy is criticized because some targeted minority applicants receive special consideration not afforded by other applicants. This is evident from admissions office documents obtained in response to an open records request.

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October 5, 2011
Capital Times

UW-Madison campus leaders and minority students responded as expected to the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Equal Opportunity report that revealed “severe discrimination” based on race and ethnicity in UW-Madison undergraduate admissions.

Campus leaders claimed their “holistic” admissions process is consistent with the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2003 decision on the University of Michigan affirmative action cases. Protesting students said they were offended by CEO’s report and on Sept. 13 disrupted CEO President Roger Clegg’s press conference at the DoubleTree Hotel.

How does UW-Madison justify its approach to minority admissions decisions? Its freshman application handbook says the admissions office employs two standards. A “competitive” standard is used to admit the best academically prepared applicants. A “selective” standard is used to admit targeted minority applicants to increase racial/ethnic diversity.

How does the admission process work? On their application forms, applicants identify their race/ethnicity. As applicant files are reviewed, applications from the best academically prepared applicants are accepted. Applications from rejected minorities get an additional review not given to rejected nonminorities. How the admissions office decides who among these initially rejected minority applicants are to be admitted remains shrouded in mystery.

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September 21, 2011
Wisconsin State Journal

A different picture of last week’s student protest over UW admissions discrimination emerged from my vantage point inside the Doubletree Hotel press conference room compared to that of the author of Monday’s letter “Student protesters wrongly called a ‘mob’.”

The chanting and yelling coming from the lobby made it impossible for Roger Clegg of the Center for Equal Opportunity to continue responding to questions, effectively shutting down the press conference. After protesters overcame hotel staff trying to prevent their entry to the press conference room, they surged in and surrounded me and Clegg. We headed for the exit only to find protesters blocking it.

After hotel staff cleared the way, we came into the lobby. Instructed to go to the elevator, we were followed by chanting protesters. Several tried to enter the elevator after us but were blocked by hotel staff. The protesters tried to prevent the doors from closing, but finally the hotel staff members pushed the protesters back so the elevator doors could close.

To describe the protesters as having “broken decorum” is a gross and misleading understatement. To describe their actions as “well-intentioned” is at odds with what should have been obvious to anyone in the lobby. The best single-word description of the protesters is they were a “mob” and acted like a “mob.”

– W. Lee Hansen, UW-Madison professor emeritus of economic

April 6, 2010
The Badger Herald

“Why do you keep stigmatizing our ‘targeted minority’ students? What you write and say makes them feel bad and interferes with their academic achievement.”

That is what campus administrators often tell me after something I write appears in print (e.g., “UW and dead-end diversity, Badger Herald Nov. 13, 2009; “Diversity initiative more words than actions, Badger Herald Feb. 2, 2010). Why do they say this? I suspect it is because of their annoyance with my long-standing criticisms of UW-Madison’s misguided diversity policy. What remains unclear to me is whether “targeted minority” students actually make such comments or whether administrators are describing what they imagine these students are saying.

So, what is stigmatization? It reflects, as sociologist Erving Goffman in his classic 1963 book “Stigma” tells us, the labeling by the majority of a group it regards as lacking some attribute that would make its members similar and equal to the majority group.

Here at UW-Madison, the process of stigmatization begins by designating certain groups of students — African Americans, American Indians, Hispanics and South East Asians — as “targeted minorities.”

Targeted for what, you ask? For special consideration as determined by the enlightened, well-meaning leaders from the majority group. This means giving “targeted minority” students preferences in admission, offering them extra tutoring and academic help, and providing them with their own space where they can associate together, e.g., the Multicultural Student Center, and so on.

Who is doing this stigmatizing? It is campus administrators who apply the “targeted minority” label to them. It is campus administrators who treat “targeted minority” students as if all of them need special academic help to become more like majority students.

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February 3, 2010
The Badger Herald

“Inclusive excellence” has quietly replaced “diversity” and “Plan 2008” as the guiding star in UW-Madison’s four-decade long effort to increase minority representation and success.

Why adopt a new name for its diversity program? The reason is clear. Something had to be done to divert attention from the failed Plan 2008 which the UW System Board of Regents promised back in 1998 would make the UW System a national leader in achieving diversity.

The big question now is this: Can “inclusive excellence” succeed in accomplishing its ambitious goals? Answering this question first requires understanding what “inclusive excellence” means.

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January 28, 2010
Op-Ed Submission