something no one has ever been addled enough to invite me to do. In my younger days as a journalist, I used to make a habit of tuning in, feeling it was essential to keeping abreast of national events and writing well-informed commentary.
But eventually it became apparent to me that what I was gaining in information, I was losing in perspective. I was mistaking the current for the important.
I often got so caught up in what the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee had to say, or how the secretary of energy saw the world, that I lost sight of other matters — like whether they were discussing anything that deserved two seconds of anyone’s time. I found the voice of Sam Donaldson or Tim Russert or George Will barging in to my cranial cavity just when I was trying to figure out what I thought about something.
So I gave up the routine for good. In the last decade and a half, the only time I relapsed was when the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke and there was talk that President Clinton might have to resign. But that prediction turned out to be a specimen of inside-the-beltway wisdom from journalists talking too much to one another. It reconfirmed that I was better off doing something else — even if it was only raking leaves.
Another reason for my inattention is that anything important said on these shows will be in the newspapers on Monday, since news is usually scarce on Sunday. And if you want the whole context of the distinguished senator’s thoughts about this nomination or that bill, you can always find a transcript online — and read it in a tiny fraction of the time it takes to watch the show. All without having to wonder what kind of mousse George Stephanopoulos puts on his hair.
In fact, most of the “news” on these programs is as predictable as Wonder Bread. Roberts admitted frustration with the format: “Over the years politicians have gotten more scripted. They have media consultants who tell them how to do it. They’ve learned how to speak in 11-second sound bites. . . So it is irritating, and you do try to think of something that maybe they haven’t thought of so that they are thrown off the script a bit, but it’s hard to do.”
But maybe the best reason for going AWON — absent without news — is the one Roberts mentioned: It frees up time for the ordinary stuff of life, whether it’s walking the dog, reading a book, going to church, meeting a friend, talking to your spouse, or supporting your local ice arena.
Those things are important, even to journalists. Like everyone else, we need regular reminders that there is a lot more to life than government and politics. Sunday-morning news shows focus a journalist’s mind on work when it ought to be focused on anything else.
I’m glad I’m not the only one who feels that way. Nobody on her deathbed ever wished she had spent more time with “This Week.” I don’t think Cokie Roberts will be the first.
Racial preferences: Unpleasant facts
Bias in universities is a policy of pretense
Sunday, January 19, 2003
The University of Michigan, in its effort to achieve racial diversity in its student body, gives preference to black, Hispanic and American Indian applicants. Without such consideration, it says, these minority groups would practically vanish from campus.
So here’s a quiz: If you’re applying for undergraduate admission to the school, is it better to have a) a perfect score on the SAT or b) a dark complexion? The answer, of course, is b). On Michigan’s 150-point scale, a perfect board score gets you 12 points. Being black or Hispanic gets you 20.
That helps explain why President Bush decided last week to support a constitutional challenge to the program, calling it “a quota system that unfairly rewards or penalizes prospective students based solely on their race.” The president obviously doesn’t like to take actions that can be construed as racially insensitive, especially right after Trent Lott got caught waxing nostalgic for segregation. But the Michigan program is so blatant in its reverse discrimination that Bush didn’t really have much choice.
Advocates of preferences in higher education give the impression that they’re a matter of just a slight thumb on the scale. In fact, these policies essentially require two entirely different scales. They mean appreciably lowering admissions standards for minority applicants. Among students with board scores and grades in the middle range of Michigan Law School applicants, one appeals court judge noted, nearly four out of five whites and Asian-Americans were rejected. But 100 percent of blacks and Hispanics in that range were accepted.
The university used to judge different races by explicitly different standards, with the law school operating a “special admissions program” to ensure that at least 10 percent of each class would be black, Hispanic or Native American. It abandoned that system because it was vulnerable to legal challenge, replacing it with a stress on “diversity” that is designed to achieve a “critical mass” of minority students.
In practice, though, the new approach bears a striking resemblance to the old one. It virtually guarantees admission to minority students with academic credentials that would usually disqualify a white candidate. And it has an impressive habit of keeping minority representation high. “Critical mass” seems to mean a quota with a little fuzz around the edges.
There is no dispute that for blacks and Hispanics, Michigan greatly de-emphasizes grades and board scores. It’s not hard to understand why. Administrators want a substantial number of minority students, but there aren’t a lot of minority students with the stellar academic credentials that the university normally demands. The law school says that each year, it gets about 900 applications from white students in the top range of grades and test scores — but only about 35 from minority candidates.
What the whole affirmative action debate passes over is the unpleasant fact behind it: the racial gulf in academic achievement. Asian-Americans don’t need special help in university admissions because they have no trouble competing with whites in the classroom. But on average, blacks and Hispanics lag behind.
You might assume that’s the lingering consequence of racism. But Abigail Thernstrom, a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and co-author of the book “America in Black and White,” points out that from the mid-1970s to the late 1980s, the gap shrank between blacks and whites, as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress test — and since then, it’s widened. Does anyone think racism has more impact today than it did 15 years ago?
Nor is poverty a convincing excuse. “Black students from families with incomes above $70,000 a year score lower on the SAT than white students from families with incomes of less than $10,000 a year,” notes Shelby Steele, an African-American scholar at the Hoover Institution.
So how can the gap be explained? Elementary and secondary schools are obviously not adequately preparing many students for higher education. The breakdown of the black family — two out of three black children are born out of wedlock, compared to 27 percent of whites — puts African-American youngsters at a great disadvantage. And African-Americans in general place less importance on education than more successful ethnic groups.
The widespread use of preferences is a policy of pretense. It pretends, against all evidence, that the racial gap in academic performance doesn’t really matter. It tells blacks and Hispanics they don’t need to meet the same standards as everyone else.
The policy is supposed to be a boon to minorities that would otherwise be “under-represented” on university campuses. But if racial preferences have failed to close the academic gap, maybe it’s because they’re part of the problem.
Thoroughly bogus case for war
