So I'm looking for some good program or website or whatnot (preferably free) that will keep track of a bunch of blogs for me, and tell me when they're updated. Not all of the blogs I want to keep track of have RSS feeds, and a lot are only updated every few days. I'm looking for some way that I can keep track of when those blogs have something new without having to click through 50-odd links several times a day. Anybody who knows of such a system is invited to email me.

Incidentally, as I'm sure you can see, every post now has an email link to the author, just click on the author's name.

Mustafa Hirji writes in with four comments on affirmative action and racial diversity.

1. You argue that if racial diversity is the goal, then Universities should be outright and open in their use of racial preference. I have to agree completely. Affirmative action is, IMHO, racism with "good" intentions, where "good" is defined by society (I'm sure the KKK would also argue they have "good" intentions). If we're going to have state-sanctioned racism, let's be open about it so we can keep an eye on it, not hide it. Hiding something like racial preferences behind a mask (social background, economic background, geographic origin, etc.) is akin to using euphemisms--it is trying to hide a barbaric practice through indirect reference. Soon the practice will be seen as good because no one will look deep into what is actually being done.

2. Let's be the devil's advocate. If a university is allowed to implement racial diversity rules, is a university now also allowed to implement racial homogeneity rules? A university could argue that racial homogeneity would further debate on issues by creating a different dynamic than racially diverse classes. They currently argue that racial diversity makes students think differently about issues. They currently argue that someone growing up in an african-american neighbourhood will see things differently than someone from an asian neighbourhood, than someone from a caucasian neighbourhood. Sure a racially homogeneous class will approach issues differently and bring a different perspective to society upon graduation.

3. I've argued many times that the whole notion of affirmative action to promote equality is wrong. While SCOTUS through the U of Michigan cases has asserted that diversity should be the justification for affirmative action in the US, in Canada (where I'm from if my email address wasn't a give away) equality reigns as the justification. A native Indian or an Asian isn't disadvantaged by race when applying to universities or jobs. It is accepted that no race is genetically inferior to another in any significant way (there are a few advocates of the opposite including a professor at University of Western Ontario, but these are few in number and their evidence is weak). If all races are equal, than the impediment isn't race, and race shouldn't be a basis for affirmative action.

I would argue that social problems lead to impediments, however. Alchoholic parents, poor parents, abusive parents, etc. Minorities who fail to advance to university overwhelmingly come from poor and abusive families. Likewise, Caucasians suffering the same problems tend, also, not to get into universities. And unlike race, these social problems have a logical link to poor academic performance--these children go to poor schools, don't have parents two instill the value of education, don't have parents who'll nurture their children's academic skills, etc. Using poverty as a basis for affirmative action would make far more sense to me than the current practice of using race. Inequality is a result of poverty, not the possession of a genetic makeup that gives you a few insignificant physical characteristics.

4. Affirmative action is a bit silly because it doesn't attack the underlying problem. We shouldn't try to "compensate" for a problem 20 years into it by hurting someone who's done nothing wrong. Rather, we should attack the root of the problem. If you think the problem is the existence of racists, we should root out these people. If, as I think, the problem is social environment of upbringing, we should try to eliminate poverty. Trying to put make-up on the effect of the problem 20 years later isn't going to solve the problem.

(via Waddling Thunder) Proving that they do have some sense of decency, Harvard just withdrew its offer for acceptance from Blair Hornstine, the girl who successfully sued her school to force them to declare her the only valedictorian.

We have a new template. Please feel free (in fact, feel encouraged) to email me comments on the change.

47 Years and Possibly Ending:

The Baton Rouge Advocate reports that

The members of the local NAACP voted Thursday by a narrow margin to allow their attorneys to sign a settlement of the 47-year-old East Baton Rouge Parish school desegregation case once the final language has been worked out.

The NAACP isn't really saying what is in the agreement they signed (citing a gag order that may or may not be as stringent as their silence), there are questions of whether all those who voted as NAACP members actually are members, but never mind, the end to litigation is going ahead.

If everyone signs and if US District Court Judge John Brady approves it, then

The proposed settlement. . . would end the case, but commit the school system to many of the current desegregation tools for four more years.

It would allow more students to attend their neighborhood schools, create as many as six new schoolwide or "dedicated" magnet schools, enhance three other magnet programs, and close several others.

It also would let more minority students transfer to magnet programs and other schools.

A key part of the proposed settlement for the local NAACP is that it preserves extra resources and teachers for predominantly black schools and preserves extended day, extended year and prekindergarten programs at those same schools.

Now if the school system can only become good enough that it no longer qualifies as a Teach for America site...

Alternatives to What?:

Amanda Butler asks whether it's any better to use income or "top X% in your high school class" to proxy for race in college admissions.

Look, it's not any better to just use X% plans or income-action if you're doing it only to proxy for race in the first place. Similarly, it's not really any better to give bonuses to students interested in critical race studies (predominantly minorities) or Tibetan Sand Art, or whatever. These aren't race-neutral alternatives to racial diversity-- they're non-facial discrimination insted of facial discrimination.

The real question, I think, is whether universities should be allowed to pursue racial diversity in the first place. I think not. After all, universities (usually) claim that the reason they want racial diversity is because it brings about intellectual diversity. Well, that's great, but then why keep track of the racial numbers at all? Programs like economic-affirmative-action are great because they both remedy past/current discrimination and bring about intellectual diversity, all without playing the race card. Indeed, economic-affirmative-action would be a good idea no matter what race happens to be predominantly poor.

The trouble arises when a school values racial diversity for its own sake-- either because a critical mass of students allows students to contribute without feeling like spokespersons for their race, or because minority students bring viewpoints and experiences of "lived race" that majority students simply can't. If the goal is racial diversity, then I don't see anything wrong with employing racial discrimintion to get there, and I don't think it makes it any better or worse if that discrimination is done blatantly, through "points systems" or "holistic review" or if its done by proxy, through X% plans. If the goal is some other kind of diversity, or a desire to give a leg up to the underprivileged, or whatever, then there's no need to proxy for race at all-- just ifnore it.

In my view we should just take the "what race are you?" box off of all of the forms at universities. Schools should aim for diverse classes, smart classes, socially responsible classes, whatever. But the same experiences ought to be valued equally coming from two applicants of the same race.

Incidentally, I'll have a piece on this coming out shortly in the Chicago Maroon.

UPDATE: As it happens I came across this passage in a 12/18/00 New Yorker article this afternoon, providing the "implicit" justification for Michigan's program. It's probably longer on rhetoric than on logic, but a good point, and a way to explain why so many academics have more complicated feelings about Affirmative Action than they do about other issues.

(Universities) believe that their main purposes are the traditional ones: pursuing scholarship and learning, and training students to go forth and improve the world. Affirmative action is easy to justify if you understand universities the way they undrstand themselves. I a society bedevilled by racial tension, they have a duty to become sites of interracial understanding, and to insure future peace and progress by making sure there will be black lawyers and judges and doctors and teachers and executives. They are not obliged to populate themselves according to a bling objective standard, in honor of an individual right to admission. These aren't arguments you can explicitly make in defending a legal challenge to the Bakke decision, but they implicitly underlie Michigan's feeling that ending affirmative action would be . . . tragic.

So thanks the generosity of my employers, I attended Solicitor General Ted Olson's Federalist Society luncheon this afternoon. Most of what he said wasn't particularly new, though much of it was quite funny. Sadly, I did not take notes, so I can't reproduce more than a quote or two, although Sara Butler did. If you pester her enough, I'm sure she'll either post them or give them to me.

They began by telling us that this was the largest audience the luncheon had ever received. "Though the fire code limits us our occupancy to 400 people, we have an opinion from Sandra Day O'Connor declaring that for the next two hours, 400 means 500. . . After two hours, she hopes that it will no longer be necessary and 400 will mean 400 again."

The tomfoolery award went to Maureen Dowd, and attempting to quote from her columns on Justice Thomas and Justice Scalia nearly had Olson's voice breaking up. He pointed out how strange it was for O'Connor to award Constitutional bonus points to "holistic, individualized, review" when in other strict scrutiny contexts (like parade permits) the system must be objective (which is to say rigid) in order tobe constitutional. And there were the requisite digs at the VMI case.

He only let a few hints as to the forthcoming BCRA brief come out, essentially insisting that the SG's office would be enthusiastically defending the constitutionality of the law...

NEAR-IMMEDIATE-UPDATE: My illustrious co-workers remind me that it was not Solicitor General Olson who gave the quote up above, but rather the gentleman introducing him, whose name escaped me entirely. You can see what little use I am without my notebook.

UPDATE REDUX: A summer associate at Gibson, Dunn etc. emails to tell me that the gentleman I quote above was Doug Cox, partner at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher and President of the DC Chapter of the Federalist Society. Thanks.

UPDATE THE THIRD: Since I just noticed that How Appealling has linked to this post (that was hours ago!--ed. Yeah, well, I was working on my real job.) I feel some obligation to try to add more substance to it. So what follows are a few more random observations and memories--

General Olson speculated on whether the right to "transcendent" liberty would extend to riding a motorcycle without a helmet, smoking cigarettes, or driving SUVs. (He suspected that the answer was no, but couldn't come up with a good reason why not). He also hypothesized that the reason that members of the court have been writing so many opinions lately (more concurrences and dissents than usual) is because they have so much more time, since they're handling a lighter caseload (only 74 cases actually decided on the merits this term).

He rattled off many more statistics (Mr. Cox pointed out that Olson's record for the Bush administration is now 14-2, plus 2-0 on the Bush Election cases before he became SG), such as the fact that the 9th Circuit's reversal rate improved to 14 out of 19, although it did have 4 summary reversals without argument (including three on one fateful November day).

He also mentioned that Justice Breyer read portions of his dissent in Ewing v. California, the 3-strikes-8th-Amendment case from the bench. This intrigues me. In fact, the practice of judges reading their dissents from the bench intrigues me. I recall hearing that the dissent in Bowers v. Hardwick was read from the bench, we know Scalia's dissent in Lawrence v. Texas was, and I also remember hearing that somebody, perhaps Souter?, read his dissent in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, the school voucher case. (Incidentally, my understanding is that when a judge "reads" his dissent he doesn't read the whole thing.) Does anybody know of a good resource that records which Justices read their dissents from the bench when? Ideally this would be a list of the bench-dissents going back to Justice Breyer's appointment, or even farther... Please let me know.

Also, while discussing the number of concurrences and dissents in various opinions, Olson mentioned the messy nest of opinions in Chavez v. Martinez, in which Justice Thomas announced the opinion of the court. Apparently after reading through the tangle from the bench, Justice Thomas commented, "As you can see, I'm a consensus builder."

Hmm. One other thing-- Olson made an offhand comment that made it sound to me as if he had been present at all or almost all of the oral arguments this year. Does anybody know how often the Solicitor General himself attends arguments or court announcements?
ONE LAST UPDATE:

Various anonymous readers report that it was Breyer who read his Zelman dissent, that Olson indeed attended every oral argument where the government had a stake and then some (have I mentioned I want that job?) partially to check on how his guys were doing, and was complimented by the Justices on his attendance.

Affirmative action and race-neutral alternatives:

So, you're a university, you want a racially diverse class, you want high standards and smart students, you don't want to (and you can't) assign 20 admissions points on the basis of race, you don't even want to add race in as a non-numerical fuzzy bonus point (ala Michigan law). In fact, you think the using race in college admissions is counter-productive to creating a universally well-educated, color blind society in the long run. Still, you don't want to see the same color faces when you look at your class. So what do you do?

Texas's merit-based program which automatically admits the top 10% of each high school's graduating class is (sometimes) praised by some for resulting in a racially-mixed group of students receiving these awards and is (routinely) criticized for de facto relying on segregated high schools to achieve this result.

Another alternative is to give points, numerical or fuzzy, to students who come from socio-economomic deficiencies. True, Ruby Cosby, with a doctor dad and lawyer mom, won't get any of these points, but she's a bright girl, she can sink or swim on her own. You can say that the students who come from these poor backgrounds are the ones who, thanks to their circumstances, are most in need of a helping hand. You also know, by running the numbers on the national poverty stats, that these socio-economic points are going to increase your university's racial diversity, which was your original goal.

Is there an ethical difference in the two programs? -- one relies on segregated secondary school systems, one relies on the segregation of poverty -- how can the difference be teased out?

Segregation in our school systems is, in some dreams of a better future, something that can and will be erased; wealth and income inequalities are an ever-present element of a capitalist society. But wasn't part of the hope behind school desegregation that it would lead to poverty desegregation (fewer racial striations in the economic stratification)? How could the second program be defended by someone who wanted racial diversity? How is the second program not just a shift to another statistic to be used as a rough racial identifier?

Ranking Games:

Acknowledging the awesome power that it wields, US News and World Report dropped the Yield Rate from its university rankings because it feared that Universities were adopting binding early admission plans in order to secure high yield rates. I'm not actually sure how much this is the case, since universities have another strong incentive to maintain such binding plans, which is the amount of leverage the university gains in financial aid negotiations.

In any case, that still leaves both graduation rate and admissions rate as factors of major importance in a University's ranking. A low admissions rate and a high graduation rate are presumably good-- but why is this so? It seems to me this choice of ranking is based on adherence to a particular model-- the model of the selective elite institution that makes it very difficult to get through the door, but easy to pass and excel once you're there. The consequence is that having (for example) a Harvard degree (96% graduation rate) tells you very little about how much the person actually learns in college but a whole lot about how much they learned in high school. Well, okay.

But there's another way-- some universities tend toward a different model. They accept a lot more students, including many whose high school statistics contain some notable blemish, but then flunk a lot more of them too. Essentially they acknowledge they widen their initial margin of error but then work harder to cull the field. On the downside, the university probably becomes a little more competitive, since performance in college suddenly matters, but it also means that while being a student at Berkeley might not signal quite as impressive an achievement, being a graduate of Berkeley (68% graduation rate) might be more impressive than being a graduate of Harvard.

Now, I'm not quite ready to argue which of these models is a better one (though the fact that I attend the University of Chicago will serve as a clue for the astute reader), but I do think that U.S. News shouldn't be taking sides in this philosophical split, or should at least acknowledge that its ratings do take sides.

A better solution would be for U.S. News to change its use of both admissions rate and graduation rate and combine them into one rate-- the % admitted and graduated rate.

Thus, if school H (say) had an admissions rate of 10% and a graduation rate of 100% while school C (say) had an admissions rate of 20% and a graduation rate of 75% and school O had an admissions rate of 50% and a graduation rate of 50%, their final percentages would be 10%, 15% and 25%. In this case, the ordering would be the same, although the disparity not nearly as great.

In other words, while it makes sense to consider low admissions rates the mark of a good institution, I'm not sure it makes sense to count high graduation rates too. The current rankings systems encourage universities to admit as few applicants as possible but to treasure them dearly once they are there-- this means that applicants secure their college degree with only three years of a high school record.

Now yes, you may object, many community colleges will suddenly do very well under this system, since their graduation rates are abysmally low. But it's doubtful most of those CC's will fare well under US News's other criteria.

Alternatively, US News should drop either admissions rate or graduation rate. A high graduation rate is usually taken as a sign that admitted students "enjoy" the school. A low admissions rate is usually taken as a sign that the school is selective and therefore prestigious. But conflating these two ratings together encourages a highly questionable philosophy of education.

Legitimacy:

A sub-question to Chris's legitimacy post earlier-- Eugene Volokh blogs on this amazingly egregious decision of the Nevada Supreme Court. The Nevada Constitution requires a two-thirds vote in order to raise taxes. This has caused a budget deadlock. The N. Supreme Court ruled that the state's constitutional obligation to provide schools overrides the state's constitutional obligation to do it by two-thirds vote. One can merely shudder to think of the various places this logic could take us.
Consider a doomsday scenario where the Supreme Court holds that the President's constitutional obligation to appoint federal judges to the courts overrode his constitutional obligation to get the advice and consent of the Senate. (That's basically the equivalent of what's happened here). But I'm not going to rail against the decision here. I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

But what now? We all made fun of Gephardt for claiming he'd override egregious Court decisions with executive orders, but what would the public reaction be if everybody just decided to ignore the N. S. Court on this one? Would the police come and arrest legislators who insisted on the 2/3 vote that the Constitution requires? As Volokh says, the people could amend the Constitution again, but what if only a small majority has the energy to, or what if they can't do it in time?

The second question-- how far would we permit the Supreme Court to go before people stopped listening to it anymore? The past hundred years has shown that it can divorce itself from text and history so long as it is tracking social change, and Roe v. Wade and Bush v. Gore show that the court can even take sides in evenly split debates without a particularly convincing rationale. So what (in peacetime) would the Court have to do to make people just ignore it?

What if the court declared child pornography to be protected speech? What if it declared that the First Amendment only applied to prior restraints? What if it found a substantitve due process right to private drug abuse? What if it declared prison incarceration to be cruel and unusual punishment? What if it suspended the Senate's advice and consent requirement for appointments?

Summer Blogging:

Diotima briefly emerges from the deep. Will they drop back into hibernation for another two weeks? Why do I feel like I'm watching a groundhog's hole?

Bodies:

Incidentally, how far would a right to bodily identity carry? Would it include the right to put alcohol into that body, even when one was carrying a child (under an abortion right wouldn't it almost have to)? Would it include the right to put heroin into that body? To kill oneself? Or to deliberately acquire a contagious disease (c.f., for example the rumor/contraversy about people intentionally getting HIV)?

As a political question (forget the Constitutional question for a sec; it's been done to death) I have no complaint about a right to bodily identity, it seems to include a whole lot of things I believe in. But I'm sort of astonished to see other people supporting it as well. Is this what they intend for it to entail?

Near as I can tell a principle of bodily identity would be a slightly weakened version of JS Mill's rule of self-regarding behavior. Again, I think such a principle would be a perfectly nice one, but I'm sort of confused, firstly about its genesis from a rule of "due process" and secondly by the fact that non-libertarians have been espousing them.

Balasubramani:

So in a single post, Balasubramani manages to defend the Burberry skateboard and Comments, promises a post on the second amendment, and pokes fun at my claims about license plates.

[Incidentally, I found my earlier posts on license plates in Virginia. Click here or here.]

Balasubramani points out that vanity plates might well be individual speech. Indeed, I think the case might come out differently if what were at issue were a government rule that forbade certain viewpoints on vanity license plates. Should the law draw a fine distinction between the two? My tentative answer is yes, but this might just expose my fundamental discomfort with the "designated public forum" doctrine. It's never been clear to me how you can tell when the government has created a forum and when it hasn't-- it seems like begging the question to some degree. The whole reason there's a first amendment claim here at all is that the government hasn't opened the forum widely enough.

Incidentally, a friend writes in to point out how silly it is to get worked up about this. He suggests that pro-choice people buy themselves a bumper sticker and donate $25 to Planned Parenthood. But of course they're fighting for the principle of the thing. I would like to suggest that it's good for courts to deal with "trivial" cases like this one. Since many judges seem tempted to contravene constitutional rules for their own personal preferences, I think these kinds of cases serve as good chances to deal with the rules almost abstractly. When judges deal with something trivial like license plates, there's less of an urge to pragmatically craft a rule to get at a certain result. Judges may not always hold to these rules when big cases come up, but some of them might, and the others are at least put under some pressure to explain why they're contravening the rule.

Death:

AJ Ayer, again, this time on death:

...if one comes to consider it, why should it worry me more, if at all, that I shall not be alive in the year 2050 than that I was not alive in the year 1850? The way things are going indeed, the latter, at least for Englishment of comfortable circumstances, might well prove the better time to have lived.

Calling New Bloggers:

No, not us. The Chicago Report is looking for some additional contributors to the site. I'm not too familiar with the site, but those who are looking for an inlet into blogging without having to start a blog of their own might want to look into it. Chicago residence is preferred but not required.

Tyler Cowen asks why people are more willing to steal music than food and DeCroy responds with the answer I was about to give. When you steal somebody's food, they don't have any more of it. When you steal their music, they still do. Thus, the costs of stealing music are lower and less direct and you don't give them as much of an incentive to come take it back. When you take somebody's food, they have something to gain by getting it back from you (especially if they want to punish you anyway). When you take their music, they have no incentive to try to download it back from you, and even if they did, you probably wouldn't mind.

This intuition seems fairly widespread-- it explains why people are more willing to steal from those who can "afford to lose it," and why people pluck flowers from flowerbeds when they wouldn't think of swiping them out of a vase. It also helps to explain why people download music but wouldn't dream of shoplifting CDs (my shoplifting friend tells me this isn't hard to do). The New York Time's "Ethicist" even advocates switching to better baseball seats at a ballgame, even when the ballpark explicitly forbids it.

Incidentally, I don't mean to say there's nothing morally wrong with copyright infringement. But I do think that it's better if people steal music than if they steal the whole cd. Why wouldn't it be?