Tag Archives: University of Virginia

Flaming assholes. Torch-wielding white supremacists marching at UVa last year — a useful distraction from what really ails American society.

This news is almost a month old, but I hadn’t seen anyone else pick it up, so here goes… The University of Virginia will create 20 new research professorships in “Democracy and Equity” to examine “underlying causes” of the white supremacist demonstrations in Charlottesville last year.

Each of the 20 professorships will be funded by $1 million in donor commitments matched one-for-one by UVA’s Strategic Investment Fund. The Board of Visitors approved the group’s recommendation to set aside $20 million in matching funds to support faculty research and teaching around “related social, cultural and political issues.” Continue reading →

UVa Hispanic students feel left out? Really? Photo credit: University of Virginia Multicultural Services website

It didn’t take long for the University of Virginia’s new president, Jim Ryan, to have his first encounter with the university’s identity politics. A few days before his inauguration Oct. 19, Hispanic students circulated an open letter calling for more Hispanic faculty, Spanish-translated documents, and tours in Spanish and Portuguese for applicants and their families.

As of Monday, reports the Cavalier Daily, the letter had been signed by more than 70 student organizations and 450 individuals. Stated the letter:

This year, the University of Virginia admitted its ‘most diverse’ class in history. This is a great stride toward improving diversity at UVA; however, UVA cannot celebrate this when many minoritized students at the University feel underserved, underrepresented, and isolated. In order to help change this, there must be sufficient infrastructure to support minority students after their admittance to the university.

“Historically, providing and advocating for these resources has fallen on student organizations, students, and members of the community. We deserve to experience UVA as students and not as free-labored assets,” the letter read.

Welcome to UVa, Mr. Ryan!

Signatories urged the administration to expand staff in Multicultural Student Services. The letter also noted that while Hispanic students comprise 6% of the student body, there are only 24 Hispanic faculty members — 2.8% — in the College (presumably of the Arts & Sciences) faculty. Outside of the language departments, there are only 10 Hispanic professors. (The letter referred to “Latinx” faculty. I’m not ready yet to swallow that politically correct nomenclature. And for the record, university-wide, there were 80 Hispanic faculty members in 2017.)

So, Hispanic students at UVa have joined the ranks of the perpetually aggrieved. While the letter signatories purport to speak for Hispanics at the university, it’s not clear how many they actually represent. The 450 signatories are only a fraction of the number of 1,069 Hispanic undergraduates (2017 figures) and 312 Hispanic graduate students at UVa. Moreover, I’m willing to wager that many signatories are members of other races/ethnicities.

Furthermore, the letter notes that the first Latino Greek organization, La Unidad Latina, Lambda Upsilon Lambda Fraternity, has been “inactive” for the past two years. Isn’t this evidence that many Hispanic students were perfectly happy joining non-ethnic fraternities, had no trouble getting accepted into them, and saw no need for an ethnic safe haven?

I suspect that the tone of whiny aggrievement and entitlement in the letter reflects the views of only a fraction of UVa’s Hispanic students.

By my count, there are at least ten active student organizations devoted to Hispanics:

• The Darden Latin American Student Association
• The Latin American Law Organization at UVA
• The Latinx Student Alliance
• The Latino/Hispanic Peer Mentor Program
• The Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers
• The Hispanic American Network at Darden
• Destina (a Hispanic Christian group)
• DREAMERS on Grounds
• Fuego (an Hispanic dance team)
• The Latin Student Network at McIntire

That doesn’t include a number of other groups dedicated to “minorities” and “diversity.” If these groups don’t fulfill their social and emotional needs, Hispanic students are free to form groups that do. Given the Student Council’s solicitude toward identity politics, they should have no trouble getting funding.

The freedom to form their own groups is not something the letter writers seem to appreciate. They want the administration’s validation and action. But I have to ask: How many Hispanic students at UVa genuinely feel “underserved, underrepresented, and isolated?” Is the feeling of isolation a real thing, or is it a political affectation of the Left? Do conservative, Republican, and non-political Hispanics — I’m sure there must be a few — feel left out?

How do letter writers think that expanding the staff of Multicultural Student Services will help? If the existence of 10 student groups doesn’t do the trick, what will adding a couple of multicultural staff members accomplish that students couldn’t do just as well by showing some initiative and launching their own groups?

What kind of world do these students imagine awaits them when they graduate? Do they expect their employers to bend over backwards to cater to their politically progressive Hispanic identity? Will they wilt like delicate flowers if they don’t have a multicultural bureaucracy to support them? Will they flounder if their bosses don’t “look like them”? Will they feel any responsibility to adapt to the corporate culture of their employers, or will they insist that their employers and fellow employees adapt to them?

Just as important, what kind of message will Jim Ryan and the UVa administration send their Hispanic students? Will they create a protective bubble to guard the tender sensitivities of the letter writers, or will they encourage them to grow up and learn to deal with the real world as, I’ll wager, most Hispanic students feel perfectly capable of doing?

Legacy students were offered admittance to the University of Virginia at nearly twice the rate of non-legacies in the fall 2018 semester, according to the UVa student newspaper, The Cavalier Daily. (UVa defines “legacies” as children or live-in stepchildren of university alumni.)

Nearly 47 percent of legacy applicants received an offer in the most recent round of applications. In the same period, only a little over 25 percent of non-legacy applications were offered admission — making the process almost two times as difficult for students whose parents did not attend the University.

Legacy applicants composed just over five percent of the approximately 37,000 applications received by the University, but represent more than 10 percent of about 10,000 offers sent by the University.

If you thought there was a social justice angle to the story, congratulations, you win the prize:

While the University does accept students of all races, legacies skew white. In 2018, this meant eight percent of admitted students were white legacies. By contrast, Hispanic and Latinx, African-American and black and Asian and Asian-American legacy applicants each compose less than one percent of all admitted students. …

The demographic with the highest admission rate was black or African-American applicants at 32.7 percent, followed by Asian or Asian-Americans at 29.8 percent. Hispanic or Latinx applicants had an acceptance rate of 25.8 percent and white or caucasian applicants had a 26.7 percent admission rate.

Legacy children go through the same admissions process as all other applicants, University spokesman Anthony de Bruyn told the Cavalier Daily. “Legacy is one of several factors that is considered as part of our holistic review of applicants. Other factors include whether applicants are first-generation college students, military veterans or from underserved and underrepresented backgrounds, to name a few.”

Legacy applicants have slightly better test scores and grades than non-legacies on average, de Bruyn said: 20 points higher on the SAT, and two percentage points more likely to have been in the top 10 percent of their high school class.

Bacon’s bottom line: The Cavalier Daily article cherry-picked data, alluded to racial/ethnic disparities, then used loaded language — “making the process almost two times as difficult for students whose parents did not attend the University” — to imply that the legacy process conferred an unfair advantage.

Fortunately, the reporter and/or editor were intellectually honest enough to include data, though buried in the article, that showed how little — remarkably little, to my way of thinking — legacy status figured into UVa admissions. It turns out that legacies are offered a spot in larger numbers, at least in part, because… (drumroll)… legacies are more qualified than the average applicant.

There’s a bit more to the story that the Cavalier Daily could have explored had the newspaper managed to break out of its social justice paradigm. Consider an alternative framing of the data:

White applicants were admitted to the University of Virginia at lower rates than African-Americans, Asians and Asian-Americans. The disparity was greatest for white applicants with no family connection to the university.

An alternative framing of the data also could have emphasized the gap — evident at other elite universities — between the qualifications and admission rate of Asian-American students.

To draw meaningful conclusions about the role of race, ethnicity and wealth in UVa’s admissions policies, we would need to break down applicants by racial/ethnic category, and then by legacy and non-legacy within each category. Then we would need to see the SAT scores and class rankings for each category and sub-category.

If such data could be obtained, I would offer the following predictions: (1) legacies of all racial/ethnic groups are admitted at somewhat higher numbers than non-legacies; (2) legacies of all racial/ethnic groups have slightly higher qualifications than non-legacies; (3) black and Hispanic applicants are admitted with lower average SAT scores and class rankings, suggesting that the admissions process discriminates (if not overtly, then in effect) in their favor; and (4) Asians and non-legacy whites who gain admission have higher average SAT scores and class rankings on average, suggesting that the admissions process discriminates (in effect) against them. Based on practices at other elite universities (see the lawsuit filed by Asian-Americans against Harvard for admission policies discriminating against Asians), I would predict that Asian-Americans are victims of the worst discrimination.

Those predictions are consistent with the data supplied by the Cavalier Daily, although we need complete data to draw definitive conclusions. Don’t ever expect, though, to see a follow-up from the Cavalier Daily. I doubt its staff is interested in pursuing an angle that conflicts with the dominant social-justice narrative.