RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/html/plot-against-merit-13667.html

THIS IS A COLUMN FROM 2014! THE PLOT HAS THICKENED WITH THE ADVENT OF THE NEW CHANCELLOR RICHARD CARRANZA WHO PLANS TO CHANGE ALL STANDARDS FOR ADMISSIONS TO ELITE PUBLIC SCHOOLS…..RSK

In 2004, seven-year-old Ting Shi arrived in New York from China, speaking almost no English. For two years, he shared a bedroom in a Chinatown apartment with his grandparents—a cook and a factory worker—and a young cousin, while his parents put in 12-hour days at a small Laundromat they had purchased on the Upper East Side. Ting mastered English and eventually set his sights on getting into Stuyvesant High School, the crown jewel of New York City’s eight “specialized high schools.” When he was in sixth grade, he took the subway downtown from his parents’ small apartment to the bustling high school to pick up prep books for its eighth-grade entrance exam. He prepared for the test over the next two years, working through the prep books and taking classes at one of the city’s free tutoring programs. His acceptance into Stuyvesant prompted a day of celebration at the Laundromat—an immigrant family’s dream beginning to come true. Ting, now a 17-year-old senior starting at NYU in the fall, says of his parents, who never went to college: “They came here for the next generation.”

New York’s specialized high schools, including Stuyvesant and the equally storied Bronx High School of Science, along with Brooklyn Technical High School and five smaller schools, have produced 14 Nobel Laureates—more than most countries. For more than 70 years, admission to these schools has been based upon a competitive examination of math, verbal, and logical reasoning skills. In 1971, the state legislature, heading off city efforts to scrap the merit selection test as culturally biased against minorities, reaffirmed that admission to the schools be based on the competitive exam. (See “How Gotham’s Elite High Schools Escaped the Leveler’s Ax,” Spring 1999.) But now, troubled by declining black and Hispanic enrollment at the schools, opponents of the exam have resurfaced. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund has filed a civil rights complaint challenging the admissions process. A bill in Albany to eliminate the test requirement has garnered the support of Sheldon Silver, the powerful Assembly Speaker. And new New York City mayor Bill de Blasio, whose son, Dante, attends Brooklyn Tech, has called for changing the admissions criteria. The mayor argues that relying solely on the test creates a “rich-get-richer” dynamic that benefits the wealthy, who can afford expensive test preparation.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/university-boardrooms-need-reform-1528652211

I recently resigned as a trustee of the University of Pennsylvania and an overseer of its law school to protest the shameful treatment of law professor Amy Wax. Her career-threatening offense was to state that in her experience with black students over 17 years at Penn, few had performed in the top half of their class. Penn Law’s dean, Ted Ruger, declared her in error but refused to provide evidence. For dissenting from politically correct orthodoxy, Mr. Ruger forbade Ms. Wax to teach her much-admired first-year course in civil procedure—for which the university gave her an award in 2015.

Since I quit, I have received an education in why universities can trample free expression with impunity. My letter of resignation was printed in full in the student newspaper and excerpted on this page. I received well over 150 supportive messages from, among others, trustees, students, law school professors and alumni. One was from Judge Ray Randolph, a 1969 law graduate who sits on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. “You . . . have disgraced an institution I had admired throughout my professional career,” Judge Randolph wrote, addressing Dean Ruger.

Mr. Ruger, meanwhile, directed his fundraisers to tell alumni that his treatment of Ms. Wax was “fairly common”—a brazen falsehood. No Penn professor’s teaching responsibilities had ever been changed or limited for speaking out on public issues. He also claimed that Penn Law did not “mandate” ethnic diversity in selecting applicants for law review, traditionally an anonymous, merit-based process. That was misleading, since Penn now encourages a subjective statement from law-review applicants, which is intended to reveal their identity and tip the ethnic scales rather than reward academic excellence.

Other than me, not a single Penn trustee, overseer or professor wrote publicly about Ms. Wax’s treatment or resigned in protest. Nobody in the university community has an incentive to speak out, and everyone seems afraid to do so. Professors fear retaliation; students worry about social ostracism. I sent my letter of resignation to Angela Duckworth, the Penn psychologist and author of the celebrated 2016 book “Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance.” She and I met last year when I accepted the university’s Distinguished Alumni Award and had a lively email correspondence. She did not respond to my resignation email.