Fewer Law School Graduates Pass California Bar Exam

Apparently, legal academics want to know why, but the entire piece avoids one explanation: it's likely more under-qualified minorities took the exam than in previous years.

At LAT, "Fewer law school graduates pass bar exam in California":

For the first time in nearly a decade, most law school graduates who took the summer California bar exam failed, adding to the pressure on law schools already dealing with plummeting enrollments, complaints about student debt and declining job prospects.

The 48.6% pass rate in California is a drop of nearly 7 percentage points from the previous year; nearly 8,500 people took the test in July. The last time the passage rate dipped below half was in 2005.

Many other states showed similar declines this year. It's unclear why the recent passage rates are so low, but they fell by at least 5 percentage points in 20 states.

The decrease in the number of law school graduates who pass the bar could make it more difficult for schools to attract applicants. As a result, administrators might have to offer further incentives to prospective attorneys, experts say.

Some schools have reduced tuition and increased scholarships, and some have cut staff. Still others are offering dual degrees in an effort to help graduates find jobs.

"Law school deans are in a particularly difficult situation these days," said Derek Muller, a professor at Pepperdine University who writes on the business of law.

The bar exam is offered twice a year, in July and February. The number of people who take the July test is traditionally far greater than in February. About 45% of test-takers passed the California bar in February.

Many academics say the drop isn't a concern — at least not yet. "We live in a sound-bite society, but one year does not make a trend," said Gilbert A. Holmes, dean of the University of La Verne College of Law...

More.

'We Have to Reach Out to People': Cathy McMorris Rodgers for Reason TV

I still like her.

An interview with Nick Gillespie:

Obama on 'Acting White'

The Wall Street Journal praises President Obamam's "My Brothers Keepers" initiative. See, "Some honest remarks about culture and authenticity" (via Google):

...Mr. Obama had some pointed but honest remarks at a town hall in Washington, D.C. on Monday: "Sometimes African Americans, in communities where I've worked, there's been the notion of 'acting white'—which sometimes is overstated, but there's an element of truth to it, where, okay, if boys are reading too much, then, well, why are you doing that? Or why are you speaking so properly? And the notion that there's some authentic way of being black, that if you're going to be black you have to act a certain way and wear a certain kind of clothes, that has to go. Because there are a whole bunch of different ways for African American men to be authentic."

Mr. Obama added that young men should know their specific cultural heritage while also appreciating our common culture in which everyone must be equipped to participate and strive to succeed. This is a message that Mr. Obama can deliver with particular authority, and good for him for doing so.

Many California Community College Students Need 4 Years to Graduate

At least 4 years.

But see the Los Angeles Times.

Yeah, it's worse, especially for minorities, "New Report Details Need to Increase College Completion and Close Success Gaps for Underrepresented Students at State’s Community Colleges." (That's from 2010, but it ain't getting any better.)

ADDED: The student pictured, Jeffrey MacGillivray, was student of mine this spring semester at Long Beach City College. At the Times he's seen at El Camino College in Torrance in 2012. It's interesting that he's shopping around, taking classes at different colleges. Usually when that happens students are unsuccessful, so they have to switch schools. I worked closely with Jeffrey, hoping to impart some sense of the importance of good attendance and punctuality, as I do for all of my classes. Also interesting is how all the students pictured have the smartphones out, texting and talking as soon as they get out of class.

When the Left Turned Against Free Speech — #LiberalFascism

From Matt Welch, at Reason, "The long, ugly journey from the Free Speech Movement to professors assaulting protesters":

On March 4, in a designated "free-speech zone" at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), associate professor of feminist studies Mireille Miller-Young walked over to a 16-year-old anti-abortion protester named Thrin Short and demanded that Short take down a graphic sign showing pictures of aborted fetuses. When Short refused, Miller-Young forcibly snatched the sign out of the smaller girl's hands, then handed it to her students and walked away triumphantly. The rattled teen accurately accused Miller-Young of being a "thief," to which the professor implausibly retorted: "I may be a thief, but you're a terrorist!" Adding injury to insult, Miller-Young then shoved the protester and barred her from entering a campus elevator. Moments later, the professor and her students cut the stolen poster to shreds.

The story gets worse. According to the ensuing police report, Miller-Young maintained that she had set a good example for her students by acting like a "conscientious objector" to offensive hate speech that had "triggered" her emotions and violated her "personal right to go to work and not be in harm." Many students, too, remained defiant about the assault long after tempers cooled.

"We, as students of UCSB, are in solidarity with Professor Miller-Young and urge our student body, staff, faculty, and community members to provide as much support as possible," reads a petition submitted by "UCSB Microaggressions" that as of press time had received more than 2,000 signatures, dwarfing a rival petition asking for the professor's ouster. "We do not condone the hate speech and media attention she has been actively receiving."

Our tale gets worse still. In an open letter to students on March 19, Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs Michael D. Young did not mention Miller-Young by name, did not address either the outrageousness of her actions or the inanity of her logic, and instead aimed most of his fire at "outsiders coming into our midst to provoke us, to taunt us and attempt to turn us against one another as they promote personal causes and agendas."...

Keep reading.

Matt Welch attended UCSB in the 1980s. You learn something new every day!

RELATED: At National Review, "UCSB Smears Pro-Lifers After Professor’s Attack on Pro-Life Student."

Liberals' Dark Ages — #LiberalFascism

I don't think she's had her full Damascus moment, but Kirsten Powers is right there.

At USA Today, "Liberals' Dark Ages" (at Memeorandum):

As the [left's fascist] mob gleefully destroys people's lives, its members haven't stopped to ask themselves a basic question: What happens when they come for me? If history is any guide, that's how these things usually end.

RTWT.

Anti-Liberalism on the Left? Just Call It #LiberalFascism

An interview with far-left (pro-abort extremist) Michelle Goldberg, at Vox, "Why are students forcing out commencement speakers?"

Is this just on college campuses, or is this something you see within the left as a whole?

There is not that much of a left in America. Whenever you talk about the American left, a big part of their base is going to be on college campuses. … There's a specific part of the anti-liberal left that sees civil liberties and free speech ideas as secondary to social justice. You see expressions of it on Twitter, but it's mostly on college campuses.

Partly that's just because college campuses are really the only place where the left has any power to enforce its own agenda. In the broader world, there are probably leftists who want to shut up all kinds of people, but they have no ability do so. They have no power in American life. But they have power on college campuses...

I think she badly underestimates leftist power off America's campuses. I mean, c'mon, the mainstream mass media is objectively leftist. Even outlets like ESPN are now pushing a Gramscian Marxian social ideology.

But keep reading.

RELATED: From our little leftist friend Olivia Nuzzi, at the Daily Beast, "The Oh-So-Fragile Class of 2014 Needs to STFU And Listen to Some New Ideas."

Faux Conservative Carl DeMaio Releases Campaign Ad Featuring His Homosexual Partner

The Wall Street Journal reports, "Gay Republican Candidate's Ad Poses Test for Party."

Look, this Carl DeMaio cat's been around for sometime. He ran for mayor in San Diego in 2012, losing to Filthy Filner. He's previously been slammed by conservatives, although he's currently being embraced by top Republicans, like GOP Majority Leader Eric Cantor and Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy.

And Brian Brown, President of the National Organization for Marriage, has long exposed DeMaio as a damned RINO. See, for example, "The Soul of the Republican Party":

Who is Carl DeMaio? you might ask. DeMaio is a liberal who happens to have an "R" after his name. What does he believe in? Abortion on demand. Gun control. Redefining marriage. Medical marijuana. Force the Republican Party to abandon social issues and focus national policies on what big corporations want.

DeMaio isn't the first RINO to run for the US House of Representatives, but it sure is disappointing to see so many establishment Republican leaders in Washington line up to help him. They are so desperate to be seen as "tolerant" and "inclusive" in supporting a homosexual candidate like DeMaio that they are willing to abandon any semblance of principle.

But think about the message they are sending: If a guy like Carl DeMaio can win as a Republican, then what the heck does being a Republican mean?

A new generation homosexual. Just like the old generation homosexual. Radical and depraved. And San Diegans might elect this man? A damned shame.

Is Fashion Racist?

Yes, to some extent.

But it's up to the major label companies to put more women of color out there, for there's no lack of beauty.

But see the take at the New York Times, FWIW, "Fashion’s Blind Spot":

Five years ago, the fashion industry faced a reckoning over the startling lack of diversity among the models on major designer runways. Reacting to complaints that many shows and magazines included nothing but white models, Vogue, in its July 2008 issue, featured a substantial article that asked, in its headline, “Is Fashion Racist?”

This came shortly after Franca Sozzani, the editor of Italian Vogue, published a provocative issue using only black models and feature subjects; Bethann Hardison, a former model and agent, initiated a series of panel discussions on the subject; and Diane von Furstenberg, the president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, urged members to be more aware of diversity in casting.

And since then, almost nothing has changed.

The New York shows are as dominated by white models as they have been since the late 1990s, roughly at the end of the era of supermodels. Jezebel, a blog that has been tracking the appearance of minorities in fashion shows since the debate erupted, noted that the numbers are hardly encouraging. After a notable increase in 2009 that followed extensive news media coverage, the representation of black models has remained fairly steady until this year, when they accounted for only 6 percent of the looks shown at the last Fashion Week in February (down from 8.1 percent the previous season); 82.7 percent were worn by white models.

In Europe, where Phoebe Philo of Céline, Raf Simons of Dior and many others have presented entire collections using no black models at all, the opportunities have been even less favorable for minorities.

“There is something terribly wrong,” said Iman, one of the most iconic models in the world, who later created a successful cosmetics company. Her experience in the fashion scene of the 1980s and ’90s, when designers like Calvin Klein, Gianni Versace and Yves Saint Laurent routinely cast black models without question, was starkly different than that of young nonwhite models today, when the racial prejudice is all but explicitly stated. The increased appearance of Asian models over the last decade, for example, is often described specifically in terms of appealing to luxury customers in China.

“We have a president and a first lady who are black,” Iman said. “You would think things have changed, and then you realize that they have not. In fact, things have gone backward.”

Yeah, I blame Obama too. Racism has exploded during his presidency, leftist, elitist, Democrat racism.

More at the link.

Supreme Court Punts in Fisher v. University of Texas

Recent analyses of the Court have stressed Chief Justice John Roberts' efforts to position the Court as a restrained judicial institution, and not an activist political one.

That said, this ruling may be more significant than meets the eye.

Background at the New York Times, "Justices Send Affirmative Action Case to Lower Court":

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday ordered lower courts to take a fresh look, under a more demanding standard, at the race-conscious admissions policy used to admit students to the University of Texas. The 7-to-1 decision was simultaneously modest and significant, and its recalibration of how courts review the constitutionality of affirmative action programs is likely to give rise to a wave of challenges to admissions programs at colleges and universities nationwide.

The brief decision, issued eight months after the case was argued, was almost surely the product of intense negotation among the justices. The compromise they reached was at least a reprieve for affirmative action in higher education, and civil rights groups that had feared for the future of race-conscious admission programs breathed a sigh of relief.

For now, the Texas program and other affirmative action programs can continue without changes.

The decision did not disturb the Supreme Court’s general approach to affirmative action in admissions decisions, saying that educational diversity is a government interest sufficient to overcome the general ban on racial classifications by the government. But the court added that public institutions must have good reasons to use the particular means they use to achieve that goal.

That requirement could endanger the Texas program when it is reconsidered by the federal appeals court in New Orleans. The program admits most students under race-neutral criteria, accepting all students in the state who graduate near the top of their high school classes. But the university also uses a race-conscious system as a supplement.

“Strict scrutiny,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority, “does not permit a court to accept a school’s assertion that its admissions process uses race in a permissible way without closely examining how the process works in practice.”

Courts reviewing affirmative action programs must, he wrote, “verify that it is necessary for a university to use race to achieve the educational benefits of diversity.” That requires, he said, “a careful judicial inquiry into whether a university could achieve sufficient diversity without using racial classifications.”

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who announced her lone dissent from the bench, said the race-neutral part of the Texas program worked only because of “de facto racial segregation in Texas’s neighborhoods and schools.” She said she would have upheld the appeals court decision endorsing the entire admissions program.

The remaining justices, including ones friendly and hostile to affirmative action, agreed on a middle ground, though Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas each issued dissents indicating that they would vote to strike down race-conscious admission plans in a future case.

RTWT.

Sandra Day O'Connor and John Paul Stephens were in the courtroom today. Interesting.

More at Memeorandum.

And William Jacobson has a roundup, "Supreme Court Affirmative Action Decision," and Ilya Somin, at Volokh, "Competing Interpretations of Fisher." (That's a must read.)

Also, Amy Howe at SCOTUS Blog, "Finally! The Fisher decision in Plain English."

Plus lots at Althouse, "'It offends me that the court failed to exert any kind of leadership with this decision'," and "'There is disagreement about whether Grutter was consistent with the principles of equal protection.... But the parties here do not ask the Court to revisit that aspect of Grutter’s holding'."

More from Althouse, "The worst forms of racial discrimination in this Nation have always been accompanied by straight-faced representations that discrimination helped minorities'," and "'If you think that you can think about a thing inextricably attached to something else without thinking of the thing which it is attached to, then you have a legal mind'."

Here's a whiny piece, from S. Mitra Kalita analysis at Quartz, "The Supreme Court sent the Fisher case back, but make no mistake: Affirmative action is dead." And from Richard Kahlenberg, at Slate, "The Next Affirmative Action?"

Why Johnathon Carrington Fears Georgetown University

This beautiful young man was valedictorian at his D.C. high school, Dunbar High, and he's afraid that as well as he's done, he could struggle when he starts at the university in the fall.

I read this story earlier on my iPhone. It's not just kids like this. I'm sure just about any decent kid who's done well in school is going to have some issues, but I can't help thinking about my students in Long Beach, many of whom have no clue what it takes to really excel at the university level.

At the Washington Post, "Graduates from low-performing D.C. schools face tough college road" (via Memeorandum):

Johnathon Carrington grew up on the sixth floor of a low-income D.C. apartment complex, a building most recently in the news for a drive-by shooting that injured 13.

His parents told him early on that education could be his escape, and Carrington took them at their word. He graduated Friday as the valedictorian of his neighborhood school, Dunbar High, and against all odds is headed to Georgetown University.

But Carrington, 17, is nervous, and so are his parents. What if Dunbar — where truancy is chronic and fewer than one-third of students are proficient in reading — didn’t prepare him for the rigors of college? What if he isn’t ready?

“I don’t think I’m going to fail everything,” Carrington said. “But I think I’m going to be a bit behind.”

It’s a valid concern. Past valedictorians of low-performing District high schools say their own transitions to college were eye-opening and at times ego-shattering, filled with revelations that — despite taking their public schools’ most difficult classes and acing them — they were not equipped to excel at the nation’s top colleges.

When these students arrived on campuses filled with students from high-flying suburban public schools and posh privates, they found a world vastly different from the one they knew in their urban high schools.

For Sache Collier, it meant writing her first research paper. For Darryl Robinson, it meant realizing that professors expected original ideas, not just regurgitated facts. For Angelica Wardell, who grew up going to school almost exclusively with African American students, it meant taking classes with whites and Asians.

And for many top D.C. graduates, it meant discarding the idea that school is easy...

Continue reading.

This last semester I had a woman email me after final grades were posted trying to argue that she deserved an "A-" for the class. She hadn't done well at all, but just being there counted for something, it turns out (and my paper assignment is a gimme, so she mistakenly thought that her grade on that was representative and should put her over the top). I'm not sure exactly where students get that mentality, although I know there's a lot of social promotion and grade inflation. It's sad too, since I've dumbed down my examinations after years of saying to myself that I wouldn't. And this young lady still couldn't pass my exams. But hey, she deserved an "A-" because she simply said she'd learned a lot. Wow. I gotta get out of this business soon.

Budget-Strapped University of California Squanders Millions on Mindless Diversity Programs

From Heather Mac Donald, at City Journal, "Multiculti U.":

It’s impossible to overstate the extent to which the diversity ideology has encroached upon UC’s collective psyche and mission. No administrator, no regent, no academic dean or chair can open his mouth for long without professing fealty to diversity. It is the one constant in every university endeavor; it impinges on hiring, distorts the curriculum, and sucks up vast amounts of faculty time and taxpayer resources. The university’s budget problems have not touched it. In September 2012, for instance, as the university system faced the threat of another $250 million in state funding cuts on top of the $1 billion lost since 2007, UC San Diego hired its first vice chancellor for equity, diversity, and inclusion. This new diversocrat would pull in a starting salary of $250,000, plus a relocation allowance of $60,000, a temporary housing allowance of $13,500, and the reimbursement of all moving expenses. (A pricey but appropriately “diverse” female-owned executive search firm had found this latest diversity accretion.) In May 2011, UCLA named a professional bureaucrat with a master’s degree in student-affairs administration as its first assistant dean for “campus climate,” tasked with “maintaining the campus as a safe, welcoming, respectful place,” in the words of UCLA’s assistant vice chancellor and dean of students. In December 2010, UC San Francisco appointed its first vice chancellor of diversity and outreach—with a starting salary of $270,000—to create a “diverse and inclusive environment,” announced UC San Francisco chancellor Susan Desmond-Hellmann. Each of these new posts is wildly redundant with the armies of diversity functionaries already larding UC’s bloated bureaucracy.

RTWT.