Personnel Is Policy

From the NYT:

In Shift, Justice Department is Hiring Lawyers With Civil Rights Backgrounds
By Charlie Savage 

WASHINGTON — Under the Obama administration, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division has reversed a pattern of systematically hiring conservative lawyers with little experience in civil rights, the practice that caused a scandal over politicization during the Bush administration. 

Instead, newly disclosed documents show, the lawyers hired over the past two years at the division have been far more likely to have civil rights backgrounds — and to have ties to traditional civil rights organizations with liberal reputations, like the American Civil Liberties Union or the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.... 

“During this administration, the department has restored the career-driven, transparent hiring process that will produce the most qualified attorneys for the job,” said Xochitl Hinojosa, a Justice Department spokeswoman. 

... Specifically, about 90 percent of the Obama-era hires listed civil rights backgrounds on their résumés, up from about 38 percent of the Bush group hires. (There were about 47 Obama-era hires and about 72 in the last six years of the Bush administration.) 

Moreover, the Obama-era hires graduated from law schools that had an average ranking of 28, according to U.S. News & World Report. The Bush group had a lower average ranking, 42. 

At the same time, there was a change in the political leanings of organizations listed on the résumés, where discernible. Nearly a quarter of the hires of the Bush group had conservative credentials like membership in the Federalist Society or the Republican National Lawyers Association, while only 7 percent had liberal ones. 

By contrast, during the first two Obama years, none of the new hires listed conservative organizations, while more than 60 percent had liberal credentials. They consisted overwhelmingly of prior employment or internships with a traditional civil rights group, like the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. 

Those findings were amplified by a report on Tuesday by The National Law Journal, which analyzed the résumés of nearly 120 career lawyers hired since 2009 across the entire division. Of that group, it reported, at least 60 had worked for traditional civil rights organizations. 

Robert Driscoll, a Bush administration official at the division who left before the hiring scandal, said that a policy of allowing professional civil rights lawyers to make hiring decisions based on civil rights experience was tactically “brilliant” because it would result in disproportionately liberal outcomes without any need for interference by Obama political appointees.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Fighting alumni bias

Here's an amusing NYT article about how Chinese-American firms that mold applications to fancy colleges for hefty fees are expanding into the Mainland China market, where they write essays and create Potemkin extracurricular activities

LuShuang Xu provides an example of that approach. Ms. Xu, who was born and raised in China before emigrating to suburban California at age 9, had high hopes that she would be the first in her family to go to college. But poor results on a practice SAT and a dearth of extracurricular activities convinced Ms. Xu, 17, that she needed a scholastic makeover if she were to make it into a school her parents could brag about to relatives. 

ThinkTank sent her to a public speaking camp, helped her improve her college essay and gave her the e-mail addresses of all the members of the Stanford University history department. At the company’s prompting, she found two internships with department professors. She also enrolled in ThinkTank’s college prep courses, which helped improve her SAT score 410 points to 2160 out of 2400. Next autumn, she will start at Harvard University. 

ThinkTank’s success with students in California’s Asian-American community, which accounts for 90 percent of the company’s American clients, has drawn interest from wealthy parents in China. Mr. Ma opened an office in Shenzhen in 2009 and another in Beijing last year. 

The company entered China at a time when the college consulting industry on the mainland was booming, with numerous agencies promising to make Chinese student’s academic dreams come true, often through questionable practices. 

One company, Best Education, has offices across China and charges clients an average of 500,000 renminbi for writing clients’ essays, training them for the visa interview at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing and providing career guidance. 

“The students just supply their information and we do all the work,” said one representative, who requested anonymity to protect his job. Best Education offers a 50 percent refund if an applicant is rejected by the student’s chosen schools. ... 

Reached by telephone, an agency representative said the company did a lot more than just polish résumés. “If a client’s English is poor, our trained professionals can write the essay to make sure it looks perfect,” she said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid repercussions from her employer. 

Helping students from China clear the college entry hurdles has presented ThinkTank with a fresh set of challenges. Often they have poor English language skills and have done little with their free time beyond homework. Yet their parents often demand the Ivy League. 

“We really have to hold their hand and do everything along with them,” Mr. Ma said, including deliberately leaving spelling mistakes on college essays so they look authentic, training them for the Test of English as a Foreign Language and building extracurricular activities from the ground up. 

ThinkTank has founded Model United Nations groups, built a Web site for a Shanghai student’s photography project to get news media coverage and helped another obtain funding to build a hydroelectric generator. 

This raises the more general question of why anybody, Chinese or non-Chinese, cares so much about getting into a famous American college? Obviously, some of it is sheer social climbing -- bragging to relatives, etc. 

Yet, there is a rational piece of the puzzle, which is that many elite employers, such as Goldman Sachs, discriminate extravagantly based on college attended (see Steve Hsu here and here). Many super-lucrative Wall Street firms won't bother recruiting at non-Ivy League campuses, and some even feel Columbia is a little downscale for them. 

Why? Well, there are various obvious reasons of convenience, but another is sheer self-interest. If you graduated from Harvard, keeping it much easier for Harvard students to get hired by your company than equally gifted graduates of lesser-known colleges burnishes the name Harvard, which is on your resume. Plus, your kids will have some legacy pull when they apply to Harvard so why give outsiders an even break?

In other words, there is a pervasive pattern of hiring bias perpetuated by an old boy's network. When discrimination involves race or sex, government and media go on red alert. But when it involves colleges, well, who cares?

Now, one thing we could do to reduce college admissions mania is make Wall Street a little less lucrative. But, that seems beyond imagining. So, let's think about a direct approach.

The normal solution for discrimination is quotas, explicit or covert. So, why not quotas for, say, Goldman Sachs? GS is not only vastly wealthy, but has been hugely helped out in recent years by the taxpayers (e.g., the AIG bailout, which saved Goldman $13 billion). So, Goldman should publicly commit to doubling the percentage of new recruits it hires each year from public universities.

I'm not sure that this is a great idea, but what's interesting is that it's a rather novel idea. 

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The Importance of Being Barack

A minor trend I've noticed is people fiddling around with their names in order to make themselves seem more eligible for diversity brownie points. For example, local talk radio host Raoul Lowery noticed that his Irish surname wasn't getting him anywhere, so he added, in the Mexican style, his Mexican mother's last name to make himself Raoul Lowery-Contreras, and, bingo, he was suddenly Spanish-surnamed and could market himself to radio stations as the Voice of the Emerging Latino Tidal Wave.

Similarly, performance artist Sandra Loh felt contempt for the whole system of diversity brownie points, but a starving performance artist has to eat. So, she realized it would a be a lot easier to get grants in the diversity-crazed SoCal arts scene if she emphasized being Asian. She already had a Chinese last name via her Cal Tech professor dad, but Loh sounds like it could be, say, German. Maybe it's short for Lohmann? And since her mother was German, that was a problem. So she added her middle name Tsing and became Sandra Tsing Loh, which immediately boosted her career.

Similarly, a friend in the Bay Area tells me about an Asian high school girl who got into UCLA despite grades and test scores well below UCLA's usual standards. Why? Well, Proposition 209 in 1996 meant that the UC schools aren't allowed to ask about racial identity on the application. So, the diversicrats struck back by making the admissions process "holistic," including two essays, on which you are encouraged to wax eloquent about your diversityness. 

The consultant who wrote the Chinese girl's UC essay played on her ambiguous sounding last name (could be Chinese, could be WASP, could be black) and the fact that she happened to have been born into the small Chinese community in Ecuador (but grew up in suburban California) to make her sound like she might be black and/or Latino instead of just another pretty smart, pretty hard working Chinese girl from a Bay Area suburb. UCLA automatically enrolled her in the summer-before-freshman-year remedial program that they run to help NAM admittees catch-up with whites and Asians.

In America, unlike in apartheid South Africa, there is very little in the way of background checking into claims to belong to a particular racial/ethnic group. 

The main exceptions are Indian tribes. If you wake up tomorrow and remember that your grandmother told you she was a Pechanga Indian, and therefore you deserve an annual check of your share of the profits from the giant Pechanga casino on the road to Palm Springs, well, you've got your work cut out for you. The Pechanga tribe is allowed only one casino, so distributing profits is a zero sum game: adding a long lost Pechangan to the roles dilutes the size of all the current Pechangans' checks. They they set a "blood quantum" of minimum Pechanganess (typically, 1/4th, so you'd better hope Grannie wasn't merely, say, 3/4th Pechangan). 

So, Indian tribes maintain systems much like the Boer state did in apartheid South Africa to decide who is in and who is out of the favorable line of descent. Much genealogical detail is required to validate claims of Pechanganess. 

On the other hand, diversity bennies for everybody else, such as blacks and Hispanics, are close to infinite sum games. The more people who claim to be diverse, the more the non-diverse must pony up, and more the beneficiaries of affirmative action there are to fight politically for their continuance. Every so often, a few black intellectuals, most notably Henry Louis Gates and Lani Guinier, complain about how Harvard gives away too many affirmative action slots to blacks who don't have a plausible claim to have been victimized by American slavery. For example, they have a white parent or their black parents are foreign. But, Gates and Guinier kind of shut up about this with the rise of Barack Obama, who is the double epitome of exactly the kind of freeloader they are kind of talking about.

Obama, himself, had the problem than "Barry Obama from Honolulu" doesn't sound black at all -- it sounds like an assimilated part-Japanese guy. (Obama is a town in Japan, and thus he almost didn't get hired for his famous community organizer job organizing blacks because the guy he sent the resume to thought he was Japanese.) 

Moreover, by the 1970s, "Barry" was sounding like the kind of tin-eared name that immigrants foist on their kids to make them sound more assimilated and classier. The classic example is Irving, an old, respectable Anglo-American surname -- most notably, Washington Irving, America's first famous fiction writer. In the early 20th Century, Russian Jewish immigrant parents seized upon "Irving" as a  WASPy first name for their sons (e.g., Irving Kristol). Soon, the name was so inextricably linked to socially maladroit hard-chargers from the Outer Boroughs that it became a standard joke name for Mad Magazine.

"Barry" peaked in popularity as a first name the year after Obama was born, but it was already starting to sound a little Irvingish, a little trying-too-hard-to-be-assimilated by the late 1970s: e.g., Barry Manilow. So, no more Barry. If Obama had been really confident in his blackness, he would have shortened Barack to Rock Obama, like baseball player Tim "Rock" Raines. Instead, at Occidental, he switched to Barack. Compared to Barry, Barack sounds more Balack.

Are there any strategies where parents could manipulate this kind of thing? Could you name your kid D'Shqwan Jacob Smith, and he grows up being Jake Smith, but when he applies to the University of California, he's suddenly D'Shqwan Smith? 

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer