At Berkeley ‘Increase Diversity’ Bake Sale: Protests, Debates : The Two-Way : NPR
One might have thought that students at the University of California flagship campus, Berkeley, might have a bit more going for them than this theatrical display of their profound lack of critical acumen.
I am not joking. Here is their research design. Take an identical set of baked goods and sell them at different prices depending on the race, ethnicity, and gender of the consumer.
And, what is this supposed to illustrate? It is supposed to illustrate the injustice of affirmative action.
Now, I want to give the Young Republicans who staged this display an opportunity to defend their research design.
Which of the following well-documented conclusions of scientific research do these Young Republicans dispute?
- social actors are deeply influenced by the social structures that shape their action orientations;
- social and economic structures limit the range of choices available to social actors;
- if equality is a value within a political community, facilitating equality will require different mechanisms for different individuals (e.g., delivering water to the central valley requires different operations than delivering water to the lakes of the upper Sierra. If we want both communities to enjoy water, we cannot implement the same delivery systems for these two different communities).
- because social actors are limited in different ways depending on the social and economic structures that shape them, different protocols will be implemented to meet these differing social and economic structures
- social actors are shaped not only by their current circumstances, but also by historical circumstances
- therefore it is reasonable to take historical circumstances into account when considering how to eliminate or reduce the limits placed on individual freedom
The long and short of it is that, were these Young Republicans to propose a research design such as that crudely advanced on the UC campus, their professors would be completely justified in awarding these students a failing grade, not because they are politically suspect, but because they display such a poor grasp of the most basic concepts of scientific research.
More to the point, the UC Regents should take better care in reviewing student applications to make sure that more than simply the ability to pay an outrageous tuition governs their decision-making. Perhaps we might also consider whether applicants have a grasp of the most basic principles of research-design.