We're No. 1!

Stanford Law sneaks its way to the top, but the real story is yet more bad news for achievement, standards, and the fight against racial rigging in academia.

Paul and I graduated from Stanford Law School. Up until yesterday, Stanford was No. 2 in the much-heralded US News & World Report rankings, with Yale Law in first place, as it had been for more than 30 years. But Yale Dean Heather Gerken has announced that Yale is withdrawing from the USN&WR survey, leaving Stanford in first place. Within 24 hours of Yale’s action, Harvard (No. 4) and Berkeley (No. 9) also withdrew. Others may follow in the days to come, although that remains to be seen.

So what’s going on?

Here’s the gist of what Dean Gerken said, summarized by David Lat:

“I have a big agenda as dean, and this is a part of it,” Dean Gerken told me in a telephone interview yesterday. “I want Yale Law School to drive the conversation about the future of legal education—and U.S. News stands in the way of reform.”

As Dean Gerken explained in her statement, “The U.S. News rankings are profoundly flawed—they disincentivize programs that support public interest careers, champion need-based aid, and welcome working-class students into the profession. We have reached a point where the rankings process is undermining the core commitments of the legal profession.”

For example, take how the rankings penalize schools that support postgraduate public-interest work. U.S. News considers law school employment outcomes in its rankings, and it heavily discounts school-funded positions. Because of its strong commitment to public service and its deep coffers, Yale Law funds numerous public-interest fellowships for its graduates—and this hurts YLS in the rankings.

“[H]urts YLS in the rankings”………….even though Yale has been No. 1 since before Bill Clinton became President?

Does this sound a little fishy?

Later on, clues start to float to the surface. Thus, as David notes (emphasis added):

[B]ecause the U.S. News rankings place so much weight on LSAT/GRE scores and GPAs—about 20 percent of a law school’s overall ranking—schools fixate on these numbers. They overlook students who don’t have great stats but show promise in other ways, including students from modest means who can’t afford expensive test-prep classes, and they throw financial-aid dollars at students with the best numbers, not the greatest need.

One might start to wonder whether “showing promise in other ways” could mean, say, having really cool personalities, unlike those stodgy Asian and white applicants who tend to get good test scores.

And this, which spills quite a few of the beans (emphasis added):

Other observers have criticized the rankings pullout as part of a larger assault on standardized test scores and other traditional barometers of merit. If U.S. News changes its rankings to deemphasize or eliminate LSAT/GRE and GPA factors, which YLS and HLS have criticized U.S. News for fetishizing, how can applicants from less-privileged backgrounds—applicants who didn’t go to Ivy League undergraduate institutions, who don’t have well-connected parents, or who don’t have well-paid law school admissions counselors—distinguish themselves?

Ummmmmmm, by working hard in undergrad school and pulling a 4.0? I was an undergrad at a state school (UNC), but I paid decent attention in class, pulled pretty good grades, and got into Stanford because of that. My family had no West Coast pull whatever (but we did visit Disneyland in 1958), and my father was the son of immigrants and the first in his family to go to college at all.

Readers will have guessed by now what all this is really about. Harvard, Yale, Berkeley and similarly elite law schools saw the same oral argument in the Supreme Court’s affirmative action cases the rest of us did, and know that the days of explicit racial preference are very likely coming to an end. But, like the South’s “massive resistance” to letting go of racial preference in the Fifties and Sixties, the Leftists running elite legal academia are not about peaceably to accept letting go of the racial preferences for their own preferred groups — with its corresponding racial discrimination against other, higher-achieving groups, specifically whites and Asians.

What that means specifically is that recognition of achievement-oriented tests like the LSAT has to be made to disappear. And one step on the way to its disappearance is to disembowel a rankings system, like US News & World Reports, that takes them significantly into account. Having the biggies like Harvard, Yale and Berkeley, with no doubt more to come, boycott the rankings is a shrewd, and a big, first step.

It’s actually not that hard to understand once you know how academia works, and how in stone the Left is about preserving by hook or by crook the racial preferences the Supreme Court is (they fear) about to ding. If, in the coming legal order, merit testing is to resume something like the importance it had in the days before Leftist racial rigging, then merit testing and its accoutrements have to go over the side of the ship. The admissions process will have to be made as murky and untraceable as possible, so the rigging gets hidden instead of ended. Indeed, the (obviously coordinated) attack on the rankings is simply one part, although an important one, in the plan to end merit selection entirely, and replace it with — you guessed it — “equity.”

Finally, although it’s tempting to look at this as one flank in the Left’s battle against giving whites and Asians a fair shake based on their scholarship and achievement, I fear its broader implications are worse than that: I don’t think the Left hates whites and Asians simply for their race (although there’s some of that, too). It’s the achievement itself, the standards, and the work needed to meet those standards that is the Left’s real target — but a target that will have to be the subject of a future post.

UPDATE: This morning’s Wall Street Journal is thinking along the same lines, as set forth in its editorial, “Yale and Harvard Law Unrank Themselves. The schools may be adapting ahead of a Supreme Court ruling on the use of race in admissions.” The editorial states in part:

Yale and Harvard law schools said this week they will no longer participate in the annual law-school rankings published by U.S. News & World Report. Readers may see no one to root for in a showdown between elite schools and the higher-ed ratings complex, but there’s a point to be made about what appears to be a flight from merit and transparency at these schools….

[Yale Dean Heather Gerken’s explanation] sounds like cover for a desire by Yale to be free to admit students with lower test scores in service to diversity, but without taking a hit to its exclusive reputation….

The LSAT isn’t perfect, but it is a good predictor of success in law school, particularly as grade inflation has rendered GPAs far less meaningful. The LSAT’s influence is also an equalizer. For the price of a prep book, a low- or middle-income applicant can use an excellent score to compete with thousands of affluent applicants with polished resumes or connections. Yet progressives have long hoped to kill the LSAT along with high-school standardized testing.

The timing here is notable given the Supreme Court may soon strike down the use of racial preferences in college admissions. The Yale and Harvard announcements look like attempts to adapt in advance. This is a reminder to the Justices that college administrators will find a way to skirt any three-pronged diversity test they might devise, or some other putative judicial compromise.

This last line is particularly important. As I have previously argued, the Court should avoid striking down explicit racial preferences only to give wink-and-a-nod (or worse) approval to largely the same preferences in a better disguise. Race rigging is race rigging whether disguised or not; if anything, the disguise makes it worse because it adds dishonesty to discrimination, thus making the latter even harder to ferret out.