Racing Towards Colorblindness: Stereotype Threat and the Myth of Meritocracy

Education law and policy debates often focus on whether college and graduate school admissions offices should take race into account. Those who advocate for a strictly merits-based regime emphasize the importance of colorblindness. The call for colorblind admissions relies on the assumption that our current admissions criteria are fair measures, which accurately capture talent and ability. Recent social science research into standardized testing suggests that this is not the case. Part I of this Article explores the psychological phenomenon of stereotype threat. Stereotype threat has been shown to detrimentally impact the performance of individuals from negatively stereotyped groups when performing tasks that may confirm the relevant stereotype. The result is that many standardized tests, including the LSAT, are likely under-measuring the ability of negatively stereotyped test-takers, especially Black and Latino applicants. This mismeasurement challenges our traditional acceptance of the LSAT as a neutral judge of talent. Part II of this Article proposes a rescaling intervention that would correct for LSAT mismeasurement by adjusting test scores based on the observed mean effect of stereotype threat on LSAT-takers. Rescaling would not only bring the LSAT closer to the fair measures ideal, but would promote institutions’ diversity objectives and help mitigate existing race-dependent burdens on underrepresented minority students. Rescaling is an explicitly race conscious policy, and thus raises numerous legal concerns. Part III defends the constitutionality of the policy, calling for an updated understanding of the well-established compelling interests of diversity and remedying discrimination. I argue that when understood through this hybrid diversity-remedying discrimination rationale, rescaling not only satisfies our need for fair measures, but brings us closer to the colorblindness that the constitution demands

Deficit Frame Dangers

Civil rights advocates have long viewed litigation as an essential, if insufficient, catalyst of social change. In part, it is. But in critical respects that remain underexplored in legal scholarship, civil rights litigation can hinder short- and long-term projects of racial justice. Specifically, certain civil rights doctrines reward plaintiffs for emphasizing community deficits—or what I term a “deficit frame.” Legal doctrine, in other words, invites legal narratives that track, activate, and reinforce pernicious racial stereotypes. This dynamic, even in the context of well-intended litigation, risks entrenching conditions that drive racial inequality—including the conditions that litigation is often intended to address. To concretize the theory, this Article explores how deficit frames can influence the behavior of four key constituencies who impact—and often undermine—the pursuit of educational equality

Hidden in Plain Sight: A More Compelling Case for Diversity

For four decades, the diversity rationale has offered a lifeline to affirmative action in higher education. Yet even after forty years, this critical feature of equal protection doctrine remains constitutionally insecure and politically fraught. Legal challenges persist, the Justice Department has launched a new assault on affirmative action, and a rightward shift on the Supreme Court could usher in an era of increased hostility toward the concept of diversity itself. The future of race-conscious admissions may hang in the balance. In this Article, I contend that the diversity rationale’s present fragility rests, in part, on its defenders’ failure to center diversity’s most compelling quality: its ability to promote personal equality within the university. To fill this void, this Article advances the first comprehensive case for diversity rooted in each student’s interest in an equal opportunity to enjoy, regardless of race, the full benefits of university membership. This framing is appealing, in part, because it makes salient the present and personal equality harms that students of color suffer when severely under-represented in predominately white institutions. Race-conscious admissions, in turn, emerge as an essential component of institutional efforts to further normative commitments—ranging from racial integration to individual meritocracy—that should resonate with Justices across the ideological spectrum. To support this new framing, I resurrect the Supreme Court’s pre- Brown desegregation cases. These decisions reinforce the constitutional infirmity of institutional conditions that compromise a student’s ability, because of her race, to access the full benefits of university membership. I then bridge the theory to social science that reveals how environmental cues—including racial demographics—can exact concrete and quantifiable burdens on students from negatively stereotyped groups. Although well-traveled in other domains, this research has only begun to inform legal scholarship

Hidden in Plain Sight: A More Compelling Case for Diversity

For four decades, the diversity rationale has offered a lifeline to affirmative action in higher education. Yet even after forty years, this critical feature of equal protection doctrine remains constitutionally insecure and politically fraught. Legal challenges persist, the Justice Department has launched a new assault on race-conscious admissions, and an impending shift on the Supreme Court could usher in an era of increased hostility toward the concept of diversity itself. The future of race-conscious admissions arguably hangs in the balance. In this Article, I argue that the diversity rationale’s present fragility rests, in part, on its defenders’ failure to center diversity’s most compelling quality: its ability to promote personal equality within the university. To fill this void, this Article advances the first comprehensive case for diversity rooted in each student’s interest in an equal opportunity to enjoy, regardless of race, the full benefits of university membership. This framing is appealing, in part, because it makes salient the present and personal equality harms that students of color suffer when severely under-represented in predominately White institutions. Race conscious-admissions, in turn, emerge as an essential component of institutional efforts to further normative commitments—ranging from racial integration to individual meritocracy—that should resonate with Justices across the ideological spectrum. To support this new framing, I resurrect the Supreme Court’s oft-forgotten pre-Brown desegregation cases. These decisions reinforce the constitutional infirmity of institutional conditions that compromise a student’s ability, because of her race, to access the full benefits of university membership. I then bridge the theory to social science that reveals how environmental cues—including racial demographics—can exact concrete and quantifiable burdens on students from negatively stereotyped groups. Although well-traveled in other domains, this research has only begun to inform legal scholarship

Deformations and dilations of chaotic billiards, dissipation rate, and quasi-orthogonality of the boundary wavefunctions

We consider chaotic billiards in d dimensions, and study the matrix elements M_{nm} corresponding to general deformations of the boundary. We analyze the dependence of |M_{nm}|^2 on \omega = (E_n-E_m)/\hbar using semiclassical considerations. This relates to an estimate of the energy dissipation rate when the deformation is periodic at frequency \omega. We show that for dilations and translations of the boundary, |M_{nm}|^2 vanishes like \omega^4 as \omega -> 0, for rotations like \omega^2, whereas for generic deformations it goes to a constant. Such special cases lead to quasi-orthogonality of the eigenstates on the boundary.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

secCl is a cys-loop ion channel necessary for the chloride conductance that mediates hormone-induced fluid secretion in Drosophila

Organisms use circulating diuretic hormones to control water balance (osmolarity), thereby avoiding dehydration and managing excretion of waste products. The hormones act through G-protein-coupled receptors to activate second messenger systems that in turn control the permeability of secretory epithelia to ions like chloride. In insects, the chloride channel mediating the effects of diuretic hormones was unknown. Surprisingly, we find a pentameric, cys-loop chloride channel, a type of channel normally associated with neurotransmission, mediating hormone-induced transepithelial chloride conductance. This discovery is important because: 1) it describes an unexpected role for pentameric receptors in the membrane permeability of secretory epithelial cells, and 2) it suggests that neurotransmitter-gated ion channels may have evolved from channels involved in secretion

Eyes Wide Open: What Social Science Can Tell Us About the Supreme Court\u27s Use of Social Science

The Northwestern University Law Review’s 2017 Symposium asked whether McCleskey v. Kemp closed the door on social science’s ability to meaningfully contribute to equal protection deliberations. This inquiry is understandable; McCleskey is widely understood to have rendered statistical racial disparities doctrinally irrelevant in the equal protection context. We suggest, however, that this account overstates McCleskey and its doctrinal impact. Roughly fifteen years after McCleskey, Chief Justice William Rehnquist—himself part of the McCleskey majority—invoked admissions data to support his conclusion that the University of Michigan Law School unconstitutionally discriminated against white applicants. Chief Justice Rehnquist’s disparate treatment of statistical evidence in McCleskey and Grutter v. Bollinger reveals the doctrine’s under-determinacy and invites a corresponding inquiry: why do Justices rely on social science in some cases, yet reject it in others? We propose that one answer lies at the intersections of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and empirical scholarship on motivated social cognition. This “eCRT” lens illuminates how ostensibly neutral biases and heuristics, when informed by socially salient racial stereotypes, will predictably and systematically lead judges to overvalue “evidence” that rationalizes existing racial disparities and, as a result, author legal opinions that re-instantiate and legitimize the status quo

Anyonic Realization of the Quantum Affine Lie Algebra U_q(A_N)

We give a realization of quantum affine Lie algebra $U_q(\hat A_{N-1})$ in terms of anyons defined on a two-dimensional lattice, the deformation parameter $q$ being related to the statistical parameter $\nu$ of the anyons by $q = e^{i\pi\nu}$. In the limit of the deformation parameter going to one we recover the Feingold-Frenkel fermionic construction of undeformed affine Lie algebra.Comment: 13p LaTeX Document (should be run twice