Black, White, Brown, Green, and Fordice: The Flavor of Higher Education in Louisiana and Mississippi

Like many other states, Mississippi and Louisiana have struggled, and continue to struggle with the difficult problem of racial segregation in higher education. Through decades of litigation and negotiation, their higher education systems developed plans to equalize and unite the historically black and historically white institutions. The author\u27s examination of Mississippi and Louisiana\u27s strategies reveals that the states used several different approaches to achieve desegregation, but nevertheless their colleges and universities, like many aspects of society, remain largely racially distinct. The author concludes that many elements essential to effective desegregation were missing from the Mississippi and Louisiana plans. Hopefully, the author offers possible ways that the historically white and historically black colleges that continue to exist can become just schools

Four Failures of Deliberating Groups

Many groups make their decisions through some process of deliberation, usually with the belief that deliberation will improve judgments and predictions. But deliberating groups often fail, in the sense that they make judgments that are false or that fail to take advantage of the information that their members have. There are four such failures. (1) Sometimes the predeliberation errors of group members are amplified, not merely propagated, as a result of deliberation. (2) Groups may fall victim to cascade effects, as the judgments of initial speakers or actors are followed by their successors, who do not disclose what they know. Nondisclosure, on the part of those successors, may be a product of either informational or reputational cascades. (3) As a result of group polarization, groups often end up in a more extreme position in line with their predeliberation tendencies. Sometimes group polarization leads in desirable directions, but there is no assurance to this effect. (4) In deliberating groups, shared information often dominates or crowds out unshared information, ensuring that groups do not learn what their members know. All four errors can be explained by reference to informational signals, reputational pressure, or both. A disturbing result is that many deliberating groups do not improve on, and sometimes do worse than, the predeliberation judgments of their average or median member