Opinion: In today’s pages: Affirmative action, kids’ health, Bush at the U.N.
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Law professors Vikram Amar and Richard H. Sander ask if affirmative action hurts minorities:
The schools involved are dozens of law schools in California and elsewhere, and the program is the system of affirmative action that enables hundreds of minority law students to attend more elite institutions than their credentials alone would allow. Data from across the country suggest to some researchers that when law students attend schools where their credentials (including LSAT scores and college grades) are much lower than the median at the school, they actually learn less, are less likely to graduate and are nearly twice as likely to fail the bar exam than they would have been had they gone to less elite schools. This is known as the ‘mismatch effect.’ The mismatch theory is controversial.
Former New York Times correspondent Barbara Crossette says that while industrialized nations worry about their declining populations, developing countries face a bigger problem -- uncontrolled growth. Columnist Ronald Brownstein wonders if Bush will veto a bill to expand kids’ health insurance, which was once a priority of the president’s.
The editorial board says speeches at the U.N. by Bush and other leaders revealed that the new big debate in the world is between liberty and inequality. The board also asks Gov. Schwarzenegger to save the condor instead of pandering to the gun lobby, and argues that companies should have to ask consent before selling customer data.
Letter writers react to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s speeches and the editorial board claim that the audience was rightly laughing at him, not with him. Santa Monica’s Edward Singer says, ‘There is no humor when a leader who has the power, means and intent to bring about evil speaks. Both Columbia University and your editorial board need to grow up.’