You may have read the Inside Higher Ed article I linked to a few days ago, about how the American Bar Association's pressure on George Mason Law to accept more black students resulted in unbelievably high failures rates among those accepted at lower standards.

Inside Higher Ed has another excellent piece out, discussing how universities obsessed with an image of physical diversity are putting out viewbooks with pictures that are much more diverse than the schools' actual demographics. In some cases, they are even doctoring photos of white students to add minorities in them.

I wrote a column on this issue more than a year ago. Excerpt:

I decided to track the website of Cornell University, my alma mater... On one of my visits to the site, the pictures showed a total of eight students, all minorities, with seven of them being women. For reference purposes, Cornell is split down the middle gender-wise, with blacks making up five percent of the student population.

This quote from the Inside Higher Ed article says it all: “Sometimes you see the same black kid in every picture."

You may have read this piece a couple of months ago in the Wall Street Journal detailing how the American Bar Association has pressured the George Mason University School of Law to accept more minorities at lower standards, even threatening to revoke the school's accreditation.

Well, GMU Law had no other choice but to begin to comply, and the results, as we see in other affirmative action programs, were not so hot. My friend Andy Guess over at Inside Higher Ed wrote a very good (yet sad!) article about what happened to GMU Law upon being forced to accept less than qualified minorities. Excerpt (emphasis mine):

The “mismatch” theory, as it’s been called, posits that some African-American students have struggled and at times dropped out of highly competitive law schools even though they might have thrived at lower-ranked or less rigorous institutions, and gone on to pass the bar exam. The article concluded that without affirmative action, black students would be better “matched” with institutions that meet their qualifications, and that disparities in failure rates would disappear.

Now, an organization that opposes race-conscious admissions policies asserts that it has found data from one particular institution illustrating the sort of dynamic the study would predict. According to data obtained through a public records request, from 2003 to 2005 some 45 percent of African-American students at George Mason University School of Law, outside of Washington, had grade-point averages below 2.15, defined as “academic failure.” For the rest of the student body, however, the figure was 4 percent.

Insane, isn't it?

Gail Herot, author of the WSJ piece I linked above, adds in her blog:

The pity is that, as Richard Sander's research suggests, some of these who failed at GMU might have succeeded at less competitive schools and had a greater chance of ultimately passing the bar.  Because somebody at the ABA thought that it was more important for George Mason's student body to look like America, a number of students have now wasted a year of their lives and saddled themselves with debt with little or no chance of ever practicing law.

A pity indeed.

Congratulations to all those of us who love and cherish the Second Amendment! Yesterday, the Supreme Court confirmed that the Second Amendment does indeed protect individuals' right to own guns.

I would like to congratulate everyone who worked so hard on both this case and this cause, particularly the fine people at my law school, the George Mason University School of Law, who helped like no other legal academics and students ever would.

I haven't yet had the time to read Scalia's decision in is entirety, but I found this amusing piece in a news article:

Scalia noted that the handgun is Americans' preferred weapon of self-defense in part because "it can be pointed at a burglar with one hand while the other hand dials the police."

George Mason's Walter Williams has penned a wonderful piece about tobacco taxes. An excerpt:

While it's politically popular to impose confiscatory taxes on America's 40 million tobacco smokers, there are a number of consequences one might consider, but let's start out with a quiz. If a carton of cigarettes sells for $160 in New York City, and $35 in North Carolina, what do you predict will happen? If you answered tons of cigarettes will be going up I-95 from North Carolina to New York City, go to the head of the class.

Smuggling cigarettes is illegal; so the next quiz question is: Who is most likely to engage in cigarette smuggling? It's a mixed answer, but for the most part, organized smugglers will be people with a high disregard for the law.

Check out this picture from the George Mason Fairfax campus. It brings tears of joy to my eyes.

John Olin was an alumnus of Cornell University (my alma mater), when in 1969, dozens of thugs initiated an armed takeover of the student union at Cornell. Worst of all, instead of being punished, the thugs were actually rewarded by the administration.

So he began to pour millions of dollars into a charitable foundation that promoted intellectual diversity in U.S. colleges. One of the positions bearing his name is the John M. Olin professorship at George Mason (also my school), occupied by the fine economist Walter Williams.

Now, following John Olin's death, his foundation also says an unfortunate goodbye. It will be missed.

It's incredible how much of an impact the NCAA Tournament can have on its participating schools. Take George Mason, whose Final Four showing in 2006 raised its national profile quite signficantly. This year, the relatively obscure Davidson College has made it into the Elite Eight, and is milking it for all it's worth (as it should).

Davidson's homepage prominently links to a USA Today article titled "At Davidson, hoops and books coexist."

Another article talks about Davidson's Sweet Sixteen showing, by the numbers. Here are some of the more interesting ones:

Average regular daily sales at Davidson College Bookstore before Sunday, March 23: $1,700
Daily sales at Davidson College Bookstore on Wednesday, March 26 (the first day “Sweet 16” t-shirts were available): $35,000

#1 – Place of “Davidson College” on Googletrends’ list of most-searched words Sunday night

Percentage increase in transfer inquiries received by Davidson’s Admission Office since Sunday’s win over Georgetown: 1,200 percent

Since Sunday, calls to the Admission Office inquiring about Davidson’s application deadline (which has already passed): 10

Unsolicited applications received since Sunday, even though Davidson’s deadline has passed: 1

Average days per year that it’s a great day to be a Wildcat: 365

And that's just the Sweet Sixteen. Imagine what will happen when they go even further.