The Bigots for the Left gave birth to this affirmative action baby: Hall of Shame: Roy Pearson, Jr. (African American lawyer alleges dry cleaner lost his pants and sues the Korean American owners for $67 million).  Who pays for affirmative action?  Asian Americans.

Only 57% of blacks who enter law school pass the bar.  43% do not become lawyers.  All are saddled with student debt, routinely running as high as $160,000, not counting undergraduate debt.


London Steverson was one of the first two African Americans to graduate from the United States Coast Guard Academy in 1968.
6/24/10 FedSmith.com: "ALJ Loses His Job and His Appeals,"
by Susan Smith
    A Social Security Administration (SSA) Administrative Law Judge has lost his job for, among other things, using government computers to store explicit photos. (Steverson v. Social Security Administration, C.A.F.C. No. 2009-3287 (nonprecedential), 6/17/10) 
    London Steverson worked for the Downey, California branch office of SSA. The agency filed a complaint with the Merit Systems Protection Board seeking to remove Steverson based on four charges. One charge was misuse of his official government computer. One specification was that Steverson has used his agency computer to view and store "sexually oriented material"—more than a thousand of them. Another specification related to his use of the computer for private business ventures, a violation of the agency's policy.
    Steverson was also charged with misuse of official agency letterhead for personal matters, lack of candor during his investigatory interview, and use of his business address for receiving personal mail despite the explicit agency policy against this practice.
    Following the procedure for dismissing an AJ, the MSPB held a hearing.
Eventually the full board found that the charges had been upheld and found there was good cause to remove Steverson. (Opinion pp. 2-4)
    The appeals court has now affirmed Steverson's removal. In its decision, the court notes "Judge Steverson engaged in conduct unbecoming of an Administrative Law Judge, misused government property, displayed a lack of candor with an investigatory official, and failed to follow agency policy." (p. 6)
    In short, the court found this added up to ample cause to remove Steverson.  Steversonv.SSA09-3287


4/7/10 U.S. Department of Education report: "Enrollment in Postsecondary Institutions, Fall 2008; Graduation Rates, 2002 and 2005 Cohorts; and Financial Statistics, Fiscal Year 2008." 
Enrollment and graduation data from the more than 6,700 postsecondary institutions that enroll just under 20 million students and that participate in Title IV student financial aid programs is broken down by race, ethnicity, and sex, in Table 5 on p. 15.
Graduation rates for both public and private 4-year institutions:
- Asians/Pacific Islander: 66.1% 
- Whites: 59.3%
- Hispanic or Latino: 46.5%
- Black or African American: 38.9%


3/17/10 Chronicle of Higher Education: "Court Dismisses 1 of 3 Complaints Filed by Madonna Constantine,"
Madonna G. Constantine, the former Columbia University professor who was fired in 2008 for plagiarism, has lost one of three lawsuits she filed against the university and her accusers, the Associated Press reported. In a ruling issued on Tuesday, a Manhattan judge dismissed the lawsuit, saying officials of Columbia's Teachers College had acted within their authority in dismissing Ms. Constantine. Her lawyer said she would press on with a $200-million defamation suit in state court and a federal discrimination complaint. She denies the plagiarism findings that led to her firing


11/16/09 New England Newspapers (www.berkshireeagle.com): 
"Williams fires accused professor,"
by Meghan Foley
    Williamstown -- A Williams College visiting professor, who pleaded guilty to charges of fraud in federal court last week, has been terminated from the college. 
    In a letter to the Williams College community, Interim President William Wagner said Bernard Moore’s employment with the college ended as of Monday. 
    He further stated, "We have found no evidence of serious misuse on his part of college resources." 
    Moore, 51, whose real name is Ernest B. Moore, was the college’s W. Ford Schumann ‘50 visiting assistant professor in Democratic Studies, and was in his second year at Williams College. 
    James G. Kolesar, assistant to the president for Public Affairs, declined to comment Monday on the terms of the termination of Moore’s employment at Williams, and if he had received a severance or benefits package. 
    Moore, who also went by the name of Bernard Glenn-Moore, was a senior policy fellow and congressional aide for U.S. Rep. Danny Davis, D-Ill., and helped write the "Second Chance" legislation, which helps non-violent offenders transition back into society. 
    On Nov. 9, Moore pleaded guilty to one count of student aid fraud, one count of bank fraud and one count of Social Security fraud in federal court in Washington, D.C. 
    He faces up to 41 months in prison, and is scheduled to be sentenced on Feb. 17, 2010. 
    The fraud was reported to be in excess of $800,000, and included defrauding the federal government, banks and credit card companies. 
    According to reports, Moore had been siphoning funds from federal student aid programs and credit cards from as far back as 1985. 
    Following his conviction, Moore was suspended from Williams College on Nov. 10. 
    Prior to his suspension, Moore was helping to organize the Congressional Black Caucus symposium at the college, which was expected to feature members of the Congressional Black Caucus and other distinguished African-Americans. 
    The symposium had been planned for Monday, but in the aftermath of Moore’s conviction, it was postponed. 
Kolesar said Monday members of the Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation have said they’re interested in holding an event similar to the symposium at the college. 
"It will take a while to work out the timing," he said. 
    Wagner said while arrangements have been made to complete the course Moore was teaching this semester, his Winter Study course has been allowed to move forward under the instruction of adjuncts Moore was planning to teach the course with. Moore’s spring semester course has been canceled, he said.



6/8/09 New York Post: “Curtains for Constantine,”
    Embattled educator Madonna Constantine has a one-of-a-kind distinction: She's the professor that not even Columbia could stomach. 
    A panel of her now-former peers last month voted to uphold the decision of Columbia 's Teachers College to fire Constantine for plagiarizing the work of her students and another professor [who is Asian American]. 
    Constantine, who is black and gained brief notoriety in 2007 after a noose was found attached to her office door, says she's simply a victim of "structural racism" at Columbia .
    And her lawyer says he'll go to court to get her job back -- on top of a $200 million defamation lawsuit he's already filed against her accusers and the university.
    Hopefully, the legal system will sort through such matters expeditiously.
    Still: If Columbia University wasn't cowed into backing down, you have to figure the charges against Constantine are pretty solid.
    This is an institution, after all, that's quailed before bad actors in the past:
    * In 2006, after students rushed the stage at a public forum to attack an anti-illegal-immigration speaker, the university dithered for months before announcing unspecified actions against some of the students.
    * In 2007, Columbia famously honored Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with a prime speaking invitation.
    * And in April, university President Lee Bollinger recommended that tenure be granted to Joseph Massad, a Middle Eastern studies prof who equates the state of Israel with white supremacism.
    Given all this, Constantine might be forgiven for wondering: What's wrong with a little plagiarism, anyway?

1/5/09 Wall Street Journal: "Housing Push for Hispanics Spawns Wave of Foreclosures," 
By Susan Schmidt and Maurice Tamman
    California Rep. Joe Baca has long pushed legislation he said would "open the doors to the American Dream" for first-time home buyers in his largely Hispanic district. For many of them, those doors have slammed shut, quickly and painfully.
    Mortgage lenders flooded Mr. Baca's San Bernardino , Calif. , district with loans that often didn't require down payments, solid credit ratings or documentation of employment. Now, many of the Hispanics who became homeowners find themselves mired in the national housing mess. Nearly 9,200 families in his district have lost their homes to foreclosure.
    Foreclosure Crisis Hits Hispanics
    Congressional districts with large Hispanic populations often feature heavy nonprime lending. See how different districts break down in terms of prime and nonprime home loans.
    For years, immigrants to the U.S. have viewed buying a home as the ultimate benchmark of success. Between 2000 and 2007, as the Hispanic population increased, Hispanic homeownership grew even faster, increasing by 47%, to 6.1 million from 4.1 million, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Over that same period, homeownership nationally grew by 8%. In 2005 alone, mortgages to Hispanics jumped by 29%, with expensive nonprime mortgages soaring 169%, according to the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council.
    An examination of that borrowing spree by The Wall Street Journal reveals that it wasn't simply the mortgage market at work. It was fueled by a campaign by low-income housing groups, Hispanic lawmakers, a congressional Hispanic housing initiative, mortgage lenders and brokers, who all were pushing to increase homeownership among Latinos.
    The network included Mr. Baca, chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, whose district is 58% Hispanic and ranks No. 5 among all congressional districts in percentage of home loans not tailored for prime borrowers. The caucus launched a housing initiative called Hogar -- Spanish for home -- to work with industry and community groups to increase mortgage lending to Latinos. Mortgage companies provided funding to that group, and to the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals, which fielded an army to make the loans.
    In years past, minority borrowers seeking loans were often stopped cold by a practice called red-lining, in which lenders were reluctant to lend within particular geographical areas, often, it appeared, on the basis of race. But combined efforts to open the mortgage pipeline to Latinos proved successful.
    "We saw what we refer to in the advocacy community as reverse red-lining," says Aracely Panameno, director of Latino affairs for the Center for Responsible Lending, an advocacy group. "Lenders were seeking out those borrowers and charging them through the roof," she says.
    Ms. Panameno says that during the height of the housing boom she sought to present the Hispanic Caucus with data showing how many Latinos were being steered into risky and expensive subprime loans. Hogar declined her requests, she says.
    When the national housing market began unraveling, so did the fortunes of many of the new homeowners. National foreclosure statistics don't break out data by ethnicity or race. But there is evidence that Hispanic borrowers have been hard hit. In part, that's because of large Hispanic populations in areas where the housing bubble was pronounced, such as Southern California, Nevada and Florida .
    In U.S. counties where Hispanics account for more than 25% of the population, banks have taken back 6.7 homes per 1,000 residents since Jan. 1, 2006, compared with 4.6 per 1,000 residents in all counties, according to a Journal analysis of U.S. Census and RealtyTrac data.
    Hispanic lawmakers and community groups have blamed subprime lenders, who specialize in making loans to customers with spotty credit histories. They complain that even solid borrowers were steered to those loans, which carry higher interest rates.
    In a written statement, Mr. Baca blamed the foreclosure crisis among Hispanics on borrowers' lack of "financial literacy" and on "lenders and brokers eager to make a bigger profit." He declined to be interviewed for this story.
    Easy Credit
    But a close look at the network of organizations pushing for increased mortgage lending reveals a more complicated picture. Subprime-industry executives were advisers to the Hogar housing initiative, and bankrolled more than $2 million of its research. Lawmakers and advocacy groups pushed hard for the easy credit that fueled the subprime phenomenon among Latinos. Members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, who received donations from the lending industry and saw their constituents moving into new homes, pushed for eased lending standards, which led to problems.
    Mortgage lenders appear to have regarded Latinos as a largely untapped demographic. Many were first or second-generation U.S. residents who didn't own homes. Many Hispanic families had multiple wage earners working multiple cash jobs, but had no savings or established credit history to allow them to qualify for traditional loans.
    The Congressional Hispanic Caucus created Hogar in 2003 to work with industry and community groups to increase mortgage lending to Latinos. At that time, the national Latino homeownership rate was 47%, compared with 68% for the overall population. Hogar called the figure "alarming," and said a concerted effort was required to ensure that "by the end of the decade Latinos will share equally in the American Dream of homeownership."
    Hogar's backers included many companies that ran into trouble in mortgage markets: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, both now under federal control; Countrywide Financial Corp., sold last year to Bank of America Corp.; Washington Mutual Inc., taken over by the government and sold to J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.; and New Century Financial Corp. and Ameriquest Mortgage Corp., both now defunct.
    Hogar's ties to the subprime industry were substantial. A Washington Mutual vice president served as chairman of its advisory committee. Companies that donated $150,000 a year got the right to place a research fellow who would conduct Hogar's studies, which were used by industry lobbyists. For donations of $100,000 a year, Hogar offered to provide news releases from the Hispanic Caucus promoting a lender's commercial products for the Latino market, according to the group's literature.
    Hogar worked with Freddie Mac on a two-year examination of Latino homeownership in 63 congressional districts. The study found Hispanic ownership on the rise thanks to "new flexible mortgage loan products" that the industry was adopting. It recommended further easing of down-payment and underwriting standards.
    Representatives for Hogar declined repeated requests for comment.
    The National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals, one of Hogar's sponsors, advised the group, shared research data and built a large membership to market loans to Latinos. By 2005, its ranks had grown to 16,000 agents and mortgage brokers.
    The association, called Nahrep, received funding from some of the same players that funded Hogar. Some 22 corporate sponsors, including Countrywide and Washington Mutual, together paid the association $2 million a year to attend conferences and forums where lenders could pitch their loan products to loan brokers.
    While home prices were rising, the lending risk seemed minimal, says Tim Sandos, Narhep's president. "We would say, 'Is he breathing? OK, we'll give him a mortgage,' " he recalls.
    Nahrep's 2006 convention in Las Vegas was called "Place Your Bets on Home Ownership." Countrywide Chairman Angelo Mozilo spoke, as did former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros, a force in Latino housing developments in the West.
    Lenders' Contributions
    Countrywide and other sponsors contracted with Nahrep to set up regional events where they could present loan products to loan brokers and their customers. Mr. Sandos says his organization doesn't get paid to promote particular lenders.
    At the height of the subprime lending boom, in 2005, banking and finance companies gave at least $2.3 million in campaign contributions to members of the Hispanic Caucus, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics.
    In October 2008, a charitable foundation set up by Mr. Baca received $25,000 from AmeriDream Inc., a nonprofit housing company and Hogar sponsor. Mr. Baca has long backed AmeriDream's controversial seller-financed down-payment assistance program. AmeriDream provided down-payment money to buyers, a cost that was covered by home builders in the form of donations to the nonprofit.
    New housing legislation last fall outlawed the program. Mr. Baca is cosponsoring a bill that would allow AmeriDream and similar nonprofits to resume arranging seller-financed down-payment assistance to low-income Federal Housing Administration borrowers.
    Such seller-financed loans comprise one-third of the loans backed by the FHA, and have defaulted at nearly triple the rate of other FHA-insured loans, according to agency spokesman William Glavin.
    In a news release, AmeriDream said the donation to Mr. Baca's foundation was intended to fund the purchase of gear for firefighters in his district. Local news reports say the foundation gave away $36,000 in scholarships this year.
    Internal Revenue Service records indicate that Mr. Baca's son, Joe Baca Jr., has an annual salary of $51,800 as executive director of the Joe Baca Foundation, which is run out of the congressman's home. Joe Baca Jr. says he currently is taking only about half that listed salary.
    Mr. Baca's office declined to comment on the AmeriDream contribution.
    Mr. Baca remains opposed to strict lending rules. "We need to keep credit easily accessible to our minority communities," he said in a statement released by his office.
    Mortgage lending to Hispanics took off between 2004 and 2007, powered by nonprime loans. The biggest jump occurred in 2005. The 169% increase in nonprime mortgages to Hispanics that year outpaced a 122% gain for blacks, and a 110% increase for whites, according to a Journal analysis of mortgage-industry and federal-housing data. Nonprime mortgages carry high interest rates and are tailored to borrowers with low credit scores or few assets.
    Between 2004 and 2007, black borrowers were offered nonprime loans at a slightly higher rate than Hispanics, but the overall number of Hispanic borrowers was much larger. From 2004 to 2005, total nonprime home loans to Hispanics more than tripled to $69 billion from $19 billion, and peaked in 2006 at $73 billion.
    Tricks of the Trade
    Mortgage brokers became a key portion of the lending pipeline. Phi Nguygn, a former broker, worked at two suburban Washington-area firms that employed hundreds of loan originators, most of them Latino. Countrywide and other subprime lenders sent account representatives to brokerage offices frequently, he says. Countrywide didn't respond to calls requesting comment.
    Representatives of subprime lenders passed on "little tricks of the trade" to get borrowers qualified, he says, such as adding a borrower's name to a relative's bank account, an illegal maneuver. Mr. Nguygn says he's now volunteering time to help borrowers facing foreclosure negotiate with banks.
    Many loans to Hispanic borrowers were based not on actual income histories but on a borrower's "stated income." These so-called no-doc loans yielded higher commissions and involved less paperwork.
    Another problem was so-called NINA -- no income, no assets -- loans. They were originally intended for self-employed people of means. But Freddie Mac executives worried about abuse, according to documents obtained by Congress. The program "appears to target borrowers who would have trouble qualifying for a mortgage if their financial position were adequately disclosed," said a staff memo to Freddie Mac Chairman Richard Syron. "It appears they are disproportionately targeted toward Hispanics."
    Freddie Mac says it tightened down-payment requirements in 2004 and stopped buying NINA loans altogether in 2007.
    "It's very hard to get in front of a train loaded with highly profitable activities and stop it," says Ronald Rosenfeld, chairman of the Federal Housing Finance Board, a government agency that regulates home loan banks.
    Regions of the country where the housing bubble grew biggest, such as California , Nevada and Florida , are heavily populated by Latinos, many of whom worked in the construction industry during the housing boom. When these markets began to weaken, bad loans depressed the value of neighboring properties, creating a downward spiral. Neighborhoods are now dotted with vacant homes.
    By late 2008, one in every nine households in San Joaquin County , Calif. , was in default or foreclosure -- 24,049 of them, according to Federal Reserve data. Banks have already taken back 55 of every 1,000 homes. In Riverside , Calif. , 66,838 houses are owned by banks or were headed in that direction as of October. In Prince William County, Va., a Washington suburb, 11,685 homes, or one in 11, was in default or foreclosure.
    Gerardo Cadima, a Bolivian immigrant who works as an electrician, bought a home in suburban Virginia for $330,000, with no money down. "I said this is too good to be true," he recalls. "I'm 23 years old, with a family, buying my own house."
    When work slowed last year, Mr. Cadima ran into trouble on his adjustable-rate mortgage. "The payments were increasing, and the price of the house was starting to drop," he says. "I started to think, is this really worth it?" He stopped making payments and his home was sold at auction for $180,000.
    In the wake of the housing slump, some participants in the Hispanic lending network are expressing second thoughts about the push. Mr. Sandos, head of Nahrep, says that some of his group's past members, lured by big commissions, steered borrowers into expensive loans that they couldn't afford.
    Nahrep has filed complaints with state regulators against some of those brokers, he says. Their actions go against Nahrep's mission of building "sustainable" Latino home ownership.
    These days, James Scruggs of Northern Virginia Legal Services is swamped with Latino borrowers facing foreclosure. "We see loan applications that are complete fabrications," he says. Typically, he says, everything was marketed to borrowers in Spanish, right up until the closing, which was conducted in English.
    "We are not talking about people working for the World Bank or the IMF," he says. "We are talking about day laborers, janitors, people who work in restaurants, people who do babysitting."
    Two such borrowers work in Mr. Scrugg's office. Sandra Cardoza, a $28,000-a-year office manager, is now $30,000 in arrears on loans totaling $370,000. "Her loan documents say she makes more than me," says Mr. Scruggs.
    Nahrep agents are networking on how to negotiate "short sales" to banks, where Hispanic homeowners sell their homes at a loss in order to escape onerous mortgages. The association has a new how-to guide: "The American Nightmare: Strategies for Preventing, Surviving and Overcoming Foreclosure."
    —Louise Radnofsky contributed to this article.


Only 57% of blacks who enter law school pass the bar.  43% do not become lawyers.  All are saddled with student debt, routinely running as high as $160,000, not counting undergraduate debt.

8/24/07 Wall Street Journal: Affirmative Action Backfires,
by Gail Heriot
    Ms. Heriot is professor of law at the University of San Diego and a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
    Three years ago, UCLA law professor Richard Sander published an explosive, fact-based study of the consequences of affirmative action in American law schools in the Stanford Law Review. Most of his findings were grim, and they caused dismay among many of the champions of affirmative action -- and indeed, among those who were not.  
    Easily the most startling conclusion of his research: Mr. Sander calculated that there are fewer black attorneys today than there would have been if law schools had practiced color-blind admissions -- about 7.9% fewer by his reckoning. He identified the culprit as the practice of admitting minority students to schools for which they are inadequately prepared. In essence, they have been "matched" to the wrong school.  
    No one claims the findings in Mr. Sander's study, "A Systemic Analysis of Affirmative Action in American Law Schools," are the last word on the subject. Although so far his work has held up to scrutiny at least as well as that of his critics, all fair-minded scholars agree that more research is necessary before the "mismatch thesis" can be definitively accepted or rejected.  
    Unfortunately, fair-minded scholars are hard to come by when the issue is affirmative action. Some of the same people who argue Mr. Sander's data are inconclusive are now actively trying to prevent him from conducting follow-up research that might yield definitive answers. If racial preferences really are causing more harm than good, they apparently don't want you -- or anyone else -- to know.  
    Take William Kidder, a University of California staff advisor and co-author of a frequently cited attack of Sander's study. When Mr. Sander and his co-investigators sought bar passage data from the State Bar of California that would allow analysis by race, Mr. Kidder passionately argued that access should be denied, because disclosure "risks stigmatizing African American attorneys." At the same time, the Society of American Law Teachers, which leans so heavily to the left it risks falling over sideways, gleefully warned that the state bar would be sued if it cooperated with Mr. Sander.  
    Sadly, the State Bar's Committee of Bar Examiners caved under the pressure. The committee members didn't formally explain their decision to deny Mr. Sander's request for this data (in which no names would be disclosed), but the root cause is clear: Over the last 40 years, many distinguished citizens -- university presidents, judges, philanthropists and other leaders -- have built their reputations on their support for race-based admissions. Ordinary citizens have found secure jobs as part of the resulting diversity bureaucracy.  
    If the policy is not working, they, too, don't want anyone to know.  
    The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights hopes that it can persuade the State Bar to reconsider. Its soon-to-be released report on affirmative action in law schools specifically calls for state bar authorities to cooperate with qualified scholars studying the mismatch issue. The recommendation is modest. The commission doesn't claim that Mr. Sander is right or his critics wrong. It simply seeks to encourage and facilitate important research.  
    The Commission's deeper purpose is to remind those who support and administer affirmative action polices that good intentions are not enough. Consequences also matter. And conscious, deliberately chosen ignorance is not a good-faith option.  
    Mr. Sander's original article noted that when elite law schools lower their academic standards in order to admit a more racially diverse class, schools one or two tiers down feel they must do the same. As a result, there is now a serious gap in academic credentials between minority and non-minority law students across the pecking order, with the average black student's academic index more than two standard deviations below that of his average white classmate.  
    Not surprisingly, such a gap leads to problems. Students who attend schools where their academic credentials are substantially below those of their fellow students tend to perform poorly.  
    The reason is simple: While some students will outperform their entering academic credentials, just as some students will underperform theirs, most students will perform in the range that their academic credentials predict. As a result, in elite law schools, 51.6% of black students had first-year grade point averages in the bottom 10% of their class as opposed to only 5.6% of white students. Nearly identical performance gaps existed at law schools at all levels. This much is uncontroversial.  
    Supporters of race-based admissions argue that, despite the likelihood of poor grades, minority students are still better off accepting the benefit of a preference and graduating from a more prestigious school. But Mr. Sander's research suggests that just the opposite may be true -- that law students, no matter what their race, may learn less, not more, when they enroll in schools for which they are not academically prepared. Students who could have performed well at less competitive schools may end up lost and demoralized. As a result, they may fail the bar.  
    Specifically, Mr. Sander found that when black and white students with similar academic credentials compete against each other at the same school, they earn about the same grades. Similarly, when black and white students with similar grades from the same tier law school take the bar examination, they pass at about the same rate.  
    Yet, paradoxically, black students as a whole have dramatically lower bar passage rates than white students with similar credentials. Something is wrong.  
    The Sander study argued that the most plausible explanation is that, as a result of affirmative action, black and white students with similar credentials are not attending the same schools. The white students are more likely to be attending a school that takes things a little more slowly and spends more time on matters that are covered on the bar exam. They are learning, while their minority peers are struggling at more elite schools.  
    Mr. Sander calculated that if law schools were to use color-blind admissions policies, fewer black law students would be admitted to law schools (3,182 students instead of 3,706), but since those who were admitted would be attending schools where they have a substantial likelihood of doing well, fewer would fail or drop out (403 vs. 670). In the end, more would pass the bar on their first try (1,859 vs. 1,567) and more would eventually pass the bar (2,150 vs. 1,981) than under the current system of race preferences. Obviously, these figures are just approximations, but they are troubling nonetheless.  
    Mr. Sander has his critics -- some thoughtful, some just strident -- but so far none has offered a plausible alternative explanation for the data. Of course, Mr. Sander doesn't need to be proven 100% correct for his research to be devastating news for affirmative-action supporters.  
    Suppose the consequences of race-based admissions turn out to be a wash -- neither increasing nor decreasing the number of minority attorneys. In that case, few people would think it worth the costs, not least among them the human costs that result from the failure of the supposed beneficiaries to graduate and pass the bar.  
    Under current practices, only 45% of blacks who enter law school pass the bar on their first attempt as opposed to over 78% of whites. Even after multiple tries, only 57% of blacks succeed. The rest are often saddled with student debt, routinely running as high as $160,000, not counting undergraduate debt. How great an increase in the number of black attorneys is needed to justify these costs?  
    The most important other recommendation of the Civil Rights Commission is a call for transparency. As a matter of consumer fairness, law school applicants -- regardless of race -- need to know the statistical likelihood that someone with their academic credentials will successfully graduate and pass the bar. Once informed, they can better decide whether to undertake the risk of attending that particular school, or any law school at all. If law schools are unwilling to undertake this simple reform, it should be mandated by law.  
    Under current practices, law school applicants are at the mercy of admissions officers for that information; it is almost never provided except on a class-wide basis where success rates are positively misleading. Minority students whose academic credentials are substantially below their average classmates are lulled into believing that they are just as likely to graduate and pass the bar. When they don't, they may be stuck with the bills, not to mention the loss of several years of their lives.  
    The problem is that the admissions officer's job is to enroll students, not to draw the risks of failure to their attention. Indeed, in some cases, the officer may be frantic to enroll minority students in order to comply with the stringent new diversity standards of the American Bar Association Council on Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar. As the federal government's accrediting agency for law schools, the ABA Council determines whether a law school will be eligible for the federal student-loan program. The law school that fails to satisfy its diversity requirements does so at its peril -- as a number of law school deans can amply attest.  
    Decades of law students have relied upon the good faith of law school officials to tell them what they needed to know. For the 43% of black law students who never became lawyers, maybe that reliance was misplaced.