Professor Bruce E. Fleming is an English Professor from Annapolis. He has an absolutely powerhouse OP-ED in Sunday’s The Capital.

We have all heard over the last month or so the chorus over how diverse the incoming class at Annapolis is. Well, the devil is in the details – and Professor Fleming lays the whole thing out there to see, smell, and feel.

A “diverse” class does not mean the Naval Academy recruits violinists, or older students (they can’t be 23 on Induction Day), or gay people (who are thrown out) or foreign students (other than the dozen or so sent by client governments).

It means applicants checked a box on their application that says they are Hispanic, African American, Native American, and now, since my time on the Admissions Board of the Academy, where I’ve taught for 22 years, Asians.

Midshipmen are admitted by two tracks. White applicants out of high school who are not also athletic recruits typically need grades of A and B and minimum SAT scores of 600 on each part for the Board to vote them “qualified.” Athletics and leadership also count.

A vote of “qualified” for a white applicant doesn’t mean s/he’s coming, only that he or she can compete to win the “slate” of up to 10 nominations that (most typically) a Congress(wo)man draws up. That means that nine “qualified” white applicants are rejected. SAT scores below 600 or C grades almost always produce a vote of “not qualified” for white applicants.

Not so for an applicant who self-identifies as one of the minorities who are our “number one priority.” For them, another set of rules apply. Their cases are briefed separately to the board, and SAT scores to the mid-500s with quite a few Cs in classes (and no visible athletics or leadership) typically produce a vote of “qualified” for them, with direct admission to Annapolis. They’re in, and are given a pro forma nomination to make it legit.

Minority applicants with scores and grades down to the 300s with Cs and Ds (and no particular leadership or athletics) also come, though after a remedial year at our taxpayer-supported remedial school, the Naval Academy Preparatory School.

By using NAPS as a feeder, we’ve virtually eliminated all competition for “diverse” candidates: in theory they have to get a C average at NAPS to come to USNA, but this is regularly re-negotiated.

There you go. Create a new sub-category (for the USNA) of minority, and have a two-track, separate and unequal selections process.  You just increased your diversity.  Quod erat demonstrandum.

I highly recommend that you read the whole thing and soak it in. When it comes to getting a handle on how such paternalistic racist policies impact our dialog on race, read some of the comments there as well.

How anyone can defend or be proud of such a blatantly discriminatory policy is beyond me. It sets up young men and women for failure, unfairly stigmatizes minority MIDN and officers who would qualify in a race-neutral environment, it pushes quality cuts to the fleet where lives are on the line (hulls of ships and skin of aircraft don’t care what your DNA is), and on a whole it tarnishes our entire culture of fairness.

In the zero-sum game that is admissions, you can no longer say that we don’t discriminate on the basis of race, creed, color, or national origin. As outlined in Professor Fleming’s OP-ED, we do. It also plants the seed of doubt that if we discriminate at the beginning; do we also continue to discriminate throughout the career path?

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• Byron

  Jay, Granpa just spent a fair amount of time explaining his position to you, and you come back with “yup”. Brilliant. Great job on YOUR thoughtful reply. I guess you have to devolve to statements like that when you have no more grounds with which to argue with.

• UltimaRatioReg

  Byron,

  It would appear that the difficulty of Jay’s and Natty’s respective positions is that they are unable to explain how racial and ethnic discrimination was once a significant societal evil, but now it is a good and just policy for admission to the most prestigious commissioning source for the United States Navy.

  The corollary to that difficulty is leveraging the argument that, if you could be categorized in an ethnic/racial checklist as “white”, that you somehow share responsibility for that earlier discrimination, and indeed gained by it. Despite the fact that one’s antecedents may have been busy either fighting to end such practices, or being persecuted in their homeland in the Old World at the time.

  But that’s just me, Mister Vegas…..

• http://fredfryinternational.blogspot.com/ Fred Fry

  There are a number of interesting comments on the original Op-Ed as well, including this one”
  “And to all those who are commenting on the quality of our young men and women, answer this question: Has a minority student ever graduated at the bottom of his/her class?”

  It makes me wonder, who is to say that the preference given to minority students ends at admission. During my first year at the Merchant Marine Academy, my class was decimated by poor grades. Males were dropped without a second thought but women were given the benefit of the doubt when possible. Still their number dwindled into the teens by the end of the first year prompting the School to extend 2nd chances to many who were doing no better than many of those booted after the first quarter. The situation in general was so bad that Congress sent a task force (or something) to investigate, the poor grades and instruction mostly, and preferential treatment to a lesser extent.

• Natty Bowditch

  CDR S: Your blog is about as diverse as a John Birch meeting in Fargo.

  Fred Fry: As you must surely know, you need a 2.0 (and the requisite qualifications) to graduate from a service academy. Unless you’re attempting to argue that certain folks are graduating without a 2.0 GPA, you’re blowing smoke.

• UltimaRatioReg

  Thanks, Natty. It’s the BLOG that was the problem. Not institutionalized discrimination. Got it.

• Byron

  Natty, maybe you should head over there and ask Lt. B. about it. I’m sure he’d be glad to have some “dialog” with you.

• http://fredfryinternational.blogspot.com/ Fred Fry

  Natty,

  “Fred Fry: As you must surely know, you need a 2.0 (and the requisite qualifications) to graduate from a service academy.”

  Yes, it takes four years to reach that point. Whan I was at KP, You had until the end of the first year to reach that point. 1.25 Min, then 1.5, 1.75 and finish the first year with a 2.0 and then maintain it through to graduation. the school was however making exceptions to maintain certain gender numbers. Not that they were doing them any favors in that they were in deeper holes that they needed to dig themselves out of.

• http://cdrsalamander.blogspot.com CDRSalamander

  Natty,
  Thanks — you just completely discredited your entire argument. When someone gets personal and starts throwing “Bircher Bombs” because they cannot defend their own opinions, well, it speaks for itself.

  Good luck next time.

• virgil xenophon

  The good perfessor’s original article may have longer legs than usual–it finally made it out of primarily the military blogosphere to the more national civilian reach of today’s Chicago Sun-Times….

• Natty Bowditch

  Yes, it takes four years to reach that point. Whan I was at KP, You had until the end of the first year to reach that point. 1.25 Min, then 1.5, 1.75 and finish the first year with a 2.0 and then maintain it through to graduation. the school was however making exceptions to maintain certain gender numbers.

  Show me.

  As I recall, decisions concerning academic deficiciencies were made on a case-by-case basis. If you were in academic trouble, you went before an Academic Board which reviewed your individual situation. The A Board could either dismiss you, turn or set you back to a following class, or place you on some sort of probation (usually you had some time period to raise your grades). There may be some kind of remedial program or course of action such as knocking off participation in team sports and the like and/or meeting with faculty advisors to monitor progress.

  The fact remains your charges are unsubstantiated and based on hearsay. To prove this point–ask yourself how anyone would know who’s getting what grades? At the time women were first being admitted to the service academies, privacy laws were also coming into place. No longer would your juice grades be posted by name outside the dept. head’s office for all to see.

• Natty Bowditch

  Byron:

  I was so sure I had made your “personal ignore file.”

  And to think I had already clutched my pearls, rent my clothing and retire to the fainting couch.

• Byron

  Natty: What CDR Sala said. Best.

• Natty Bowditch

  “What CDR Sala said.”

  But of course, Byron. From his lips to yours..

• Byron

  Of course, meaning that Sala does my thinking. Far from it. Just a matter of agreeing on this principle. You just don’t get it, and likely never will. Suggest this ends with agree to disagree, and part like gentlemen.

• Jay

  CDR S — just thought I would swing by & see if you had posted any numbers…

• http://fredfryinternational.blogspot.com/ Fred Fry

  “To prove this point–ask yourself how anyone would know who’s getting what grades? At the time women were first being admitted to the service academies, privacy laws were also coming into place. No longer would your juice grades be posted by name outside the dept. head’s office for all to see.”

  Your kidding right? In a class with 17 or less students (and half of them standing at the door at the same time) looking at a very short list of grades, can’t figure out who is getting what, given that everyone is disclosing what they got, all in an attempt to determine what that one special classmate received. Not always possible but most of the time was.

  As for the academic board, my point was that the board which appeared eager to toss students at the beginning of the year, was not so eager by the end of the year. And no, I am not suggesting that people were kept sub 2.0 at the end of the year.

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