The Outstater
IU Law and Stereotypes
“Have we reached the ultimate age of absurdity where some people are held responsible for things that happened before they were born, while other people are not held responsible for what they themselves are doing today?” — Thomas Sowell
WHY WOULD AN INDIANA LAW SCHOOL abide an admissions policy that rejects hundreds of Hoosier applicants in favor of less qualified applicants, most from out-of-state? There’s a reason, a really bad one.
Before we get to that, here is some background.
In a memorandum to the admissions committee of the Maurer School of Law at Indiana University, Robert Heidt, a member of the committee and a professor at the school, documented the situation:
“The admissions committee maintains a de facto quota for the minimum number of certain minorities that it insists be enrolled in each entering class,” Professor Heidt wrote. “And to fill that minimum quota the admissions committee has been willing to leap-frog minority applicants over more accomplished, qualified and promising non-minority applicants. While the same could be said for virtually all law schools, almost none is as willing as we to admit minority applicants with relatively poor credentials.”
Heidt reported that more than 75 percent of the minority applicants at IU who were admitted with lower standards were from out-of-state. There have been years where fully two minority applicants were admitted for only one denied, he said, a substantially better ratio than enjoyed by non-minority applicants.
The professor brought receipts in the form of charts comparing year-by-year admission rates and results of the Law School Admission Test (LSAT). One year, IU Law admitted 67 students with scores below 150, he said. Please know that LSAT scores for black applicants nationally are in the 146-148 range while the average generally is 151-152. Applicants to the best law schools score 170 and higher.
Yes, you read all of that right: The policy of our state-funded university has been to prefer under-qualified out-of-state students over more qualified in-state students. The law school’s website still boasts of a 2027 class expected to be made up of 18 percent minority, a high number by any comparison.
Twenty years later, if that’s not still the policy, we have not heard the public announcement. How many are from out of state? How many score below the average? You might need a subpoena to find out, and this at a campus receiving more than $600 million annually from Indiana taxpayers.
Our argument is summed up by Justice Clarence Thomas: “(The school) is not looking for those students who despite a lower LSAT score or under-graduate grade point average will succeed in the study of law. The law school seeks only a facade — it is sufficient that the class looks right; even if it does not perform right.”
I said there was a reason, a rationale, for admitting out-of-state applicants who score fully 10 to 20 points lower than others on a test that predicts achievement in law school and the profession. Specifically, it is something sociologists call “stereotype threat,” a founding concept of diversity, equity and inclusion.
First proposed in the early 1990s, it says that individuals who are part of a negatively stereotyped group can in certain situations experience anxiety about confirming those stereotypes, leading to underperformance and thus confirming the disparaging stereotype.
It seemed to explain why blacks didn’t perform as well on the LSAT. It wasn’t that they weren’t well prepared, you see, it was that they were intimidated, uncomfortable. “The idea felt revolutionary, hopeful even, because it suggested that these vexing performance gaps could be addressed by changing people’s immediate environments rather than accepting them as fixed outcomes, inherent to the groups themselves,” writes social psychologist Michael Inzlicht, initially a proponent of the concept. Inzlicht quotes a New York Times article:
“In a 1995 article in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Professor Claude Steele of Stanford found that black students performed comparably with white students when told that the test they were taking was ‘a laboratory problem-solving task.’ Black students scored much lower, however, when they were instructed that the test was meant to measure their intellectual ability. In effect, the prospect of social evaluation suppressed these students’ intelligence.”
Presumably, the faculty at IU Law sought to correct that by simply ignoring the LSAT gap and thereby repenting for slavery. The best of intentions, perhaps, but there are two problems.
First, persons with high melanin count are not necessarily descendent from American slaves or even the victims of any measurable prejudice. Indeed, some of them, Vice-President Kamala Harris for example, are descendent from slave owners or slave traders. Others, the Vice-President again and former President Barack Obama, are middle-class descendants of those who freely immigrated or visited within the last couple of generations.
Ironically, the great number of rejected Anglo-Saxon, German- and Irish-American applicants, whose ancestors settled the Midwest, this state and built its university, are fully innocent, having no genealogical connection to American slavery whatsoever. And in any case, whatever the identity issue, such preferential admission is now flat-out illegal.
Second, there now is doubt about the validity of stereotype threat. To put it bluntly, there is reason to believe that blacks who score lower on entrance exams just aren’t as well prepared. That, after all, is what tests are meant to determine, and there is a stack of research debunking stereotype threat as a “dog ate my paper” excuse. Here again is Inzlicht:
“There are now multiple failed replications, large-sample studies that found no effect, and at least one bias-corrected meta-analysis pointing to the same conclusion: if stereotype threat exists, it is far weaker and more inconsistent than we originally believed. I no longer believe it is real, but you can make up your own mind.”
As you can make up your own mind, but if you believe that denying resident Hoosiers a fair shot at law school is justified by a 30-year-old bad research paper, or whether you just dislike white people, then you should fund your own law school and apply whatever social-justice measure or racial test you wish. Don’t ask the rest of us, though, to pay for it. — tcl
Resources
Heidt, R. (Spring 2002). “A Memorandum to the Admissions Committee.” The Indiana Policy Review.
Stricker, L., and Ward, W. (July 31, 2006). “Stereotype Threat: Inquiring About Test Takers’ Ethnicity and Gender, and Standardized Test Performance.” Journal of Applied Social Psychology.
Stoevenbelt, A., Flore, P., and Schwabe, I. (July 1, 2022). “The Uniformity of Stereotype Threat: Analyzing the Moderating Effects of Pre-measured Performance.” Intelligence Journal.
Inzlicht, M. (Dec. 18, 2024). “Revisiting Stereotype Threat: A Reckoning for Social Psychology.” Speak Now, Regret Later (blog).
Report. (Last viewed Dec. 21, 2024). “Indiana University Diversity and Inclusion.” Maurer School of Law: https://law.indiana.edu/about/diversity/index.html
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