Affirmative Action: We Don't Want To Know Whether It Works.

According to an article published this week in the Recorder, UCLA School of Law professor Richard Sander wants access to data to study whether affirmative action increases or decreases black students' access to becoming a lawyer. Specifically, he wants to study whether affirmative action sets up black students for failure by placing them in schools for which they are unqualified, and is possibly the cause of black students' high failure rates on bar exams around the country. To find out if this was true, he asked the California State Bar's Committee of Bar Examiners for access to historic data on past bar exam scores, including the race and academic credentials for each applicant, not including, however, individual names. The Bar said no.

Sander previously published an article in The Stanford Law Review, using bar exam failure and passage rates obtained for a national study by the nonprofit Law School Admissions Council to assert that race-based preferences had opened the doors of elite law schools to minority students who were academically unprepared. As a result of that mismatch, the article asserted, there were about 8 percent fewer black attorneys in 2004 than there would have been if law schools had employed color-blind admissions practices. For those who question his motives, Sander points out that his has always been a civil rights activist and that he has an African-American son.

Gayle Murphy, the State Bar's senior executive for admissions, says "We're not against people doing research," she said. "And nothing prohibits [Sander] from contacting the law schools directly or even the students themselves." But the reality is that this data would be incomplete, and its findings dismissed, if access to State Bar records are kept private.

Many civil rights leaders, who ostensibly want to advance the interests of black students, are opposed to the study. Michael Yaki, a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights opposed the release, saying "we might as well hang a sign saying 'blacks and other minorities need not apply' on the doorways of Yale, Harvard and other elite schools."

John Steele, a lawyer and law professor, told the State Bar "that the problem in understanding and combating exclusion is the absence of careful statistical studies, not the existence of them. "In the absence of well-constructed studies based on sound data," he added, "ignorance reigns."

The data can only do one of two things: it can reinforce the validity of affirmative action, or it can suggest that changes should be made, for the benefit of blacks and other disadvantaged minorities. The preliminary findings suggest that changes would benefit blacks. If so, why do minority advocates oppose knowing this?