Is FASORP For You?

It's not a lovely name. But you may be interested in this new organization.

FASORP stands for "Faculty, Alumni, and Students Opposed to Racial Preferences." Here's how the FASORP web site explains itself:

FASORP is a voluntary membership organization that litigates against race and sex preferences in academia. Its members include faculty, alumni, and students of many different universities.

We encourage you to join our organization if you share our commitment to meritocracy and our opposition to the corrupt and discriminatory practices that subordinate academic merit to diversity considerations. There is no charge to become a member of FASORP, and your membership will expand the range of universities that FASORP can target for lawsuits. Membership in FASORP is strictly confidential and will not be shared with anyone.

You can also use this website to submit evidence of race and sex discrimination in academia. You can submit incriminating emails, audio recordings, and documents that expose race or sex preferences in faculty hiring or the selection of law-review members. Simply drag and drop the files into the box at the bottom right of the screen. E-mail files should be converted to .pdf before submitting. You may also relate anecdotes of reverse discrimination that you or others have witnessed. If you wish to submit your evidence anonymously, you can omit your name, e-mail, and identifying information in the other boxes, and if you choose to submit anonymously there is no way for anyone to trace or identify the source.

We are especially interested in evidence and anecdotes related to our pending litigations against Harvard Law Review and the NYU Law Review. But we welcome the submission of any evidence that could lead to future litigation.

I'll write about FASORP's interesting litigation against the Harvard Law Review and the NYU Law Review very, very soon.

Comments

[susancol]

Interesting thought, but the likelihood that any faculty member or senior administrator could *successfully* anonymously submit information without it having thereafter been traced back to the "leaker" is pretty much nil, and the likelihood of a leaker retaining their position after being identified is similarly miniscule.

[AtR]

This is especially true on a technical level. The website is very poorly designed, from a security perspective, and I would not recommend anyone, no matter how well intentioned, submit anonymous or private information there, especially when jobs may be on the line.

Some key issues:

* The website is served out through (unsecured) http, not https. This means that anything transmitted through it may be observed (and/or changed) in transit and, in fact, others can set up a fake site that looks the same for inncent passsers-by to drop their sensitive information.

* The site links to numerous external scripts, whose servers can easily be logging IP addresses of the visitors (for correlation with the huge amount of private, personal information available about just about every one of us in the advertising arena).

* The site *does* have de-anonimyzing data, like CSRF tokens, and you are the mercy of the site administrators for your anonymity.

And, by the way,

* The site lists *NO* public entities associated with it ... it could be the Mafia, or even one of the universities, for all we know.

[AtR]

See this analysis

[OtisAH]

FASORP is an organization dedicated to ensuring racial preferences for white folks by ending racial preferences for minorities.

[FlameCCT]

Does it hurt being that ignorant Otis?
Or just normal for a Progressive serf?

[Hyman Rosen]

I know this is whataboutism, but shouldn't a commitment to meritocracy also include opposition to preferences based on legacy, athletics, religion, and relation to employees?

[Rossami]

Legacy admissions do violate the commitment to meritocracy but they are a tiny fraction of the total.

Your other examples are apples and oranges. Relationship to employees, for example, is a contractual perk for the employees. I'm not aware of any religious preferences offered at schools, though there are self-selections of religious students to their own religion's schools. But that's not a violation of meritocracy - simply a statement that religion is an inherent part of the education that the particular school wants to deliver and that the student wants to receive. And athletics are the very definition of meritocracy - just not your narrow purely-academic definition. Athletics used to be a substantial and inherent part of a university education. The fact that athletics are now optional for most students does not automatically make it anti-meritocratic to consider athletic capability for those people who still do participate.

[bernard11]

Legacy admissions do violate the commitment to meritocracy but they are a tiny fraction of the total.

I'm not sure this is true.

See Here.

But evidence suggests that legacy is a significant factor at many elite schools. Research from the Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade of 10 highly selective colleges suggests being a legacy provides a boost equivalent to scoring 160 points higher on the SAT (out of 1600 points). And in 2011, research on 30 elite schools from the higher-education expert Michael Hurwitz found that the children of alumni saw a 45 percentage-point increase in their chances of admission compared to otherwise equally qualified candidates who were not legacies, controlling for factors such as SAT scores, athlete status, gender, race, and "many less-quantifiable characteristics."

That 160 point boost, by the way, is out of 1200, not 1600, since the lowest possible score is 400, not zero.

[Social Justice is neither]

while those are evidence that they are favored, what % of the student population does that drive?

[Sarcastr0]

'In 1980, 24 percent of Yale's freshman class had a parent who had attended, but in the class of 2014, 13 percent were legacy students. At most Ivy League schools, 10 percent to 15 percent of those who end up enrolling are the children of former students.'

-Being a Legacy Has Its Burden - The New York Times

[DavidTaylor]

"Legacy admissions do violate the commitment to meritocracy but they are a tiny fraction of the total."

African-American students are about 15% of Harvard's undergraduates.

Legacy students are about 29% of the Harvard class of 2021.

If legacy admits are a tiny fraction, and not worth worrying about, perhaps race is even less an issue.

[Rossami]

To clarify - Legacy admissions are a tiny fraction of TOTAL admissions, though that is not necessarily true at any one institution. Based on the statistics I have seen, they play a more significant part at private schools (which are not generally bound by the First Amendment and other constitutional protections). They play a much, much smaller part in public school admissions. And there are a lot more public school students than private.

[bernard11]

But it's admissions to the prestigious private schools that are under discussion.

You can't dilute the evidence by adding in state schools.

[Rossami]

No, that filter is not in Hyman Rosen's original comment, bernard. Nor is that filter part of FASORP's mission. The discussion is about meritocracy in academia as a whole, not merely in "prestigious private schools".

I am not trying to dilute the evidence. But I am pushing back against some cherry-picking of the evidence.

[Stephen Lathrop]

It's unclear to me why FASORP thinks its peculiar notion of meritocracy ought to be imposed legally on a private institution which prefers a different notion of meritocracy.

[David Nieporent]

It's unclear to me how someone can be alive in 2018 and be unfamiliar with the Civil Rights Act. (It does not, of course, require a "meritocracy," but it does forbid racial discrimination.)

[Stephen Lathrop]

It's also unclear to me why the notion of meritocracy has any legal standing at all. Is it in the Constitution? Where is it?

[Placeholder Name]

Ten to one this has already been labeled a hate group by the SPLC. After all, the "m-word" comes right after "n."

[Sarcastr0]

So why not look it up? Or do you prefer your speculative victimhood unfettered by reality?

[Per Son]

I think that this loses out based on standing. Not sure if Title VI or Title IX even covers the law reviews. Also, the harm is pretty speculative--that the authors are harmed because the editors may not be the very best. I think you would need to show how your article or academic standing were harmed by Harvard or NYU's policy.

[David Nieporent]

Of course the law reviews are covered; they are programs of covered universities. The claim that you mention is pretty lame; I think that argument would get laughed out of court. But they also claim harm in that the articles themselves are supposedly being chosen based on the race & sex of the authors, and membership on the law review is being chosen in part based on race & sex.

[Per Son]

It still remains speculative. Have they offered up any plaintiffs that can make the case that they have actually been discriminated against in the selection of articles? At least with the Asian-American case, there are actual people that can allege a concrete harm.

[David Nieporent]

Associational standing isn't my specialty, but my understanding is that the key issue is whether a member has standing, A plaintiff would need to show that he submitted to HLR and was turned down in order to establish standing.

[Per Son]

You are correct, but no harmed individual has been identified. If it gets past standing, the court would be put in an odd place, because harm would need to be demonstrated. That would require the court to basically say what is the best piece of scholarship in a way.

[Smooth Like a Rhapsody]

It's been 6 hours, and still no comment castigating Hillsdale, and "old-timey losers".
Arthur-itis must be taking the week off.