Prof. Rick Sander Logistics Meeting Memo
SDAAFE-1009 04/22 50074.5/147
Prof. Rick Sander Logistics Meeting Memo
Overview:
~20 people (Chinese Americans) attended Prof Rick Sander’s Logistics meetings, individuals and organizations from Southern California, such as Backbone Foundation (LA), Orange Club (a newly formed PAC in Orange County), APAPA, Thousand Oaks (in Ventura County) Chinese school, Cal State LA faculty, San Diego Asian Americans for Equality (SDAAEF), and 80-20 etc. Organizers Simon and Huiping have an official sign-up sheet listing people and their organizations, is expected to generate an e-mail contact group. Prof. Tim Groseclose and Prof. Rick Sander made short presentations. The whole meeting lasted over 3 hours as there are quite bit of discussions.
Prof. Tim Groseclose’s new book
Prof. Groseclose is a political science professor at UCLA, was a member of UCLA faculty oversight committee on undergraduate admissions ~2007, resigned in protest after UCLA refused to provide any data for him to perform statistics analysis, and generated a lot of attention at the time. His new book, “Cheating, An Insider’s Report on the Use of Race in Admissions at UCLA” will be published in May 2014. Advanced copies are available, which gave a devastating account of how UCLA actually admits undergraduate students. The book is timed to help Prof. Sander’s potential lawsuit. Prof. Groseclose will be leaving UCLA soon to take up a faculty position in George Mason University. The Prof. Mare study was commissioned by UCLA in the fallout of Prof. Groseclose’s highly publicized resignation from the UCLA oversight committee. Prof. Mare was highly respected, used neutral terms such as “discrepancy” instead of “discrimination” to describe what he found cannot be explained without using race. In essence, the black would be ~1/3 less, and the AsAms would be ~8% more if indeed the admissions was race neutral. Mare’s report was delayed for ~3 years before a most low-key release (not a single news media report based on the Mare report itself, except for following the conclusion of the UCLA press release), together with a high-key press release by UCLA claiming that “independent researcher found no discrimination by UCLA”. According Prof. Groseclose (detailed in his book), the Mare Report would be most damaging to UCLA if widely publicized because it is UCLA data by UCLA approved researcher finding UCLA undergraduate admissions cannot be explained by race-neutral policy. After Prof Rick Sander filed “public record act” request and threaten with lawsuit, UCLA finally release six year worth of admissions data to Sander and Groseclose (which is the same dataset for Mare), from which they now documented “irrefutable” evidence of racial consideration. These are documented in Groseclose’s new book. Prof. Sander will also release an update to his 2012 report used on this data in the next few weeks. The Mare report, Groseclose book and Sander reports would form the factual basis of the potential class-action lawsuit by Prof. Sander.
Interestingly, Prof. Sander is a Democrate, Prof. Groseclose is a Republican. They both reached conclusion UCLA is cheating, infecting academia and outrageous. They are both now outcast at UCLA, with the common reaction “You are one of us, how can you betray us?” Chapter 5 of Prof. Croseclose’s book also provided personal details on Prof. Sander. Prof. Sander’s former wife was black, with a mixed race son getting into college ~2007, personally experienced “mismatch” which to some extent motivated Prof. Sander’s research on “mismatch”. Prof. Sander also had a long history of helping disadvantaged communities, which makes his opponents particularly frustrating because labeling his a “racist” simply does not stick.
The conclusion of Sander/Groseclose analysis is that the UCLA “holistic” system implemented in 2007 was indeed race neutral, however, it only admits ~80% of the students, based on ~150 reviewers. The other 20% of the students are admitted by two separate processes (a) Supplemental Reviews (b) Final Reviews. These latter two were conducted by 10 or so senior admissions officers and are highly racially biased. The 2007 system is designed to help blacks only (in response of the 2006 “Got black students?” demonstration, and UC regents threat to fire UC chancellors if the situation is not immediately improved), it has a slight negative impact on Latino students and a big negative impact on Vietnamese students, because the socioeconomic consideration was reduced from the earlier approach. (Among the large ethnic groups who apply to UCLA, Vietnamese are the most socioeconomically challenged, followed by Latino, followed by blacks).
Prof. Sander’s potential class-action lawsuit
Three potential individuals identified but not firm. Prof. Sander prefers to have 6-50 individuals and organizations to file a strong suit. Would like to have an umbrella organization in CA to support this activities. A website will be prepared by Huiping in ~2 weeks, it is not clear whether Simon is the lead person to set up the umbrella organization but he will at least set up a contact list. Pacific Legal Foundation has offered to provide pro bono legal representation. Both PLF and Prof. Sander will provide free service. Prof. Sander did say that a cost between $10 to $100K is still expected due to external expert witnesses, court filing fees, etc over the course of several years. The initial cost would be close to zero. It is noteworthy that PLF has represented defendants in all eight legal challenges to Prop 209, and won all 8 cases. So it would be in the ideal position to represent class-action plaintiffs. They are interested in developing the case in the next three-four months and announce the case in July 2014.
Prof. Sander said there are three ways to find plaintiffs to file this class action suit, in the order of decreasing desirability:
1) Find 6-50 AsAm individuals who applied to UCLA since 2007 and being rejected. The individuals can remain anonymous as John Doe 1,2,3 and the time involved can be zero if the person chooses to be. Prof. Sander has a matrix to rate candidates on a scale of 1 to 10, once the interested person provide the relevant personal info to him. (For example, he said the three he had was 9-10 strong candidates, whereas Fisher is only a 4-5 candidate)
2) Find a mixture of individual rejected AsAm candidates and California organizations
3) Find a list of California organizations under an umbrella organizations.
This is the area he need as much help as possible from all interested parties.
Some interesting information:
Hong Shang, the principal of Thousand Oaks Chinese School, learned from her Assembly representative that there is an current initiative to put SCA5 on the ballot (not sure who is doing it and whether it is 2014 or 2016 ballot) by gathering 8% of voter signatures (~half a million). This way the ballot initiative would bypass the legislature all together and not hinge upon Democratic Supermajority. No other detail is available at this time but we should stay vigilant.
