Dear Prof. Ramakrishnan and Prof. Lee:

I have received a copy of your new report as indicated in the Subject line, released about 2 hours ago. I went straight to your Affirmative Action portion (pages 8-9), and I was shocked.

Affirmative action is an extremely complicated topic (I am sure you know there are tons and tons of law review and poly-sci research papers on the topic, not to mentioned the many related Supreme Court cases).

Yet, you put a clearly misleading question into your survey:

"Do you favor or oppose affirmative action programs designed to help blacks, women, and other minorities get better jobs and education?"

How further could you have gone in terms of misleading the people being "surveyed" by you?

First, "education" and "employment" are two separate and different issues (as shown in Prop. 209). Thus, you asked two different questions but requested a person under your survey to provide a *single* Yes/No answer. It does not take two PhDs and two UC professorships to see this is academically flawed. In a lawyer's jargon, it is called "compound question" and should be immediately objected to.

Second, as the maintainer of www.no2sca5.org, I guess I know what is going on there. I would say your "study" has probably been designed to fool people and lay down a foundation for a SCA-6's coming back. SCA 5 hurt most if not all Asian American students in California who are working hard to earn their future seats at Berkeley, UCLA and so on. In many cases, such hard working is combined with tremendous family supports, and such family supports translate into working-class dollars and parental sacrifices.