maxparrish
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http://www.libertylawsite.org/2014/08/13/injustice-by-the-numbers/Tim Groseclose has confirmed that he is one of America’s leading conservative commentators with the publication of Cheating: An Insider’s Report on the Use of Race in Admissions at UCLA. It may seem an odd role for Groseclose, for six years the Marvin Hoffenberg Chair of American Politics at UCLA and a quantitative social scientist whose innovations are widely recognized (see the list of publications on his website). He has achieved academic plaudits while openly declaring his Rush Limbaugh-listening and other rightwing proclivities.
To fully appreciate Cheating, we should start by discussing Left Turn, Groseclose’s earlier popular work about liberal media bias. Such critiques (as well as exposées of race preference in academia) are legion, but he devises formal models to measure the extent of bias or discrimination that enables all sorts of instructive comparisons. He establishes PQ measurements (political bias) of counties, cities, politicians, and media outlets. His website even contains instructions on how to calculate your own PQ.
Among his provocative comparisons, Groseclose argues that one of the most conservative areas in America, a gun-toting Mormon locale (which, coincidentally, Edward Banfield studied in his now 60-year-old classic, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society), is by his analysis less conservative than the Beltway is liberal. Using Groseclose’s framework, we can see that a leftist politician could perceive herself as less leftist than she actually is, especially after we have compared her with a Tea Party Republican who is less conservative than she thinks. Given their environments, the media, and colleagues, extreme liberals can come to regard themselves as centrists.
Besides PQ, Groseclose had developed (in a coauthored article) SQ, a slant quotient, which measures media bias by its selection and use of think-tank research. In Left Turn Groseclose approximates the actual effect of the SQ of media on attitudes and ultimately voting patterns. (For a readable assessment of his methodology see the review by Joshua Lerner in Commentary, November 2011.) Again, the conclusions are not surprising, but the ability to make comparisons is fascinating, as are his careful considerations of the effects of the media on voting.
Apparently, in the article, one of his many findings of his work, is that the victims of Discrimination at UCLA are actually Asians. With identical scores and grades, blacks are twice as likely to be accepted as an Asian.