(Facing REALITY and actually accepting REALITY - as a matter of personal and factual honesty with oneself - is a rare commodity when observed against wishful thinking - which dominates our society and civilization. - CL)
Why were the credentials of black applicants so poor that their admission to a competitive law school required abandoning — not just tweaking — standards? The author did not answer this question. I preferred to think that the circumstances of black applicants’ lives were largely responsible for their inability to earn strong GPAs or Law School Admission Test scores; but I uneasily noted that proponents of the environmental explanation for low black achievement relied more on wishful thinking than evidence.
The next article I found was the mother lode: Arthur Jensen’s magisterial essay in the Harvard Educational Review from the winter of 1969. Jensen demonstrated, with a clarity that later writings on the subject have not surpassed, that educational attainment is strongly predicted by IQ, and that IQ is largely heritable and resistant to modification. He also showed that black and white student populations differed in average IQ by a standard deviation, resulting in drastic differences in the presence of black and white students at the high-end “tail” of the IQ distribution.
I understood intuitively that Jensen’s explanation accounted for more than differing educational attainment. A population with only a tiny percentage of average- and higher-IQ people, such as a black neighborhood from which all sensible and responsible residents had fled, could look only like South Shore (or worse). No amount of outside money and benevolence could change that by much or for long.
