Sound and Fury

As with so much at Duke, a small spark is all it takes to ignite cross-campus outrage. The culprit this time: a Duke research team’s unpublished study, which traced, among other things, the academic performance of black students over their Duke careers. It was only a matter of time before the study—dragged to light after it was cited in an amicus brief filed in a Supreme Court case centered around affirmative action—had spawned a score of upset protestors.

No group’s hands are clean in this flare-up, but none are especially dirty. The errors committed by each party were small—an unnecessary label employed on the part of the researchers, a cursory read-through on the part of the students—but the gap in understanding between each party was large. That this study caused such an uproar should turn our attention away the from study itself and toward the question that really matters: Why does Duke burst into cross-campus vitriol whenever a match is struck?

We find two missteps in the study that could have been avoided, but should not be condemned. The first is the researchers’ choice to use racial categories as a heuristic for college preparedness. The study cites “affirmative action”—a race-based policy—as responsible for talented but underprepared students winding up at elite universities. But the students actually studied—Duke students—attend a university that does not count race—or anything else—as an independent reason to admit an applicant.

Duke does evaluate applicants contextually, which means that applicants from less privileged backgrounds do not get punished for it. This is not a problem: In fact, studying the performance of underprepared students could be useful. But researchers chose to use race as a heuristic for underpreparedness—allowing black students to stand in for underprepared ones—and erred in doing so. This is especially odd given the study’s recognition of intra-race variation in student preparedness: Some black students have parents with advanced degrees, for instance, and some do not.

The researchers commit the same sin in using as a stand-in for less “difficult” courses the humanities and social sciences (minus economics). The criteria the study employs for difficulty, like the average grade given in a course or the SAT scores of the students enrolled in it, fail to capture the full range of what might make a course difficult.

Neither of these errors are fatal. The researchers offer a justification for their race-based heuristics and, while their criteria for difficulty is not comprehensive, it is certainly reasonable. Avoiding these labels could have headed off controversy, but they are small errors.

So are the errors of student protestors. The letter of protest offered by the Black Student Alliance raised several interesting questions. Did the administration think to intervene in the study? How are faculty held responsible for the academic progress of their students? But these questions either trample on the idea of academic freedom or fail to relate to the study at hand. In fact, the study could easily be offered as an empirical justification for University policies to address the same “societal, complex and institutionalized factors” that BSA claims the study ignored.

Our reactions to the study highlight latent tensions in campus culture. It is toward addressing these tensions—not the study that unleashed them—that we should turn.