The Naval Academy at Annapolis is where the U.S. Navy educates officers. So what do you think is the number one priority at Annapolis?

Would it be educating future naval officers to defend our nation? Learning the regulations and traditions of the U.S. Navy? Studying oceanography, navigation, the operation of seagoing vessels and new technologies that affect naval operations? Learning about the world situation and possible future challenges? All of the above?

No, of course not. According to Admiral Gary Roughead, Chief of Naval Operations, “DIVERSITY” is the institution’s number one priority.

Bruce Fleming, English professor at Annapolis, is not in agreement, however. Fleming submitted a guest opinion to HometownAnnapolis.Com which was actually published. It’s entitled “The Cost of a Diverse Naval Academy” and I just wonder how long Professor Fleming will have his job! Here are some excerpts:

The Naval Academy superintendent, Vice Adm. Jeffrey Fowler… insisted recently that we needed to have Annapolis graduates who “looked like” the Fleet, where enlisted people are about 42 percent nonwhite, largely African American and Hispanic. The stunning revelation last week was that the Naval Academy had an incoming class that was “more diverse” than ever before: 35 percent minority. Sounds good, only this comes with a huge price tag. It’s taxpayers who bankroll the military. Yet nobody has asked us if we’re willing to pay this price. Instead we’re being told there is no price to pay at all. If you believe that, you probably also believe in the Tooth Fairy.

A “diverse” class does not mean the Naval Academy recruits violinists, or older students (they can’t be 23 on Induction Day), or gay people (who are thrown out) or foreign students (other than the dozen or so sent by client governments). It means applicants checked a box on their application that says they are Hispanic, African American, Native American, and now, since my time on the Admissions Board of the Academy, where I’ve taught for 22 years, Asians.

So how about those white applicants?

Midshipmen are admitted by two tracks. White applicants out of high school who are not also athletic recruits typically need grades of A and B and minimum SAT scores of 600 on each part for the Board to vote them “qualified.” Athletics and leadership also count.A vote of “qualified” for a white applicant doesn’t mean s/he’s coming, only that he or she can compete to win the “slate” of up to 10 nominations that (most typically) a Congress(wo)man draws up. That means that nine “qualified” white applicants are rejected. SAT scores below 600 or C grades almost always produce a vote of “not qualified” for white applicants.

So, a SAT score below 600, or C grades, nearly always mean that a white applicant will not be accepted. Prof. Fleming continues…

Not so for an applicant who self-identifies as one of the minorities who are our “number one priority.” For them, another set of rules apply. Their cases are briefed separately to the board, and SAT scores to the mid-500s with quite a few Cs in classes (and no visible athletics or leadership) typically produce a vote of “qualified” for them, with direct admission to Annapolis. They’re in, and are given a pro forma nomination to make it legit. Minority applicants with scores and grades down to the 300s with Cs and Ds (and no particular leadership or athletics) also come, though after a remedial year at our taxpayer-supported remedial school, the Naval Academy Preparatory School.By using NAPS as a feeder, we’ve virtually eliminated all competition for “diverse” candidates: in theory they have to get a C average at NAPS to come to USNA, but this is regularly re-negotiated.

So what happens after the applicants become midshipmen?

Once at Annapolis, “diverse” midshipmen are over-represented in our pre-college classes, in lower-track courses, in mandatory tutoring programs and less challenging majors. Many struggle to master basic concepts. (I teach some of these courses.)Of course, some minority students are stellar, but they’re the exception. Despite being dragged toward the finish line, minorities graduate at about a 10 percent lower rate than the whole class, which of course includes them (so the real split is greater). Don’t want to believe me? Have a lawyer sit in on a year’s worth of Admissions Board deliberations. Or better still, pray that one of the stellar white students rejected to give a seat to a “diverse” candidate sues us. That’s the only way taxpayers will ever fully understand the price to them of “putting diversity first.”

Read it all here.

Professor Fleming is a brave man to publish this. What’s going to happen to him next?

Arizona State University posted a notice that they will be hiring a postdoctoral biophysicist on an H-1B visa. The H-1B worker will be paid just over $39k/yr (before taxes) for 3 years and will receive full benefits such as health insurance.

Now you know what a PhD in biophysics is worth.

For a copy of the actual document click here. Text version below. To find out more about public postings of Labor Condition Applications go here. (more…)

I just found an ariticle called African Americans and Serial Killing in the Media The Myth and the Reality, By Anthony Walsh, Homicide Studies, November 2005[PDF].The subheading says

There were many expressions of shock and surprise voiced in the media in 2002 when the “D.C. Sniper” turned out to be two Black males. Two of the stereotypes surrounding serial killers are that they are almost always White males and that African American males are barely represented in their ranks. In a sample of 413 serial killers operating in the United States from 1945 to mid-2004, it was found that 90 were African American. Relative to the African American proportion of the population across that time period, African Americans were overrepresented in the ranks of serial killers by a factor of about 2. Possible reasons why so few African American serial killers are known to the public are explored.

He starts with this amazing popular culture moment:

In Copycat (Fiedler, Nathanson, & Amiel, 1995), Sigourney Weaver plays a criminal psychologist and expert on serial killing. In the opening scene, she is giving a lecture in an auditorium in which she asks all the males in the audience to stand, emphasizing that serial killing is primarily a male behavior. She then asks all African American and Asian American males to sit down, leaving only White males standing as representative of serial killers. The message that viewers of Copycat get is that only White males commit these heinous crimes and that members of other races or ethnicities never do.

You are invited to imagine what would happen to a professor who did it the other way around.

This stereotype is pervasive in the United States, so much so that the only African American serial killer that any of my criminal justice department colleagues could name was Wayne Williams (the Atlanta child killer), and the only mass or spree killer named prior to the 2002 John Mohammed and Lee Malvo sniper spree was Colin Ferguson, the Long Island train mass killer. A Bowie State University graduate thesis available online explicitly states that “there is an absence of African American murderers within the realm of serial homicide investigation” (Duncan, n.d., p.1). This statement apparently passed muster without comment by a thesis committee.Acommentator in the HarlemTimes expressed shock and disbelief when the D.C. Sniper turned out to be two Blacks, because “white guys have pretty much cornered the market on mass murders and serial killing” (Charles, 2002). Psychologist Na’im Akbar stated, “This is not typical conduct for us. I mean Black folks do some crazy stuff, but we don’t do anonymous violence. That’s not in our history. We just don’t do that” (cited in White,Willis,&Smith, 2002, p. 2). Given this widespread “authoritative” opinion, it is no wonder that a columnist in the Black Commentator wrote, “‘There aren’t any black serial killers.’

This refrain was on the lips of most Americans in the fall of 2002 before two suspects were apprehended in the Washington, D.C.– area sniper shootings” (Kimberley, 2003).

It is one of the mysteries of modern criminology that a group responsible for a highly disproportionate number of homicides of all other types has gained a reputation for not producing serial killers, or at least for producing a disproportionately low number of them.

Read the whole thing:[PDF].

The abuse of whites in the mainstream media is a depressingly routine–and unchecked–affair. For years, characters like Mark Potok have gone unanswered and unchallenged as go-to sources on “hate.” But there’s more to the story than what the “watchdog” groups have to say, and two journalists have noticed.

Louis Andrews, a spokesman for the National Policy Institute, a white advocacy group, was included in an Australian radio broadcast (alongside Potok) and an Associated Press story on reaction to the Holocaust Museum shooting.

(“There’s no such thing as post-racial” is about as refreshing a quote as I’ve heard in a long time.)

It’s about time. Of course, for the willing journalist, there are plenty of white voices (both professional and otherwise) out there who might have a good quote about immigration, affirmative action and other issues facing them. Why not include them in your stories?

The Washington Blade reported yesterday that the Hate Crimes Bill is to be attached to (of all things) a Tourism Bill, and will be voted on this week – possibly even today.

Lawmakers are expected to pass the measure by amending S. 1023, or the Travel Promotion Act, said the source. The bill is geared toward establishing a national travel promotion program to communicate U.S. travel policies and to promote travel to the United States.

Senate hate crimes vote expected this week By CHRIS JOHNSON, Washington Blade
Jun 15 2009,

This was forecast by one John Berry, director of the Office of Personnel Management in an interview he gave to The Advocate over the weekend

Berry: Hate Crimes May Pass Next Week By Kerry Eleveld Advocate.com June 14 2009
Berry is described as

The highest ranking LGBT official in the Obama administration

(VDARE.com Note: LGBT! So that is what explains the presence of an apparent Christian-heritage white man in the Obama gang!)

All, however, may not be lost. Under pressure by the interviewer for not supplying more privileges to the Gay “community” Berry retorted

Berry: We don’t have the votes to do Hate Crimes right now, we don’t have the votes to do ENDA, how are we going [to get “don’t ask, don’t tell]?

Their tactics betray that the Free Speech repression crowd is indeed having difficulty. But it is plain from their comments and from history that this legislation and the mess of similar state laws will be used to curtail discussion of immigration – as has been done in the UK

Our lawyers tell us VDARE.com should not directly seek to influence legislation. Better funded Immigration Reform outfits – for instance NumbersUSA – seem to have figured out a way round this. Where are they in this fight?

As a follow-up to my last VDARE.com column, let me add that in psychologist Richard E. Nisbett’s much-lauded new book Intelligence and How to Get It, he devotes pages 124-126 to recounting the successes at raising black test scores achieved by Rick Heber’s Milwaukee Project. This was an expensive late-1960s study much like the Early Childhood Education endeavors that Barack Obama is now promoting.

Nisbett writes with a straight face:

An intervention even more ambitious than the Perry program was started by researchers in Milwaukee. Rick Heber, the program’s initiator, discovered that one particular area of the city, which 3 percent of the population, accounted for 33 percent of the mentally retarded children in the district. He decided to concentrate his resources on that section of the city. All of the children recruited for the study were African Americans at high risk for mental retardation because their mothers were poor and had IQs of 75 or less. The children were randomly assigned either to a control group (eighteen children) or to an intervention group (seventeen children), which was an intensive day-care program lasting from the time the children were less than six months old until they enrolled in first grade. …

At termination of the program at age seven, the average treatment-group IQ was still 22 points higher than the average for the control group. (Note that this gives an even higher upper bound for the differences between typical lower-SES rearing strategies and superior strategies.)

Amusingly, Nisbett never mentions that Heber went to prison for fraud in connection with the Milwaukee Project! The Concise Encyclopedia of Special Education says:

HEBER, RICK R. (1932-1992)

… Heber is best known for his work as principal investigator of the Milwaukee Project and the subsequent controversies surrounding the project. … Heber was a member of the faculty of the University of Wisconsin at Madison when he was indicted on charges stemming from the misuse of federal funds allocated to the project. He was subsequently convicted and served time in the federal prison in Bastrop, Texas. Previously a respected scholar in the field of mental retardation, his academic work on the Milwaukee Project has been called into serious question. It is now questionable whether the project ever actually existed as it had been described by Heber.

And here’s the Encyclopedia’s description of this Milwaukee Project that Nisbett takes so seriously:

MILWAUKEE PROJECT

The term Milwaukee Project is the popular title of a widely publicized program begun in the mid-1960s as one of many Great Society efforts to improve the intellectual development of low-achieving groups. It was headed by Rick Heber of the University of Wisconsin (UW), Madison, who was also director of the generously funded Waisman Institute in Madison. The Milwaukee Project was a small study with some 20 experimental subjects and 20 control subjects. It was not reported on by the investigators in any refereed scientific journals, yet its cost was some $14 million, mostly in federal funds, and its fame was international, since it claimed to have moved the IQs of its subject children from the dull-normal range of intelligence to the superior range of intelligence.

Enthusiasm, controversy, and scandal subsequently surrounded the history of the project. Its claimed success was hailed by famous psychologists and by the popular media. Later in the project, Heber, the principal investigator, was discharged from UW, Madison and convicted and imprisoned for large-scale abuse of federal funding for private gain. Two of his colleagues were also convicted of violations of federal laws in connection with misuse of project funds. …. However, the project received uncritical acceptance in many college textbooks in psychology and education.

Hmmhmmhmm … This reference book gives a rather different perspective on the Milwaukee Project than Nisbett’s book, no?

To be fair to Nisbett, perhaps he never heard of Heber’s fraud conviction 28 years ago. After all, it didn’t get much coverage from the media outlets that had earlier trumpeted Heber’s press releases.

On the other hand, imagine how you would never hear the end of it if, say, Charles Murray wound up in the slammer …