Friedrich August von Hayek said in 1974, durng his Nobel Prize lecture titled The Pretense of Knowledge, "If we are to safeguard the reputation of science, and to prevent the arrogation of knowledge based on a superficial similarity of procedure with that of the physical sciences, much effort will have to be directed toward debunking such arrogations, some of which have by now become the vested interests of established university departments." GURIN'S 1999 EXPERT TESTIMONY DR. JOHN STADDON'S CRITIQUE OFGURIN'S TESTIMONY NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF SCHOLARS CRITIQUE, by DR. THOMAS WOOD AND MALCOLM SHERMAN DR. ROBERT LERNER AND ALTHEA NAGAI'S SECOND CRITIQUE OF GURIN'S TESTIMONY RUDOLPH WEBSTER'S (Pseudonym, source of Hayek quote) DIVERSITY LINKS

This archive details the events leading up to, the many responses, and public debate caused by the author's The Wall Street Journal, The Evidence of Things Not Seen.  May 16, 2003expose.

Archive of Investigation of Patricia Gurin's Flawed Scientific Claims for the "Educational Benefits" of "Diversity"

Timeline
1990-1994 The U-M Office of Multicultural and Academic Affairs begins a series of lengthy student surveys about racial and other student experiences on U-M campuses, at the director of new (1988-89 inaugration) President James J. Duderstadt, as part of his larger Michigan Mandate program on race.  The study is called the Michigan Student Study (MSS).
1992. An interim report of preliminary conclusions from first two years of surveys is written.  This preliminary report is later cited by Patricia Gurin in her 1999 expert testimony in Gratz v. Bollinger.  Some questions on the final year questionnaire  to students are changed.
May 24, 1994 Executive Summary, The Michigan Study Project, Office of Academic and Multicultural Affairs, Retreat for the Committee on a Multicultural University. Photos taken by author in Bentley Historical Library, James J. Duderstadt collection in a PDF file [for bandwidth purposes, updated to include an internal link to only an archived PDF version, downloaded from CIR]  Files as received by Plaintiffs' counsel sometime in 1998-1999, UMA 017529 - UMA 017551 here in .pdf format. Documents are the first final analyses after collection of all the data points from the Michigan Student Study (MSS). Plaintiffs were not aware they even possessed these documents (or of their importance) until claiming they didn't in May 2003, and then retracting their statement the following day.  However, despite this error, U-M never fully released these documents to the public, the plaintiffs never received Gurin's raw data despite repeated requests, and in her 1999 expert testimony to the Gratz district court Gurin did not cite the summary or its attachments showing contradictory conclusions in her bibliography or required testimony of sources. The 1994 summary concludes that blacks felt "stigmatized" increasingly over time on campus, that race relations "increasingly polarized," and that raw numerical diversity alone does not yield educational benefits.
June 20, 1994 memo to Vice Provost from Assistant Vice Provost ORDERING SELECTIVE DATA WITHHOLDING from those whose projects "clash" with U-M's goals, .jpg format.  Page 1 / Page 2.
1996 Professor of Philosophy Carl Cohen discovers through FOIA the Michigan "grid system" giving quantifiable preferences to minorities. Dr. Cohen's work is the first public proof of the extent of Michigan's race preference program, which had been kept under wraps until this point. Cohen's work becomes widely published, and in the wake of Hopwood v. Texas and California's Prop 209 passage, state legislators seek to make Michigan the next test case.
1997 Center for Individual Rights and attorneys file Gratz v. Bollinger et al and Grutter v. Bollinger et al.  Michigan promptly changes admissions system to a "points system," but admits both the new points system and grid system give quantifiable preference to minorities.
1998 Website version of the Michigan Student Study (MSS) Executive Summary is constructed, co-authored by Gerald Gurin (Pat Gurin's husband, and now a retired psychology professor). This summary focuses on different data and comes to much more positive conclusions
1999 Dr. Patricia Gurin (Psychology Professor, at the time Interim Dean of the LS&A School, U-M's largest sub-school)  files a written expert testimony report of the Michigan Student Study and other data concluding a "remarkable consistency" among the data showing the educational benefits of diversity.  Gurin's research only reports the students internal beliefs that they personally experience less racism over time, and correlates this to increased "diversity experiences."  Gurin ignores the data her husband wrote about in 1994 about students' external beliefs of increased "campus racism" over time, and fails to account for both response set and attribution bias (the tendency to under-report internal problems and overreport external problems). Gurin's expert testimony cites the 1992 summary of the partially done MSS study, but fails to cite the 1994 summary of the completed MSS study. Some argue that Gurin had an "affirmative duty" to cite all material she relied upon in her expert testimony sources section.  Gurin has never denied she had access to this report, only that it wasn't relevant to her claims. Indeed, U-M produced it in discovery, but Gurin's failure to cite it as related to her testimony is one reason (as is the fact that it was among tens of thousands of other documents) that Plaintiffs overlooked it, and meant that outside peer reviewers, the public, and media never had a chance to review it or correlate its relevance to the Michigan Study or the expert testimony.
February 2003 Author requests through FOIA several files related to affirmative action from 1993-1994 boxes of former President James Duderstadt's "restricted access" archives.  Author had requested other Duderstadt documents since 1997, but all were older based on an older index. After publishing to the internet less sensitive and older affirmative action documents (showing how socioeconomic alternatives were ignored) from a request in early 2000, Bentley expanded the scope and length of its restrictions on U-M records (from the President and one VP to all top-level administrators and from 10 years to 20 years). Fran Blouin, Bentley's director, revealed just recently that this 2000 publication by the author partially caused the policy change.
March 19, 2003 FOIA officer clears portions of folders for release, withholding more than 30 documents.
March 23, 2003 Author receives letter notifying him of this clearance.  Filing deadlines for submission of amicus briefs expire.
March 27, 2003 Author discovers key executive summary, realizing it contradicts U-M research claims and that it is important. The version discovered, from Duderstadt's more limited holdings, however doesn't have authorship or surrounding documents from which to glean the authors.
March 31, 2003 Author arrives in Washington D.C., both to experience the historic oral arguments and disseminate his contradictory research discovery.
April 1, 2003 Oral arguments before Supreme Court at 10am.  Printed press release on contradictory research (no link to Gurin) distributed to media in D.C. on the steps of S.C. Author appears on Flint, MI ABC TV, but contradictory research claims are not aired in favor of author's opinion about socio-economic alternatives.  At dinner, author hears Gurin's name in audiotapes of oral arguments and recognizes it from seeing the 1998 website claims. Author begins to realize the full scope of the story and a need to obtain further information.
April 2, 2003 Detroit News runs photo of author on steps of Supreme Court, with no mention of contradictory research (but comments on socio-economic alternatives).  Ann Arbor News includes several paragraphs about author's visit to D.C. and one sentence citing alleged contradictory research.
April 5, 2003  Author files a FOIA request with U-Michigan seeking all of the "raw data" for the Michigan Student Study.
April 4-15, 2003 Author discovers a second copy of Executive Summary in Vice Provost for Multicultural and Academic Affairs (files ironically finished processing for public release in April 2003), with 160 additional background documents.  Author learns that Patricia Gurin's husband co-authored 1994 summary, that he was given credit for assisting in 1999 expert testimony, and that he co-wrote an "updated" 1998 version of the 1994 summary.  The 1994 original summary comes to mixed conclusions on the "educational benefits of diversity," indicating some positive and negative effects.  The 1998 and 1999 reports, based on the same scientific data, coming only to glowing conclusions about the positive effects of diversity.
April 16-22, 2003 Press Release disseminated with an outline of the above facts.
April 24, 2004  Publication to AADAP national e-mail listserve draft version of story later to become Wall St. Journal article.
Late April 2003 Author discovers among the 160 documents, and after detailed review, a document planning how to keep MSS data under control and out of public light.  Author receives official U-M FOIA denial of the "raw data" behind the MSS, and this denial becomes as much the story as the contradictory results outlined by the 1994 document.  Indeed, it is the author's personal view that the FOIA denial directly resulted in the Wall Street Journal coverage, and with no doubt the Detroit News editorial to follow (which focused only on the concealment of data). If the data had been released, the author would have been hard pressed to do anything with it before June 23rd.  On the other hand, if the data were released and experts found a more serious flaw, some other unknowable sequence of events could have occurred.
May 1, 2003 Science Without Peer Review! Specific Plan to Withhold and "Revamp" Data Uncovered. "U-Michigan FOIA Officer Officially Denies Public Access to the Dataset Supporting Expert Testimony Submitted to U.S. Supreme Court." Posted to website. By this time, hundreds of individuals are "following" the story, although only a few from major media.
May 14, 2003 Private e-mail Michigan Response to Lying to Supreme Court? by Julie Peterson, Director, U-Michigan News and Information Service.  Peterson only prepared this knowing that a major publication was imminent. Peterson had already fended off several local media inquiries by this time.
May 16, 2003 Wall Street Journal opinion analysis The Evidence of Things Not Seen is published.
May 16, 2003 INDEPENDENT QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS, Diversity Distorted, of over 160 documents sent by author to Dr. Robert Lerner and Dr. Althea Nagai and their CEO publication (PDF), is published, later in the day. Nagai and Lerner had been working on this for about a week.
May 18, 2003 Rebuttal of overall charges by Julie Peterson.
May 19, 2003 The Point by Point Response to Critique of U-M Diversity Research. by John Matlock and Gerald Gurin, authors of the questioned reports.
May 22, 2003 U-M Denies FOIA Appeal. Published to website. Contains expert testimony requirements law and excerpts from plaintiffs' documents. Copy of e-mail to author denying "FOIA Appeal."  "...the data set in its entirety has never been released and remains the intellectual property of the investigators and the University."
May 22, 2003 Open Letter to the Editor to the Wall Street Journal by Paul Courant, Provost-Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs published to U-Michigan website - later to be published by Journal on June 9..
May 28, 2003   NAT Hentoff and LINDA CHAVEZ write syndicated columns.
May 29, 2003 The Detroit News Editorial agreeing data should be released under FOIA, despite reiterating its strong support for U-M diversity policy.
June 2, 2003  Courant: Challenge to diversity evidence is unfounded. by Laurel Thomas Gnagey, The University Record, Page 1, Lead story.
June 8, 2003   Thomas Bray, editorializes on Gurin in his Detroit News column.
June 9, 2003 Roger Clegg, of the Center for Equal Opportunity, writes against Bad Science in the U-M case National Review Online.
June 9, 11, 2003 The Wall Street Journal  'letters exchange" 'June 9, 2003, U-M's letter to the editor. Author's response ran June 11.
June 19, 2003 Zarko speech to Board of Regents.
June 23, 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger. 900K pdf  Gratz v. Bollinger. 850K .pdf.
June 24, 2003 O'Connor Gives "Deference" to Flawed Social Science! Published to website.
July 21, 2003 Diversity Science Beyond Review.  Letter to editor, The University Record. by Chetly Zarko.
July 28, 2003 National Review (Print), Diversity, D'oh. by John Miller.  Page 1.  Page 2.
Aug 5, 2003 U-M releases additional notes on policy for release of datasets, ironically priority is now given to "underutilized" (a nice description of the problem) parts of dataset. Newly released FOIA material shows multiple efforts by the U-M information office to prevent author's publications from reaching print by portraying it as outrageous (in an of itself to be expected and appropriate), without substantively rebutting the arguments.  Most local media bought into this, and e-mail shows a clear "working relationship" between U-M information and local papers.  One local reporter betrays his/her personal bias by writing an e-mail back wondering why "they" (as if author was part of the CIR conspiracy) would "wait until now" (May 16) to "attack" Gurin's science (quite simply, because CIR didn't focus on the science, and neither I or the public knew about it until it was too late). To maintain my own working relationship with local papers, I won't name names here. All major local papers with beat reporters covering U-M editorialized on U-M's behalf generally against CIR since 1997, but none wrote a news report on the Wall Street Journal publication (clearly top of page local news). The Ann Arbor News finally relented on its news page only after CIR issued a press release endorsing the author and specifically accused (inaccurately) U-M of withholding the 1994 document. Only the Detroit News had the journalistic integrity to run an editorial decrying the continuing secrecy of the raw dataset (despite maintaining its reasoned editorial support for U-M diversity policy) and allow a columnist (Tom Bray) to write an op-ed generally endorsing the Wall Street Journal piece and stating his personal opposition to race preferences.

UPDATES AND MISCELLANEOUS

Reverse Chrono, as of Oct. 29, 2003  In the form it was originally posted on the web (minus photos to preserve load times).

October 29, 2003. An original exclusive: September Affirmative Action Panel at U-M Reveals First Amendment Problems with  "New" Policy in Wake of Grutter and Gratz Decisions.
Essays must be "risky, but not too risky," scientist intentionally witheld contrary regression data.

ANN ARBOR, MI  -  by Chetly Zarko
On September 17, 2003 a public panel discussion was convened by the University of Michigan administration. The panel participants were all University administrators or researchers who have taken public positions in favor of race preferences. They made various statements that call into question the real nature of change since June, raise first amendment questions related to the weighting of the new essay admissions system, and lead to questions about veracity of previous statements by the same individuals.

The panel, titled Affirmative Action Rulings:  How Will They Impact Our Campus was recently replayed on local cable. The videotapes provide a veritable goldmine of priceless quotes.  The author attended this panel in September after requesting in writing that the University balance the discussion by including some of the known opponents of race preferences, but was told the purpose of the panel was strictly "informational." (Perhaps even more reason to include an alternative viewpoint) The information was designed to address issues related to the legal decisions and the August 28th announcement of a new "holistic" admissions policy relying heavily on essay questions related to a prospective student's "diversity contribution."

Theodore Spencer, Director, Undergraduate Admission, had a remarkable thing to say when asked by an audience member later in the session to more precisely define what the evaluative criteria in the new "holistic" process was.  "We will look for them [essay writers] to take a bit of risk, but we don't want them to take too much risk to where they can offend the reader or someone else.  We will look for all those kinds of things that the U still feels are important ... The only thing we've done ... we've rearranged them so that ... they are no longer given points ..."  So there you have it, a prima facie admission that the content of the essay will be judged on unconstitutional grounds ("offensiveness"), and that the point system's values have not been changed ("the only thing we've done ... rearranged them") except to take off the quantifications.  This statement was perhaps the most remarkable of the evening.

Earlier in the session, Dean of Students and co-moderator Edward Willis kicked off the question and answer session with a prepared question to each panelist.  Willis began with a question to Professor Emerita Patricia Gurin, in clear reference to an opinion analysis this author had written for The Wall Street Journal on May 16th. That piece had criticized Gurin for making rosy claims about a dataset she used, when her husband had co-authored an executive summary 5 years earlier reporting a very 'mixed bag' of conclusions, including that racial tension actually increased on campus over a student's four years, that blacks self-segregated, and that numerical diversity alone had no effect (without 'diversity classes'). The Journal piece also criticized U-M for withholding under FOIA the raw data that would have proved or disproved these concerns conclusively, and that scientists had been consistently refused access to this raw data.
   Willis asked, "Some opponents" say that the Michigan Student Study data [that she used in her 1999 expert testimony to the Court in Grutter] show "increased racial tension.  Are these arguments valid?"  Gurin, obviously expecting the question, immediately replied, almost with a laugh, "I want to make five points ... quickly." I remember thinking at the time that this was a bit of overkill, but then again, the charges against her research from many angles are quite serious. Gurin continued,  "the claim of increased tension ... has no way to be tested.  We don't have a baseline, before there was any race-conscious admissions policy. We have no real evidence about there was increased racial tension because race conscious policies or not."  Certainly, Gurin is quite correct about the lack of a baseline to compare against non racial admissions policies, but this criticism also affects the question of whether race conscious admissions have educational benefits, meaning that her expert testimony assertions had no baseline.  When you attack your critics, you must be careful not to do so with a double-edged sword. Of course, the dataset provides itself with a weak internal baseline, by comparing the freshman, sophomore, and senior year's questions (all of whom experienced the ongoing U-M system of diversity); and the hidden result never reported in Gurin's expert testimony is that perceived racial tension on campus actually increased from freshman to senior year. Her better defense could have been her second point, something U-M has stuck to since May.  She argued that the data show a difference between student perceptions of campus climate and students perceptions of their own relationships.  She admits that 25% (and increasing over time) of white students perceive campus tension, whereas only 1-7% (how precise!) of the same students perceive racial tension in their own lives.  Here's the kicker, and its a new insight into the study and Gurin's beliefs about it.  Gurin says the campus tension does not come racial diversity, comes from "it probably""graffiti" and the "media", but not from students interacting.  How does she know?  "We've tried to understand where the tension comes from ... none of the regressions work" in finding the answer.  This is a significant revelation.  Gurin just admitted that she and her group looked, and looked hard, for an answer to the troublesome data.  They ran regressions, none of which were reported to the Court or peer reviewers. They just couldn't find it.  So she's left with a "probably ... graffiti and the media", (this of course all ignores the failure to account for set response and attribution bias which could explain why perceptions of external reality and personal reality differ, but that is a more technical concern) but most significantly, she never reported the regressions that don't work to the Court.

An unexplained variable is certainly something the judge and world was entitled to know about. Given the new concession that she looked and experimented but couldn't find an answer, and never reported these regressions in her expert testimony; this author, now, for the first time, will make the assertion that Gurin committed academic fraud as defined by her profession's standards. I believe that Ms. Gurin's motivations may been sub-conscious, or that she firmly believed she was in the right, but very few people think of themselves as ill-motivated (the essence of attribution bias, BTW). Scientific integrity requires that one report the known weaknesses in one's own work.

Gurin's third, fourth, and fifth points all seem to blend into the same argument, that we should expect tension when we put different people together, and that the tension is perhaps good in creating an opportunity to overcome obstacles and pre-existing systemic differences (this "societal benefit" is far afield from the notion that there are "educational benefits" in diversity). This integrationist argument is correct of course - there is a benefit from the conflict diversity creates - but Gurin's husband concluded based upon the same dataset that African Americans were actually more likely to "self-segregate," and other University policies ("multicultural lounges" designed for specific groups, funding race-specific group activities, etc.) increase this segregation.

"Large Midwestern University".  How Michigan wanted to hide itself from the Michigan Student Study.  by Chetly Zarko.  August 5, 2003.
In a humorous footnote to the Evidence of Things Not Seen, Zarko Research has discovered "Data Use Policies and Procedures" written in May 1998 for the Michigan Student Study. Although probably not the first data policy for MSS, it does allow researchers to submit proposals for parts of the dataset, and gives priority to proposals for access to "underutilized" portions of the dataset (see Lerner and Nagai's analysis of Gurin's "underutilization" of legally relevant datapoints). John Matlock and Gerald Gurin retain exclusive jurisdiction and discretion under this policy to accept or deny proposals.  Most humorously, "individuals using the data should not, without permission, identify the University of Michigan as the institution that is being studied. They should use "large Midwestern research university" as the identifier." This document is a nice companion to the document reported on in Science Beyond Review, where Matlock writes to Vice Provost Monts declaring that he and Gerry would ensure no one whoses goals "clashed" with their own would get access to the data.

'Diversity' . . . D'oh! Some tactical stumbles on the way to the Michigan debacle.  by John J. Miller, National Review (Print), July 28, 2003.
Mentions the Gurin debacle in the context of a failed strategy by CIR in the Michigan case, and directly cites Zarko's Wall Street Journal piece as "reported in the press" (similar to a debate about the piece on Hannity and Colmes the day after the Court ruled in late June).   Here's some fair use quotes, which I might replace with the entire story when the issue is no longer on the newsstands.

"Conservatives who thought they were on the verge of a game-winning touchdown with the Michigan cases now find that they've thrown an interception-and the other team is sprinting down the field. ... The Hopwood case was won on pure law, with no mention of the social-science gobbledygook underpinning Michigan's key claim that diversity is essential to intellectual growth. ... They needed a new reason for being, and they got from Patricia Gurin, a Michigan psychology professor who produced a flurry of research on the supposed benefits of diversity in Ann Arbor.
    Gurin's conclusions have been picked apart in exhaustive critiques by the Center for Equal Opportunity and the National Association of Scholars and contradicted in separate research by political scientists Stanley Rothman, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Neil Nevitte. Yet Michigan's entire case rested on her claims.  Still, CIR believed Gurin's work was irrelevant.  "Whether diversity is a compelling state interest is a legal question, not an empirical one," says CIR's Levey. Questions of principle shouldn't play second fiddle to the soft claims of social science, after all. ... "I say this more in sadness than in anger, but CIR made a tactical error," says Peter Wood of Boston University.  "They should have confronted the diversity argument."  This would not have been difficult. Following the oral arguments in April, it was reported in the press that a University of Michigan survey of its own students show "diversity" having a negative impact on campus.  Naturally, this piece of information did not find its way into Michigan's court presentations.  It was briefly assumed by some that the university had suppresed the survey results-until administrators said they have provided the report to CIR years earlier.  "We had the material in our files," says Levey.  "We overlooked it."

Diversity Science Beyond Review.  Letter to The University Record.
by Chetly Zarko.  July 21, 2003.
The U-Record is the official publicity tool of the University of Michigan.  Despite other letters as long as 585 words, and despite its acceptance of a multitude of guest writings of tremendous length, the editor would not allow a longer rebuttal to her own news analysis on June 2 criticizing my Wall Street Journal article (she also never interviewed me for that piece).

O'Connor Gives "Deference" to Flawed Social Science!  Zarko analysis.
THE DECISIONS:  Grutter v. Bollinger. 900K pdf  Gratz v. Bollinger. 850K .pdf.  June 23, 2003.

June 19 Zarko speech to Board of Regents .
Regents should open up U-M scientific data used in court or public policy processes.

The ORIGINAL SOURCE material for the Wall Street Journal documented
ONLINE IN .pdf format (RECOMMENDED).

1994 DOCUMENT ORDERING DATA WITHHOLDING
from those whose projects "clash" with U-M's goals.  P-1 / P-2.

Over a 160 OTHER BACKGROUND DOCUMENTS are available on CD-ROM (this is the data analyzed by Dr. Lerner and Dr. Nagai in "DIVERSITY DISTORTED");
Based upon 5 of the 160  ---  Unattributed 'ATTRIBUTION BIAS'  Caution: 1 MB File.

NAT Hentoff and LINDA CHAVEZ write syndicated columns citing WSJ story.
Hentoff's piece is particularly on-point, and suggests socio-economic preferences.
Thomas BRAY argues against misused social science and critiques Gurin
in his Sunday, June 8, 2003 Detroit News column.
ROGER CLEGG, of the Center for Equal Opportunity,
writes against "Bad Science" in the U-M case in June 9 National Review Online.

May 29, THE DETROIT NEWS Editorial Board agrees
with FOIA data release, despite reiterating its strong support for U-M diversity policy.
The News finds the withholding of scientific data "unseemly" and U-M's credibility at stake.

The Wall Street Journal  'letters exchange' on
June 9, 2003, U-M's letter to the editor. My response ran June 11.

Dr. Robert Lerner and Dr. Althea Nagai support author's conclusions in an INDEPENDENT QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS of hundreds of supporting documents and their CEO publication (PDF).

Special Counsel to U-M President, Gary Krenz,
Officially Continues to Withhold Gurin's 'Diversity' Data from public.
Contains expert testimony requirements law and excerpts from plaintiffs documents. Copy of e-mail to author denying "FOIA Appeal."
"...the data set in its entirety has never been released and remains the intellectual property of the investigators and the University."

The Many Official Responses of U-M
First E-mail Official University of Michigan Response to the Lying to Supreme Court? Opinion Analysis
by Julie Peterson, Director, U-Michigan News and Information Service (May 14)

Rebuttal of overall charges
by Julie Peterson (May 18)

"The Point by Point Response to Critique of U-M Diversity Research"
by John Matlock and Gerald Gurin, author's of the questioned reports (May 19)

Open Letter to the Editor of the Wall Street Journal
by Paul Courant,  Provost-Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs (May 22)

Courant: Challenge to diversity evidence is unfounded
by Laurel Thomas Gnagey
The University Record, June 2, 2003. Page 1, Lead story.

Science Without Peer Review! May 1, 2003. 
Specific Plan to Withhold and "Revamp" Data Uncovered. U-Michigan FOIA Officer Officially Denies Public Access to the Dataset Supporting Expert Testimony Submitted to U.S. Supreme Court.