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DURHAM — Black students at Duke University are angry over a university research paper that found African-American undergraduates at the school are disproportionally more likely to switch from tough majors to easier ones.
“The implications and intentions of this research at the hands of our very own prestigious faculty, seemingly without a genuine concern for proactively furthering the well-being of the black community is hurtful and alienating,” wrote the officers of Duke’s Black Student Alliance in an email sent to the state NAACP.
The letter from Nana Asante, president of the alliance, challenged the faculty members involved in the research and the university administration to consider “what image has this … report portrayed to the rest of the country, namely our peer institutions, about Duke and its black students?”
The unpublished report, “What Happens After Enrollment? An Analysis of the Time Path of Racial Differences in GPA and Major Choice,” looked at the Duke freshman classes that matriculated in 2001 and 2002, in their first, second and fourth years of college.
It found that among students who initially expressed an interest in majoring in economics, engineering and the natural sciences, 54 percent of black men and 51 percent of black women ended up switching to the humanities or another social science.
By comparison, 33 percent of white women and just 8 percent of white men made the switch to majors that are considered less rigorous, require less study and have easier grading standards.
According to the paper, 68 percent of Duke’s black students but less than 55 percent of white students ended up majoring in the humanities or social sciences other than economics.
The authors of the paper suggested that the switch to easier majors was predominantly responsible for why the grade point averages of black undergraduates ultimately became similar to the GPAs of white students as they progressed through school.
The paper is included in a brief submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court by opponents of affirmative action. The court is considering whether to hear a lawsuit challenging race-conscious undergraduate admission at the University of Texas.
The paper’s authors — professors Peter Arcidiacono and Kenneth Spenner, and graduate student Esteban Aucejo — write that their work calls into question other studies that play down the academic difficulties initially experienced by those who benefit from race-conscious admissions by saying that such students eventually catch up with their nonminority peers in GPA.
Instead, the findings suggest that “attempts to increase representation [of minorities] at elite universities through the use of affirmative action may come at a cost of perpetuating underrepresentation of blacks in the natural sciences and engineering,” the paper says.
In responding to the paper, which also found similar results for students of alumni, who also get extra consideration in admissions, Asante wrote that the authors failed “to account for the societal, complex and institutional factors that must be considered in any attempt to delineate trends in racial differences in grade point averages and major choices, in a scholarly manner.”
The BSA officers, in the letter, ask what “acknowledgement or intervention took place, in the best interests of black students” by the university administration when the results of the research were known.
They also extended “an invitation to the authors of this research to engage in a dialogue that addresses our concerns about research’s intent, methodology, analysis and conclusion, in addition to its validity.”
