Well, I think we know now where our university president will stand on the University of Michigan case. From a Chronicle of Higher Education article that Dave just emailed me:

"The United States is home to 2,294 four-year colleges and universities. If we were to use a strict quota system for college presidents based on the percentage of Asian-Pacific Americans in the population (3.8 per cent in 1997), 87 of those institutions should be headed by Asian-Pacific Americans. If we were to base our quota system on the representation of Asian-Pacific Americans on college faculties and professional staffs (4 per cent), then there should be 92 presidents from among our ranks. In fact, there are 13. That is about one-half of 1 per cent.

In 1997 the California State University system�s 22 campuses had 276,054 undergraduates, of whom 53,895, or 19.5 per cent, were Asian-Pacific Americans. Based on that representation, you might expect to see four Asian-Pacific American presidents in the system. You�d be wrong. If you were to simply to use the percentage of Asian-Pacific Americans in the overall population of California-11.8 per cent-you might expect to see two or three Asian-Pacific American presidents. Wrong again. There is one.

While nearly one in five students in California State University system is an Asian-Pacific American, only one in 22 presidents is. Something is wrong with that picture.

Yeah, what's wrong with that picture is that you're spending more time counting up racial groups than you're spending telling students what will happen to their tuition or dealing with the fact that 32% of students in a survey think your university has a somewhat or very unfavorable image? (see table 31)