Murtaugh's selective memory Murtaugh harkens back to our first meeting, but it seems that he's suffering from an attack of selective memory. He says (my emphasis):

I'm reminded of my long-ago first dust-up with Godless Capitalist, over whether or not the Berkeley linguist John McWhorter depended on affirmative action to get to where he is today. Both men[1] are eminently qualified for their positions, and it's risible to suggest that either one was given their job "over the heads" of more-qualified white applicants. Nonetheless, they may have enjoyed an advantage over equally-qualified whites, because of our absurd obsession over race. (This is a point I tried to make in a follow-up post about McWhorter.)

As I recall, I demolished this contention pretty thoroughly:

Dr. Murtaugh has a response up to the substance of my comments on McWhorter. He says, despite the fact that McWhorter has admitted himself to be a beneficiary of affirmative action:

I don't think the evidence is strong enough to disprove the null hypothesis that McWhorter didn't need whatever benefits he may have obtained from affirmative action.

Very well. I don't think the evidence can get much stronger than the following history of Dr. McWhorter's career, courtesy of Stuart Buck's comment on the Jane Galt post:

On pages 247-54 of the paperback edition of his book Losing the Race, McWhorter describes how affirmative action played a part in his admission to the Stanford linguistics program, his receipt of a minority fellowship there, his post-doctoral fellowship at Berkeley dedicated to minorities, and his initial hiring by the Cornell Linguistics Department.

For the sake of argument, let's stretch the bounds of credibility by pretending that McWhorter got no affirmative action consideration in his Stanford admission and his Cornell appointment. After all, this can't be definitively proven due to the deplorable secrecy of the affirmative action process. Let's simply focus on the funding that he obtained simply by dint of being black. If McWhorter had shown merit, he would have been able to get "real" linguistics fellowships like the (non-minority) ones awarded by NSF. "Underrepresented" minority fellowships are simply less competitive. To be blunt, they're race-normed consolation prizes awarded to people who can't hang with the big boys. Most academics don't get second chances when it comes to funding decisions, especially early in their careers. Therefore, even if McWhorter didn't benefit from affirmative action in his hiring at Berkeley, he most certainly would not have been in an academic position without minority set asides. Case closed.

It seems clear that McWhorter wouldn't have his job at Berkeley without affirmative action; he owed his admission, his fellowship, his post-doc, and his initial appointment to lower standards. Race was not a tiebreaker - it was the deciding factor in every one of those decisions. [1] Here Murtaugh is referring to Tyrone Willingham, the new head coach of Notre Dame's football team. Willingham has a trip to the Rose Bowl on his resume and a 44-35 record at Stanford. While the fact that Willingham is black is useful for PR purposes, the truth is that Willingham is an excellent coach who would deserve his position even without affirmative action. Willingham - unlike McWhorter - actually proved his merit in the unforgiving "real world" of college football. His experience as a coach was far more similar to that of a professor in the natural sciences than it was to a professor of the humanities, because Willingham had to deal with such inconvenient trifles as "facts" and "reality". McWhorter, on the other hand, has spent most of his academic career in ethnic studies, perhaps the most sheltered and benighted of academic ghettos. As I've said before:

I suppose, then, that my objection is to the humanities in general - or to what they've become. I consider Stanley Fish and Estelle Freedman to be just as bad as Cornel West. The only thing that sets ethnic studies and feminist studies below the rest is that they can cry "racism" or "sexism" whenever they're under attack by those who know their work to be rubbish. Thus black scholars in African-American studies are held to an even lower standard than Stanley Fish. While postmodernists are open to criticism from the mainstream, ethnic studies professors are simply invulnerable. The Cornel West affair is, obviously, a case in point. This invulnerability leads in practice to a complete lack of standards. It is for this reason that ethnic studies is worthy of singular disdain.