Branch Rickey, Affirmative Action and 'Merit' in Baseball\nand Education
Bibliographic record
Abstract
When General Manager Wesley Branch Rickey broke Organized Baseball’s longstanding color barrier on October 23, 1945, by signing Jackie Robinson to a contract to play for the Montreal Royals, a minor league affiliate of the Brooklyn Dodgers, Rickey catalyzed the movement for racial justice. Millions of people saw, heard, and read about black and white men playing side-by-side. Integrating the national pastime helped challenge segregationist norms across the land, facilitating the integration of military troops and public schools soon thereafter.\nRickey’s stirring call in his 1956 Atlanta address to judge people on their merits rather than their pigmentation still resonates for leaders of another revered American institution—higher education. For the past half- century, universities have considered whether, why, and how race ought to play a role in selective admissions processes. The argument has moved past ending and redressing the wrongs of excluding racial minorities to focus on the benefits of including them, with universities arguing that racially diverse student bodies advance their educational missions.\nI was dean- in-waiting of Rickey’s alma mater, the University of Michigan Law School, when a legal challenge to our race- conscious admissions policy went all the way to the Supreme Court. In Grutter v. Bollinger, 3 the Court upheld our policy, concluding that racially diverse student bodies both help students to learn more from each other and help prepare them to succeed in a multicultural world so they can better serve the needs of society.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.012 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.018 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".