The leaders of 35 higher education organizations have sent President Bush a letter urging him to support Michigan’s use of racial preferences to promote diversity.
“Diversity” is not defined in the letter, and claims for its benefits are vastly overstated:
research findings show that the interactions diversity allows and institutional commitment to diversity are associated with success in college, growth in acceptance of people of different races, low racial tension, retention of minority students, and other educational benefits for white and minority students.
What I continue to find most striking, however, is the largely unchallenged claim that “[t]he freedom to pursue diversity is especially worthy of protection because diversity benefits all students.”
As I have argued here and here, whatever benefits derive from diversity are provided by the preferentially admitted minorities, not to them. They may well receive some benefit from being admitted to more selective institutions than they would have absent the racial preference they received (or course, they are also less likely to graduate), but the diversity benefit they receive cannot justify those preferences because the preferentially admitted minorities would have received the same diversity benefits at the less selective institutions they would otherwise have attended.
Not to put too fine a point on it, the elite institutions that offer racial preferences are using minorities to provide “diversity” to their non-minority students. In return, those students are allowed entry into institutions whose requirements would have excluded them if they had been judged by the same standards as the other students. This bargain may or may not be beneficial to the instiutions or to the preferentially admitted, i.e., differentially treated, minorities, but it is a fallacy to point to diversity benefits allegedly received by the preferred to justify the preferences extended to them. If “diversity” justifies racial discrimination, it is because of the benefits received by the non-minorities who are exposed to the preferentially admitted minorities. To claim otherwise is less than honest.
UPDATE – Two posts below I discussed how the Associated Press (and the Washington Post, which ran the AP story) badly misreported the case of Taxman v. Piscataway, which involved a school board using race as the sole criterion to fire a teacher in order to preserve faculty diversity.
The American Council on Education, joined by the same large host of familiar suspect educational organizations, filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court defending the race-based firing.
The higher education establishment has put all of its eggs in the diversity basket, and, it would appear, is willing to justify just about anything to achieve it, even firing someone based on nothing other than race. What is perhaps even more striking about its brief in this case, however, is its obliviousness. It refers on a number of occasions to the fact that racial preferences are designed to benefit whites by exposing them to minorities without recognizing the grating condescension to minorities this entails.
Some examples:
Students, particularly whites, who socialize across racial groups express greater satisfaction with the college experience…. (Emphasis added)
Thus, it has been shown that a person’s prejudice towards stigmatized groups, such as mental patients or people with AIDS, is lessened by personal contact with members of the group….
Such studies support earlier findings that the interactions made possible by diversity lessen prejudice….
Recruitment and retention of minority faculty members contributes to an “environment of racial tolerance and equality on our campuses,” by exposing non- minority students to minority faculty. (Emphasis added)
Of course, the brief also quotes studies purporting to show benefits to blacks from diversity.
Attendance at a racially mixed school affects decisions that students, both white and black, subsequently make concerning with whom they choose to work and socialize….
Blacks from racially diverse elementary schools are more likely to have white social contacts, live in integrated neighborhoods, and evaluate white co-workers positively….
[Ten] or 20 black students could not begin to bring
to their classmates and to each other the variety of
points of view, backgrounds and experiences of
blacks in the United States….
It is worth emphasizing, however, that none of these alleged benefits of diversity to the preferentially admitted blacks requires admission to highly selective institutions. If the University of Michigan were forced to abandon its race-based preferences and the minority students who would have been admitted under the abandoned program instead attended Michigan State Univ. or Eastern Michigan Univ. or Wayne State Univ. or Northern Michigan Univ., they would receive all the diversity-specific benefits they would have received in Ann Arbor. It is only the non-minority students at Michigan who would have experienced any loss.
In short, it is disingenuous to suggest — as virtually all the established higher education organizations do — that racial discrimination is justified at elite, selective institutions in order to provide otherwise unobtainable diversity benefits to the preferentially admitted minorities. If such discrimination is to be justified, it is only because of the benefits that accrue to the non-minorities from being exposed to the preferentially admitted minorities.
I don’t like the sound of that, and I’m continually surprised when others do.
I hope this doesn’t sound snotty but John, you’re being oblivious here. I think every supporter of “diversity” would say that black students admitted to U. Michigan instead of MSU or Wayne State are getting an advantage. Graduates of UM generally have more opportunities and make more money than graduates of the others.
The diversity supporters may believe this is because of better teachers, or more aggressive students to interact with, or contacts made, or just the fact that people think UM graduates are “smarter” or “better.” Whatever, they think minorities who go get an advantage.
This, of course, isn’t an advantage to the black students from diversity itself. It’s an advantage from going to a more selective school than they otherwise would.
White students may get the “advantages” of diversity but in return for giving these advantages black students get higher incomes and higher self-esteem (I got into UM!). I think that’s how many people in the “35 higher education organizations” see it.
Roger – I have received some snotty comments, and so please believe me when I say that yours is not one.
Now in my defense: I may be wrong in my argument, but I am not oblivious at all to the point you make. I specifically acknowledged that preferentially admitted minorities “may well receive some benefit from being admitted to more selective instiutions than they would have absent the preference they received.”
I certainly agree that, perhaps with certain exceptions for specialties at other places, in general attendance at the University of Michigan generally provides advantages not available at Wayne State, Northern Michigan, et. al. My point was that these advantages are not derived from diversity, since those other insitutions are every bit as diverse.
Racial preferences may be justified on many grounds, but the only ground that is being argued in the Supreme Court is diversity.
A bargain, in short, that admits less qualified minorities to selective institutions so that non-minorities may benefit from being exposed to them may well be justified (although I don’t think it is), but not based on the argument that it is necessary so that the preferentially admitted can benefit from diversity.
Okay.
So the argument is “Whites get the benefit from diversity; blacks get the benefit from going to a ‘better’ school. That’s fair. How could you say such a wonderful thing is unconstitutional?”
The argument is simple and emotionally appealing to a lot of people.
Roger – I dunno. I guess I’d be reduced to repeating the tired old former truism that discriminating on the basis of race is wrong.
Anyone who thinks this bargain fair should pause to consider that the benefits extended to minorities as payment for their providing the experience of diversity to whites are a byproduct, not the purpose, of the bargain. Proof of that can be found in school transfer policies, discussed here, where precisely the same “diversity” justification is used to prevent minorities from transferring to schools of their choice when doing so would reduce the “diversity” enjoyed by whites at their base schools.
The benefit a minority student gets from the perception that UM is an elite school is diminished by the widespread assumption that a minority student at an elite school probably didn’t belong there, and probably took a watered down curriculum specializing in grievance collection.
Another thing is the amazingly high drop-out/failure rate among minority students in elite schools with racial preference policies in operation. The more aggressive the preference policy, the higher the failure rate. Of those that do make it to graduation, only a depressing few make it in less than six years … for four year degrees … and a lot do so with truly atrocious GPAs. The prestige gained from graduating from an elite school is largely negated.
This little fact is something you will never see any preference proponents ever highlighting. Thousands of black students who could have graduated from a much less intense academic setting have had their life plans seriously derailed because they were put somewhere where they were in way over their heads. I’d sooner graduate from CSU Northridge than drop out from UC Berkeley. And I’d rather get a 3.4 from Northridge than a 2.4 from Berkeley.
It’s not that black students are less intelligent or even less diligent than students of other races. It’s primarily because the K-12 education recieved by a huge number of black children is incredibly substandard. Huge numbers of black high school graduates, even the best ones, are seriously underprepared for tertiary academics. Racial preferences are a band-aid on a serious deep flesh-wound. Ineffective at best, incredibly harmful at worst.
PS: I happen to be black.
Roger,
I think John is right on this one. It’s the disingenuousness that bothers me, at least. I doubt that anyone advocating “diversity” in education is primarily thinking of its beneficial effects on white and Asian students. I am not claiming that there are no such effects, but I have great difficulty believing that they are the actual point. The point is to benefit underrepresented-minority students, and the “diversity” line is Bakke-mandated boilerplate.
If universities were serious about exposing all students to a variety of viewpoints, they would do two things they haven’t done to my knowledge. They would try actually to measure the difference in “viewpoint” affirmative action has made; and they would use many factors that they haven’t. Parents’ occupation and parents’ religious affiliation come to mind. (I think it would be unfair to ask an applicant’s own religious beliefs, but parental affiliation would surely provide some sort of clue to upbringing, culture, “viewpoint”?)
If any university has shown the slightest interest in this sort of thing, I haven’t seen it. The closest things are the “geographical distribution” preferences that some schools have, and these (I think) long predate affirmative action, let alone “diversity” as an explicit goal.