Jacque Steinberg has a Week in Review article on affirmative action in today’s New York Times that is egregiously, outrageously snide, even for the New York Times.
According to Mr. Steinberg, the opposition to racial preferences is at bottom nothing more than the angry rage of disappointed, disgruntled whites who are furious that “their rightful places” at elite institutions, which they see as their “birthright,” are “being given to black and Hispanic students of lesser ability.”
Their anxiety
Funny how this Steinberg character brings up Harvard in the context of the U. Michigan case. As a private entity, Harvard won’t be bound by any precedent set in Bollinger anyway.
Good point. Given the way everyone responded to Bakke — with its limited use of race as one of many factors, as a tie-breaker in close cases — even the public universities might not act bound by Bollinger if it goes against them.
It is sad (and frightening) that the first response to any criticism of affirmative action is to personally demonize the person raising the criticism. Of course, that suggests to me that even proponents of affirmative action realize that they would have problems winning an argument “on the merits.”
Consider this (The New York Times certainly has not): The people who have benefitted the most from affirmative action are, surprise, surprise, the white male leaders of the institutions that adopt racial quotas for minorities, which in turn attract favorable attention from the media, which in turn leads to high six-figure salaries as presidents of elite colleges (see, e.g., Jeff Lehman and Lee Bollinger, moving on from Michigan to Cornell and Columbia, respectively). These upper class white men have never lost an opportunity or promotion to a reverse quota. The costs of their personal advancement are borne entirely by lower and middle class whites.