Brent Staples’ column in the NYT today is entitled “What the United States Army Teaches Us About Affirmative Action.” As a columnist, Staples is certainly not all he could be. What the Army’s experience with affirmative action teaches is not at all what Staples seems to have learned.
Here’s the money quote:
But it is far from clear what the White House will do when the Supreme Court hears the University of Michigan affirmative action case this year. Mr. Bush has struggled to erase the image of the Republican Party as a haven for bigots. But will he tackle right-wing ideologues who want to kill a program that does for Michigan what he did for Texas?
Nothing really surprising here. In Staples’ view, indeed in the entire world of the New York Times editorial offices (that is the entire world, isn’t it?), all who oppose preferences based on race are “right-wing ideologues.”
But I guess I haven’t entirely lost my ability to be shocked by the NYT view of the world. Call me naive, but I just don’t see how anyone, even Staples or a NYT editor could regard the race-neutral Texas Plan of offering college admission to the top 10% of each high school’s graduating class with Michigan’s program of awarding clear and convincing preferences based overtly on race.
Money quote No. 2:
The core principle behind affirmative action is that excluding black people undermines civic harmony and runs counter to American ideals.
No, what “undermines civic harmony and runs counter to American ideals” is assigning benefits or burdens based on race. The core principle behind affirmative action, as it is now practiced, is that proportional representation is so important that, if necessary, standards must be different for different groups in order to achieve it. Or at least for some groups.
Staples correctly describes how affirmative action has worked in the army — by taking strong measures to ensure that discrimination does not corrupt merit in the promotion process, “that race would no longer be an obstacle to promotion” — and he equally correctly concludes that this is “affirmative action in its purest, most elemental form.” (He could have said, but did not: this is how affirmative action was originally understood.)
He goes off the predictable deep end, however, in suggesting that affirmative action as practiced in the army has anything in common with racial preferences as practiced at Michigan and other campuses across the country. “Loaded terms such as “quotas” and “reverse discrimination,” Staples writes, “have made it all but impossible to see affirmative action as a constructive and vitally important policy for the United States.”
No. It’s not “loaded terms” that have made it “impossible to see” that affirmative action is constructive. It is the actual practice of employing quotas and reverse discrimination that have converted affirmative action into something that is destructive.
UPDATE – One other thing that bugged me about Staples’ column that, in my haste, I neglected to mention is his use of the treacly euphemism, “race-sensitive admissions.” The commonly used “race-conscious” is bad enough; the problem is not that “race-conscious” admissions is conscious of race but that it discriminates based on race. It’s not the consciousness that offends principle; it’s the action. “Race-sensitive” is even worse, implying as it does that to oppose benefits or burden based on race is to be insensitive. I think the country would be much better off with less sensitivity to race.
I’m not sure that I agree that schools should not take race into account at all in admissions decisions. I would not be troubled if they used it as a “tie-breaker”, all other things being equal. Not that I can offer a reasoned legal argument for why this would be constitutional, it just wouldn’t offend my sense of fairness.
I guess the problem is the temptation to fudge on the “all other things being equal” part in order to justify favoring the minority candidate. After all, Michigan could claim that’s all it’s done – taken a group of black and white students, all of whom are “equal” in the sense of being able to do the work at the school (notwithstanding the hundred to two hundred point differences on the LSAT), and given a tie breaker to the black candidates. However, that claim would be plainly dishonest since white students with SAT scores as low as the black applicants were tossed out of the pile altogether.
Doug – I think yours is a quite sensible reaction. At the very least, using race as a real tie-breaker in close cases would certainly be less bothersome than how it is in fact being used now. I think the problem for many of us comes with the arguments — legal, political, moral — that one would have to offer to support such a practice when it was challenged.
Doug,
If your method was being used, it wouldn’t be an issue. Unfortunately, it is far far far worse:
IU Law School Admissions
Doug the problem I see with your proposal is the way it’s implemented. Should a black student from a wealthy family get a preference over a white student from a poor family? What about over an Asian immigrant? If you try to factor all those things in you’re again trying to put quantitative values on subjective experiences and you’re right back to where you started. Advocates of affirmative action use the term ‘qualified’ to blur these distinctions and to arrive at a situation where they can claim that all things are equal but they really aren’t. In Boston the Boston Latin School used to have a set aside for 35% of Freshman admissions to go to ‘qualified’ minority students. In the case that overturned this the girl that was not admitted was passed over 107 times in a class of 400 kids. The defense claimed that all of these kids were ‘qualified’ so therefore deserved an equal chance of being admitted and only then was their race a factor and that was acceptable. Reason would say that 107 of the qualified minority kids were not as qualified as the child who was bypassed but as soon as you try to put subjective factors in there then there is no difference.