Jacques Steinberg’s article in the NYT’s Week in Review today, “The New Calculus of Diversity on Campus,” contains numbers that present an unusually clear picture (especially for the New York Times; did it have a guest editor today?) of the extent of discrimination that is carried out on some campuses in the name of diversity, particularly discrimination against Asians. At the same time, those practices are described in obfuscating, euphemistic terms, perhaps revealing that even those who support discriminatory preferences fear that describing them clearly would lead to their rejection by the public.
First, some numbers:
In California, where Asians make up 11 percent of the general population, the gains were also striking after the state ended traditional affirmative action in the late 1990’s and adopted a system similar to that of Texas.
At Berkeley, the percentage of the freshman class that was Asian-American rose 6 percentage points, to 45 percent, in 2001. Over the same period, the percentage of the class that was black fell by three percentage points, to 4 percent; the percentage that was white dropped by one percentage point, to 29 percent; and the percentage that was Hispanic fell by six percentage points, to 11 percent.
….
When [the University of Michigan] assembled its class for the fall of 1999, the law school accepted only one of the 61 Asian-Americans, or 2 percent, who were ranked in the middle range of the applicant pool, as defined by their grades and test scores, according to court filings. The admission rate for whites with similar grades and scores was 3 percent.
But among black applicants with similar transcripts, 22 out of 27, or 81 percent, were offered admission.
Several things stand out here. First, at Berkeley, often a prime exhibit of the “resegregation” that will occur if racial preferences are ended, the percentage of blacks in the freshman class dropped only 3%. In the heated rhetoric of the preferentialists, a freshman class with 7% blacks is presumably integrated but one with 4% is resegregated. The same observation can be applied to the Hispanic drop at Berkeley from 17% with preferences to 11% without. Since the Asian percentage increased by 6%, it seems clear that the lament about Berkeley is not about any decline in “diversity” but simply anger at the elimination of preferences as a method of promoting a more appealing racial balance.
At Michigan, on the other hand, the numbers reveal the extreme heaviness of the thumb on the racial scale.
The presence of these glaringly clear numbers serves to make the euphemistic quality of the terms in which they are discussed even more obvious. Texas, for example, was not barred “from practicing affirmative action”; it was barred from discriminating on the basis of race. Similarly, Steinberg says that Michigan “practices race-conscious admissions in a typical way, with admissions officers considering applicants’ test scores and grades, as well as their backgrounds.” But the issue is not “race consciousness” or “considering” test scores, grades, and background. What else would they consider? The issue is a blatant racial double standard. Similarly, Steinberg writes,
Michigan, like other selective colleges, defends the lift given to black applicants, as well as to Hispanics, for two main reasons: to level the playing field for what it calls underrepresented minorities, who might not have the educational advantages of many whites and Asians, and to enhance the educational experience of all students by immersing them in a diverse environment.
The numbers presented by Steinberg suggest something a bit more dramatic than “a lift.” Race-based preferences, in any event, are not a rising tide that lifts all boats — an image suggested by the constant assurance that they “enhance the educational experience of all students by immersing them in a diverse environment — but a benefit given to applicants of a few selected groups that imposes a burden on all others. I have already criticized (here) the argument that diversity benefits the preferred, since they would experience the same or more diversity at the institutions they would have attended if they had not been preferred at Michigan or other elite schools. Minorities are admitted to Michigan to provide diversity, not to themselves, but to the whites and Asians who will be exposed to them.
If hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, then obfuscation is the tribute those who violate principles pay to the principles they violate.
asians overwhelmingly voted against proposition 209. so are they really intelligent or just honorary whites?
Cobb – Neither. Just misguided. But at least their overwhelming vote against 209 (61%) wasn’t as overwhelming as that of blacks (74%) or Hispanics (76%).
You missed the best quote in the article, “[Evelyn Hu-DeHart] added: ‘Let Asians compete freely with white students.’ ”
That quote is indicative of the prevailing liberal view, that there is something about Asians that enables them to freely compete. But that attitude prejudiced against Blacks and Hispanics, as it says that Blacks and Hispanics can’t freely compete against whites (and Asians). Don’t people see that is a racist attitude?
The problem with lumping Asians together is that the child of a VietNamese boat person is considered the same as the son of 4th generation Chinese professionals.
But that’s no different from considering a 4th generation American of Spanish ancestry the same as a recent immigrant from Guatemala for “Hispanic” preference purposes. All of this simply is additional evidence of the virtual impossibility of making reasonable distinctions among people based on race or ethnicity.
Without getting into the cause, or whether it’s a problem, a drop of 7% black to 4% is better though of as 3/7 ~ 43% than 3%. I realize the ambiguities of the English language make the latter phrasing correct, but it distorts the picture.
From 1933 to 1946 the percentage of Jews in Europe fell from about 2.5% to 0.6%. Only a 1.9% drop?
Andrew – I’m aware, of course, that a drop of blacks in the freshman class from 7% to 4% of the class is a drop of 43% (assuming your aritmetic is correct!) I can understand why some think that means the sky fell. In my view, that reaction — based largely on describing the decline as one of 43% rather than the equally accurate drop from 7% to 4% — overstates its significance.
John, was the 1.9% drop in the percentage of Europeans who were Jewish 1939-46 significant? (Yes. Very.) I think you have a great argument that the AA programs eliminated by Prop. 209 were not the best available (e.g., in comparison to class-based programs), a fair-or-better argument that these programs are unconstitional, but really no argument about the significance of black enrollment in the UC system being cut nearly in half.
Let me approach this another way. You often point out that whatever the merits of “legacy” and other preferential admissions, there isn’t a consitutional question, as there is with race. But if “legacy” admissions are so great, and they certainly benefited the current President of the United States, then maybe we should be uniting behind a constitutional amendment to permit race-based AA. Note, I am not presenting this entirely seriously. I am presenting this to give you a sense of the frustration that the left-behind must feel seeing this strange approval of preferential programs only when they work against them.
Andrew – As I’m sure you’re aware, the number of blacks “in the UC system” were not cut nearly in half. That was only at Berkeley (and close at UCLA). The system didn’t change that much, only the two flagships, and now they’ve returned close to where they were before.
Re legacies etc., as I think I’ve probably mentioned I’m not a big fan of legacy preferences (or athletic, or musical, or whatever) at schools that pretend to be, or are, academically elite. It’s just that those preferences don’t raise constitutional issues. But I can easily understand why non-legacies/athletes/musicians/etc. resent them. It is only recently, after all, that Jews could be legacies in any numbers from Ivy League schools, and yet almost everyone would recognize that a preference for Jews would have been an inappropriate remedy.
well, i don’t doubt that asians were misguided. everyone in california was misguided about prop 209; the politics focused on ‘quotas’ and ‘asians at berkeley’.
and yes asians were and continue to be misrepresented as racially superior to whites, especially by those who get their jollies beating up blacks and latinos. so yes i was offended and continue to see that thread of racist reasoning in anti-affirmative action activism.
one of these days, there is going to be a story about some poor chinese kid who commits suicide because he dropped below a 3.75 gpa knowing he couldn’t be socially accepted any other way. this is just the other side of the same coin thrown at blacks about ‘acting white’.
Cobb,
I don’t think that anyone in the affirmative-action debates is representing Asians as “racially superior to whites.” The argument is and always has always been that there is a cultural superiority — that Asian-American students simply work harder and take studies more seriously than do white students.
Look, the phenomenon is there, and anyone can see it; at Berkeley, under a race-blind admissions regimen, black and white students are underrepresented by just about the same fraction, and Asian-American students are overrepresented by a factor of four or five. If you are not attributing this to genes, you have no choice but to attribute it to culture, because the median income difference between white and Asian-American families in CA is too small to bother about.
Your hypothetical Chinese student who kills himself over a bad grade existed; he was a Chinese national, a student at Boalt if I remember correctly, and he committed suicide rather than explain to his father that he had failed an exam. This was in the late 80s, I think, when I was at UCB.
I have seen cruel parental pressure, and I’m not saying it’s harmless. But equating a pressure from one’s parents to learn, to study, to do one’s best with a pressure from ones peers to slack off (because actually learning anything is “acting white”) as “two sides of the same coin” is sick.