Diversity Is As Diversity Does

The more “diversity” is examined in detail, the clearer it becomes that in practice it is not nearly as pretty as in theory. The latest evidence comes, appropriately enough, from the University of Michigan, in an article in yesterday’s New York Times that clearly intended to put racial preferences in a favorable light but had only limited success (at best) in doing so.

It opens with the shuffling law school professor, Richard Primus, who picks the students to call on in his Constitutional law class by shuffling a deck of cards adorned with the pictures of his students. And then he shuffles and re-shuffles and re-shuffles until he is satisfied with the racial, ethnic, gender, geographical, and ideological mix. (Of one “white man known throughout the campus for his conservative views,” the professor says he speaks every day, and even “‘[s]ometimes has good things to say,’ but I don’t need to call on him.”)

Given the persistent pattern of men speaking more often in classrooms, he tries to pick women two of the first three times he calls on students.

“I want to make sure the conversation in the first few minutes includes some women,” he said. “I won’t call on three men in a row. It’s just too much.” The first man in the deck sits too close to the first woman, so he shuffled again. “I want to move the conversation around the room,” he said, swapping Kristin Cleary, who sits to the professor’s right, for Umbreen Bhatti across the room. Then he picked a man who sits toward the back, then a woman down front. He stopped for a demographic check: two of the first four on the roster were minority women. He was set

Set for now, that is, but the shuffling professor is worried that he may have to stop shuffling.

If the Supreme Court decides in favor of the plaintiffs, the professor said, it would mean the end of affirmative action not only in admissions but also in his card-shuffling ritual. Taking gender and race into account as he selects the students to be called on each day, he explained, would also be illegal. Then again, there would most likely be far fewer black faces to choose from.

Somehow having every student subject to the same luck of the draw doesn’t seem like such a high price to pay for abandoning discrimination based on race.

21 of the 346 current first year students at the Michigan law school are black, but of those 21 only 5 are male. I wonder whether Michigan gives greater preferences to black men than black women, and if not, why not. These students are so in demand because of the “diversity” that their presence is said to provide to others that the admissions barrier is lower for them than the other students, with an entirely predictable result: many of them resent it because they “find this role an unfair burden.”

Here in the corner [of the basement] devoted to the Black Law Students Alliance, everyone has a story of being stigmatized, of being presumed less qualified, of being looked to as an advocate for some particular perspective. It is their retreat and, frankly, they would rather not discuss affirmative action. They may be beneficiaries but they are hardly ardent advocates.

Of course, if your announced policy is that there would be few black students if standards were not lowered for them, it is not surprising that people will presume them less qualified.

The black students aren’t the only one who don’t want to discuss affirmative action. Even though it is the hottest legal issue of the day, there seems to be precious little “diversity” of opinion about it at Michigan, at least not expressed. Most support it, and everyone seems reluctant to discuss it “in mixed racial company.”

“It’s universal: in ‘Constitutional Law,’ when you get to the race issue, everyone shuts up,” said Sarah Sterken, a third-year student whose dorm-room walls are decorated with posters of Africa, where she spent last semester. “I can’t imagine going to school with all white people here. The snobbery would go up 100 million times. Maybe you’d get more debate on the affirmative action issue, but nobody would be very well informed.”

Ms. Sterken, a white woman from the small town of Holland, Mich., says her closest friends here are a black woman — with whom she has never discussed racial issues — and a Hispanic woman from South Texas. She also enjoys arguing with an archconservative Russian immigrant and was recently grateful that a French woman interrupted her in a law journal meeting for poking fun at a professor whose writing betrayed that English was not his native language. “I don’t think affirmative action is the best way to go under the law, but I think it’s the only way to go,” Ms. Sterken said. “I’ve never heard so many diverse views. I’ve never had my mouth so gaping open.”

The “diversity” that Ms. Sterken seems most to appreciate is not a result racial preferences, but in any event I’m not sure the wideness of her gaping mouth is a good measure of how educationally crucial racial preferences are.

The article stretches far and wide to find some Michigan students offering good evidence or even argument to support the view that racial preferences are “crucial” to the educational mission. Some of what is offered — professors shuffling, cards, students with gaping mouths — is pretty pathetic. Here’s another:

Ryan Houseal, a third-year student who grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn and attended City College, pointed to a discussion in his “Financial Institutions” class about why some people lack access to banks — people like his mother, who had neither a high school diploma nor bank account.

“One of the students, a white student, raised her hand and said, ‘I was in New York over the summer, and I took a bus through Harlem, and I saw banks everywhere,’ Mr. Houseal recalled.” “I said, ‘Why don’t you get off the bus? Or, God forbid, take an apartment in Harlem.'”

“I was the only person of color in that class. If I hadn’t been there, it would have gone unsaid.”

Mr. Houseal has been told for three years that the educational mission of the Michigan Law School depends on having him there to express such views, so he can be excused for thinking he has offered a gem of wisdom of sufficient value as to justify racial double standards. More depressing is that the article’s author, Jodi Wilgoren the Midwest bureau chief of the New York Times, apparently thinks so, too.

It is also not surprising that race-based privileges generate resentment among the disfavored races.

The Michigan Law Review, the most prestigious of six student-run law journals, also uses race, along with G.P.A. and writing samples, to dole out editorships. And the administration provides a special support group, the Minority Assistance Program, to help first-year students adjust.

Some white students resent that program participants lunch with professors monthly at Ann Arbor restaurants, a break from the daily ritual of trying to scrounge free pizza from some boring campus workshop. Last fall, such resentment grew when a criminal law professor gave the students tips before Thanksgiving about what would be on the final exam — tips he planned to withhold from the rest of the class until after the break. When white students discovered the minority students’ advantage and complained, the professor changed course and revealed his hints to all before the holiday.

But once the non-discrimination principle equal treatment has been abandoned, is there any principled reason why the minority students should not have been given a leg up on law review editorships and even grades? If race conscious admissions and law review editorships are fair, why not race conscious grades?

The Michigan administrators and flaks can talk all they want, and its lawyers can argue all they want, about how “diversity” is crucial to the academic mission, but apparently many of the students they’ve admitted to provide it aren’t buying.

“I’m not here to enhance any white kid’s education,” Mr. Kasoga [a second year student who was a Michigan undergraduate] said, bringing the university’s legal argument down to a personal level. “I don’t give a damn how their education turns out. I’m here to get a J.D. and get a better life for my family and my community.”

That’s “diversity” for you.

UPDATE – Kimberly Swygert adds some fascinating data (yes, real facts) about the gender make up of the minority college age population on her fine blog, Number 2 Pencil.