Now The French Are Doing It…

Blogging will be light over the weekend. I won’t have much time to blog since I need to step back and devote some concentrated and extended thought to the basic principles that underlie most of what I write here. The Chronicle of Higher Education has just reported that one of the elite schools in France (yes, France!) has instituted an affirmative action program that survived a constitutional challenge in a French court!

I have been plowing ahead in the conviction that arguing a principled case against preferences had a reasonable chance of persuading a working majority of Americans to return to what I regard as one of our most important core values (treating everyone without regard to race, religion, national origin), but now that France has implemented preferences it may prove impossible to persuade the Democrats.

The ruling capped three years of controversy over the policy at the Institute of Political Studies, a Paris institution widely known as Sciences Po, and could open the way for other universities to adopt similar policies.

For generations, Sciences Po, along with some two dozen other “grandes écoles,” or elite schools, have trained young people to fill the upper echelons of France’s civil service, business world, and political establishment. Among its graduates are the president, Jacques Chirac; a former prime minister, Lionel Jospin; and a former United Nations secretary general, Boutros Boutros-Ghali

I mean, if a school that is responsible for producing the president of France and a former UN secretary general has decided that affirmative action is a good thing, why should we let a little thing like our traditional principle of non-discrimination stand in our way?

In 2001, in an attempt to shake off its socially elitist image, Sciences Po started a program of preferential recruitment from high schools in some of France’s poorest neighborhoods, populated mainly by North African immigrants….

Instead of sitting for two days of highly competitive and grueling entry examinations, like most students who seek to enroll at the university, these candidates are preselected by their high schools and then undergo a 45-minute oral exam by a Sciences Po jury.

Now, to be fair to the French (I know it’s hard), this program is closer to the “Top X%” plans in Texas and Florida than to overt racial and ethnic preferences. Indeed, the Sciences Po director insisted that its program differed from affirmative action in the U.S. (Well, he would, wouldn’t he?)

“We have no ethnic or social criteria” in choosing students, he said, as long as they attend one of the disadvantaged high schools that has signed a recruitment agreement with the university. “Our only criterion,” he said, “is intellectual merit.”

And another Sciences Po spokesman tried to argue that France’s traditional idea of equality of opportunity had not been compromised:

Mr. [Xavier] Brunschvicg, the Sciences Po spokesman, said disadvantaged students can be just as intelligent and capable as those from privileged backgrounds. But they typically lack the role models, as well as the exposure to books and good French, that would prepare them to compete in the traditional written entrance exams. “A single instrument of selection,” he said, “does not allow us to ensure a real equality of opportunity.”

The disingenousness of this argument is not disguised by wrapping it in a French accent and dousing it with French perfume. What Sciences Po is admitting here is that its traditional entrance tests do not accurately measure the ability of “disadvantaged students.” Fine. That may well be true. The students admitted so far under the preferences program are said to be doing well. But if it is true, then what is the rationale for dispensing with those tests only for students who attend high schools with a North African majority? What if a student “pre-selected” by one of those schools is not actually “disadvantaged”? What about North African students who attend other, more mainstream schools? What about “disadvantaged students” who are not North African?

If Sciences Po believes what it says, it should restrict its normal entrance tests to students, of whatever race or ethnic group, who can prove they are advantaged. Otherwise, the French will be convicted in the court of world opinion of (sacre bleu!) behaving … just like the United States.

Say What? (5)

  1. pathos November 7, 2003 at 10:30 am | | Reply

    One of France’s largest problems is a large, unassimilated Muslim minority. Permitting more of them into mainstream institutions should serve to assist with assimilation. It is to everyone’s benefit not to have a permanent underclass in your society.

  2. Rob Lyman November 7, 2003 at 11:33 am | | Reply

    Pathos, no one here is the least bit in favor of a permanent underclass, despite what you seem to believe.

    We are opposed to offering people special dispensations excusing them from ordinary standards because of their skin color. Perhaps poor people (those would be the ones in the “underclass”) should get a leg up. But the “underclass” is not the same thing as all people of a particular skin color. (Well, in France the two groups overlap an awful lot.)

    What bothers most of us is the fact that AA in the US goes overwhelmingly to the black sons of doctors and lawyers, to the detriment of whithe children of coal miners. That’s exactly contrary to the avowed purpose of preventing an underclass, and proponents of racial preferences never bother to address the point.

    It would be nice if you did.

  3. StuartT November 7, 2003 at 6:10 pm | | Reply

    Rob: Parfait! Great point, and one quite incisively made. Though the next time a proponent of racial preferences addresses this point will be the first time.

    If you are waiting for Pathos (or any other AA advocate) to give you a reasoned response, I suggest you find a comfortable chair–you’ll be sitting in it a long time in anticipation.

  4. Jamie B. November 7, 2003 at 9:36 pm | | Reply

    Isn’t Europe where all the America-haters go? When Europe becomes just like the United States, where are they supposed to go next?

  5. Claire November 12, 2003 at 2:10 pm | | Reply

    The fact that “now the French are doing it” is, to me, an extremely strong argument that we should STOP doing it.

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