Stuart Taylor’s Excellent Idea

Stuart Taylor’s most recent column in National Journal, “Ted’s Excellent Idea: Disclosing Admissions Preferences,” is, well, excellent. (Thanks to InstaPundit for the link.) He takes Ted Kennedy’s idea — requiring all universities that receive federal funds to release detailed demographic data on all legacies they admit — and runs with it, making it (here I go again) an excellent proposal.

“Why not,” Stuart proposes,

require publicly funded universities to disclose detailed data about all of their preferential-admissions programs? This would shed light on who benefits and who does not, on the nature and magnitude of the preferences, and on how much they compromise academic standards.

The only reason why not is that such disclosure would

expose the stunning magnitude of the racial preferences — which are far greater than the legacy preferences — used by all (or almost all) selective institutions, and who benefits from them. For that reason, my amendment would be anathema to Kennedy and other advocates of racial preferences. They know that greater public awareness may be the only obstacle to the perpetual entrenchment of racial preferences in all walks of American life, now that the Supreme Court has broadly upheld their legality.

Dozens of surveys and polls over the past several decades show consistently that, by overwhelming margins, most Americans (often including substantial majorities of blacks) oppose racial preferences. They show greater support for “affirmative action,” but this is because that term camouflages the actual nature of the programs. “On no other issue,” Stuart points out, “have elected officials and establishment leaders succeeded in implementing so pervasively a policy that the public rejects so overwhelmingly.” (Emphasis added)

What accounts for this success? A large part of the explanation is that racial preferences have lived on lies and on concealment of how “affirmative action” actually works. This obfuscation has lulled into quiescence voters who might well be outraged were they fully informed. The news media typically give a misleadingly benign aura to racial preferences by portraying them, inaccurately, as boosts for the underprivileged and by obscuring the way they operate as double standards that discriminate systematically against whites and Asians and in favor of less-academically-qualified applicants who are, in many cases, more affluent.

No wonder preferentiaists quake in their boots at the prospect of a public debate and vote over preferences, and try so hard, as they are doing in Michigan now, to keep the matter off the ballot. Just in case anyone still misses the point here, Stuart adds:

Most Americans don’t realize that the racial preferences at the University of Michigan Law School, upheld by the Supreme Court last June in Grutter v. Bollinger, are worth more than 1 full point of college GPA — catapulting black and Hispanic applicants with just-below-B averages over otherwise similar whites and Asians with straight A’s. Or that the average SAT scores of the preferentially admitted black students at most elite colleges are 150 to 200 points below the average white and Asian scores. Or that this SAT gap understates the academic gap, because black students do less well in college, on average, than do white and Asian classmates with the same SAT scores. Or that most recipients of racial preferences, unlike most legacies, end up in the bottom third of their classes and have far higher dropout rates than other groups. Or that, according to a study of 28 highly selective colleges by two leading supporters of preferences, some 85 percent of preferentially admitted minorities are from middle- and upper-class families.

Full disclosure of the nature and extent of all non-academic preferences is an excellent idea, all the more so since Ted Kennedy would have a hard time opposing it.

UPDATE

Kimberly Swygert has much more to say about Taylor’s article here.