Ending Discrimination: Grinding Progress, Massive Resistance

The Chronicle of Higher Education has just published a long article reporting the increasingly successful ground war the Center for Equal Opportunity, the American Civil Rights Institute, and others are waging against college programs that discriminate on the basis of race, ethnicity, or sex.

The colleges, of course, who are fighting tenaciously for every inch of this ground, do not regard their being forced to relinquish their discriminatory programs as any kind of success, and apparently neither does the Chronicle, whose headline on the article proclaimed:

As Colleges Open Race-Exclusive Programs to All, Some Minority Students May Be Left Out in the Cold

That’s one way to look at it. I prefer a more optimistic (and I believe more accurate) alternative: As Colleges Cease Discriminating, Minorities Are Freed From The Shackles Of Special Treatment And Brought Into The Sunlight Of Equality. But that’s just me.

The more I read of this struggle, the more I’m reminded of what increasingly appears to me to be the similar struggle to put an end to discrimination in the South, and what I take away from this comparison is both optimism and pessimism, or perhaps the notion that both optimism and pessimism are premature. Higher education — administrations, faculties, students — is playing the role in this modern drama of the recalcitrant white South.

Although there are few Orville Faubuses or George Wallaces standing in the schoolhouse door, defying the courts, and inviting federal marshals, higher academia as a whole is a hotbed of massive resistance. It will cling to its discriminatory programs as long as it can. It will force litigation, or the threat of litigation, over each program on each campus. It is not embarrassed by patent hypocrisy — thus officials who I would bet dollars to donuts opposed Ward Connerly’s attempt to bar the state of California from collecting racial data often refuse to release to the taxpayers of their state the racial composition of their racially exclusive programs, “saying,” as The Chronicle reports, “that doing so would violate students’ privacy.” (How would it do that, with no names released? These, mind you, are in all likelihood the same people who objected in principle (remember principles?) to the state of Virginia taxing both men and women to support a public institution (VMI) from which women were excluded.) It will engage in subterfuge, feigning compliance with cosmetic changes:

In some cases, colleges have even overhauled their own administrative structures to avoid the appearance of providing certain services solely to minority groups. Officials at Cornell University, for example, reported that their institution had created new positions in its central administration charged with promoting diversity in a broadly defined sense. Meanwhile, the university’s undergraduate schools and colleges have been renaming their various “minority” offices as “diversity” or “multicultural” offices to reflect the full range of students served.

That “full range” often includes only one or two token whites or Asians, but hey, who’s counting?

The glass looks half full when I read, as here, of how successful this trench warfare has been, when I see the appointment of new judges and justices who believe in a Constitution that is colorblind, when I hear of more students like one of the three “white” participants in a summer program at the Busch campus of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey “who routinely identifies himself on applications as ‘African-American’ because his father was raised in Egypt” and like Devin D. Downing, a junior in that same program from the University of Maryland-Baltimore County who is black and who says:

“I don’t want to be defined by the color of my skin.”

“I am an intelligent person, a person who exhibits such-and-such characteristics,” Mr. Downing said. “I don’t just want to be ‘a black guy.’”

Another source of optimism, underlying the above, is that the “without regard” principle, the belief that Americans have a right to be treated “without regard” to their race or religion or ethnicity, is so pervasive and so deep-seated that those who support programs that violate that principle have such a hard time making principled arguments that many of them have given up on principle altogether.

Indeed, the colorblind principle — the belief that people should be judged, as one universally revered American put it, by the content of their character and not the color of their skin — is such a core value that I’m convinced many white Southerners knew they were wrong even as they clung to their own racial preference policies. Wasn’t it Jefferson who feared for the future of his country when he reflected that God is just? [Ed: It was; I just checked.]

On the other hand (here’s the glass that’s half empty), I see no traces of doubt in any of the precincts occupied by liberals today, especially the campus precincts. On the contrary, on campuses across the country the “without regard” principle has been so thoroughly rejected and abandoned that those of us who continue to honor it are regarded as retrograde, at best, and more often as racist. College officials may, grudgingly, drop their racially exclusive programs rather than, say, lose any federal funds, but you can be sure they don’t believe such programs are wrong. As soon as they come back to power they’ll appoint judges and federal regulators who will give them a green light to reinstate racially exclusive programs.

Indeed, looking across the bleak racial landscape of American higher educations today is almost enough to make me miss George Wallace. It was, I fear, easier to win the battle against him than against the modern practitioners of massive resistance.

ADDENDUM [27 Jan.]

I left out a couple of things that, on re-reading the Chronicle article, seem worth mentioning.

Here’s one:

The University of Delaware’s provost, Daniel Rich, says that his institution has changed a scholarship program so that, rather than being reserved for members of racial or ethnic minority groups, it now is available to students who are part of the first generation of their family to attend college; who have been through “challenging social, economic, educational, cultural, or other life circumstances”; or who are deemed financially needy based on federal financial-aid criteria. Mr. Rich reports that about 30 percent of the students nominated for scholarships last year were white, and says “the new program is better because it attracts more nominations and supports more students from more diverse backgrounds.”

I wonder, what exactly is a “challenging cultural circumstance[],” and how would an applicant demonstrate that he or she had “been through” one? Would submitting ticket stubs from attendance at a bad opera count?

It is encouraging, but not surprising, that the new, racially inclusive admissions criteria have led to more “diversity” in the program. But that unsurprising fact led me to wonder whether or not any of the defenders of the racially exclusive programs ever noticed the irony of their defending “diversity” while excluding most known races and ethnicities. If “diversity” is really all its advocates say it is, you’d think the students who are admitted to racially exclusive programs would be crippled for life by these programs’ lack of “diversity.”

And then there’s Saint Louis University, which “opened [its] programs to white or Asian-American students who show a commitment to promoting diversity.” I wonder what sort of evidence of this “commitment” Saint Louis U. looks for. Is simply applying for a program designed for minorities — and which formerly admitted only minorities — sufficient? But then, wouldn’t this amount to saying, at least implicitly, that the proof of my commitment to diversity is my willingness to attend your program (preferably with financial aid), thus giving the program’s other students the opportunity to be exposed to me?

Diversiphiles, it seems, have a hard row to hoe….