Discriminations

Peter Schmidt reports on the Chronicle of Higher Education news blog that former Justice O’Connor acknowledged in a recent speech that “she is not confident the court had preserved affirmative action in higher education for much longer.”

The former Justice would obviously prefer “the people” (my quotes, not hers) to leave constitutions to the courts, and not take matters into their own hands by amending their state constitutions in an attempt to clean up messes made by the Supreme Court.

Speaking at Washington’s National Press Club at a symposium on diversity at colleges, Justice O’Connor said, “The future of affirmative action in higher education today is certainly muddy.” As the basis for her observation, she cited Michigan voters’ adoption last fall of an amendment to that state’s Constitution banning affirmative-action preferences, as well as the passage of similar measures in California in 1996 and Washington State in 1998, and current efforts to place preference bans on several states’ ballots in 2008.

Several of her other comments were equally interesting. For example, she stated that in Grutter she and the court’s majority “had tried to be careful in stressing that affirmative action should be a temporary bandage rather than a permanent cure.”

Should be? Was that friendly advice, wishful thinking, or a constitutional command? Alas, her opinion wasn’t careful enough to answer that question.

She was also quoted as saying:

“It probably would be better if we could remedy the racial gap in academic achievement long before application for college admission,” by finding ways to improve elementary and secondary schools enough that race-conscious admissions policies will no longer be necessary.

Probably? No matter. The good news, which is what worries Justice O’Connor, is that substantial majorities of the pesky people believe that racial discrimination (politely if euphemistically known as “race-conscious admissions”) is not necessary now.

UPDATE

John Fund has an excellent, longer piece on Justice O’Connor’s speech in today’s Wall Street Journal. You should read the whole thing, but here are some excerpts:

Justice O’Connor continued to defend her original position. She lamented statistics that showed that as a result of California’s Proposition 209 (passed in 1996) only 2.2% of UCLA freshmen were black, and a fifth of those were on athletic scholarships. (California’s overall population is 6.1% black.)

She seemed strangely unaware, however, of the growing evidence that racial preferences might have actually decreased the likelihood that blacks and Hispanics will graduate from college. Put differently, if the body of evidence is correct, the whole affirmative action enterprise has been deeply and tragically flawed from the beginning, failing to achieve its most basic aim: increasing the number of minority college graduates, doctors, lawyers and other professionals.
....
Moreover, Justice O’Connor’s comments about UCLA obscured an important and promising real story. While it’s true that black and Hispanic enrollment at UCLA and Berkeley went down after Prop 209, these students simply didn’t just vanish. The vast majority were admitted on the basis of their academic record to somewhat less highly ranked campuses of the prestigious 10-campus UC system, which caters only to the top one-eighth of California’s high school graduates. In the immediate wake of Proposition 209, the number of minority students at some of the nonflagship campuses went up, not down.

This “cascading” effect has had real benefits in matching students with the campus where they are most likely to do well. Despite what affirmative action supporters often imply, academic ability matters. Although some students will outperform their entering credentials and some students will underperform theirs, most students will succeed in the range that their high school grades and SAT scores predict. Leapfrogging minority candidates into elite colleges where they often become frustrated and fail hurts them even more than the institutions. It creates the illusion that we are closing racial disparities in education when in fact we are not. While blacks and Hispanics now attend college at nearly the same rate as whites, only about 1 in 6 graduates.

Affirmative action often creates the illusion that black or other minority students cannot excel. At the University of California at San Diego, in the year before race-based preferences were abolished in 1997, only one black student had a freshman-year GPA of 3.5 or better. In other words, there was a single black honor student in a freshman class of 3,268. In contrast, 20% of the white students on campus had a 3.5 or better GPA.

There were lots of black students capable of doing honors work at UCSD. But such students were probably admitted to Harvard, Yale or Berkeley, where often they were not receiving an honor GPA. The end to racial preferences changed that. In 1999, 20% of black freshmen at UCSD boasted a GPA of 3.5 or better after their first year, almost equaling the 22% rate for whites after their first year. Similarly, failure rates for black students declined dramatically at UCSD immediately after the implementation of Proposition 209. Isn’t that better for everyone in the long run?

These are more examples that the recent study by two Princeton professors, discussed here, can’t explain.