Discriminations

Regular readers — or for that matter, even irregular readers — of this blog know that I have a high regard for the writing of Peter Schmidt, a deputy editor of the Chronicle of Higher Education who writes extensively, and well, there about affirmative action. That is not to say that I always agree with what he writes, but I always find his work fair and balanced even when I think he’s wrong.

Thus I am looking forward to the publication of his new book, Color And Money: How Rich White Kids Are Winning The War Over College Affirmative Action. But you don’t have to wait to get more than a taste of what it will contain. He has an impressive new blog , still under construction and not quite announced to the world but still very much worth looking at now, that previews the book, has some excerpts, and that also will provide a running commentary on affirmative action issues in higher education. I encourage you to look at it now, and to keep checking it.

But for a heavy-duty, concentrated dose of Schmidt’s take on affirmative action, drop whatever you’re doing now (except finishing reading this post) and take a look at this luncheon speech he just delivered to the Consortium on High Achievement and Success, a group of 34 selective, private liberal arts colleges trying to find ways to improve the success of minority students. I am embarrassed to admit that I relish the thought of the indigestion he must given all those good people trying to do good.

You really must read the entire speech, but here are a few appetizers to whet your appetite:

• Now, I have had plenty of informal discussions with staunch advocates of affirmative action in higher education. And most cannot get through a glass of wine without betraying the fact that their chief reason for supporting affirmative action is the very same one Powell took off the table way back in 1978. They believe that affirmative action is needed to remedy injustice.

• Here is another thing even some of the staunchest advocates of affirmative action admit. The evidence that race-conscious admissions policies produce clear educational benefits is still not all that compelling.

  The justices who espoused such benefits in the Grutter decision had either been snowed or, more likely, were too invested in the status quo in higher education to look at the research with a skeptical eye.

• I have called my book Color and Money partly because it seems at times that color and money are the only thing the admissions offices of selective colleges care about. They extend affirmative action to the children of well-off immigrants from Africa or Central or South America. They lump Asian kids with white kids and treat the children of Vietnamese boat people and West Virginia coal miners as historically advantaged. They have all but shut their doors to much of working- and middle-class white America.
  ....
  Truth be told, your admissions policies promote racial and class segregation in our neighborhoods and our schools.

  Enrolling in a racially and ethnically integrated, middle- or working-class public high school is probably the single worst thing that can happen to a white student who ever hopes to get admitted into one of your institutions. Parents know that.

• It is your institution’s decision to let rich families buy their kids’ way in. Your system salvages privileged applicants who have squandered every advantage offered to them, and screens out many white and Asian applicants who have overcome hardship or played the best hand possible with the cards life has dealt them.

• Back in 1997, when the lawsuits against it were first filed, the University of Michigan was accepting more than half of the graduates of high schools in Bloomfield Hills and Grosse Point while turning away the valedictorians and salutatorians of blue-collar white schools.

  And people wonder why—when presented with a referendum affirmative action last fall—58 percent of Michigan residents voted to join California and Washington in banning the use of racial and ethnic preferences by public colleges and other state agencies.

  The elite of that state pulled out every stop to argue that affirmative action preferences need to be preserved for the good of everybody involved, and nearly six out of ten people in that state told its elite to go to hell.

• Folks, I will be honest with you. There are times when I hear people defend race- conscious admissions policies and I feel like I am watching a crew of sailors refuse to abandon a sinking ship. Rather than trying to find a new vessel to board, they stay on deck and say: But this is a good ship. This is a noble ship. This ship will not sink because it does not deserve to sink. It will not sink as long as we stay with it.

  The question of how you feel about affirmative action in your hearts may soon be completely irrelevant. It’s entirely possible that nothing you do will save this ship.
  

Wow. I would like to have had the Tums or Rolaid concession outside the door to that luncheon.

As powerful and right-on as these remarks are, however, I believe Peter Schmidt would be surprised (and perhaps even a little disappointed) if I didn’t find a few nits to pick. Alas, there isn’t much to complain about, but I will mention one possible bone of contention that seems to me to mar his otherwise delicious fillet of affirmative action argumentation.

In the beginning of his remarks Schmidt quotes extensively from the epilogue to his book, and several times he suggests or implies or perhaps merely seems to accept the notion that equality means or requires something like proportional representation. He writes, for example, that

I have yet to encounter an expert on education or social policy who thinks the playing field is being leveled as quickly as O’Connor predicted.

There’s that pesky, ubiquitous “level playing field” metaphor. I’ve criticized it before, noting recently (here) that those who support racial preferences

don’t favor a “level playing field” at all, or at least not one where all contestants play by the same rules. If the general rule is ten yards for a first down, the preferentialists want their favored teams to be given a first down after only seven or so yards. If the general penalty for unsportsmanlike conduct is 15 yards, the preferentialists want their designated villains to be penalized 50 points, or perhaps forfeit the game at the outset. They’d like football, etc., to be more like golf, with its uneven field and players handicapped by history to be given handicaps making it easier for them to compete. And when their team strikes out on some test, they’d like it to be given unlimited mulligans until they get it right.

And, I might have noted, the games played on “playing fields” usually have winners and losers, a thought that is as foreign to many precincts of modern liberalism as the idea that neutral rules should be applied equally to all players.

In the same vein, Schmidt writes:

Even if the Supreme Court’s Michigan decisions hold up, it is important to keep in mind that they embraced a justification for race-conscious admissions policies that has little to do with ensuring minority members equal access to higher education. Michigan’s stated goal was not enrolling minority students in numbers that reflected their share of the population; its goal was to maintain a “critical mass” so that everyone on its Ann Arbor campus could reap the purported educational benefits of diversity....

As I read it, this passage implies that “equal access to higher education” will be achieved only when minority students are enrolled “in numbers that reflect[] their share of the population.” This is certainly one possible meaning of “equal access,” but it is a highly controversial one that needs to be argued, not merely asserted as though we all agree that equality requires proportional representation. We don’t.

And finally:

Black demands for equal opportunity have already brought about two revolutions in higher education, the first carried out through integration, the second, through affirmative action. What remains to be seen is whether the shortcomings of those policies will lead to another revolution down the road.

Yes, but the controversy over racial preference concerns a fundamental disagreement over the relationship of those two revolutions. Preferentialists see them as both of a piece, sharing values, purposes, principles. Critics, by contrast, argue they are at odds, pointing out that the first civil rights revolution was based on the principle that discriminating on the basis of race is wrong while the second abandoned that principle to argue that discriminating on the basis of race is good, and necessary to promote either social justice or diversity.

Let us hope that the coming third revolution comes full circle around to the position of the first, this time with liberals and conservatives embracing (at the same time!) the principle advocated by the NAACP in its long march leading up to Brown and expressed so forcefully in Thurgood Marshall’s brief there:

The Fourteenth Amendment precludes a state from imposing distinctions or classifications based upon race and color alone. The State of Kansas has no power thereunder to use race as a factor in affording educational opportunities to its citizens.

Let’s hope that when the Supremes decide the racial school assignment cases this week, they decide that Seattle and Louisville have no more power “to use race as a factor in affording educational opportunities to its citizens” than they found in Kansas in 1954.