Every year educators in states that have banned racial preferences, California and Washington, are newly shocked and newly outraged that the forced (by voters) elimination of racial preferences resulted in there being fewer students from the formerly favored groups. I suspect we would fire any economists who professed similar surprise that, say, subsidies to peanut farmers leads to more farmers planting peanuts and eliminating subsidies to peanuts results in fewer farmers planting peanuts, but higher education diversicrats seem immune to market forces.
True to form, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports today that educators in Washington state are still blaming I-200, a measure that outlawed state racial preferences that passed in November 1998, for the fact that
the percentage of black and Hispanic students enrolled in the state’s public four-year colleges remained lower than those groups’ share of the state’s population age 17 to 39….
Of course, the draft report of the Washington Higher Education Coordinating Board also noted and presented evidence that the unfortunate “disparities” it found were not only in rates of attendance but also in “achievement.” No matter. Since all diversicrats believe as an article of faith that all racial and ethnic groups are equally interested in and qualified for higher education (and if they’re not, they should be), any “disparity” represents a problem to be corrected.
The report is suffused with quotes and comments that represent the peculiar mindset of “diversity” professionals. One of my favorites, from page 3 in the Introduction, is from Edgar F. Beckham, identified as “senior fellow at AAC&U and emeritus dean of the college at Wesleyan University” (I assume AAC&U is the American Association of Colleges and Universities):
The primary question put to institutions regarding diversity still remains, “How much diversity do you have?” A secondary question is, “How well are your ‘diversity’ students achieving and how comfortable do they feel in your institution?” I want us to modify the second question and create a third. We must, of course, get rid of the notion that our diversity students are a subset of our students and replace it with the conviction that our diversity students are all our students. Then we must add the third question, “What are you doing educationally with the diversity you’ve got? How are you using it intentionally as an educational resource? And how are these uses benefiting all your students?”
Amazing. The “primary question” is not what or how much students, or even minority students, are learning, but how many of them do you have? Only “secondary” is a concern with how much they are achieving, presumably including their graduation rates, although that concern is paired with the apparently equally weighty question of “how comfortable” they feel.
But I like Beckham’s point about regarding all students as diversity students, which points to the the obvious conclusion that all students should be given admission preferences.
As usual, the ‘diversity’ equivocation dishonestly shifts from ‘how could you be against diversity in general’, to a hyper-specific meaning of diversity in terms of 4.6% of this and 3.9% of that disadvantaged minority, all stated in relation to a minutely specified reference population!
Thus a false dilemma is implied: either you are antidiversity and advocate first cousin or closer marriage, or you applaud quota administration down to the tenths of percentage points, as above.
The pro-diversity have all along had the burden to prove that such a dilemma is really there. Without a rational argument for it, the assumption must be that our alternatives are greater than just those two.
A minor quibble, at worst, but I’d like to point out that even supposing all ethnicities are equally qualified for and interested in college, there’s not necessarily a problem to be corrected at the college level.
I think members of some ethnic groups do tend to instill a stronger work ethic and a higher value on learning in their kids than others. But a big problem is that neighborhoods with disproportionately black or hispanic populations are more likely to be underserved by public schools than neighborhoods with a lot of white and asians. The solution to this problem doesn’t involve putting black kids who haven’t been properly prepared into classes for which they aren’t prepared; it’s to apologize to those kids for the failure to allow them primary and secondary schools which would have properly prepared them, to admit them to postsecondary options for which they’re qualified, and to make sure the next group of students have better choices in secondary education, so that they can attend whatever colleges their innate abilities combined with decent secondary schooling qualifies them for.
I just want to make it clear that one could believe that premise without reaching that conclusion (in large part because I’m more nearly sympathetic to the premise than to the conclusion).
Steven – I of course agree with your conclusion here, but allow me to pick a small nit with your minor quibble. If one believes that some races and ethnic groups have been disproportionately subjected to bad schools, etc., then one doesn’t believe that “all racial and ethnic groups are equally … qualified for higher education.”