Constitutional Opinions: Diversity Snobs
Rabkin, Jeremy
CONSTITUTIONAL OPINIONS by Jeremy Rabkin Diversity Snobs E ven before President Clinton called for a new dialogue on race, the country had a most instructive debate on affirmative action this...
...Not many Americans are likely to feel deep pangs of sympathy for applicants to an elite school suddenly faced with more competitive admission standards...
...Kweisi Mfume and Jesse Jackson may have decided that there was not much to be gained from bewailing the troubles of applicants to these very elite programs...
...They're so wedded to preferences that it didn't bother them to proclaim that minority students simply couldn't compete on a level playing field...
...If people know that formal credentials translate into bigger earnings, why should they suddenly be filled with indignation when told by the New York Times that in law school admissions in Higher education prefers blinders to color-blindness...
...In corporate and government offices nationwide, employees know that a lawyer's salary depends on his legal credentials...
...Far from being intimidated, critics touted these numbers as proof of just how outlandish past preferences must have been...
...Or is the only acceptable recourse the fetishizing of race itself...
...The number of black students admitted dropped this year to n—from the 65 admitted last year under affirmative action...
...Champions of affirmative action plainly thought that the numbers would help their case...
...The Ivy League schools and the other private universities among the 62 could hardly collect the staggering tuition charges that they do, if they didn't have a reputation for being highly selective...
...The point was to embarrass the critics of affirmative action...
...Do they "merit" more money in these situations...
...n April, the presidents and chancellors I of major universities (what the New York Times called "a prestigious circle of 62 of the nation's leading research universities") issued a joint statement to "reaffirm our support for the continuation of admissions policies...
...Why didn't it...
...But the pattern was striking nonetheless...
...CONSTITUTIONAL OPINIONS by Jeremy Rabkin Diversity Snobs E ven before President Clinton called for a new dialogue on race, the country had a most instructive debate on affirmative action this past spring...
...Last year's U.S...
...No less remarkable is how nonplussed defenders of preferential admissions appear at new revelations of how affirmative action works in practice...
...Over the past decade, millions of Americans — from factory workers to senior executives—have been forced into wrenching career changes as a result of corporate down-sizing and the winnowing of uncompetitive lines of business...
...Texas officials are not the only ones to argue that minority students will disappear from elite institutions if not specially protected...
...Why...
...Few people go to law school, let alone to top law schools such as Berkeley or UT-Austin...
...Ronald Reagan (Eureka College) was a pretty successful president without making it into Yale Law School or even into the "prestige circle" for his undergraduate degree...
...0)4 The American Spectator • August r997 63...
...The answer, of course, is that the "prestige circle" wants to retain the prestige of being highly selective...
...That was declared unconstitutional a long time ago...
...In May, Texas officials announced that not a single black student would attend their law school next year, in part because those few blacks UT had accepted decided to enroll at schools they found more "hospitable to minorities...
...One reason, perhaps, was that national black leaders didn't raise much of a fuss about the impact of color-blind admissions on elite institutions...
...The University of Texas—whose president signed this statement—used to have an entirely separate law school for "colored" students who were then expected to serve the "colored" community...
...Changes in undergraduate admissions were not quite so dramatic nor was the fall-off quite so steep for Hispanic students...
...Ward Connerly, the University of California regent who led the fight for anti-quota Proposition 209, said, "If we really want to help those black and Latino kids we will give them some tough love and get them channeled into being able to compete...
...court of appeals decision in Hopwood v. University of Texas forced the UT law school to abandon racial preferences...
...I f minority constituencies did not respond, it's not surprising that most other Americans shrugged off the stories from Berkeley and Austin as well...
...If schools can lend a hand to struggling students who show promise amid adversity—and do so without relaxing admissions standards as much as they now do under race-based affirmative action—why does it matter whether the resulting mix of students includes some particular percentage of minority students...
...So the leaders of higher education want to have standards, but not have the wrong people excluded by them...
...It was a rather one-way debate, as dire warnings from one side elicited little more than a shrug from the other...
...They could, after all, ensure their schools a perfectly proportional share of minority students without any sort of direct racial preference...
...This dramatic decline," said the dean of Berkeley's law school, "is precisely what we feared would result from the elimination of affirmative action...
...Why not exclude consideration of grades...
...There may be a simple explanation...
...Perhaps, the reason again is that doing so makes them feel egalitarian—while preserving their claim to a special role in training America's elite "leaders...
...The New York Times warned in JEREMY RASKIN is a professor of government at Cornell University...
...that take many factors into account—including ethnicity, race and gender...
...Why isn't it enough to avoid the "fetishizing of test scores" with criteria for special consideration that are, in themselves, race neutral...
...June of a "new segregation" arising from a system in which "race has been eliminated and test scores have been feiishized" —a system that already "endangers the social coherence of both Texas and California...
...That thought probably appalls top officials at our 62 "leading research universities...
...With or without quota set-asides, the number of minority students affected by admissions policies at these institutions is minuscule...
...The alternative would be to admit that it really isn't all that crucial—to minorities or to America as a whole—how many individuals of what race attend particular elite schools...
...Lawyers from higher-rated law schools enjoy a sizable edge in the competition for higher-paying jobs...
...Because the new color-blind policy in California and the Hopwood ruling in Texas "have all combined to create substantial uncertainty about the future representation of minority students within our student bodies...
...Why not choose students by lottery or by some other random system, which would guarantee racially proportional results without having to give any preference by race...
...The "prestigious circle" proclaims that "the evaluation of an individual applicant to our universities cannot...be based on a narrow or mainly 'statistical' definition of merit" Why not then abolish all reference to scores on standardized tests...
...In Texas and California state legislators did agitate for changes at the state universities, but focused entirely on undergraduate admissions...
...If any "'statistical' definition of merit" is so misleading, why rely on it for anyone...
...Law schools were pretty much ignored in this discussion, despite the far more dramatic drop-off in law school admissions...
...Even more striking was that each side in the long-running debate on affirmative action cited the same numbers to support opposite conclusions...
...Rather than apologize for its dual system, Texas officials defended it as necessary to preserve a minority presence in the student body...
...They want to indulge in the satisfactions of snobbery and still relish the thrill of egalitarian "commitment" Their commitment to affirmative action, then, isn't so surprising...
...The dean of admissions acknowledged that the result was "a very diverse [entering] class, but not the same diversity...
...Aren't all sorts of career credentials already "fetishized" throughout the economy...
...But this very asymmetry may be more instructive than anything the White House stirs up in the coming year...
...Hopwood revealed that UT Law used a numerical index to screen applicants, based on a weighted average of the applicant's college GPA and LSAT score...
...Similarly, as a result of the 1995 decision by the University of California's regents to do away with racial preferences, black admissions at Berkeley's law school dropped from 75 last year to 14 this year, while UCLA's black admissions fell from 104 to 21...
...UCLA's law school actually developed such a system and found that its greatest beneficiaries were recent immigrants—from places as diverse as Iran, Ukraine, and Korea —"because they had many disadvantages...
...In a recent study, a former member of the Law School Admissions Council claims that of 3,500 black students accepted at more than one law school in 199o-91, only one-fifth would have been admitted if decisions had been based solely on college GPA and LSAT scores...
...Other analyses trumpeted in the higher education press insist that relatively few minority students would be selected, even under an admissions system giving extra weight to applicants from low income backgrounds or facing special hardships—so long as these criteria were applied in a color-blind manner...
...62 August 1997 • The American Spectator California and Texas "test scores have been fetishized...
...This spring, for the first time, schools that recently had abandoned racial preferences released numbers on the effect of color-blind admissions...
...If this means anything, it means that each racial and ethnic "community" must have "leaders" of the same race to take care of it...
...The fall-off in minority admissions, the New York Post told readers, "disproves the assertion that deserving white applicants wete not being turned away to make room for less-qualified minorities...
...There may be even broader reasons to withhold sympathy...
...Why aren't the heads of leading universities embarrassed to emulate the thinking of that era...
...They're happy to imply that blacks and Hispanics are racially inferior, if that's what is required to demonstrate their commitment to equality...
...As heads of "prestigious" institutions "which have historically produced many of America's leaders in business, government, professions or the arts," they continued, "we are conscious of our obligation to educate exceptional people who will serve all of the nation's different communities...
...To achieve a pre-established quota of minority admissions, the school set an admit score for blacks that would have automatically disqualified any white or Asian applicant with that index score...
...44 They want to indulge in the attractions of snobbery and still relish the thrill of egalitarian 'commitment.' 11 If schools can readily obtain an interesting mix, why does it matter whether the mix does or doesn't include some particular proportion of "minority" students...
...These diverging reactions are worth pondering...
...Officials of the affected schools issued press releases to publicize them and to lament the even smaller number of black students, from among those few admitted, who finally decided to attend...
...Walk down the street in Los Angeles and you will see what our class is going to look like...
Vol. 30 • August 1997 • No. 8
