Bill Gates, Minority Leader
Caldwell, Christopher
Bill Gates, Minority Leader A billion dollars is a terrible thing to waste. BY CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL ALL THE BLACKS who got Ph.D.s in physics last year and all the American Indians who got Ph.D.s...
...Gates insists there was "no politics" involved in his decision...
...Can we call Gates's gift a generous one...
...It's fine for people to talk about what public policy should be, but this is private philanthropy," he says...
...If so, one wonders what Gates thinks politics is, because the scholarships were announced against the backdrop of threats to affirmative action programs...
...If Gates doesn't pay out at least $850 million, it gets seized from him...
...It is hard to decide whether to applaud Gates's largesse or deplore his racialism...
...Blacks make up 13 percent of the population, but only 1 percent of engineers and 7.2 percent of computer techies...
...It means a privately funded expansion of colleges' already huge commitment to minority enrollments...
...Starting in the fall of 2000, the Gates Millennium Scholars program will send 1,000 minority students to college in whatever discipline they choose and then continue to fund them through grad school, provided they pursue computer technology, engineering, math, science, education, or library science...
...This seemed to be an almost universal misperception among the various racial representatives...
...But clearly, no such encouragement is needed...
...The richest man in the world worries that these figures bespeak a "digital divide" or a "computer gap" between the races...
...That renders dubious the grant-makers' assumption that funding is the primary—even the only—obstacle to higher minority representation in high-tech...
...No one yet knows how to handle "Asians," since no foundation exists to agitate for scholarships for them...
...Gates, whatever his intentions, is shunting responsibility for black and Hispanic non-participation in the high-tech economy away from (his own) business sector and onto (someone else's) education sector...
...Says Washington's liberal governor Gary Locke, who was present at the scholarship announcement: "The advocates of Initiative 200 said government can't do it...
...There is no evidence beyond the anecdotal to back up this proposition...
...Administered that way, the Gates program is an affirmative-action program pure and simple, a billion-dollar subsidy for the racebased swapping of prospective (white) science candidates for (non-white) students a couple hundred SAT points lower...
...And the scholarships' potential to erode academic standards does not stop there...
...At the University of Washington, Seattle, an end to quotas is expected to leave the institution with 40 percent fewer blacks, 30 percent fewer Hispanics, and 20 percent fewer Indians...
...so at upcoming referenda, and Texas's race-based college admission policies have been overturned in the courts...
...or that the scholarship's designers have doubts that minority communities are capable of absorbing a billion dollars in hard-science scholarship money...
...So in mid-September, Bill Gates earmarked a portion of his $100 billion Microsoft fortune to minority education...
...So get used to these grants: Gates is required by law to give roughly a billion dollars away to something every year...
...Microsoft took a stand against Washington's anti-preference Initiative 200...
...Amidst the cavalcade of malarkey that followed the September announcement, Bill Gray's allegation that whites controlled vast tranches of scholarship money stood out as particularly delusional: "There are scholarships by the Daughters of Norway, Sons of the Confederacy," Gray said, "and I don't think that an Asian American could claim that his great-grandfather was from Norway or fought for the Confederacy and get one of those...
...The question is whether he should do this by means of racially exclusive policies that Americans are repudiating by overwhelming plebiscitary majorities...
...It sounds like we're on our way to having two funds—one for minorities and one for whites...
...And to the extent that the gift merely replaces other sources of financing, much of this money will be going to top-notch students who would have been paid for at Ivy League-caliber universities in any case...
...The program's insistence that Millennium Scholars maintain at least a 3.0 grade point average to retain eligibility is superficially attractive...
...And yet, Bill Gray hopes for a "20 percent add-on to where our normal growth would take us...
...BY CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL ALL THE BLACKS who got Ph.D.s in physics last year and all the American Indians who got Ph.D.s in math could ride comfortably on one tandem bicycle...
...It is clearly Gates's hope to do with private funding what it is rapidly becoming illegal to do with public...
...Bill Clinton, in his very brief statement on Gates's gift, addressed "the need to encourage young people to become teachers...
...The actual payouts are now compulsory...
...The United Negro College Fund—whose president, the ex-congressman Bill Gray, is a friend of Gates—will take a lead role, with the National Hispanic Scholarship Fund and the American Indian College Fund acting as junior partners...
...Gates's father, an old-line Seattle civic leader, has consulted with UW about how to get around the rules and keep minority enrollment high...
...The gift is open-ended and will cost at least a billion dollars over twenty years...
...The exact interplay of these groups is to be determined by a minority advisory board that begins meeting in October...
...But a billion dollars may be very little to pay for the opportunity to deflect skepticism from the high-tech industry's own anemic rates of minority (except for Asian) hiring...
...But conversations with officials at all three groups indicate that they will act as bureaucratic Bantustans, with each minority group picking an allotted number of Millennium Scholars from its own "race...
...When asked about the exclusion of whites from the Millennium Scholars, he replied, "We'll be supporting other scholarship programs as well...
...One suspects either that powerful education lobbies have had a hand in shaping this program (Gray was a member of the board of the Gates Learning Foundation until it was merged into a larger Gates endowment...
...This means something different...
...The Gates scholarships are open to blacks, Hispanics, Indians, and Asians (for whom underrepresenta-tion in higher education is hardly a problem), but not to whites...
...Lump them together with American Indians and Hispanics, and you still don't reach 2 percent of hard-science doctorates...
...No one can deny that Gates has long held a serious interest in minority issues...
...But it is hard to see how this could fail to result in near-irresistible pressure on teachers to race-norm their grades...
...Historically, they run the system...
...Even if it has been at times bizarre: As a Harvard undergrad, he requested minority roommates from the university housing office...
...Under the terms of the 1969 Tax Reform Act, set up to keep rich people from parking funds in tax-free charities, all foundations must spend at least 5 percent of their assets annually...
...80 percent of doctorates awarded to blacks are in education...
...One of these, unfortunately, is the tradition that used to be called "separate but equal...
...What world is Gray living in...
...To be perfectly honest...
...The most illogical aspect of the grant is that education is listed as one of the graduate disciplines eligible for funding...
...In fact, Gates dropped a hint last week that he might get around to subsidizing whites too...
...Not that scholarships weren't set up that way at one time, but if anyone today tried to administer them that way, he'd be thrown in jail faster than you can say Bob Jones...
...The New York Times may be right to say that Gates is "adhering to the finest traditions of philanthropy...
...they never said that the private sector can't do it...
...The "generosity" consisted in making the original investment in the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which a booming stock market has fattened to $17 billion...
...Nor should one gainsay that Gates is throwing a lot of money around...
...So by definition, who are those scholarships for...
...Asked if she thought the criticism of the scholarships' exclusion of whites was justified, she replied, "To be measured in my response, I would have to say, generally and historically speaking, no...
...As such, the gift would ultimately go not to needy kids but to Harvard, Stanford, Yale, MIT, and the other elite universities that are the bulwark of America's rapidly hardening class system...
...The representatives of the various college funds were wholly untroubled by the scholarship's racial basis, but only Suzette Brewer, spokesperson for the American Indian College Fund, was willing to say so for the record...
...California and Washington (where Microsoft is headquartered) have banned racial preferences through initiatives at the state level, Michigan and Florida are likely to do Christopher Caldwell is senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...Now for the gift itself...
...Gates is clearly entering a phase of his life in which he seeks to drive public policy from a position of personal privilege...
Vol. 5 • October 1999 • No. 3
