A DUBIOUS EXPEDIENCY: HOW RACE PREFERENCES DAMAGE HIGHER EDUCATION
(New York, etc. 2022)
Edited by GAIL HERIOT and MAIMON SCHWARZSCHILD
Review by Hugh Murray
This is a collection of essays on a narrow, but important topic: affirmative action in higher education. There are overlaps as the different authors analyze the policy from different aspects on campus and reactions to it by the general society. A main thrust is the contention that affirmation action results in a mismatch at top-flight universities of academically weaker, minority students with much stronger white ones. This harms the black students. There is a similar concern about Hispanic students. One chapter details the new cultural atmosphere on many campuses, while another describes growing Asian opposition to affirmative action (hereafter, AA). As part of the current Zeitgeist in academia, there is little discussion of the effect of AA's discrimination against white males, who in the new WOKE era are to shut up, listen, (and take whatever the others decide).
John Ellis in the Slippery Slope chapter relates how he, a university dean at the dawning of AA, was encouraged to accept Federal funds for a program of outreach to minority students. He thought it a superb idea as the federal money allocated to this program would allow the university to spend more money on its traditional programs. However, soon it was revealed that many of the minority students recruited under the program lacked basic skills and were having difficulties and doing poorly in classes. There was now mounting pressure not to disappoint, to hire tutors, and to speak with professors who might be more sympathetic (and lower their standards). The Federal Government was paying, but changing the university's quality of education, and forcing more hiring of diversity staff, as well as more recruitment of lesser qualified minorities. The newer minority staff became a lobby inside the university administration to press for ever more recruitment, retention, hiring, and the concomitant lowering of standards further. After some years of this, Ellis came to the conclusion that not only did he oppose AA, but he now also opposed any special outreach to recruit minorities, for “the one removes any defense against the other.”(18) Once you lower academic standards for one, inevitably you must lower them to continue the spiral downward process.
In the next chapter Gail Heriot reveals the source of the book's title. By the 1970s, AA was established as policy at many colleges, and the U. of California Davis had devised its plan on admissions: 84 openings were admitted according to the best qualifications, while 16 were set aside for “disadvantaged” applicants. In university liberal NewSpeak, disadvantaged translates as racial minority. A white applicant, Allan Bakke was rejected, though he came very close to making the merit based 84. Nevertheless, he believed he had performed better than the minority hopefuls, and sued the university to gain admittance alleging he was the victim or racial discrimination. Bakke was the son of a postman and a school teacher. He had served in Vietnam as a medic, and had volunteered at local emergency rooms at night. He wanted to become a doctor. Bakke sued the university, won in the lower courts, and UC Davis appealed to the California Supreme Court. In 1976 the California high court decided 6-1 and a liberal wrote the decision, Judge Stanley Mosk. Many assumed that the university had won the case. However, Mosk ruled in favor of Bakke and against the university, because to rule in favor of AA “would represent a retreat in the struggle to assure that each man and woman shall be judged based on individual merit alone.” It would “sacrifice principle for the sake of a dubious expediency”(20) By ruling against AA for minorities Judge Mosk became the subject of denunciations, protestors screaming outside his office window in the court, and mobs shouting him down when he spoke on a campus.
However, the case did not end there. UC Davis appealed to the US Supreme Court, and in 1978 that court ruled on the case too. The Supreme Court ruled in a very split, complex decision – 4 Justices affirmed the lower courts and Bakke's right to be enrolled, and rejected the racial discrimination inherent in AA. Four others quite disagreed and upheld the university's racial favoritism for blacks and minorities that permitted discrimination against the white applicant. One Justice, Louis Powell, Jr. found the Cal Davis AA policy too inflexible, and he therefore found it unConstitutional. So with the 4 conservative justices on board with this part of his decision, Powell had a majority, and consequently Bakke must be admitted. However, if the university could propose a more flexible manner to give a better chance to minorities, that would be Constitutional. Justice Powell opined that with a flexible admissions approach, AA would be legal because it bestows the advantages of “diversity,” on both black and white students. They all gain from learning in a diverse atmosphere, and to achieve this goal through AA, everyone gains. On this part of his decision, Powell lost the votes of the 4 conservatives, but gained the 4 liberal justices, so his entire decision was affirmed 5-4, with different majorities for different parts of his decision. Therefore, it is permissible to discriminate against some (who might have better credentials) in order to achieve a diverse student body which will benefit all.
It is noteworthy how this Justice, and others to follow, dislike a simple, obvious and mechanical AA formula for discrimination against whites. Perhaps, if the formula becomes known, it is too easy to see how unfair it is in traditional terms (it is outright racial discrimination.) In 2003, when the Supremes next took up the AA issue, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote for the majority upholding AA. She too objected to too rigid formulae, and sought nebula evaluations so each group would achieve a “critical mass” on campus. Chief Justice Rehnquist, in dissent, asked why the “critical mass” for blacks was so much larger than that for Native Americans. He observed that the critical mass of students in both cases was quite like a quota for each group (but of course the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had made quotas illegal). “Critical mass,” “holistic” assessments, or Harvard's evaluations of Asian's inferior personality traits, are all performed behind the thick ivy university walls of secrecy but their purpose is to arrive at the proper quotas in admissions using whatever discrimination against whatever race serves their “diversity” goal.
While Heriot rightly discusses the significance of the Bakke case, she nowhere mentions a comment by Justice Harry Blackmun, one of the 4 who outright supported U Cal Davis and its AA policy. However, Blackmun did write: that this decision was a “regrettable but necessary stage of 'transitional inequality'”, hoping it would end “within a decade at the most.”(The Civil Rights Era, Hugh Davis Graham, p.472) Did AA end in 1988? In 2003 Justice O'Connor, who authored the majority decision upholding AA also wrote that she hoped the policy would end within 25 years.
Heriot writes that Powell's decision gave the green light to anti-white discrimination so long as performed in the name of “diversity,” and universities, government agencies, and corporations joined the diversity crusade. What were some of the results? Heriot fails to mention the case spotlighted by the New York Times Magazine (July 2, 1995 by Nicholas Lemann). To deflect growing opposition to AA, Lemann sought to bolster its importance by contrasting the careers of 2 doctors: Allan Bakke, who had originally been denied admission to U Cal Med School, and Patrick Chavis, a black applicant, who though doing less well on objective examinations, and receiving lower grades, was admitted to that university through its special program for the disadvantaged. Lemann reported the young Chavis was indeed disadvantaged: the son of a single mom, he grew up poor. But Chavis pressed forward, even if he did not get as many A's as Bakke. Even after graduation Chavis received a Master's in Public Health from UCLA. He served the poor black community of Compton, and worked with young mothers and those expecting. In the magazine a picture showed him holding a new born he had just delivered. By contrast the white Bakke was an anesthetist working in a white area of the Middle West; a pedestrian practice by a pedestrian physician. So, even without the higher credentials of Bakke, Chavis, through AA admission to Med School, provided a public service to the community that went beyond just being another doctor. The black AA recipient paid back to the community in a way Bakke did not, and probably could not. That is why AA is necessary, for the good of all communities and for the good of the nation. This is why the AA candidate outshines the one chosen on mere merit. That was the point of the article.
Lemann was not alone in making this point. Soon after Tom Hayden, the main founder of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) who had become an elected politician in California, wrote a similar article in the leftist magazine, The Nation. Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy was informing a Senate Committee about the advantages of AA, as seen in the careers of Bakke and Chavis. In 1996 not only were several Republican candidates for President openly declaring AA unfair, one Gov. Pete Wilson of California, worked with Ward Connerly, a black member of the U Cal Board of Regents, to place the issue before the people. An amendment to the state's constitution to repeal AA in California state universities and agencies wiykd be in the ballot in the November 1996 election. The usual left forces rallied against this ballot initiative, and Chavis's name and service was invoked in the campaign to save AA. As what usually happens when voters can choose, AA was defeated, the amendment for equal rights passed, and the pro-AA academics had to retreat to their faculty lounges to scheme up other ways to discriminate against white males.
Things changed in 1997. A short, powerful description is in Coloring the News: How Crusading for Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism, by William Mc Gowan, (see especially pp. 1-4) In those few pages Mc Gowan tells more of the story of Dr. Patrick Chavis, a black admitted to U Cal Davis through AA the same time as the white Bakke. Mc Gowan adds information beyond the scope of the New York Times article: “On June 19, 1997, the Medical Board of California suspended his [Chavis's] license to practice medicine...unable to perform some of the most basic duties...guilty of gross negligence and incompetence in the cases of three patients – one of whom had died -...” I urge all to read some of the details in the McGowan book of the horrors Dr. Chavis subjected some black women to. The poster boy of AA suddenly became the poster boy against AA. But this addition to the Chavis story seemingly failed to make it to the New York Times, The Nation, or most major media.
In June 2022 Michael Louis, a black man, in notes he left at the St. Francis Hospital in Tulsa, Oklahoma, wrote that he was going to kill the doctor who had recently operated on him as well as anyone else who stood in his way. On May 19 Louis had undergone back surgery by Dr. Preston Phillips, and had been complaining since because of the pain. Dr. Phillips, who was also black, was known as the “consummate gentleman,” a graduate of Harvard Medical School with advanced degrees in organic chemistry, pharmacy, and theology. Of course, everyone makes mistakes, even the best. When I undergo eye surgery, I must sign a paper saying that anything can go wrong. Happily, so far, nothing has. One possibility is that patient Mr. Louis was simply a nut. Most people vent criticism by giving a single star on Yelp for poor service, not shooting several bullets. Or is it possible that the esteemed Dr. Phillips was an AA graduate, one who had failed to acquire certain basic techniques in the procedures but was passed on because he was black? Mr. Louis, true to his mission, also killed several others who stood in his way; another doctor, a receptionist, another patient, and then he killed himself.
In an article by Richard Pearson in the Washington Post on the murder of Dr. Chavis by a carjacker (23 July 2022), Pearson noted that the liberal defenders of Dr. Chavis's inadequacies “pointed out that there was no statistical correlation between AA admissions to medical school and later malpractice charges.” That may be true, but who would be the first to demand a halt to any such investigation, who would be calling it “racist” before any statistics were gathered, or even seek to block any submission of such data? And any researcher who tried to perform such research would be engaged in an academic suicide mission.
Peter Kirasanow, in his chapter “Segregation Now” describes today's encouragement and growth of separate organizations, and dormitories on major universities following the implementation of AA. Particularly, in the early stages of AA, some of the newly admitted students (who normally might not be qualified to attend that particular institution), were experiencing academic troubles, difficulty in following the professor's lectures, failing to perform required assignments, and were consequently doing poorly on exams. They might consult with the university's diversity dean and cluster with their fellow black students who were encountering similar problems. Not told their own academic records had ill-prepared them for this university, they could quickly learn instead to blame their common problems on the uncaring, racist professors, the arrogant white students, the university's systemic racism, and racism in America generally. How to overcome this? Band together and the easiest method, live together in an all-black dorm. As AA expanded this might even be the case for Hispanic, Asian, and Native American dorms, too. The news, interests, and especially the culture of each minority would be emphasized, and, most important, the political demands of the group readily organized into action, so as to prevent a speaker on campus who researched race and IQ, or race and crime, or who opposed AA, or who was simply a Republican.
Kirasanow notes that the Supreme Court's justification for AA – bringing the rewards of diversity to ALL students, was being thwarted by these segregated, politicized dormitories. With this segregation on campus, where the races ate separately, often lived separately, socialized separately, and later even had separate home-comings and graduations – all of this violated the spirit of diversity. Only in classes did the races mix, and even these integrated spaces were in decline as more minorities enrolled in separate racial and ethnic studies programs. So while “diversity” became the legal justification for AA on campus (and throughout society), the more blacks on campus, the more segregated the university became – physically, intellectually, and culturally. Kirasanow also presents evidence that the purpose of some of these dorms and organizations is to prevent assimilation into the larger (white) American culture, and even to de-assimilate those already there (like some Native Americans who had been residing in cities). Furthermore, the ideology underlying much of this is anti-white, anti-Western, and often anti-American. A view of multiculturalism in the mix is that somehow all other cultures are equally good, but Western civilization is oppressive and inherently bad.
Strangely, Kirasanow does not remark on one phenomena that others have noticed: the one table in the university cafeteria that might be integrated ls the one where the athletes gather. Perhaps the main department where blacks do not require AA to gain admission, the one where all are on an equal footing, is the one that is most integrated.
Amazingly, somehow in this chapter Kirasanow fails to mention the HBCU's (Historically Black Colleges and Universities). For much of the 20th century, most blacks who received college educations did so at the HBCUs. Even in the mid-1960s Southern U. in Louisiana was the largest black university in the world. Although it was not his first choice (he wanted Harvard), the young W. E. B. Du Bois departed his integrated world of New England in 1885 to attend Fisk U. in Nashville, Tennessee, a newly founded black college. (There were no old ones in the South where before the Civil War, it was a crime to teach a black even to read in many states.) With Northern victory, the American Missionary Society and other abolitionist groups joined with Freedmen in the South to try to establish schools and colleges. Many struggled to stay afloat, especially when Republican rule in the South was challenged by the resurgent Democrats and their Ku Klux paramilitary forces. Some of Du Bois's friends sought to dissuade the 17-year-old from leaving the land of freedom for a college in the land of slavery, but Du Bois, who had an outstanding record at high school among the Yankees, was excited about his new venture.
Fisk, even before Du Bois's arrival, and though a newly established college, had already earned a world-wide reputation! In 1871 the impoverished college sought to raise funds in a new way. The white choir director, smitten by the unusual songs of the former slaves, he cleaned up the grammar, gathered some choir members into an a Capella group, threw in some popular songs of Stephen Foster, and off they went to sing and raise money. Their program was more serious than the popular, contemporary minstrel shows of lighter, comic, but often demeaning performances. The Fisk Jubilee Singers expanded their tours, and sang before Pres. Grant in the White House, and before an international peace group in Boston. Later in the 1870s they performed for, and won applause from Queen Victoria, who then ruled over so much of the globe. Is it possible that by 1880 more people round the world had heard of Fisk than of Harvard?
Not surprisingly, Du Bois excelled academically at Fisk. He soon edited the school newspaper. Du Bois developed his powers as an orator, and he was a popular student. Here he was socializing in a black environment, noting perhaps different pronunciations, but also different customs. In addition to learning in class, he roamed the environs, keeping his eyes and ears open, and he too heard the music that the singers sang round the world. He also heard the raw, ungrammatical lyrics they did not sing, and some of this would provide material for his chapter on music in his classic Souls of Black Folk (1903). Upon graduating from Fisk, Du Bois was admitted to Harvard, where again he excelled academically. But how much more did Du Bois learn by attending the newly founded college, the segregated college, in Nashville? Had Du Bois NOT gone to Fisk, would there have even been the book, Souls of Black Folk? Would Du Bois have even been aware of the black soul had he not attended Fisk in Nashville? With his background at Fisk, perhaps the reader will not be surprised by this quote from wikipedia: ”While taking part in the American Negro Academy in 1897, Du Bois presented a paper in which he rejected Frederick Douglass's plea for black Americans to integrate into white society.”
My question, if many black students wanted a black cultural experience, why attend an historically white, still mainly white university with a ghettoized dorm instead of going to Fisk or one of the many other HBCUs? The reason – money. Many are unaware that the civil rights era of the 1960s and passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 ushered in difficult times for many (not all) HBCU's. Many black students who in the past might have enrolled in these colleges, were suddenly offered numerous, handsome scholarships by the wealthier white universities, North and even in the South. Many HBCU's were suddenly starved for students and funds, and many Northern liberals seemed to think – like the friends of Du Bois in 1885 – that these relics of the past in the land of slavery and segregation should disappear. The larger white universities simply siphoned off the students and grants that might otherwise have gone to the traditional black universities. A few, like Xavier U. in New Orleans, did thrive, becoming one of Louisiana's most important dental schools for all races, while also retaining its traditional black, Roman Catholic heritage.
While some HBCU's folded and others neared the brink, integrationists like former Pres. Obama, seemed to emit a “good riddance” to the institutions of that horrid era. It was Republican Pres. Trump who took up the challenge and sought out financial support to keep these institutions alive, at least for some years to come. And these institutions continue a strategy of accommodation/conflict that kept them alive and sometimes thriving through decades of often hostile, one-party Democratic Party political dominance. They survived. Their physical facilities were often inferior, a truly negative heritage of segregation, Yet the content of their character, in class and out, was distinct. Surely Du Bois encountered that in the 1880s. In the 1960s I recall some conversations with Prof. Lester Granger, at Dillard U. I was then on the left, I voted (my first time at the polls) for Kennedy, and my folks had never said a bad word about FDR (except obliquely, mentioning the rumors that the order to assassinate the very popular La. Senator Huey Long in 1935 had been ordered from Washington, DC). Prof. Granger informed me that on a trip to Arkansas, when the FDR motorcade passed a white neighborhood, all the white children cheered him. And then, in the black neighborhood, all the black kids cheered him too. But Granger added; the white kids were being paid to cheer; the blacks were cheering from their hearts. He had stories critical of Roosevelt and the New Deal that did not fit my leftwing mindset, but I recall his words almost 60 years later. Only for this paper, did I look up his background. On campus, I had heard only that he wrote newspaper columns. Only now I discovered that for over 2 decades Granger had headed the National Urban League, and often pushed the US national administrations to do more for blacks. I do not mean all the faculty at Dillard was conservative (though in the South, the Democratic Party was the party of segregation.). I certainly do not maintain that all professors on the campuses of HBCUs were conservative; they were not. By contrast, Howard Zinn, famous for his Marxist history of the United States, which is often required reading in public schools today, taught at another HBCU. My point is that there was variety of views, and approaches. There was certainly more diversity of thought at the HBCUs then, than at the segregated ethnic houses on white campuses today.
Heriot does mention the HBCUs in her chapter on mismatch. Her point simply put, - major universities use AA to siphon off the best black students in the STEM areas, and indeed, many, when they first arrive on the white campuses, are quite interested in science and engineering. In some, half the black men want to major in those fields. However, at top universities, most AA admissions are not among the top students overall on these elite campuses; and they tend toward the bottom of their class. Within a short time, many of the new black students cannot follow what is being taught in class. They begin to fail, and leave the university, fail and are discouraged, or change majors to ethnic studies or sociology or some subject where their lack of preparation is not an impediment. She argues that black students who might get an AA admission to a lesser white university, might fit in better, and they may well graduate in the STEM courses. Most important, she quotes National Science Foundation statistics, that now with only 20% of black enrollment, the HBCU's graduate many who go on to earn doctorates at non-black universities, producing 42% of black biologists, and 36% of black engineers.(36)
The chapter on Asians by Lance Izumi and Rowena Itchon is interesting because the challenges facing Asians are often the reverse of those faced by blacks and Hispanics. For example, by the 1960s when it became the orthodox sociological view that poverty causes crime, there were enclaves of extremely poor Asians, yet crime in their neighborhoods was lower than in those of blacks or whites (the term “Hispanic” had not yet been fully adopted, and many Hispanics were simply classified by their race usually white, or black. Having resided in a black ghetto for a short time, my view was that crime causes poverty, the obverse of the official approach.
The other major difference, whether because of culture or genetics, Northern Asians tend to do very well academically with an IQ to rival Ashkenazi Jews. Thus, in university admissions, AA (a fancy name for quotas), tends to greatly increase black admissions, somewhat increases Hispanics, and reduces the number of Asians. Some Asians from Southeast Asia seek a separate AA for different kinds of Asians. Even North Asians in business may gain from traditional AA disbursements to businesses, so Asians and AA is a mixed bag. But there is much more open and vigorous opposition to the policy among Asians than among other minorities.
In 1996 with the aid of California Republican Gov. Pete Wilson, and Regent Board member Ward Connerly were able to get AA on the ballot, and defeat it. The Asian chapter notes that Connerly took the issue to other states, and AA lost when it was on the ballot. The city of Houston was an exception. In 1996 Democrat Bill Clinton carried California with 51% of the vote, but AA lost in the same election with 45.5%. The lgenerally eft hates when AA goes to the popular vote, and the Bush wing of the Republicans, continuing the tradition of Richard Nixon, try to keep AA legal by keeping it off the ballot. Thus, the Bushes obstructed efforts to vote on the policy in Texas and Florida.
In 2020, liberals believed their time had come, at least in our most populous state – California. After losing the vote in 1996, for over over 20 years the state functioned without an official AA program. By 2020 California had become an overwhelmingly Democratic Party state, and the Democrats decided to repeal the anti-AA amendment by placing a pro-AA initiative on the California ballot in 2020. This was the same election as the Biden Trump competition.
In California, the liberal vote in the 2020 election was overwhelming:
Biden (Dem) ….11,110,250 Trump (GOP) 6,006,429
63.58% 34.3%
For AA..... 7,217,064 Against AA 9,655,595
42.77% 57.28%
Not only did the anti-AA forces win, they won bigger in 2020 than in 1996. Biden, who supports AA, won the state overwhelmingly, but 3.8 million Biden voters did NOT vote for AA. The anti-AA vote was probably all the Trumpers plus 3.6 million Biden votes. In almost every state when the people have voted on AA, AA has lost. Only in Houston did it win. This is why the left does all it can to prevent it going on the ballot. The Bush family prevented AA from losing in Texas and Florida, and AA nationally goes back to Richard Nixon (who made it national policy) and the corporate wing of the Republican Party. As on many other issues, there is a rift between the elite and the majority of people on this issue. It is good that we can still have books that describe the problems of the policy.
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