Most discussions of affirmative action center on whether it is legal. Can universities give special advantages to groups that are supposed to be “disadvantaged,” especially blacks? From a libertarian standpoint, private institutions should be free to set whatever admission requirements they want. State-run universities raise more complicated issues, but this isn’t what I want to discuss. We need to ask, is affirmative action a good idea?
Thomas Sowell tells us why it isn’t. “The human tragedy, amid all the legal evasions and frauds, is that, while many laws and policies sacrifice some people for the sake of other people, affirmative action manages to harm blacks, whites, Asians and others, even if in different ways.
Students who are kept out of a college because other students are admitted instead, under racial quotas, obviously lose opportunities they would otherwise have had.
But minority students admitted to institutions whose academic standards they do not meet are all too often needlessly turned into failures, even when they have the prerequisites for success in some other institution whose normal standards they do meet.
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When black students who scored at the 90th percentile in math were admitted to M.I.T., where the other students scored at the 99th percentile, a significant number of black students failed to graduate there, even though they could have graduated with honors from most other academic institutions.
We do not have so many students with that kind of ability that we can afford to sacrifice them on the altar of political correctness.
Such negative consequences of mismatching minority students with institutions, for the sake of racial body count, have been documented in a number of studies, most notably ‘Mismatch,’ a book by Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor, Jr., whose sub-title is: ‘How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It.’
When racial preferences in student admissions in the University of California system were banned, the number of black and Hispanic students in the system declined slightly, but the number actually graduating rose substantially. So did the number graduating with degrees in tough subjects like math, science and engineering.
But hard facts carry no such weight among politicians as magic words like ‘diversity’ — a word repeated endlessly, without one speck of evidence to back up its sweeping claims of benefits. It too is part of the Supreme Court fraud, going back to a 1978 decision that seemingly banned racial quotas — unless the word ‘diversity’ was used instead of ‘quotas.’
Seeming to ban racial preferences, while letting them continue under another name, was clever politically. But the last thing we need in Washington are nine more politicians, wearing judicial robes. See this.
Michelle Obama illustrates Sowell’s point that affirmative action leads to the admission of unqualified students. “In 1985, Michelle Obama presented her senior thesis in the sociology department of Princeton University. Although Michelle drew no such conclusion, the thesis is a stunning indictment of affirmative action. Those who benefited from it, Michelle most notably, may never recover from its sting.
Her thesis reads like a cry for help. ‘I have found that at Princeton no matter how matter how liberal and open-minded some of my white professors and classmates try to be toward me,’ she writes, ‘I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as I really don’t belong.’
She didn’t. Michelle should never have been admitted to Princeton. Thanks to the ‘numerous opportunities’ presented by affirmative action, however, Princeton is where she found herself. ‘Told by counselors that her SAT scores and her grades weren’t good enough for an Ivy League school,’ writes biographer Christopher Andersen, ‘Michelle applied to Princeton and Harvard anyway.’ Sympathetic biographer Liza Mundy writes, ‘Michelle frequently deplores the modern reliance on test scores, describing herself as a person who did not test well.’
She did not write well, either. She even typed badly. Mundy charitably describes the thesis as ‘dense and turgid.’ The less charitable Christopher Hitchens observed, ‘To describe [the thesis] as hard to read would be a mistake; the thesis cannot be “read” at all, in the strict sense of the verb. This is because it wasn’t written in any known language.’
Hitchens exaggerates only a little. The following summary statement by Michelle captures her unfamiliarity with many of the rules of grammar and most of logic:
