Affirmative Action Out of Control
By George F. Will
Thursday, March 1, 2001; Page A19
Advocates of affirmative action in higher education scored two
debilitating triumphs in December when courts upheld the legality of
racial preferences in admissions as administered at the University of
Washington and the University of Michigan. A few more such victories and
affirmative action will be completely incoherent. Affirmative action originally concerned employment, not college
admissions. It was a remedial -- and hence presumably temporary -- measure
of restitution for injustice done to blacks by history. But both December
cases turned on a different rationale -- "diversity," a benefit for campus
culture. That makes affirmative action in higher education into a
potentially permanent servant of institutions' interests rather than a
theoretically temporary assistance for blacks. John Skrentny, a sociologist at the University of California, San
Diego, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, argues that
justifications for affirmative action "are becoming incongruous with the
changing population of the United States." This is because of the policy's
changing beneficiaries, particularly Latinos and Asian Americans --
together, 16 percent of the population, compared with blacks at 12
percent. Without serious national debate or congressional guidance,
affirmative action has been broadened to include various other
government-favored minorities, and increasingly it benefits immigrants and
their children -- people who came to the United States voluntarily, not in
bondage. This broadening of affirmative action sharpens the dilemma that, in the
landmark 1978 Bakke decision concerning racial preferences in
higher education, troubled Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell: How do you
equitably administer affirmative action only to certain groups "whose
societal injury is thought to exceed some arbitrary level of
tolerability"? The suddenly fashionable "diversity" rationale is one
response to this difficulty. It is a way of changing the subject. Yet, awkward subjects multiply and cannot forever be evaded. Skrentny
is astonished that in neither the Michigan nor the Washington case did the
court consider the question of the criteria for determining which minority
groups should benefit from affirmative action. This even though those
courts concluded -- one suspects perfunctorily and formulaically -- that
the two schools' plans are constitutional because they are "narrowly
tailored" and serve a "compelling" purpose. But how could the courts know
that without knowing who they were talking about? However, then, as affirmative action metastasizes into a shapeless
component of the spreading racial and ethnic spoils system, many questions
are evaded, such as: How much minority ancestry must one have to
contribute to "diversity" or otherwise qualify for preferences? Skrentny,
anticipating conflicts arising from "the convergence of affirmative action
and immigration policy" writes: "It is only a matter of time before future litigants or political
opponents begin to question whether, in a program such as that at
Michigan, Latino applicants deserve all of the 20 points that are added to
the admissions scores of black applicants, or whether someone who is half-
or quarter-Latino should get all 20 points, or whether Mexican and Puerto
Rican applicants deserve more points than Salvadoran or Cuban applicants,
or whether a recent Latino immigrant should receive all of the points, and
so on." And on and on. Such arithmetic would have suited Nazi Germany's
Nuremberg laws. It mocks America's premises. Even if affirmative action were restored to its original focus on black
Americans, and even if the "diversity" rationale were jettisoned, John
McWhorter and a hearty band of other black thinkers who agree with him
would remain critics of affirmative action in higher education. In his new
book, "Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America," McWhorter, a
young professor of linguistics at Berkeley, sharply criticizes a
much-discussed recent book defending such affirmative action, "The Shape
of the River" by William Bowen, former president of Princeton, and Derek
Bok, former president of Harvard. Bowen and Bok cite data demonstrating that most beneficiaries of
affirmative action are happy in their lives and contented in their jobs.
McWhorter faults Bowen and Bok for not recognizing that the contentment of
affirmative action's beneficiaries might be evidence of damage done to
them by affirmative action. McWhorter argues that it renders beneficiaries unconcerned about the
fact that high-achieving blacks can never be properly confident about, or
fully credited for, their achievements, and they come to feel entitled to
evade rigorous competition and to make less than their best efforts to
earn university admissions. McWhorter is incensed that affirmative action
advocates believe "that the children I will have by 2020 ought to be held
to a lower academic standard because my father was not allowed to fly
planes in the Navy in 1944." If they do not believe that, let them say why
not.
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