Newsletter

April 2003

Have Race-Biased Admissions Improved American Higher Education?

John Staddon

The University of Michigan
made the mistake of implementing affirmative action in admissions in such
an honest fashion that its racial bias was impossible to miss.
Michigan selects students on the basis of a 150-point-maximum scale.
Getting a maximum SAT score is worth 12 points, but being black gets you
20. Hence, many white or Asian students with scores and grades better
than successful black applicants have been rejected. Two such white applicants
sued Michigan, were supported, and were then rejected on appeal.
Now they have their day before the Supremes on a final appeal.

The key legal point is whether
or not the university’s policy serves a “compelling interest,”
which, in this case, means: Does the
policy produce educational benefits? In
support of the supposed benefits, the university
presented a “scientific” report from Dr. Patricia Gurin, Chair of the Department
of Psychology at Michigan. She happily concludes that her work “consistently
confirms that racial diversity and … activities related to diversity have
a direct and strong effect on learning and the way students conduct themselves
in later life.” But in fact, Gurin’s report illustrates everything
that is wrong with Michigan’s case and with race-biased admissions generally.

Gurin’s study shows no effects
at all, just correlations between largely self-chosen “diversity
experiences” and self-reports (questionnaires). The kids choose their
courses, they were not randomly assigned to them, which would be required
to show a real cause-effect relation. Moreover, the correlations
are weak and contradictory. Sometimes it looks as if kids who self-segregate
do better than those who don’t. Her methods have been severely criticized
on technical grounds, but even if they were perfect, they would still be
just correlations.

Correlations are sometimes
useful, but they aren’t always acceptable as a basis for policy.
For example, profiling by race, age and gender can improve the detection
of criminal behavior because women, older people, and whites are less likely
to commit crimes than young, male and black individuals – criminality is
correlated with age, sex and race. The violation of equal treatment
entailed by profiling is defensible because the relatively minor cost to
innocent suspects – being “stopped” – is outweighed by a substantial increase
– typically by a factor of five or more per “stop”- in the number of criminals
apprehended.

But applicant profiling,
giving black applicants extra points in a point-based selection process,
can be justified in neither of these ways. The cost to the disadvantaged
group – no admission to a prestigious university – is substantial and the
effects of race-based admissions far from being beneficial are damaging
to the scholarly mission of the university.

If racial profiling is subject
to legal restrictions then, by the same criteria, applicant profiling should
be outlawed entirely.

Prof. Gurin sees only benefits
from several decades of race-biased admissions, both on students themselves
and on the curriculum. “Students learn more and think in deeper,
more complex ways in a diverse educational environment.” Not only
do her ideas of complexity and depth bear little relation to what most
people mean by those terms, but history doesn’t really agree. The
greatest advances in human creativity have been made by groups that were
not very diverse, either racially or intellectually: the group of philosophers
and scientists in early 20th century Vienna (think “Einstein, Popper, Freud”),
Newton’s Royal Society of London, the Bloomsbury Group of English writers,
the Harlem Renaissance. A certain amount of intellectual diversity
is obviously helpful, but too much is probably bad. Astronomers and
astrologers, Darwinians and fundamentalists, Taliban and feminists, would
make poor combinations, one feels.

Unlimited diversity is obviously
bad, but some intellectual diversity is certainly good. Unfortunately,
the effect of affirmative action has been to reduce the real intellectual
diversity of our universities. As several surveys have shown, opinion,
particularly political opinion, among academics is much more uniform now
than it was a few decades ago. The students themselves came up with
a name for this: political correctness.

How about effects on the
curriculum? Is the contemporary university better than the traditional
one? John Henry Newman in his landmark essay The Idea of a University
wrote that the university is “a place of teaching universal knowledge…its
object is…intellectual, not moral…”

Newman’s view is being upended
by modern “diversity” policies. Increasingly, education in the humanities
and “soft” social sciences is moral, not intellectual. Other sectors
of society – family, church, primary through high school, are, Newman thought,
responsible for moral education. Universities are supposed to have
a different task. But the new university not only aspires to take
over moral education, it seeks to undermine traditional sources
of morality – particularly religion and the family. Listen to Dr.
Gurin: college education should “involve confrontation with diversity
and complexity, lest young people passively make commitments that follow
their past, rather than being obliged to think and make decisions that
fit their talents and feel authentic.”

Welcome
to the therapeutic university. But the therapeutic
university promises to improve your mind as well as your morals.
Gurin boasts of “rich curricular offerings” that foster “conscious, effortful,
deep thinking.” Numerous critical books have been written over the past
two decades on these “rich offerings,” beginning with Alan Bloom’s best-seller
The closing of the American mindin 1988. They argue that
far from promoting profundity, the new courses are as superficial as they
are political. Courses in women’s studies, for example, are often
more like indoctrination or group-therapy sessions than rigorous examinations
of literature from a variety of per-spectives. Indeed, why else would
one need a separate department to study writing by women? – no such separation
has been found necessary in the sciences. Women’s science is judged
in precisely the same way as men’s science. The main achievement
of women’s studies programs has in fact been to insulate much of the work
from legitimate criticism. Very few men participate in these programs,
either as teachers or students. Indeed, in a few documented cases,
men have actually been prevented from taking specific women’s studies courses.
Far from promoting “deep thinking,” all too often the courses simply require
the parroting of buzzwords and acquiescence in a particular feminist ideology.

The case for African-American
studies is stronger. But even so, one would like to hear coherent
arguments for why Afro-American history should not be part of the history
curriculum or Afro-American art part of the art history curriculum (as
it is at Duke), and so on. But such arguments are notable by their absence.
The case that is usually made (by African Americans, but also increasingly
by other “students of color”) is largely a political one: We are here (in
a “critical mass”), so why can’t we have our own department?

Dr. Gurin and other fans
of race-biased admissions thoroughly approve of these trends: “The
increases in diverse student enrollments that have occurred as a result
of affirmative action and other factors have resulted in pressures for
institutional transformation of the academic and social life at colleges
across the country.” What she fails to note is that these “pressures for
institutional transformation” are unashamedly political, rather than scholarly.
The aim is not to learn, but to change – to change the university
but, above all, to change society.

There is another and in some
ways more sinister problem with a race-inspired curriculum: so-called “ghetto
courses.” In a recent mini-scandal at Colgate University, for
example, a white professor made the mistake of telling a black
student to avoid black-studies courses because they provided an easy-grading
haven for ill-prepared students without giving them a real education.
Few students or faculty disputed this claim, which illustrates the fact
that many of Gurin’s “rich curricular offerings” are just ways to paper
over the problems caused by admitting ill-qualified minorities. Race-biased
admissions and hiring policies have eroded the idea of the university as
a place for intellectual education. Their effects are not good, as
their supporters claim, but bad.

What should be done?
Ideally, universities, especially private universities, should be able
to admit whomever they like. But giving one racial group an automatic
advantage over others is both morally wrong and educationally damaging.
Public universities, at least, should not be permitted to practice it.
Will the weight of evidence persuade private universities to abandon it
also? I don’t think so. Many academics believe race-biased
admissions to be morally justified; many also endorse the questionable
changes in academic standards that are taking place partly because of it;
a large bureaucracy has evolved to implement it. Like an older kind
of racial discrimination, it will not go away by itself. Under these
conditions, I believe the Supreme Court would be fully justified in ruling
decisively against it. Let’s hope they do.

John Staddon, James B.
Duke Professor of Psychology, is Chairman of the Duke University branch
of the National Association of Scholars.