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Kevin Wolfman: The White Case for Affirmative Action
The U.S. Supreme Court may strike down race-based admissions this year. For the sake of Caucasian students, it shouldn’t, writes Kevin Wolfman.
By Kevin Wolfman
Affirmative action, White America’s eternal nemesis, is about to get another close-up.
Kevin Wolfman
In 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in Grutter v. Bollinger that race-conscious admissions policies at the University of Michigan’s law school, as well as universities nationwide, were acceptable. While the Court rejected the constitutionality of strict “quota” admissions, it reaffirmed that institutions were free to consider race as one factor, among many others, in admissions decisions. Writing for the majority, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor held that affirmative action “further[ed] a compelling interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body.”
But this is 2012. O’Connor, the conservative swing vote in the Bollinger case, is long gone from the bench. In her place sits Samuel Alito, a Justice who would be conservative enough to win the upcoming Republican primary in Arizona, were he so inclined. (O’Connor, herself an Arizona native, wouldn’t stand a snowball’s chance in the desert.) With the replacement of the conservative O’Connor with the arch-conservative Alito, it was only a matter of time before a miffed white applicant denied entrance to her school of choice decided to raise a stink about affirmative action in federal court. So here we are, with the Supreme Court once again poised to possibly throw affirmative action in the trashcan, just nine years after polishing and displaying it proudly on the mantel.
The case against affirmative action has always been, and will always be, the same: Considering race in university admissions is “reverse discrimination”—explicitly racist, and therefore against the law. It’s a fair point. Given that each university has a limited number of slots for new students, the application process is a zero-sum game by definition. Giving a race-centric boost to certain minorities (Asians excluded, of course) automatically decreases the odds of acceptance for white applicants.
On the surface, therefore, this is a pretty cut-and-dried case. Affirmative action decreases whites’ chances for admission due solely due to the color of their skin, so that makes it illegal.
This argument is shallow and incomplete, however. The fact remains that affirmative action, while possibly harmful to white college applicants, presents significant benefits to white college students. O’Connor stated in her Bollinger opinion that a “diverse student body” provides “educational benefits,” presumably to white students as well as those of color. What are these benefits, exactly?
For one, diverse student bodies actually promote higher-level thinking skills. As demonstrated by Stanford education researcher Anthony Lising Antonio, white students who socialize regularly in multiracial peer groups tend to reason more critically about political and social issues than those who hang out in homogenous crowds. Rather than resorting to shallow, emotional appeals, they demonstrate increased “integrative complexity,” weaving multiple perspectives and shades of nuance into their arguments. (Read this article for a more complete discussion of the Antonio study.)
At the same time, college, as a whole, makes students of all colors more tolerant, compassionate, and inclusive. These are universal values that any well-adjusted human being can get behind, and increasing diversity on campus can only accelerate students’ embrace of them. The value of the college experience is not limited to the acquisition of professional skills and a rise in lifetime earning potential. College honestly promotes understanding, acceptance, and unity across racial and ethnic lines. That is not a warm and fuzzy liberal talking point, but an established scientific fact. White students benefit significantly from the experience of living and learning alongside students of color—and vice versa.
These are just a couple of the “educational benefits” cited by Justice O’Connor in 2003, and they still exist in 2012.
Of course, even if opponents of race-conscious admissions accept the fact that diversity does help make white students become better critical thinkers, more tolerant citizens, and more compassionate human beings, they are likely to fall back on this position: In the end, the minority applicants who get accepted to college through affirmative action programs just don’t “deserve” their spots. Because affirmative action admits often have relatively lower grade point averages and/or standardized test scores than their peers, critics claim that they do not rightfully “earn” their positions on campus.
This would be a valid argument if grade point averages and test scores were universally reliable measures of past performance, current aptitude, and future potential. They are most assuredly not—for many reasons, which will be discussed in a future article. For now, it will suffice to state that academic “merit” cannot be reliably measured solely with GPAs and SATs.
Do a few white applicants lose out a spot in their college of choice due to affirmative action policies? Yes. But there are hundreds, if not thousands, of colleges and universities in this country that provide both a quality education and an attractive lifestyle. As journalist and Yale grad Alexandra Robbins persuasively illustrates in her book The Overachievers, when it comes to future earnings and career advancement, where one attends college matters much less than how well one performs in college academically.
Among other things, Robbins cites a study that followed the careers of two groups of Harvard applicants. The first group’s students were admitted to Harvard and enrolled in the school. The second group’s students were admitted to Harvard but chose to enroll elsewhere, usually at a less prestigious place (it’s hard to find anywhere as prestigious as Harvard). Years later, the students in the second group were just as professionally successful as the students in the first group. The lesson? If you are “qualified” for a particular school, you are probably going to end up just as well off as the students at that school, whether or not you actually attend that school yourself.
White America’s never-ending hissy fit over affirmative action may be just one more symptom of our society’s unhealthy obsession with so-called “top” colleges. Students (and parents, of course) have been brainwashed by self-interested, for-profit entities like The Princeton Review, Kaplan, and U.S. News and World Report into believing that a rejection from a college perceived as “elite” will seriously damage an applicant’s odds of future success. As Robbins demonstrated, however, this is simply untrue.
The intellectual and social benefits of campus diversity, for students both white and non-white, are clear. Affirmative action, in turn, bolsters these benefits by diversifying the college environment. The white applicants who miss out on attending their first-choice schools due to affirmative action policies will, in all likelihood, not suffer any real long-term negative effects—they are still perfectly “qualified,” after all. So, is the principle of “race-blind” admissions worth the practical decreases in intellectual strength and social cohesiveness that would result?
If the Supreme Court declares “yes,” it won’t just be the minorities that suffer.
Kevin Wolfman is a teacher and holds a Masters degree in political science from the University of California at Davis. He is the author of Not Politics: The Student’s Guide to Political Science. Follow him on Twitter at @kevinwolfman.
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February 29th, 2012
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Comments
Reward the blacks and screw the whites. Of course the blacks and dumb down whites are in favor. Kinda like reward the thief and violate the victim. Not likely the thief will complain. Great plan if your not the victim. What a joke and scam.
Thank you for your feedback. Actually, the main thrust of the article is that white students can actually benefit from pro-diversity policies like affirmative action. Your comment about “thieves” and “victims” failed to address this. Feel free to re-read the article and get back to me on your thoughts about its central point.
The article and the study did seem to show that the white and asian students (victims) were better able to state views that the AA crowd approved, so obviously were much better off because they learned to like the wolves. This assumes that the Stockholm Symdrome is a good thing.
“Among other things, Robbins cites a study that followed the careers of two groups of Harvard applicants. The first group’s students were admitted to Harvard and enrolled in the school. The second group’s students were admitted to Harvard but chose to enroll elsewhere, usually at a less prestigious place (it’s hard to find anywhere as prestigious as Harvard). Years later, the students in the second group were just as professionally successful as the students in the first group. The lesson? If you are “qualified” for a particular school, you are probably going to end up just as well off as the students at that school, whether or not you actually attend that school yourself.”
Maybe the study shows that a college education at an elite school isn’t really worth all that much. Those students who are smart and motivated will do better than those who are less smart and less motivated. Excluding affirmative action (which causes many minorities to fail in schools for which the government schools do not adequately prepare them), the applications process merely selects the best of the best to go to Harvard (or some other overpriced, over-hyped “elite” school) and gives them about the same education at a much higher price. In other words, Harvard, Yale, etc. are less efficient in providing an education than the less “elite” schools.
“Maybe the study shows that a college education at an elite school really isn’t worth all that much. Those students who are smart and motivated will do better than those who are smart and less motivated.” I entirely agree with you. The value of a degree from an “elite” school like Harvard lies entirely in the connections and weight associated with the school’s name. Harvard students probably don’t receive a classroom education that’s any higher in quality than students at most decent state universities. This is why U.S. News rankings and the obsessions over elite college admissions are so ridiculous. Good students are probably going to turn out just fine no matter where they go to school.
“The case against affirmative action has always been, and will always be, the same: Considering race in university admissions is “reverse discrimination”—explicitly racist, and therefore against the law. It’s a fair point.” ….not exactly, inherent in the term racism is a position of power, which minorities do not have. If those in power could be trusted to be fair, affirmative action would be a moot point. Affirmative action redreess inequality. If it were not for affirmative action many Sfrican Americans, like Professor Henry Louis Gates and President Obama would perhaps not have been admitted to Harvard.
“Inherent in the term racism is a position of power, which minorities do not have.” This may very well be true, but the debate over the technical/academic meaning of the term “racism” is outside the scope of this article. In any event, I’ll defend my use of it here because the article, in the section you quote, is discussing the reason for many whites’ opposition to affirmative action. White opponents of “A.A.” nearly always describe the policy as “racist” or “racism,” which is why it is described as such here. Anyways, thanks for your feedback!
The social science data for the benefits of diversity are disputed and the benefits are at best marginal (and, of course, those benefits are enjoyed only by the white students who are admitted, not those that are turned down). The list of costs, on the other hand, is long and largely irrefutable: It is personally unfair, passes over better qualified students, and sets a disturbing legal, political, and moral precedent in allowing racial discrimination; it creates resentment; it stigmatizes the so-called beneficiaries in the eyes of their classmates, teachers, and themselves, as well as future employers, clients, and patients; it fosters a victim mindset, removes the incentive for academic excellence, and encourages separatism; it compromises the academic mission of the university and lowers the overall academic quality of the student body; it creates pressure to discriminate in grading and graduation; it breeds hypocrisy within the school; it encourages a scofflaw attitude among college officials; it mismatches students and institutions, guaranteeing failure for many of the former; it papers over the real social problem of why so many African Americans and Latinos are academically uncompetitive; and it gets states and schools involved in unsavory activities like deciding which racial and ethnic minorities will be favored and which ones not, and how much blood is needed to establish group membership. Q.E.D.: Racial preferences ought not to be used.
Mr. Clegg, thank you for your perspective and feedback. I would argue that, contrary to your claim that affirmative action provides only “marginal” benefits at best, years of social science research–like the Antonio study cited in this article–have demonstrated that programs that increase diversity on campus benefit students significantly–both white and non-white students, for that matter. There is not enough space here to answer each of 20+ arguments you posed, so I’ll focus on just one for now: your claim that affirmative action “mismatches students and institutions, guaranteeing failure for many of the former.” This argument is based on a presumption that a school’s reputation is directly correlated with its level of academic difficulty–i.e., Harvard must be a “more difficult” school than, say, Michigan State, because Harvard is more prestigious. This position is shaky at best, and I wholeheartedly disagree with it. The difficulty of college is likely much more a function of what specific classes one takes than what specific school one attends. More importantly, your position rests on the assumption that a student’s high school grades and standardized test scores are accurate predictors of academic success in college. This is a misnomer. Success in college depends much more on work ethic than pre-existing knowledge. So long as an incoming student has a solid grasp of certain fundamentals of reading, writing, mathematics, etc., their specific GPA level and test scores from high school are all but irrelevant. As Malcolm Gladwell showed in “Outliers,” you don’t have to be “the best” at something to succeed at it. You just have to be “good enough,” and combine that basic level of competence with the requisite amount of motivation. I highly doubt a black or Latino applicant with a 3.9 GPA and 1300 SAT score is going to “fail” more often than a white or Asian applicant with a 4.2 GPA and 1450 SAT score, given equal amounts of work ethic.
Furthermore, as Robbins showed in “The Overachievers,” the overall admissions process itself likely does a far better job of “mismatching” students and schools than affirmative action does. Consider the study Robbins cites which demonstrated that Harvard, one of the most prestigious and selective schools in the country, also had–on average–some of the least happy and satisfied students. This study was conducted in a year in which Harvard was ranked #1 by U.S. News and World Report, by the way. Clearly, admissions offices are doing a great job of mismatching students and schools already–how else could so many bright, exceptionally driven students end up so unhappy in college, an institution whose sole purpose is nurturing such students? I doubt affirmative action is playing much of a role in the epidemic of “mismatching” that’s currently sweeping American colleges and universities, at least compared to U.S. News and the other for-profit entities fueling the admissions rat race.
Of course, given that you are the CEO of the Center for Equal Opportunity and served in the Reagan and Bush 41 administrations, I doubt this little rebuttal is going to sway you in the least. In fact, I find it flattering that a person of your position would bother to comment on my article in the first place. So, thank you for the exposure! By all means, let’s “debate” some more.
Re “mismatch,’ readers may want to check out the briefs by Rick Sander and Stuart Taylor, and by Gail Heriot-Peter Kirsanow-Todd Gaziano, at this link: http://www.nationalreview.com/phi-beta-cons/281063/good-amicus-briefs-ifisher-v-university-texasi-roger-clegg
Mr. Clegg, you haven’t really responded to the evidence that points to campus diversity having a positive effect on white students’ interpersonal values and intellectual strength, which was the real topic of this article. What are your thoughts on this?
It’s hard to improve on Roger Clegg’s comments since it covers all bases.
Among the pernicious effects of AA is the enormous damage it causes to race relations in many respects. AA creates a deep, lasting suspicion that AA graduates and professionals are not qualified because of lower standards, rigging and a multitude of shenanigans.
Mr. Clegg’s original comment was certainly lengthy and comprehensive, but it failed to address the central premise of this particular article. It was standard anti-affirmative action boilerplate.
I did address that premise: I said that, even if there are some marginal and controverted benefits, they must be weighed against the numeous, heavy, and incontrovertible costs. On the problems with using the dubious social science in this area to justify something as ugly as racial discrimination, readers can take a look at part III of this essay: http://198.173.245.213/pdfs/roger-clegg_attacking_diversity.pdf
Speaking of dubious research, the paper cited here as proving that white students become “better thinkers” if the student body is more diverse fits that category. I just read it and all that its experiment really shows is that white students, when challenged by unconventional views, will do a better job of arguing their views than when they are not. That doesn’t indicate any lasting, or even temporary improvement in their “thinking skills.” Furthermore, the key to it is not necessarily racial difference, but different perspectives. That could just as well — actually, better — come from affirmative action to get more students on campus who hold such views and are not shy about advancing them. Doing that would probably lead to real campus interactions, not just the contrived experiment here. So should Harvard try to recruit more libertarians, Marxists,vegans, atheists, gun rights advocates, etc. in order to really improve “diversity” and serious discussions?
Affirmative action, and indeed any effort to force “diversity,” serves to further discrimination and racism.
Although you might disagree with it, although it might be wrong, you cannot deny people’s perceptions of affirmative action. I completely agree with the benefits of diversity, as I have observed them first-hand at my school. However, the diversity at my school is natural, not forced.
Mr. Clegg’s list of negative effects is the reality where diversity is forced. Affirmative action draws negative attention to race. It tells people of a certain race. “You’re not good enough on your own, so we’re lowering our standards for you.” It tells other students, “You worked really hard and you’ve excelled amazingly, but your skin is the wrong color for this school or for this scholarship. You can’t add a different enough perspective.” Maybe that’s not really what is happening, but that is what people perceive.
Instead of relying on forced diversity that calls greater attention to race and furthers stereotypes, schools should find a more natural diversity solution. I don’t have that solution, but I have confidence that it’s out there.
Speaking of boilerplate, as he does in responding to Clegg, Wolfman’s entire case rests on the mantra that diversity of the kind extolled throughout the American academy is something to be sought out for its myriad advantages. Pure boilerplate!
As Jared Taylor has written ( http://www.lrainc.com/swtaboo/taboos/jt_diver.html ), if there really were substantial advantages in “glorious-rainbow”-style diversity, people would eventually catch on and seek it out, instead of having it imposed upon them, shoved down their throats.
In fact, all you actually get in this real world regarding diversity are contradictions. First, if there’s to be benefit in diversity, there must be systematic differences among the categories of people called “white,” “Asian,” “black,” etc. (After all, the trivial difference of skin color can’t yield benefits.) So, e.g., black students must be heard from. But aren’t the people pushing hardest for diversity pretty much the same ones who insist that there’s no such thing as race, and everyone is fundamentally the same? (Yes!)
Second, the general experience on “diverse” campuses is not of increased understanding and appreciation across racial lines but of increased hostility and self-segregation. As in the larger society, race relations are actually deteriorating. (There’s really nothing surprising about this — humans are tribal, worldwide and throughout history, and “diverse” societies are usually fractious, often lethally so.)
Wolfman takes a wave at describing diversity’s specific benefit for white college students with his assertion that those immersed in diversity wind up capable of “weaving multiple perspectives and shades of nuance.” But this is easily recognizable as mere orotund, fatuous blather.
Finally, a sufficient argument **against** affirmative action — never mind its disadvantages for minorities — is that it’s bad for whites (in its unfairness) and white institutions (for the deterioration in their standards that inevitably results). And if non-whites want to benefit from the civilization that white people have created, then it’s up to the non-whites to assimilate and perform and then let the chips fall where they may, not to demand re-engineering of the societies and institutions they specifically sought out.
(Of course, black Americans who are descendants of slaves can’t be said to have sought out Western societies. But would they really want to migrate to Africa? A book pertinent to that question is Keith Richburg’s _Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa_.)
The major impact of affirmative action is not on whites but on Asians. If you eliminated AA today, the numbers of Asian students at elite schools would go up, the numbers of black students would go down, and the numbers of white students would stay about the same.
So tell me again why Asian students today should pay the price for discrimination long ago against black people?
I interpret AA as principally reflecting a desire by elite schools to keep the numbers of Asian students down, just as they tried to keep the numbers of Jewish students down in the last century.
Mr. Wolfman, So many contradictions propagated by the proponents of AA like you. I’ll pick one. We should recognize that racial diversity on campus is a continuum, namely there are more diverse and less diverse colleges. If more diversity is a goal worthy of pursuing at the many costs listed by Roger Clegg above, then let’s bring it to it’s logical conclusion –racial quota would achieve the ultimate ideal. But we all know racial quota is unconstitutional.
This is because a racial quota system is in disagreement with liberal free-market principles. Whatever smoke and mirrors one may empoly, the current admission AA practice is a version of quota, and it undermines free choice, competition, and fair play.
What did you learn the hard way in this job and what happened specifically that led up to this lesson?
http://www.militaryobservation.info/
I learned that I love the structure and order of the Military. There was a time when I felt that I didn’t want to be a Marine anymore and I ended my contract and faded away into another corporate job without rewards. I spent three years of my life in a business skirt and went home each night wondering what difference I was making. That’s when I decided to come back into the Military and deploy to Iraq.
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