Amicus Boxers

Read Reason's complete coverage of the Supreme Court's affirmative action decisions:

The New York Post's Robert A. George situates the drive for diversity in the context of establishment opinion.

Julian Sanchez sorts through the tangled corpus of laws and precedents that produced yesterday's two-headed decision.

Jeff Taylor considers the appeal pusillanimous solutions hold for the American people.

And a couple of Golden Oldies by Richard A. Epstein: In a review of Glenn Loury's The Anatomy of Racial Inequality, Epstein squares affirmative action with liberal individualism. His review of Bowen and Bok's The Shape of the River makes the case for diverse diversity—a range of private initiatives rather than a centrally planned mandate.

Comments

[Russ]

The quote from Loury's book:

"Succinctly stated," he writes, "my problem with liberal individualism is that it fails to comprehend how stigma-influenced dynamics in the spheres of social interaction and self-image production can induce objective racial inequality, decoupled from contemporaneous discriminatory acts of individuals, carrying across generations, shaping political and social-cognitive sensibilities in the citizenry, making racial disparity appear natural and nondissonant, stymieing reform and locking in inequality."

Anyone who thinks that sentence is "succint" can go to the bottom of the class.

[fredH]

Russ:

People who like to hear the sound of their own voices measure succintness by a different scale from that used by you and I. Loury comes from that corner of Academe where prolixity is taken for profundity.

[Anonymous]

http://online.wsj.com/article_email/0,,SB105640519246214000,00.html

---
For American business, Monday's Supreme Court decision on affirmative action brought a double message: Diversity efforts are acceptable, but quotas aren't.

[Warren]

There are many things that trouble me over this decision. I will however confine my comments here to one point that hasn't been repeated so often. Discrimination is one compelling reason to privatize education. It's wrong to discriminate based on race. But it's no more wrong to bestow an advantage to a particular student because of his race than because of his jump shot, or political associations, or legacy status, or parental wealth, etcetera. Yet all these forms of discrimination routinely take place without the hue and cry for Supreme Court review. Furthermore, racial discrimination is no more onerous than merit discrimination. Why should superior students be considered better qualified? Would not a secondary education be of greater advantage to poorer students than to those whom have demonstrated an ability to educate themselves? Wouldn't society as a whole be better served continuing the education of those that still lack basic skills, than those who are already capable of self-sufficiency? When a university feeds from the public trough, how can it ethically justify refusing to admit any member of that public whom applies, whatever their credentials? Private schools should of course be allowed to make their own admissions standards, based on any criteria, without government interference.

[Nick]

Julian,

Bravo, good presentation of arguments that go beyond typical rhetoric for and against affirmative action. Schools need to consider the complete applicant, of which race is a factor, although as you point out not a criterion that lends itself to check off boxes.

Plus, you mention my alma mater that is also now the NCAA Division I baseball champions. Go Rice.

Nick

[Julian]

Nick-
Thanks...I'm a bit surprised that the first comment on the piece wasn't a flame. As for Rice, I was actually watching the game last night--I only know about Hopwood because my girlfriend is a Rice alum.

[Nick]

Julian,

When the Hopwood decision game down I was affiliated with the Rice Young Democrats and attended a number of pro-affirmative action rallies. At some point in those rallies I began to notice that the participants were as interested in maintaining the program as actually increasing diversity, however conceived. That was pretty early in my descent (ascent) to libertarian thought. After the decision we talked about how it would gut the university of minority students and diversity, but seems that hasn't happened. Kind of makes Epstein's case about allowing a diverse approach to diversity.

I wonder if I know your girlfriend? I graduated in 1999 and it's a pretty small school.

Nick

[rick]

There isn't much I like about affirmative action. The only aspect of it that I could go along with is the intent. It is meant to help those who are at a disadvantage to succeed. But just that statement indicates that those of color are automatically at a disadvantage for just that reason. Economics should play a big part in this. Being poor is a major disadvantage. Those kids deserve a helping hand more than the rich (insert a color) kid. To give something to someone due mostly in part to the color of their skin is racism. Or you could call it racial profiling. Either way it judging someone on the color of their skin more than/before the content of their character.

[Anonymous]

what the ruling really says & means:
"there're too many damn Asians in our colleges and universities!"

[joe]

Cracker,

I believe that a person who is not experienced at, or used to, working in an environment in which people of different races, cultures, etc. are their peers, colleagues and superiors has not prepared been properly prepared to succeed in the job market or in society. Disagree?

[Anonymous]

Joe - if that's your argument for AA, then why does it focus on blacks & hispanics? shouldn't schools be required to use this criteria to have certain numbers of Amish, Jehova Witnesses, people raised by hippies, conservatives or rednecks...

[Cracker's boy.]

You know, I guess I'm just a Luddite.

So you are saying that the people (admittedly mostly Western European males) who graduated from college 30 years ago (pre-AA) did not "succeed in the job market or society"?

Agreed?

Cracker's Boy.

[joe]

The job market and society were quite different 30 years ago.

That's a good thing.

[Cracker's boy.]

Agreed. In some ways better and in some ways worse. But we agree that it was different.

It (society and "the job market" pre-AA) did manage to produce sufficient talent to oh, go to the moon, build the interstate highway system, make America the most powerful and rich nation on Earth et al. I can see why it needed change.

Are we still in agreement?

[white nerd]

Joe-

I have 14 engineers reporting to me. They come from a variety of backgrounds and schools. From Berkley to Stanford, State, private etc. Personality and aptitude matters a whole lot more than the diversity of a school choice. The best engineer of the lot isn't even an engineer, he didn't go to college. And I'm not just talking about numbers and formulas here, I'm talking about interaction with coworkers, collaboration etc. The ones who excel are the ones who really don't need to see and hear a smart black college professor who talks differently to figure out that speech inflection doesn't correlate with ability or knowledge

[joe]

Cracker, how much more could have been done if we weren't wasting the talents of so much of our population? Go ahead, write an ode to George Washington Carver, but you can't tell me that forcing black people to live under a system of segregation is an effective way to foster their achievement and ability.

[Jim]

Seems to me that libertarians shouldn't have a problem in principle with voluntary affirmative action. Discrimination is allowable on the 'freedom of association' grounds and different groups can set up whatever rules they want. I know, this question surrounds a public school but there's no particular reason to think that colleges need to be publicly owned and operated (there's lots of private ones and they aren't always more expensive).

A better question is to ask if they actually work at what they're supposed to do. I can see some benefit in the 'diversity' argument but as has been pointed out by others it's a crude measure, at best. After all, a poor white kid that grew up in a mixed or mostly non-white neighborhood probably brings more 'urban street culture' to a school than a middle class black kid from a mostly white suburb. The 'free diversity training' comment lampooned by the anonymous poster above would not really be relevant if signifcant minority representation exists (as opposed to tokenism). But these issues mostly concern themselves with the notion that adding ethnically diverse students to the student population benefits the white students. What does it actually do for the 'students of color' themselves?

If you look at the numbers, minority students have a much higher dropout rate. At historically all black schools, the dropout rate is the same for white students at other universities. One possible explanation for this is that if the academic requirements are lowered for these students, they are not as well equipped to compete with Asian and white students who where held to higher standards. Doing well at a state college is probably better than flunking out of Harvard, to make a crude example. It also sends the message that minority students aren't expected to achieve as well, furthering the whole 'culture of victimhood' that seems not to do anyone any good. The 'ten percent' rule in Texas has some merit, on the rationale that the highest achievers, regardless of environment, will continue to do well when challenged. The minority drop out rate is less and probably because in general a greater range of ability and educational preparedness has entered the universities in those states that practice it, thus increasing the ability of students who are somewhat less academically prepared to compete. However the downside is that it lowers the prestige of these schools and effectively reduces the value of the degree for post college employment.

There are pros and cons to any approach you can think of. The best answer is to allow a diversity of approaches (even the worst ones) and let people choose which best fits their situation (a la the free market). State mandates and/or court rulings remove multiple options in favor of 'one size fits all' solutions that rarely do.

[Cracker's boy.]

Looks like this thread has run its course...

"Wasting the talents of much of our population" and invoking AA to Increase Diversity are not related, so you resort to attacking: "forcing black people to live under a system of segregation".

I guess we're done here.

[omnibus bill]

I won't even use the word "diversity" here. It is a slogan that means so much to so many diametrically opposed people, that it means nothing.

In a more or less democratic country, it makes sense that all the little republics of self-interest around the country have some sort of voice. As long as the governance is democratic, it's healthy to have a lot of positions represented in the political marketplace of ideas and interests. Likewise, social mobility is a good thing to encourage. A permanent underclass of aggrieved poor people (though our poor are rich by world standards) is fertile ground for destructive social movements, and racial grievance can become another aggravating factor in that mix.

Moreover, it's bad when your elites running the country and most of the states are drawn from a relative handful of wealthy and upper middle class neighborhoods, where all the kids go to the same relative handful of schools, and they all share the same assumptions about life, even though they may have some minor political quibbles.

How then to be inclusive of a wide variety of people from many backgrounds? Easy, use racially neutral methods. If you must give preferences, give them to people who have overcome crappy schooling and poverty. Kids who finish in the top 10% of their high school class, for instance, perform as well in college as kids scoring 200 - 300 points higher on the SAT. Ninety percent of kids who are from the bottom economic quartile finish college within 6 years, whereas only around 70% of kids from the top quartile do as well; and only around 55% of Blacks and Hispanics admitted to college via racial preferences.

One advantage of these admissions programs is that they discriminate on legally permissible grounds - geography, family income, good grades. Similarly situated people are treated similarly. Yeah, somebody's feelings are hurt when they lose their seat to a top 10 percenter, but it's not the same quality of grievance as losing a seat at UT Austin because you were too White or too Asian. Another advantage is that these admissions methods cast a broader net. In Texas, 40 schools used to supply almost all of the incoming, in-state freshman class for UT Austin. Now over 600 high schools are represented. There are more minority kids going to school at Austin, and a lot of kids who would never have had a shot at UT, based on their high school's lack of credentials and extracurricular activities, now get a chance. College admissions are always a bit arbitrary to begin with, and it seems to me there are better ways to get a widely representative demographic sampling into college than saying "send me five Blacks, five Hispanics, a Native American and an Asian Pacific Islander."

Naturally, the Democratic legislators in California and Texas have already announced plans to try and scrap the race neutral programs that were having some success, in favor of returning to plain old racial preferences...

[joe]

Rick, the justification for AA isn't that we want to give presents to orphans. Affirmative Action is about desegregation; a college with a significant number of minority students does a better job at producing thoughtful, educated graduates, who are prepared for the real world, than a college that is all-white or nearly so.

Eduation isn't about filling kids' heads with formulas and dates. It's about preparing them to succeed in the outside world as thoughtful, capable, educated people. That includes being able to operate within a workplace and society in which people who are differnt from you intellectually, racially, ethnically, etc etc etc are your peers, colleagues, and superiors. This is really tough to do if all (or nearly all) of your classmates and professors are just like you.

[Nick]

Joe,

One might argue that education is about what the students want it to be about. Some do want to "just" fill their heads with numbers and letters, absent any relationship to future life. Why do you (we?) try to impose any kind of central purpose on education rather than let those who are attending school determine their own reasons/goals for doing so?

Desegregation may be a worthwhile goal, but that doesn't mean any methods of achieving it are justified. One can also look at the history of mandatory desegregation in K-12 schools to see that it's often been ineffective and perhaps even counter-effective, because it can create resentment from all those, black, white or green, who are discouraged from attending the school they would like to. Would you support preferences for rich white kids at Howard University or Grambling?

The desegregation rationale is way too fuzzy, as are the downstream effects you claim. If deseg is appropriate in higher ed why not in housing, workplaces or anywhere else? Is there any situation/place where individuals/groups can create their own identities without another person claiming a right to access their activity?

[Anonymous]

I'd say Joe is about the only honest pro-AA person I've read. AA isn't about helping minority students - it's about providing free diversity training for insulated white people who think that meeting one black person will teach them how all black people think and act.
Kind of like this stupid Woody Guthrie lyric
"Ten hundred books could I write you about her, Because I felt if I could know her
I would know all women"

[joe]

Funny, troll, my argument is exactly the same one made by Michigan before the Supreme Court.

[Anonymous]

joe - exactly.

[Anonymous]

Make no mistake, the underlying assumption in the Court's argument, especially in Grutter, is that blacks and Latinos cannot be held to the same high standards we expect of whites and Asians. The justices have sent a very clear message to black and Latino students: "We don't expect you to measure up." Melanin, their argument implies, will be treated as a measurable "plus factor" in order to make up for intellectual or academic deficiencies. It is a view that is racist at its core.

[Cracker's boy.]

Joe -

"a college with a significant number of minority students does a better job at producing thoughtful, educated graduates, who are prepared for the real world, than a college that is all-white or nearly so."

How so?

Cracker's Boy.

[rick]

I was glad to see someone mention the ALL BLACK colleges to show contridiction in Joe's argument. Why aren't we working towards helping out the black colleges and community by 'forcing' them to admit whites to better educate those blacks on racial diversity? How many white folks, aside from former Prez Clinton, want to move into Harlem, or Watts? I already know what I would learn there....duck and cover. Some of your thoughts tell me that you and others who support AA are looking for 'a perfect world where everyone is happy and lives together in love'. It won't happen. For years I hear those minorities calling for equality, to be treated like everyone else. This goes against their wishes. It causes us to judge them by the color of their skin(a.k.a. racism). So which way is it going to be? Judge them by skin color when they can get something good out of it, but not when it's to harm them?