Posted by David Bernstein:
Dishonest Defense of Affirmative Action:
Perhaps the most obnoxious element of affirmative action as currently
practiced is the refusal of those who practice and defend it to
acknowledge what that current policies, especially in universities,
require significant racial preferences. Instead, they claim that
affirmative action serves as a mere "diversity" tiebreaker among
essentially equally qualified applicants. A case in point is a recent
article by Yale Law professor Robert Solomon, who writes the
following:
I can't speak for others, but I do believe in diversity. Let me
explain what that means, since you seem to think it means that
white men are disadvantaged. That's not what it means, although
diversity does mean that white men from privileged backgrounds now
have to earn their admission, which was not always the case, and
that women and people of color and people with interesting
backgrounds now get to compete on equal footing. Since the grades
and LSAT scores are so similar, most of us look at other things,
like essays and extra-curricular activities and jobs. When all of
this is done, the largest group is white men.
This is just false. While I don't have any data for Yale, I do have
data for two other top 10 law schools, Boalt and Michigan, from the
mid-1990s (there is no reason to believe the data has changed much
since then). 1996 was the last class at Boalt Law School before Prop.
209 affected admissions. The entering students's stats were as follows
(source: American Lawyer, November 1997): LSAT(%ile) GPA Nonminorities
168 (96.9) 3.72 Asian 166 (95.0) 3.71 Hispanic 159 (80.5) 3.50 Black
155 (67.0) 3.54 Similarly, we learn from the district court opinion in
Grutter v. Bollinger that in 1995, another top ten state law school,
the University of Michigan, had the following statistics: white
students had a median LSAT score of 167 and a median GPA of 3.59,
while the corresponding figures were 155 and 3.18 for African American
students, and 159 and 3.35 for Mexican American students. More
generally, statistics show that annually only a handful of African
American students have scores that would remotely qualify them for
Yale admission under the standards applied to whites. For the 1996-97
admissions year, only sixteen African Americans nationwide had and
LSAT of at least 164 (92.3 percentile) and a GPA of at least 3.50,
compared to 2,646 whites (source: American Lawyer). The median scores
of entering students at Yale, meanwhile, are somewhere around 171 and
3.9. There is simply no statistical possibility that the grades and
LSAT scores of African American matriculants to Yale are "so similar"
to the scores of white matriculants that diversity is used as a factor
akin in weight to essays, extracurricular activities, and work
experience. I think affirmative action is a complex issue, and racial
preferences in private universities can plausibly be defended on
social justice grounds. And the article that Solomon was responding
to, by a white male student afraid he wouldn't get into a good grad
school because of affirmative action, was somewhat silly. For example,
even if top law schools implicitly reserve 15 or so percent of their
slots for minority students, as Michigan was doing, that still leaves
85% of the slots available for white students. The vast majority of
white students rejected from Michigan would have been rejected
regardless of affirmative action. But the entire debate over
affirmative action has been poisoned by the failure of its advocates
to acknowledge what it really means in practice (O'Connor, in Grutter,
studiously avoided this herself). Some schools might not be able to
successfully defend their racial preferences in the court of public
opinion. On the other hand, if universities were more candid in their
acknowledgment and defense of racial preferences in admissions, they
might be able to develop a stronger constituency in favor of the
preferences. Moreover, a frank acknowledgment by elite universities of
the difficulty in finding African American (and to a lesser extent,
Latino) applicants meeting the schools' regular standards might lead
to some useful national soul-searching regarding the inferior
educational opportunities given minority students.
References
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Hidden links:
1. http://www.nylawyer.com/news/04/08/081204h.html
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