UNIVERSITIES should not give preferences to some students and discriminate against others on the basis of skin color and the countries their ancestors came from.
That simple proposition should not be controversial. There are very high costs associated with violating it. It is personally unfair, passes over better qualified students and sets a disturbing legal, political and moral precedent if we engage in racial discrimination. It creates resentment among those discriminated against -- and 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 and creates pressure to discriminate in grading and graduation. It breeds hypocrisy within the school and 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 problems that result in so many African-Americans and Latinos being 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.
Given these costs, the benefits that the proponents of preferences adduce would have to be overwhelming. In fact, they are weak and implausible.
The most commonly heard justification is that somehow this discrimination is needed in order to make up for past discrimination. But the students involved are not former slaves, nor were they even alive during the Jim Crow era:They are 17 and 18 year-olds, born in the mid-1980s.Little wonder then that the Supreme Court has already rejected this rationale and universities--like the University of Michigan in the cases now pending before the Court -- don't make it.At selective schools like Michigan, very few of the African Americans admitted (only 14 percent) come from low-income backgrounds; the other 86 percent are middle or upper-class.
Instead, schools rely on an even flimsier rationale. They argue that students will learn better and more as a result of random observations that might be made in class and random conversations that might take place outside of class, which might be more likely in a student body that reflects a predetermined racial and ethnic mix.Not only that, but it has to be asserted that students might learn so much more that the schools have a constitutionally "compelling" reason to discriminate on the basis of race and ethnicity to ensure that these random observations and conversations are more likely to come about.
So, that's the question:Is this reason persuasive enough to outweigh all the costs that inevitably follow from racial and ethnic discrimination? Of course, the only fair-minded answer to this question is no.
The "diversity" rationale, incidentally, can also be used to discriminate against members of racial and ethnic minority groups, and indeed it already is. The University of Michigan discriminates against not only whites, but also Asian and Arab-Americans. Its law school discriminates in favor of some Latinos (Mexican-Americans) but against others (those with Cuban or Central or South American ancestry). It discriminates in favor of some Puerto Ricans (those born in the United States) but against others (those born in Puerto Rico). The University of Georgia was recently sued for discriminating against women in the name of diversity.In principle, there is no reason why African-Americans could not be discriminated against, if they are "overrepresented" at a school.
And make no mistake about it, race is no mere "tiebreaker" at institutions like the University of Michigan and the University of Virginia: It is a very, very heavy thumb on the scale. At the University, for instance, if an in-state applicant scored 550 on the verbal SAT, 540 on the math SAT and was in the 85th percentile of her high school class, then she would have a 91 percent chance of getting in if black, but only an 8 percent chance of acceptance if white.At Michigan, to give another example, if an applicant had a 900 cumulative SAT and 3.0 high school GPA, the applicant has a 9 in 10 chance of getting in if black or Latino, but less than 1 in 10 chance of acceptance if white or Asian. (These figures are taken from studies published by the Center for Equal Opportunity, based on data supplied by the schools themselves, and available on our website, www.ceousa.org.)
Those supporting racial preferences claim, finally, that they are needed to improve race relations and combat stereotypes.So, let's get this straight:The University of Virginia and the University of Michigan have admission policies that tell African-Americans, "We have rigorous academic requirements for whites and Asians, but we don't expect you to be able to meet those standards, and so we have a second, much lower set of qualifications for you"-- and this is supposed to improve race relations and dispel the myth that black people are intellectually inferior to white people? Not likely.
(Roger Clegg is general counsel for the Center for Equal Opportunity in Sterling, Virginia.)
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