College Rulings Add Insult to Injury
Never count on the U.S. Supreme Court to think and write clearly. Its two decisions in the University of Michigan affirmative action cases are, to put it mildly, a mess. But the bottom line seems clear enough, even if the reasoning barely qualifies as “reason.” The Supreme Court has told those of us who abhor racial preferences to get lost. Our principles, arguments and evidence about how those preferences work have been dumped in a dead-letter box. The proponents of racial-driven decision-making have won. Big-time.
Some preference opponents have been trying to spin the decisions as something-for-us, something-for-them. They should stop trying. The effort is as absurd as the court’s own spin, pretending that the 14th Amendment’s promise of racial equality is alive and well, while upholding racial double standards in University of Michigan law school admissions in Grutter vs. Bollinger.
In Gratz vs. Bollinger, which dealt with the school’s undergraduate admissions, the court struck down the blatant quota system that the university was using to admit black and Latino applicants. But that decision was unimportant. Six members of the court agreed that the school was a tad over the line in assigning 20 extra points (on a 150-point scale) just for the color of an applicant’s skin, when perfect SAT scores counted for less. In other words, extraordinary academic promise meant less than the presence of African American or Latino blood. Do something just a little more subtle, the majority of justices said, in effect. With a bit of camouflage, you can achieve the same ends. Take a leaf from Michigan’s law school book.
And thus, it is Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s opinion for a majority of five in the Grutter law school case that makes the decisions historic. That opinion endorses the use of racial double standards in admissions on the grounds that the school’s commitment to “diversity” justifies them. For obvious historical reasons, treating people differently on the basis of their racial identity has long been considered deeply suspect in American constitutional law. No longer. The need for “diverse” institutions evidently trumps the cost of judging individuals by the color of their skin.
The fact that Michigan’s law school engages in racial double standards cannot seriously be doubted. A white or Asian applicant with, say, an LSAT score of 165 and a grade-point average of 3.25 to 3.49 has only about a 20% chance of getting in. But precisely the same academic profile guarantees admission for a non-Asian minority student. The law school itself has acknowledged that three out of four students from “underrepresented” minorities would not be admitted if race were left out of the equation. Similar glaring disparities in qualifications can be found at every law school.
Of course many non-Asian minority students do not need racial preferences to get into selective schools. But those preferences are necessary, the court said, to create a “critical mass” of blacks, Latinos and Native Americans.
What is a critical mass? Critical mass, the director of admissions helpfully explained, means “meaningful numbers” or “meaningful representation.” Other administrators came up with slightly more illuminating answers. The law school dean was concerned that “underrepresented” minority students not feel “isolated.” Translation: We need to make sure the number of black students is sufficient to allow black student organizations, black study groups and so forth. And in many colleges, that critical mass also allows separate dorms, freshman orientations and graduation celebrations. In other words, a school’s commitment to “diversity” is essential to the self-segregation so prevalent in institutions of higher education.
The court (ignoring the self-segregation apparent on almost every campus) talks about the “educational benefits” that “diversity” brings. “Being a racial minority” is a “unique experience.” The statement comes awfully close to saying that all Latinos think alike and whites need to hear the “Latino” point of view. In any case, O’Connor offers no evidence of any actual “educational benefits,” and Justice Clarence Thomas is surely right to say that the law school’s primary interest is “aesthetic.” The school, he wrote, “wants to have a certain appearance, from the shape of the desks and tables in its classrooms to the color of the students sitting at them.”
Race has been called the “American dilemma.” It is, in fact, the American undoing -- the ground on which we lose our footing, the problem that plays havoc with bedrock American values. Racial classifications in the United States have a long and ugly history; racial subordination was all about double standards, with different entitlements depending on your racial identity. Nevertheless, the highest court in the land has now embraced them. It is a bleak day in American constitutional law.
The majority opinion in Grutter reads like a panic attack that triggers desperate and unconvincing arguments. Without racial preferences, we’ll sink, it implies. Black, Latino and Native American students just can’t meet white and Asian standards, O’Connor seems to presume. American educators constantly and rightly bemoan the low academic expectations schools have for non-Asian minority kids. But O’Connor, in effect, sanctions those low expectations -- indeed she writes them into 14th Amendment law.
The writer and political thinker Jim Sleeper has a nice phrase for such an attitude: “liberal racism.” Of course non-Asian minority students can do well in school. There’s nothing wrong with their potential. There is something very wrong with their level of academic achievement at the moment, however. And that is the tragic problem driving all preferential policies -- not only in admission to selective schools, but in employment as well.
By the 12th grade, black students on average are four years behind the typical white or Asian. Latinos don’t do much better, although how they do in school depends in part on how long their families have been in this country.
An employer hiring the typical black high school graduate, or the college that admits the average black student, is choosing a youngster who has only an eighth-grade education. In most subjects, the majority of black students by the 12th grade do not have even a “partial mastery” of the skills and knowledge that the authoritative National Assessment of Educational Progress says are “fundamental for proficient work” at their grade. They fall into the category called “below basic.”
In reporting the scores of American students, NAEP (often called the nation’s educational report card) uses four “achievement levels,” the top two of which are “proficient” and “advanced.” In math, only 0.2% of blacks score at the advanced level; the figure for whites is 11 times higher, and for Asians 37 times higher. African Americans have made tremendous gains since the days when most attended legally segregated schools. But they have made no further progress in the last 15 years and have even fallen back in some subjects.
There is no reason to panic. There is every reason to get busy educating kids. “The acid test” of preferential treatment will be its “efficacy in eliminating the need for any racial or ethnic preferences at all,” O’Connor writes for the majority in Grutter. But preferences don’t “eliminate” the racial gap in academic achievement; they paper it over, and in doing so allow educators and the public to ignore the nation’s most important civil rights issue. Only elementary and secondary schools can close the gap. Creating good schools with high academic and behavioral standards is not impossible: We know what they look like -- although resistance and inertia create serious obstacles to substantial educational reform.
The alternative to fixing the real problem is continuing the long and dishonorable tradition of linking academic and economic opportunities to race. Judging citizens by the color of their skin is as American as apple pie, but the magnificent civil rights warriors of the 1950s and 1960s did not put their lives on the line to perpetuate such terrible habits of mind.
Grutter and Gratz are not victories for advocates of racial equality. They are victories for those who expect less from black and Latino students, and, as such, they legitimize stigmatizing inequality. There is, in fact, only one way to realize true equality: Close the racial gap in skills and knowledge starting in the early grades.