Egan pegs his story to UC-Berkeley, where the percentage of Asian students has grown to 41% in the wake of a statewide ballot initiative prohibiting the consideration of race in public college admissions. But while he gives a sense of the changing atmosphere on the Berkeley campus, Egan doesn’t really dig into the heart of the matter—affirmative action.
Affirmative action comes with serious costs. But on the whole I think it’s a good idea, for three reasons.
First, not all students get the same opportunities in K-12 schools. Black and Latino students, on average, are forced to attend schools that receive less funding, are taught by worse teachers, have less access to advanced curricula like Advanced Placement tests, and generally suffer from the hard bigotry of low expectations. Affirmative action helps students who would have come to the admissions process with better credentials if they’d been given a fair shot to begin with.
Second, affirmative action works, in the words of Yale law school professor Stephen Carter, whose Reflections of An Affirmative Action Baby is required reading on this topic, as a tax. Taxes are necessary for a functioning society, and there’s plenty of precedent for tax policies that treat different people differently. For example, the federal income tax system taxes rich people at a higher rate than poor people. This is a good, workable policy because (A) rich people can afford it, and (B) other people need that money more.
Affirmative action is basically an educational opportunity tax on white people. Like progressive income taxes, it redistributes resources from people who have a disproportionate share to people who need them more. This seems unfair to white people who themselves come from less advantaged backgrounds, and it probably is. But it’s no more unfair than applying the same tax rate to the rich person who earned every dollar from the sweat of his brow as to the person who inherited his money and got a cushy job in the family business. Policies are by nature imperfect, and in the end it’s still better to be rich than poor in America, and white people still enjoy huge advantages that others don’t. Having to settle for a slot in a slightly less competitive college moves the traditional losers in the zero-sum affirmative action game—unusually smart, well-qualified white people—from being in the 99.999th percentile of luckiest people on the face of the Earth to about the 99.998th. They’ll be fine.
The third justification for affirmative action is diversity, which is certainly important—it makes sense for colleges to create an academic environment with broad, differing perspectives, backgrounds, and beliefs. But I tend to value diversity less than the first two justifications for affirmative action, mostly because of how the idea gets used and applied in practical terms. Proponents don’t do a good job of explaining the theoretical limits of diversity as a value, the degree of its benefits or cases when it should be subordinate to other things. Nor do they seem eager to discuss the fact that some perspectives, backgrounds, and beliefs are more worthwhile than others. As a result, diversity as an idea is routinely diluted and abused by people like the college coach in Dan Golden’s excellent book on the corruption of the college admissions process, The Price of Admission, who justified giving preferences to academically suspect athletes on the grounds that the university would benefit from “academic diversity” in that students who aren’t as smart ask more questions in class.
Moreover, for reasons of constitutional law and, I think, a fair amount of intellectual dishonesty, the diversity benefits of affirmative action are increasingly framed in terms of what’s good for white people, as if the whole point is to give the sons and daughters of privilege a chance to spend a few years in a controlled environment hearing about how what it’s like to be a minority in America, before going back to the economically and racially segregated world from which they came. As Dahlia Lithwick said in a discussion of the Michigan affirmative action case, “Schools are not petting zoos.” Or do we honestly think that the main benefit of affirmative action is to give minority students a once-in-a-lifetime exposure to the white perspective? Don’t they get more than enough of that already?
Asian students make all of this more complicated. Many are striving first-generation immigrants from modest economic backgrounds, the embodiment of the American dream. They belong to ethnic groups that have suffered significant past legal and cultural discrimination. Given the added benefits of diversity, the more in college the better—right?
As it turns out, not so much. As Golden made clear in his book and subsequent articles in the WSJ, a number of elite colleges now have what amount to reverse quotas for Asian students, admitting a smaller percentage of Asian applicants than other groups even though those students have stronger qualifications by basically reviving the racist policies the same colleges first developed in the 1920s to keep out Jewish students. Apparently, a college can become too diverse, or it least it can when diversity is defined as “degree of difference from the white people who run things.” What institutions like Princeton (which is being sued by an Asian student with perfect SATs it rejected) seem to want is enough diversity to keep things interesting, but not so much that it threatens their overwhelmingly white base of wealthy alumni, particularly those who have children up for admission.
This collision of race, class, privilege, and history has led to a lot of confused thinking. Both Egan and one of the students he interviews refer to UC-Berkeley as “overwhelmingly Asian,” a strange thing to say about a university where Asian students are still less than half the population. This is neatly reflected in the cover of the Education Life supplement, which is comprised of 100 identical squares, 41 of which feature a picture of an Asian student, exactly the same as the percent of Asians among Berkeley undergrads. But the other 59 squares don’t feature the white, black, Hispanic, and other non-Asian students that make up the majority of the Berkeley campus. They’re blank, so all you see are Asians. The cover reflects the same skewed perspective as Egan and his interviewee.
Egan also quotes a professor getting several things wrong all at once:
“I’ve heard from Latinos and blacks that Asians should not be considered a minority at all,” says Elaine Kim, a professor of Asian-American studies at Berkeley. “What happened after they got rid of affirmative action has been a disaster — for blacks and Latinos. And for Asians it’s been a disaster because some people think the campus has become all-Asian.”
Most of the Asians interviewed in the article seemed pretty psyched to be enrolled at the top-ranked public university in the nation with lots of other Asian students. To say that getting rid of race-conscious admissions has been a “disaster” for them is bizarre, and represents a common failure among affirmative action advocates--an unwillingness to acknowledge that admissions policies are zero-sum. You can't say there are no winners and losers in affirmative action. You can only say who should win, who should lose, and why.
Moreover, the last thing Latinos and black should want from a purely selfish standpoint is for Asians to not be considered a minority, unless they mean a minority that’s actively discriminated against. Berkeley in 2007 is what happens when race isn’t considered in admissions, not when it is.
It will be a long time before society can consider racial issues or embody them in public policy without considerable pain and controversy. But it strikes me that the difficulties of considering race in higher education admissions could at least be lessened if universities would be more nuanced about their criteria and more disciplined in their decision-making. Treating students from Japan, China, and Korea (much less India, Pakistan, etc. etc. etc.) similarly just because their countries of origin are sort of near one another and they kind of look the same to Western eyes is absurd. It would be better if colleges developed some rational criteria (diversity value, historical discrimination, etc.) for deciding exactly which racial/ethnic groups deserve various degrees of admissions preference and which don’t, using as many categories as it takes—10, 50, 100, whatever makes sense. Then they should be a lot more transparent about how that plays out in the admission process, instead of hiding behind the “we consider the whole student” generalities that act as smokescreen for whatever vague or sinister policies they actually have in place. The Michigan decision is driving things in the opposite direction, of course, but that’s what happens when the Supreme Court resorts to using sketchy constitutional law to try to do the right thing.
The great dilemma of racial and ethnic differences lies with reconciling the need to recognize their value and meaning with the need to heal the wounds that have been and continue to be inflicted in their name. As a result, affirmative action will always be hard to sort out. But as the case of Asian student admissions shows, we can’t stop thinking about it, even if we want to.
No comments:
Post a Comment