Diversity's Stigma - U of Michigan ruling due shortly

With the Supreme Court ruling on the Unversity of Michigan admissions case due out shortly, here is a timely article on the damages that affirmative action causes. Before you start the whole "well legacy students get preferential treatment, so why shouldn't blacks," consider the following: At the University of Michigan, students get 4 points for being legacy, compared to 20 points for being black, Hispanic or Native American. Additionally, consider that what is truly at issue here is the fact that the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution prohibits race discrimination, but not discrimination on the basis of alumni affiliation. This is from today's Wall Street Journal.

Diversity’s Stigma
By Jason L. Riley

A young news reporter is sacked after editors discover he’s been writing fake stories. The embarrassed publication details the deception and issues an earnest apology to readers. Then the chattering classes descend for a news cycle of navel gazing.

If the perpetrator is Stephen Glass, the white fabulist fired five years ago from the New Republic magazine, he is just another ethically challenged youngster who made some very bad decisions in life. But if the perpetrators is Jayson Blair, the black fabulist who resigned two weeks ago from the New York Times, he is an example of affirmative action run amok.

Somewhere in between the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1978 Supreme Court Bakke decision on university admissions, blacks forfeited the right to be judged by society as individuals. The most unfortunate consequence of racial preferences is not that they produce the occasional Jayson Blair. (Indeed, the existence of Stephen Glass would seem to make that link tentative at best). Far more troubling is that racial preferences, however well-intentioned, strip blacks of their individuality, their pride, their humanity.

Race-based policies make black achievement a white allowance and black failure a group stigma. Which is why so many black journalists hung their heads at the revelation of Mr. Blair’s race. If the Supreme Court, which is expected to rule shortly on racial preferences at the University of Michigan, needs another reason to right a wrong it sanctioned 25 years ago, this is it.

Liberals have done an exquisite job of misinforming the public about how affirmative action is practiced in the real world and what’s at stake in the current Supreme Court case. In university admissions, for example, they would have us believe that racial quotas are an innocuous policy of giving a slight edge to otherwise qualified blacks. This, we’re told, produced “diversity,” which supposedly brings its own unique (and conveniently unquantifiable) advantages to the learning process.

But in practice, the affirmative action ideal runs smack into a brick wall of black demographic realities. An elite law school like Michigan typically requires a score of 165 (out of 180) on the Law School Admissions Test and a 3.5 grade point average. Last year, 4,461 law school applicants nationwide met that criteria. Just 29 of them were black. Of course, spreading 29 qualified blacks over two dozen or so elite law schools would result in some pretty paltry numbers for the color-conscious. So Michigan’s solution is to lower the entry bar for blacks.

Michigan’s law school dean told the Washington Post that “If there were a way to enroll more underrepresented minorities without considering race, we’d do it. It’s not that we like being race-conscious.” But his comments contradict those of Lee Bollinger, Michigan’s former president, who, in defense of racial preferences, has argued that diversity is as essential to a college education as the study of Shakespeare. “For our students to better understand the diverse country and world they inhabit, they must be immersed in a campus culture that allows them to study with, argue with and become friends with students who may be different from them.”

That sounds like someone obsessed with racial considerations, not averse to them. Note, too, that for Mr. Bollinger, who’s now head of Columbia, diversity’s benefits are a one way street. After all, he’s surely not suggesting that Howard University, a historically black institution, should be shut down, or that its students can’t really understand “King Lear” because there aren’t enough whites on campus to “argue with.”

Liberals want blacks on elite college campuses for the same reason they want them on elite newspaper staffs. Their presence makes these institutions “look like America.” How it makes those blacks look is at best a secondary concern. But the way in which we go about color coding our institutions matters. The indignity of walking around a campus (or workplace) susceptible to the charge that you’re only there because the standards were lowered just doesn’t interest very many on the left. Instead, they push for quotas at the college level while agitating against primary education reforms – like school choice – that would obviate quotas.

But let’s hope that the effects of preference-based racial stigmas do interest the Supreme Court, which in effect must decide if there’s a constitutional justification for holding Justice Thomas’s offspring to lower standards than Justice O’Connor’s.

Unlike “legacy” preferences for children of alumni, affirmative action in practice is tinged with ugly inferences of genetically predisposed black inferiority. A decision to end these policies will put the educational spotlight back on grades K-12, where it belongs. But an important byproduct would be to ease the dehumanizing stigma that, among other things, forces black professionals to wince at the publicized shortcomings of a colleague who happens to be black.

 

subtomic -- You are wrong.

Here is the point system, note that the 20 point bonus for socio-economic disadvantage is *separate* from the 20 point bonus for underrepresented racial identification.
***************************************************
ADMISSIONS CRITERIA
At the University of Michigan, minority undergraduate applicants to the College of Literature, Science and the Arts receive a 20-point bonus on the basis of race out of a 150-point system, which takes into consideration other criteria, including academics. Scholarship athletes, for example, get 20 points. Race is covered in a category called "other factors." The point system includes:


Geography
10 points - Michigan resident
6 points - Underrepresented Michigan county
2 points - Underrepresented state

Alumni
4 points - "Legacy" (parents, step-parents)
1 point - Other (grandparents, siblings, spouses)

Essay
1 point - Outstanding essay (since 1999, 3 points)

Personal achievement
1 point - State
3 points - Regional
5 points - National

Leadership and service
1 point - State
3 points - Regional
5 points - National

Miscellaneous
20 points - Socio-economic disadvantage
20 points - Underrepresented racial-ethnic minority identification or education
5 points - Men in nursing
20 points - Scholarship athlete
20 points - Provost's discretion
**************************************************

None of this is truly the issue, however. The true issue at stake here is equal protection under the Constitution. All races must be treated *equally* under the law. Emotions and social issues aside, the Univeristy of Michigan is *not* treating all races equally by giving preferential treatment to blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans. This is the bottom line.

 

Nope, it can total up to 40.

http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/01/16/bush.affirmativeaction/

 

The point about legacy points is a much less direct linkage to racial discrimination, not to mention a much smaller point total. It is largely irrelevant to this debate and is not a counter-point to the fact that people of Asian, Russian, German, Saudi, etc backgrounds are not being afforded equal protection under the law with regard to race. If someone wants to bring a suit to the courts with regard to legacy preferential treatment, then fine. We'll debate that then. Until that happens, don't misdirect attention away from the real issue.