For conservatives, the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action decision upholding a popular referendum ending affirmative action in Michigan public universities marked a clear triumph over discrimination. For liberals, Schuette was a shameful continuation of our collective legacy of discrimination. Indeed, National Public Radio has had guests imply the decision reflected the values of disgraced Los Angeles Clippers owner Don Sterling.
Yet for professors, affirmative action is not nearly so clear cut. Having taught at 10 colleges and universities and also having served in government, I’m convinced that it is useful to have people from different groups bringing distinct perspectives to the workplace. Nowhere is that truer than in the intellectual workplace, the university, which is why I recruit members of under-represented groups as students and faculty.
Unfortunately, as practiced in many universities, affirmative action does more harm than good. Even college professors, who as a group lean well to the left, privately agree with that politically incorrect assessment. In “The Still Divided Academy,” the authors offer extensive survey data showing that while college and university administrators acknowledge no downside to affirmative action, faculty see serious tradeoffs between diversity and merit.
I saw this firsthand as a graduate student in a top 10 Ph.D. program back in the 1980s. I was the only openly conservative student in the program, my best friend was the only African-American student, and our basically decent colleagues never knew how to act around either of us. But unlike my friend, I was never called out of class to have my picture taken for the department brochure, nor asked to serve on committees to represent the minority point of view. My friend could not just be a doctoral student, which is hard enough; he was supposed to be the minority student, a token, not a person. He ended up leaving the program.
Nor was he alone. On the verge of flunking out, I was kicked off the 12th floor of the social sciences tower and exiled to the second floor to share an office with … the African-American Studies students. They were a decent but bitter lot, who lamented our status having the only office in the building that did not even have a phone. That was how much the university trusted us. Everyone knew that no one from African-American Studies would make dean any time soon. We were the ghetto of the university, though for me it was only temporary.
So I get it when U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor opines that “race matters because of the slights, the snickers, the silent judgments that reinforce that most crippling of thoughts: ‘I do not belong here.’”
But here is what Justice Sotomayer and others on the left do not get. The way many university administrators practice affirmative action, putting PR over people; admitting African-American and occasionally Hispanic students with academic skills well below their white and (especially) Asian peers; and then exiling those students and sometimes faculty to the margins of the university — to special majors, programs and even dorms — does far more to divide than unite us.
As Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor document in “Mismatch,” after a popular referendum forced UCLA to drop racial preferences, the number of black graduates stayed the same because their graduation rate doubled. This happened because UCLA could no longer use less-prepared minorities as the academic equivalent of cannon fodder to hit numerical goals dictated by public relations. Those turned away from UCLA still attended college, typically at schools where they were more likely to succeed than fail.
None of this is to say that affirmative action is always bad; again, I believe in and work on recruitment and outreach efforts and more important, to improve schools in minority communities. But it does say affirmative action is complex. Justice Stephen Breyer wrote in his concurring opinion in Schuette that the Constitution “foresees the ballot box, not the courts, as the normal instrument for resolving differences and debates about the merits of these programs.”
Of course, for other liberals to acknowledge affirmative action tradeoffs, they would need exposure to conservative ideas. On our unhealthy lack of intellectual diversity at universities, don’t get me started.
Robert Maranto (rmaranto@uark.edu) is the 21st Century Chair in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas.
