Readers’ Thoughts on Affirmative Action

The Supreme Court’s ruling is a triumph for meritocracy and fairness. It is also an opportunity for both elite private and selective public universities to do something to help poor students in their local regions, such as Boston and North Carolina, to have better elementary and secondary schooling, with the result that more Black and brown students in Boston and North Carolina will graduate from high school academically prepared to attend Harvard or the University of North Carolina, and able to do the same rigorous classwork as their peers.

Harvard has a $50 billion endowment. There is no financial reason that Harvard could not start a private K–12 academic preparatory school, open to all races, with generous financial aid to poor families. To create the likelihood that Black students would predominate in the student body, Harvard could put Harvard Academic Prep in the Roxbury area of Boston. With control over curriculum and student-achievement standards, Harvard could guarantee that any student graduating in the top half of the class at Harvard Academic Prep would be admitted to Harvard and have academic preparation equal to their classmates.  

Likewise, the University of North Carolina, with its school of education, could do more to help poor students in North Carolina have better elementary and secondary schooling.  The university could sponsor summer enrichment programs for the bottom 10 percent of local North Carolina school districts. It could advocate for the use of weighted (in favor of low-income families) lotteries for public charter schools. Over time the result would be more Black and brown students graduating from North Carolina high schools with the academic preparation necessary to succeed at the University of North Carolina. Affirmative action has over the decades become an increasingly cynical and superficial means by which elite universities pretend to care about disadvantaged Black and brown people. Now they have the opportunity to do something substantial.

Justice Sotomayor got it right: “Equality requires acknowledgment of inequality.” While the Declaration of Independence describes the unalienable rights of men, and the Constitution purports to be authored by “We, the People,” both documents originally secured rights to white men alone. The road to securing even the most basic human rights has been long and arduous for those not fortunate enough to have been born into the dominant group. It took 335 years after the first enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia Colony, and almost 200 years after the colonies declared their intent to form a new nation, for the Supreme Court to decide that the “separate but equal” doctrine was unconstitutional.

What the majority in the Harvard affirmative-action case ignores is the reality that having a legal right is not the same as having the ability to enjoy that right. Laws are not self-enforcing. The interpretation of our governing documents and laws through the subsequent actions of those in power gives life to our history. Because of this, changes in the law often do not translate into new societal norms. This has proved to be particularly true when it comes to racial discrimination. Striking down unjust laws and replacing them with legislation designed to ensure equal treatment is only a start. Such steps do not magically reposition everyone so that they occupy the place in society where they would have been had they and their ancestors enjoyed genuine equality. Undoing the effects of using race as a cudgel for hundreds of years takes generations, not the 20 years since the Supreme Court approved the use of an applicant’s race as a factor in a school’s admissions policy.

Cries of “reverse discrimination” and “two wrongs don’t make a right” are subterfuge of the worst kind. Affirmative action is designed to right an egregious wrong. After hundreds of years of allowing race to be used as a basis for oppression, it is patently hypocritical for the Supreme Court to decide now that it cannot even be considered as but one factor in society’s efforts to modify older norms as it strives to achieve equality through equity.

My experience with Black students is mostly positive. But one student haunts me. He was underprepared for college work, despite being relatively mature plus an armed-services veteran of two tours in Iraq. What he did turn in was strong, evocative, proficient writing. It’s just that his points in total were too low due to missing or very late work. When it was clear, according to my syllabus policies, that there was no way for him to reach a passing grade … we had a hard chat: I told him he was most welcome to retake my class and I hoped he would when circumstances were better for his attendance and assignments.

He was polite and positive. Two weeks later, he came back to class to take part and promote success in a group presentation—a generous, thoughtful thing to do. I tried to catch him to chat, but he slipped away. Next semester he came to my office and asked for a letter.

“I need to expunge the entire fall semester,” he said.

Why? I asked him. What happened? With difficulty, he explained the emotional and psychological turmoil of re-entering civilian life after his tours of duty. Then he said he’d lost his brother, mid-semester, in a drive-by shooting back home in Detroit. I told him I was happy to write a letter on his behalf and hoped he’d try my class again soon. I never saw him after that. I don’t know what happened, but my guess is he re-entered the military, which is a much more tenable option for “expendable” young men of color from dangerous urban environments. He served his country; he served me. I am chagrined and regretful at not pushing through to really “see” that young man in time to at least provide him better recovery options in my class. Were his shortfalls and troubles due to his Blackness? I couldn’t see it then. But I surely see it now: To succeed in college, he needed to not be a young Black male veteran from inner-city Detroit.

Affirmative-action policies attempt to mitigate this. They don’t do it perfectly. But my worry is that with this current change, it will be even more difficult for students like mine … and for instructors like me to assist in their success.

Whether it’s Darwin in my course on human evolution or Shakespeare in my English-literature class, the accusations and focus are always the same: Rather than learning about natural selection or the elements of good storytelling, we learn about how Darwin was a misogynist and how subversive postmodernists in the 1990s exposed Shakespeare as a transphobe who surreptitiously embedded white supremacy throughout all his plays. These discussions, couched in the language of insurrection, as if we were all insurgents leading the charge against elite power, comfortably distract us from the disturbing hypocrisy that we are all attending one of the most discriminatory institutions in America.

It is the elephant in the room—a form of bigotry rarely discussed in the “social justice”–obsessed classrooms across campus espousing the virtues of diversity. It is prejudice against the poor, or “classism.” At Dartmouth [as of 2018], 45 percent of my classmates are from families in the top 5 percent of the income distribution, while 14 percent come from the bottom 60 percent. Indeed, the exhausting discourse on race, sex, and gender identity in my classes is so stale, slavish, and uninspired precisely because there is no real diversity at Dartmouth. Everyone is from the same background. Everyone is rich.

The diversity that Dartmouth so meticulously engineers is the kind that adds more colorful pins to the world map hanging outside the diversity-and-inclusion office but does nothing to help the most disadvantaged among us: poor kids. It is what Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas described as the “aesthetic” of diversity, a cosmetic policy designed to admit full-pay minorities in a pretense of diversity. It’s a mirage.

The Supreme Court’s recent ruling will hopefully force Dartmouth to inject itself with a real dose of diversity and in turn enliven class discussions and broaden student perspectives.

In 1990 I was a premed adviser, responsible for composing reference letters for students’ medical-school applications. I got a call from the director of admissions at a local medical school asking me about a recent graduate. I said she was a nice, quiet young woman who I had not known as well as many of our premeds, and that I had nothing to say beyond what I had written in her letter the year before, when she had applied to medical school but not been accepted.

That director then told me that she had reapplied to medical schools as “Black.”  (In her original application she’d listed her race as “Other.”) I believe he was wondering if I had encouraged her to do so. She had graduated and was no longer at the college and had not spoken to me about reapplying, but merely asked my secretary to send out her old letter.

This young woman was an immigrant from Guyana whose name and appearance were generally South Asian. Guyana is populated by a mix of people brought there by [Europeans] from Africa and India. If she had come to ask my advice, I would have said it was her decision. Was I going to sit there as a middle-aged white guy and say: “You don’t look Black to me”? Later an admissions director from another medical school called me about her, and I knew what the issue was.

This young woman, who had good but not exceptional credentials for medical school, was accepted on this second try, to a medical school to which she had not originally applied.

At that time there were about 40,000 applicants for about 16,000 openings in medical schools, and many qualified applicants were not accepted. This young woman had both the values and the academic skills to do well in medical school and be a fine physician. In my 15 years as premed adviser, I sent a little more than 100 Black students to medical school, all of whom were well qualified.  Affirmative action increased the number of minority physicians without compromising quality.

As a late-middle-age white man, I’ve always considered affirmative action to be essentially discrimination against me, a man with no advantages other than determination and willingness to work hard. I sympathize deeply with the plight of Blacks and other minorities who through no fault of their own have been subjected to extreme hardship. But I believe affirmative action is too much. It breeds resentment and racial antagonism. It leads to suspicion whenever a Black person is successful—Did they truly earn their success? I know all the arguments against what I just stated. I can see both sides of the argument, but a great many people can’t. For many, affirmative action is a cudgel intended to hurt white people. It must be stopped. I will happily support a more nuanced approach should a practical one be proposed, and I suspect a great many other white men would do the same.

The society we have now is very different from when affirmative-action programs were first implemented. The racial makeup of our country has changed dramatically in the decades since, as our demographics shift to a pluralistic society with more biracial people than ever. Affirmative action in its modern form has essentially become legalized racism against Asians, who were disproportionately rated low in a subjective measure of “personality” by Harvard officials. There’s a reason that famously liberal California has outlawed affirmative action in our public schools. Diversity is an admirable and worthy goal to strive for in our colleges, but there is much more to diversity than one’s skin color, such as prioritizing diverse ways of thinking. If these institutions were truly committed to diversity, they would significantly restrict legacy admissions, or eliminate them altogether. Legacy admissions are one of the chief ways that the legacy of racism in our country is preserved.

If we need some simple heuristic to judge college applicants, I would prefer those who are low-income to receive preferential admission. This would still disproportionately benefit racial minorities, but would avoid discriminating against a bright white or Asian student who is working hard to escape poverty, only to have their potential limited because of the color of their skin. Our country continues to struggle with racism, but we need a scalpel to address it at this point and not the crude tool of affirmative action.