By Marc Jampole
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia expressed an odious
racist sentiment the other day when he said that those admitted to elite
universities based on Affirmative Action standards suffered a disservice
because they struggle at the elite school instead of succeeding at a lesser
institution.
The reason I know
Scalia’s comments carry a racial tinge—the false notion of black intellectual
abilities—is because Scalia says nothing about the struggles faced by the less
qualified student who happens to be an athlete or a legacy. Studies show that legacies get a bigger break than
either African-Americans or athletes do in college admissions, that is, that
legacies have the lowest grades and SAT scores on average of any studied
group. A legacy, don’t forget, is someone who gets admitted because mom
and dad and maybe granddad and great-gramps went to the college in question and
have been giving it a lot of money for a long time. I imagine that many
of Scalia’s bosses, their children and perhaps one or more of Scalia’s own
children have benefited from the special treatment given legacies. I vividly
remember my son’s friend complaining that the legacies held back the classes at
Harvard because they were so unprepared. Legacies and athletes would also do
better at lesser schools by Scalia’s reasoning.
Scalia also doesn’t take into account many realities of higher education.
For vast numbers of programs such as engineering, hard sciences, medicine and
law, there is no difference between what is taught at any university. The only
difference is who teaches it. An engineering course will be just as challenging
at Harvard as at Arizona State as at New Jersey Institute of Technology. Why
shouldn’t someone deprived of the breaks routinely given to legacies get a
chance to interact with a more prestigious and probably better connected
professor at an elite school? Society will benefit from the greater diversity
and equality of wealth and income that will ensue.
As to much of the rest of the university curricula—the humanities and
social sciences plus the burgeoning if sometimes dubious fields that try to
apply the research in those venerable disciplines such as mass communications
and marketing—grade inflation over the past few decades has eroded my
confidence in the meaning of the grade performance at the university
level.
I also find that the easier SAT test no longer serves as a valid measure
of how the very most talented students are performing in relation to each other,
and so is of no value in sorting which kids should go to the very top
universities and which belong in the next level down.
Universities mouth mealy justifications for admitting great athletes and
the children of former grads. Their reasons for affirmative action are much more
compelling: those admitted under affirmative action programs have often gone to
segregated schools with fewer resources, not gone to specialty camps or taken
SAT prep course, not had consultants help them write their essays. Some may
have suffered food insecurity or other trauma, which research now tells us will
reduce a person’s ability to perform on an intellectual level. Some suffer
because of the reverberating effects of racism through the decades: There is
little social mobility in the United States, and the ancestors of most
affirmative action students were slaves, including those who come from middle
class backgrounds.
The Wall Street Journal is carrying an opinion piece by
Jason l. Riley, another of what seems to be an army of right-wing
policy analysts from the Manhattan Institute, which praises Scalia’s comments. Riley
argues that society suffers by allowing less qualified affirmative action
applicants to attend elite schools instead of the more qualified because the
school at the second tier now has to go to even less qualified applicants
creating a chain of less qualified applicants attending each subsequent level
of school. That reasoning doesn’t take into account that the white who is
bumped from Harvard or Michigan for an affirmative action candidate—or a legacy
or athlete for that matter—will now bring up the standards of the lower rated
school.
Riley uses anecdotal evidence to state that affirmative action students
do less well in college. I was unable to find any large study on the topic, but
it seems beside the point for several reasons. First of all, we don’t ask the
same question of legacies and athletes, although I suspect that since they come
into schools less qualified than affirmative action students they will perform
worse. Besides, the leading institutions have a value beyond the grade point
average. In fact, the value of the elite diploma outweighs the grades for
many—just ask Al Gore, Jack Kennedy, Teddy Kennedy or George Bush II.
Perhaps the most significant reason that the performance of affirmative
action students is a moot point is that affirmative action is not about
guaranteeing success, but about creating opportunity. Affirmative action gives
someone from a disadvantaged background the opportunity to make it. As in the
Texas case before the Supreme Court, the kids who get accepted to elite schools
on an affirmative action basis are no slouches, and often the tops in their
school and tops in the competitions in which they have participated. They
deserve the opportunity to attend the elite school at
least as much as the gifted athlete or the pampered scion of a wealthy family.
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