“Renting Bodies” at Harvard
How Big Ed Games Affirmative Action
The Supreme Court has been on a juggernaut lately against the shibboleths of the left, first striking down the federal abortion law, canceling the presidential giveaway to indebted students, and then rejecting the Soviet-like idea that artistic expression is subject to governmental control.
But the decision that has really set the left on fire, like Dobbs, was the recent one striking down affirmative action in college admissions. Students are angry; pundits proclaim the return of de facto discrimination. But there is another player in this game besides the aggrieved students, and that is Big Ed, or K-12 education and the university system it feeds into.
Affirmative action has been around for decades; it is embedded so firmly in society that we hardly notice it, unless we are a student passed over or accepted on the basis of race. Now we are being forced to talk about this default position by the Supreme Court, and that is good.
President LBJ issued the first executive order prohibiting racial discrimination in employers garnering federal contracts, and then the SCOTUS in 2003 upheld the University of Michigan Law School’s use of race to consider admission, thus affirming the notion that such diversity (of race) was in the interest of the school and of society as a whole.
But why today, when people of many races work and play together and intermarry, and even serve as US presidents, do we still need special accommodations to admit those students to Ivy League colleges? Are the universities saying that Black and Latino high school students never will be as capable as White or Asian students? Or are they saying that their own admissions policy is so irredeemably racist that universities must still employ this scheme? Of course they don’t say that.
The truth is, I believe, that affirmative action in these colleges covers up a dirty little secret, or perhaps two secrets: the first being that the union-controlled elementary and high schools are not educating children effectively, especially those with the bad luck of living near badly performing schools. The stunningly low math and reading scores of inner city schools are real, and even a top graduate from one of these schools will probably not be capable of the rigors of an elite college.
But parents are not satisfied to have their children sentenced to failure in these schools, so why does the failure continue? If you have ever seen the documentary Waiting for Superman, you will see real life illustrations of this tragic situation. Parents enter a lottery for their child to go to a good public school, yet there are only a few spots. They weep when their child’s name is not called.
The teachers’ unions and the administrators, political and elected, must be held to account for this situation. Competition is the best way to accomplish accountability, so of course the establishment resists competition, and this results in the scarcity of excellent schools in the public system. A recent report from Chicago, for instance, notes that many schools there are still open even though they are nearly empty. One school built for 800 students now serves ten! The parents have either left the neighborhood or the system completely. The answer to all this waste and failure is competition, and competition should be introduced by giving parents the right to choose their children’s schools.
The second big winner is the affirmative action game is the university itself. By admitting lower-scoring minority students, or immigrants from Black countries, the school can absolve itself any meaningful accounting for widespread poor academic preparation and for poor college performance once a minority student is admitted. The situation that results, as Thomas Sowell famously said, is that the universities are simply “renting bodies” to satisfy societal pressures. If they were serious about increasing minority student success at elite institutions, and all the future opportunities resulting from that degree, they would support elementary and high school choice in full voice -- and perhaps open a few pilot feeder schools themselves in the inner cities with some of the profits from their billions strong tax-exempt hedge funds. Even the United States Army and various private foundations hold summer trainings to get students ready to compete for admission on a level playing field. The elite universities can too.
The most propitious outcome of this Supreme Court decision is that a discussion of race-based admissions will finally be had. The Asian plaintiffs here, unlike my Irish forbears who founded Notre Dame or their Jewish cousins who founded Brandeis after being shut out by the Ivies, they have chosen to stand and fight through the courts.
Yes, some other minority students will lose their chance to attend an Ivy League; Barack Obama has acknowledged that he and his wife benefitted from affirmative action. It is also true, though, that two students who otherwise would have been admitted to Harvard Law didn’t make it because the Obamas did. There are only a limited number of spots in elite colleges; and some qualified students will inevitably lose out. Again Thomas Sowell reminds us, there are no perfect solutions, only tradeoffs. So let us manage our tradeoffs as honorably as possible in future policies.
And yes, colleges admit students because they can throw a touchdown pass or whose fathers donated money to build a new library, but there is something pernicious about race-based admissions, especially when the underlying tacit lie is that minority students are simply not as capable as others. This covers up the real problem, the utter failure of our elementary and high school educational system to teach and the university’s wink at that failure and perhaps the doubtful impact on racial success itself of a few hundred kids admitted to prized colleges.
So as I watched all the commentators choking back tears and politicians predicting disaster for Black students last week, I heard not a word from controversial union chief Randi Weingarten or any other union official, whose stranglehold on public education benefits the party of these same commentators – 94% of their millions in campaign donations go to Democrats every year – about why they have failed to educate their young charges. I heard not a word about reform from the universities affected, except that they accept the Court’s decision. Of course they can still consider the individual and his or her record and history, but now is the time for real reform, and an end to the window dressing of this destructive, racialist system. No more mothers weeping at the schoolhouse door.