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Seminar IX Affirmative Action: Is There A Better Way? June 2000  |
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SPEAKERS Ward Connerly, Chairman, American Civil Rights Institute; Member, University of California Board of Regnts. Jerome Karabel, Professor of Sociology, University of California at Berkeley; Co-Director,Project on Equal Opportunity. Ruth Simmons, President, Smith College. Abigail Thernstrom, Senior Fellow, The Manhattan Institute; Co-Author (with Stephan Thernstrom), America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible (1997). Stephan Thernstrom, Winthrop Professor of History, Harvard University. KEYNOTE James Traub, Contributing Writer, New York Times Magazine; Author, "The End of Affirmative Action (And the Beginning Of Something Better)," New York Times Magazine, May 2, 1999. FACILITATORS John L. Kane, Jr., U.S. Senior District Court Judge, Denver, CO Brooks Thomas, Chairman, the Vail Valley Institute; former Chairman and CEO, Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. |
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An Overview Affirmative action in higher education began in the late 1960s as an attempt to compensate for the historical exclusion of blacks from public and private colleges and universities. Originally a combination of community outreach and scholarship programs, affirmative action became institutionalized in academe as separate programs that set targets for enrollment of under-represented minorities. During the 1970s the number of black, Latino and Native American matriculants at institutions of higher learning grew significantly. Successful challenges to the consideration of race in university admissions (1978, California; 1996, California; 1998, Washington) have created a public forum for reevaluation of the legality, the justice, and the necessity of affirmative action programs in higher education. A federal appellate court has found that race-based admissions policies violate the Fourteenth Amendment, and critics of affirmative action in higher education contend that programs proposing that race be a factor in admissions too often make race the only or the predominant factor. Some critics of affirmative action believe that the best chance for black and Latino educational advancement lies in improving early education, K-12. Other opponents argue that the very act of providing opportunities for all, with bias toward none, will give students the best chance at admission to a school for which they are qualified. Those who support affirmative action in admissions stress the continuing need to overcome the effects of past discrimination: unequal access to good education, work and living conditions. They argue that while national measurements of minorities’ educational progress show annual improvement, part of this rapid improvement is the result of affirmative action policies which it is too soon to abandon. The speakers at the ninth Vail Valley Institute agreed that the common goal of affirmative action was equality of opportunity for all Americans. They also expressed understanding of the need to maintain open avenues of access to leadership for all citizens and acknowledged the danger to social harmony of failing to do this. The challenge remains balancing the demand that academic merit be the primary criterion for admission to selective colleges and universities with the pressure to include representatives from the many cultures in our democracy in all our institutions. Following are brief summaries of the presentations delivered to the participants of the Vail Valley Institute’s Ninth Annual Seminar and Forum. TOP OF PAGE |
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James Traub Keynote Speaker Contributing Writer, The New York Times Magazine Author, Better by Design? A Consumer’s Guide to Schoolwide Reform I always feel uneasy talking about affirmative action. When I counted myself a supporter of it, I was an uneasy supporter. Now that I’m more or less a critic, I’m not too happy about that, either. My unease lies with the nature of the thing itself. Affirmative action is not only a specific practice but also a way of thinking about race and ethnicity, about merit and about elite institutions. It is the distinction between affirmative action as an outcome and affirmative action as a set of values that causes so much agonizing among the people who think about it. The most famous example of agonized second thoughts belongs to the Harvard sociologist Nathan Glazer. Glazer is the co-author, along with Daniel Patrick Moynihan, of Beyond the Melting Pot, a book that offered a tremendously optimistic vision of the progress and integration of New York’s ethnic groups. This faith in the assimilative powers of the culture lay at the heart of post-war liberalism, and it is a note that Glazer struck constantly throughout the 1960s. Affirmative action, which began to take root in higher education in the late 60s, struck Glazer as a terrible repudiation of this vision. In 1976 he wrote, “The rising emphasis on group difference which government is called upon to correct might mean the destruction of any hope for the larger fraternity of all Americans.” But Glazer also recognized from the very beginning that the immigrant pattern didn’t seem to be working for blacks. Glazer at first believed that, owing to their historical experience of mistreatment, blacks were choosing not to assimilate, but by the mid-80s he had come to conclude that “the actual condition of blacks”—that is, continued high poverty rates and low social status—was responsible. Whatever the reason, blacks were stuck in place. And so two years ago Glazer wrote a celebrated article in The New Republic in which he, in effect, recanted, stating that without affirmative action, virtually no black students would be able to attend the nation’s elite universities, and that such a state of affairs would “undermine the legitimacy of American democracy.” One possible response is that this outcome would not be nearly so catastrophic as Glazer thinks. Affirmative action’s most prominent critics have argued that graduation from an elite school is an over-rated good. Nevertheless, it’s very hard to sell the virtues of the second tier. The truth is that students at elite schools are a lot more likely to vault into the upper echelon of graduate schools than are the students at second tier schools, and this means that they are much likelier to get not the good jobs, but the terrific jobs at the big law firms and corporations and hospitals. There’s not much point in arguing that affirmative action isn’t really good for its own beneficiaries. You also are not going to convince the head of any elite institution that they would be better off without affirmative action. Big institutions must be seen as reflecting consensus values; diversity has now become such a value. So affirmative action produces a result that is both very desirable and broadly popular. What about the means? And this brings us back to the other side of Glazer’s equation, which is that affirmative action, by forcing us to count and categorize by race strikes at the heart of our belief in the individual and our faith in “the large fraternity of all Americans.” Affirmative action is built on a set of delicate evasions. The administrator deprecates academic distinctions that would once have seemed paramount, arguing that extracurricular activities or “leadership abilities” matter as much as academic performance. And he or she takes refuge in the language of “diversity,” which takes the zero-sum edge off of the admissions process by implying that affirmative action is just as great a benefit to non-minority as to minority students. In other words, there are no losers, or victims, of preference policies. But of course there are. And you have to wonder whether those losers, Asian as well as white, won’t start complaining as admission to elite schools grows harder and harder. The long-term solution, of course, is to increase the pool of minority students able to get into the best universities on their own. There are a few hopeful signs on this front. Until now, universities themselves haven’t had to work to expand the pool of eligible minority students because affirmative action itself has delivered them. Universities can make a real difference. One example is the enormous effort at the University of California at Riverside to help area high schools and even junior highs prepare minority students so that they will be eligible for admission to a University of California college. But the pull from above can accomplish just so much. Lasting change will have to come from the schools themselves and will have to start with the youngest children. The answer is school reform. We know that in some schools inner-city kids are scoring at middle-class levels. A recent study, No Excuses: Lessons from 21 High-Performing, High-Poverty Schools, found that effective schools focus relentlessly on basic skills, and above all on gaining reading competency in the first grade; use standardized tests to measure progress; hire teachers who are well versed in their field; insist on discipline without being punitive; and engage parents deeply in their children’s education. There are also models of schoolwide reform that are beginning to show real success with impoverished children. There is progress, but it’s slow. Even the most impressive school reforms show relatively modest effects over time. School is a powerful instrument, but accumulated disadvantage is a powerful force, and deep-rooted values and habits are hard to uproot. While black students are now graduating from high school at almost the same rate as whites, the gap in SAT scores remains very large. Middle-class black kids, as the Thernstroms have demonstrated, are scoring slightly below the rate of impoverished whites. Poor black kids are still facing a trajectory of failure. The wild card in this debate is demography. The familiar black-white world described by the Kerner Commission just doesn’t exist any more. The number of Hispanics in America will soon exceed the number of blacks. The Asian population is growing rapidly. Blacks are losing their special status as America’s excluded “other.” What’s more, many of these new entrants to the country are moving up and out just as their predecessors did a century ago; they are succeeding despite disadvantage, including some disadvantages from which black Americans do not suffer. Asians, of course, are already net losers of preference policies. And some Hispanic groups—second- or third-generation Chicanos, South and Central American immigrants—are doing well enough in school that affirmative action could become superfluous for them. The coalition of minority groups which now supports affirmative action may not survive these shifts. And the plight of blacks may come to exert even less of a tug on the national conscience than it does now. What kind of society should we wish for? The answer—or at least my answer—is one in which race is not a determining factor in anything. People should be able to base their own identities as much or as little as they want on race or ethnicity, but public institutions should regard individuals only as individuals. From this point of view, affirmative action is at best a necessary evil, and at worst a very serious mistake. But I also take seriously something which Randall Kennedy, a black professor at Harvard Law School, said to me a few years ago. Kennedy said that he had become increasingly skeptical of any policy that explicitly took race into account, but, he added, “I don’t want to get in bed with the Fifth Circuit [the court that prohibited the use of affirmative action in Texas.] They’re gangbusters when it comes to affirmative action, but they turn a blind eye when there’s an employee who says, ‘I was dealt with differently from my white counterpart.’” I take his point: You can’t remove the one benefit that accrues to racial identity if you’re unwilling to do anything about the harms. What about housing discrimination? Routine police mistreatment? Racial profiling? More broadly, what about the neglect of the inner-city poor, even at a time of stupendous prosperity? What about second-rate housing and health care and schools and jobs? Where’s the moral outrage about all that? I think where I come out on this vexed question is: Yes, let’s rewrite the social contract, but let’s rewrite it on both sides. If we’re going to end affirmative action in public institutions, let’s also put a stop to invidious racial distinctions. Let’s demand much more, and expect much more, from the inner-city poor, but let’s also take the problems of the inner city seriously. School reform is good, but it’s not enough. Poor children should have access to high-quality pre-school, and they should have it virtually from birth. They should have decent health care, affordable housing, and drug treatment available to anyone who needs it. And since the federal budget surplus over the coming decade is now estimated at $4 trillion, we can certainly afford to do it if we want to. The question, at bottom, is: What kind of continuing obligations does the United States have to its minority citizens, and above all, to its black citizens? We have to help people get to the starting line, as President Johnson once put it in a phrase scripted by Daniel Patrick Moynihan. And we have to accept that we do have obligations, because black people helped build this country and did so at a terrible cost to themselves. And even if the hardships which so many black people experience today have nothing to so with present-day mistreatment, even if those hardships represent a self-perpetuating cycle of pathology, they are nevertheless the consequence of that bottomless history of mistreatment. Taking stock of this fact does not mean that we have to embrace race-specific remedies like affirmative action. It does, however, impose on us an obligation not to turn away. TOP OF PAGE |
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Ward Connerly Chairman, American Civil Rights Institute Member, University of California Board of Regents It has been my personal experience as a Regent of the University of California that the issue of affirmative action or, as I choose to call it, preferences in admission to higher education cannot be divorced from the context of our concern about the issue of race in American life. When I was appointed to the Board of Regents in 1993, I knew little about affirmative action and came with no agenda. What I learned was that at University of California, Berkeley, 34,000 applicants compete for 3500 freshman seats. More than 14,000 of these applicants have a 4.0 or higher grade point average, so potentially we could fill our annual quota with 4.2-average students. In fact, 25 percent of students were admitted on the basis of academic achievement alone. In the interest of creating a diverse student body, admissions officers use factors in addition to grades such as students’ special talents, activities and achievements to determine some admissions. A maximum of 50 percent of students was admitted on a combination of academic and other factors. Six percent of the student body was admitted ‘by exception,’ i.e. academic standards were waived. What we learned was that—contrary to the Bakke decision—race was not a factor in admitting these ‘exceptional’ students; rather, it was the factor, and hence a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. In 1995, when the Board of Regents discovered that its admissions policies violated the law, I introduced and the Regents passed a proposal in which we resolved to eliminate the use of race in the admissions practices of the University of California. At the same time we committed ourselves to a major program of non-race-based outreach. We determined that the state’s universities would work with under-performing public schools in the K-12 system to help students compete so they could become University of California-eligible. In a widening effort to eliminate consideration of race in government, in 1996 California passed Proposition 209, which states: The state shall not discriminate against or grant preferential treatment to any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin in the operation of public education, public employment or public contracting. The State of Washington has passed the same law and it is under consideration in Florida. This is the beginning of a new effort to address the problem of race in this country. We have never tried to build a race-blind society in America. After the Civil Rights Act of 1964, we went from Jim Crow and segregation to a very paternalistic system in which race mattered. I believe that you cannot use race to get beyond race and that if we can get government out of the business of classifying its citizens by race, we will have made progress in solving the problem. TOP OF PAGE |
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Jerome Karabel Professor of Sociology,University of California at Berkeley Co-director, Project on Equal Opportunity The focus of my presentation is on what happened at the professional schools of the University of California after the elimination of affirmative action. Prior to California’s implementation of affirmative action in the late 60’s, the number of black and Hispanic matriculants at Boalt Hall, the law school at University of California at Berkeley, was less than 1% of enrollees. In 1968 and 1969, the figure rose rapidly to 7.5% and that rise was echoed at University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) Law School, where black and Hispanic enrollments rose from approximately 8% in 1967 to 19% in 1971. The results at UCLA School of Medicine were even more amazing. The UCLA Medical School opened in 1950. From 1954 to 1967 more than 570 students graduated and the number of African American and Latino graduates was zero. By 1969, 8% of matriculants were African American or Latino, and that number increased to 17% in 1970. The most interesting data are found when we look at three decades of affirmative action at Boalt Hall. In 1967 African American and Hispanic matriculants were approximately 2% of the class. In 1977 they were approximately 22%; in 1987, 19%; and in 1997, one year after the passage of Proposition 209, 5%. To put this in context, the 1970 census showed that blacks and Hispanics were 20% of the population. By 1997, they represented 40% of the state’s population and 5% of matriculants to Boalt Hall. That percentage increased to 12.3 in 1998 and was 9.3 in 1999, less than half the pre-Proposition 209 enrollment. As a substitute for its previous policy of race-based affirmative action, the UCLA law school adopted a policy of giving preference to students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Although in 1997 there was only a moderate decline in the percentage of under-represented minority students, in 1998 and 1999 the percentage of disadvantaged matriculants had fallen below half the average pre-Proposition 209 enrollment of 21%. The results at UCLA suggest that class-based policies are not an effective substitute for race-attentive affirmative action. Admission of under-represented minority students in the University of California medical schools shows a different pattern of decline as a result of a legal challenge to the system in 1992. During that year 20% of matriculants at University of California medical schools were members of under-represented minorities: blacks, Mexican-Americans, and Native Americans. In 1999 that percentage stood at 11, and the University was so alarmed by this decline that it appointed a special task force to see what could be done to produce a more diverse medical student body. The truth is, all institutions of higher learning routinely use preferences in determining whom to admit. Some of these preferences—for applicants whose parents are alumni, who come from families that have made large donations or have political influence, who are from disadvantaged backgrounds or from under-represented geographical regions or who suffer from disabilities—have nothing to do with individual merit, either academic or non-academic. The lack of controversy engendered by these preferences makes the argument against racial preferences seem disingenuous. In the end, the debate about affirmative action is about the value of inclusion in American society and how willing we are to see few blacks and Latinos at the elite institutions from which many of America’s leaders are recruited. If elimination of affirmative action becomes national policy, we are sure to see a level of exclusion in our leading colleges and professional schools that we have not witnessed in 30 years. TOP OF PAGE |
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Ruth Simmons President, Smith College The principle of affirmative action as public policy is a good thing. It was a bold step in moving the country away from American apartheid, a system of white racial preferences, and in a short time has brought about major changes, advancing the goal of equality for women and minorities. It has made access to college admission and jobs a more open process for those who were, for economic and other reasons, outside the power and cultural elites. Affirmative action has advanced accountability in job access and hiring and protected people against arbitrary acts in the work and school environment. Our government’s attempt to promote social equity and justice won the allegiance of many minorities who were prepared to give up on this country. Through affirmative action, the government came to represent a true ideal of fairness. Most people talking about affirmative action today don’t understand the practice of it. We can agree in the abstract that we should be a color-blind society; on the other hand, in many specific instances, especially for African Americans, race is relevant. African Americans still cannot go into many department stores without being followed or drive without being unfairly stopped by the police. If race matters in the way we carry out justice, how can it not matter in setting public policy? One of the reasons we are having difficulty today is that affirmative action got off on the wrong track. It began as an effort to promote nondiscrimination in public life. Title 7 of the 1964 Civil Rights act said specifically that affirmative action was not intended to achieve racial balance in institutions. Affirmative action was not intended to become a system of racial preferences, but in their attempts to insure fairness, federal and state bureaucracies came up with systems that were corruptible. There were too few measures to insure that affirmative action was limited, that it would end at a specific time or that a compelling state interest was involved in every case. We have been struggling for years to eliminate discrimination. The fact that there are so few effective suggestions for change is testimony to the difficulty of the task, and there will always be people unhappy with the means chosen. W.E.B. Dubois recalled that almost immediately after the establishment of the Freedmen’s Bureau, intended to help blacks in their transition from slavery after the Civil War, whites were calling for the Bureau’s dissolution because it was race-based. But insuring access and equity has to be a part of our government’s job because there are too many instances in this country where race is an enormous factor. In devising successor programs to affirmative action, we must ask ourselves how we can arrive at practices that are the least detrimental in generating the fewest divisions in society, the least detrimental in alienating young people, the least detrimental in terms of preferring one race over another. But in my mind there is no question that we have to push forward and insist on programs to bring people from poverty and discrimination. To do less would be a serious mistake for us as a nation. TOP OF PAGE |
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Abigail Thernstrom Senior Fellow, The Manhattan Institute Co-author, America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible Preferences in higher education are very difficult to talk about because emotions run very high and nobody has a monopoly on the truth. We’re all simply making guesses about the future, guesses about the best means of getting to where we all want to go: the goal of racial equality. We argue not over ends, but over means. I am in fact a passionate advocate for aggressive nondiscrimination, for affirmative action in that sense. I am a hard-line opponent of all racial sorting, all racial classifications, all racial preferences. I am doubtful about the use of federal power to alter the fundamental causes of racial equality. I see the sources of racial change as much more bottom-up. In the last four decades the status of blacks has changed significantly. Forty-five percent are in the middle class and a third live in the suburbs. Racial attitudes have also changed in ways that are very heartening by historical standards. This is good news, but there is bad news as well. Obviously we are far from the point of racial equality and I see the continuing ominous racial gap in academic achievement in the K-12 years as the worst news. The average black student at age 17 is reading at the level of a white 13-year-old; the gaps are comparable in other subjects, and worse in science. This is the civil rights issue today. Why do so few black students graduate from high school with strong academic skills? Nobody knows for sure. There is the usual list of suspects: black poverty, inadequate funding for predominantly black schools, racial segregation. But none of these would stand the scrutiny of a good social scientist. I blame the schools, primarily. Good schools make an enormous difference in student achievement. Take the KIPP-NY [Knowledge Is Power Program] Academy in the New York’s South Bronx. Many of its students come from the neighboring housing projects, and all are black or Hispanic. It’s a public school, K-8, featuring a 91/2-hour school day plus Saturday mornings, two hours of mandatory homework nightly, teachers available by phone to help after school hours, and parent contracts pledging students’ regular attendance. The KIPP Academy fosters a culture of self- and mutual respect by demanding courtesy, neatness, diligence and punctuality. KIPP-NY has the best scores of any middle school in the Bronx. And it is not alone; there are other good schools in minority neighborhoods that create successful environments for learning. Can we fix the schools? Yes. Doing so is going to require radical educational reform against which there is a lot a resistance, and it isn’t going to happen tomorrow. But until the day that blacks and whites are equally well educated, racial equality will remain a dream. Yet if racial equality is the persistent American dilemma—which it is—it’s also the American project. Down the road, schools will change and we’ll get to where we all want to go. TOP OF PAGE |
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Stephan Thernstrom Winthrop Professor of History, Harvard University Co-author, America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible I wanted to begin with a bit of autobiography to explain certain biases I hold. First, I am skeptical about the value of elite higher education. My father was a self-educated man, having gone to work after eighth grade, and I went to Northwestern University on scholarship. That experience led me to feel it’s very nice to go to a school where competition is at a level you can meet easily. When I got a fellowship to graduate school at Harvard, I remember being afraid that there would be all these geniuses who could read ten times faster and would have read ten times more than I. After a few months, I felt a great sense of liberation when I realized that nobody was that far ahead of anyone else. Another personal bias relates to the label conservative for people who oppose racial preferences. For much of my adult life, I was well to the left of where most of you are today. I edited a socialist magazine, considered myself a democratic socialist and was much influenced by Marx. Although I believe today that on almost every major issue he was concerned with, Marx was wrong, I think he was right in his deep hostility toward racial and ethnic politics. He believed that class-based politics make much more sense. At the present, the worst ethnic conflicts in the world occur where the state has recognized racial and ethnic differences and has attempted social engineering to level groups. Data from the U.S. Bureau of the Census show the phenomenal increase in black participation in higher education between 1960 and 1998: by 1998, 12.6% of college students were black, a figure equivalent to the percentage of blacks in the U.S. population. But 1998 data from the National Center for Educational Research show that although similar percentages of blacks and whites enroll in college after high school (blacks: 61.9%; whites: 68.5%), there is a wide racial disparity in the current percentage of 25-29-year-olds with a bachelor’s degree or higher (blacks: 16.9%; whites 36.1%). Thus, the concern about using affirmative action to get black students into elite colleges is shortsighted. The larger problem is retaining black students, very few of whom are in college because of affirmative action. A number of studies show that too many black students are ill prepared for higher education. The 1996 National Assessment of Educational Progress [NAEP] found that the average 17-year-old black student was 4.9 years behind his white peers in science, 4.2 in reading, 3.4 in mathematics and 3.3 in writing. The disparity was even higher when NAEP rated proficiency and advanced cognitive skills. College Board Report 99-5 shows the disparity continuing between blacks and whites tested for admission to graduate schools. Blacks were one standard deviation or more below whites on the Law School Aptitude Test, the Medical College Aptitude Test and the Graduate Record Examination, and data show that a much greater proportion of blacks than whites fail to pass professional qualifying tests set by the Bar and the National Board of Medical Examiners. However, when blacks who are academically qualified to compete are admitted to institutions of higher learning, they perform as well as their peers of other races with similar qualifications. Thus, our concern should be improving the quality of preparatory education for blacks and other minorities, rather than struggling to arrange proportional racial representation at the most selective universities. If blacks are well prepared, they will achieve. TOP OF PAGE |
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