To the Editor:
Debates over affirmative action in college and university admissions often overlook several important facts, and COMMENTARY’s symposium, “Is Affirmative Action on the Way Out? Should It Be?” [March], is no exception.
First, few who discuss Hopwood v. State of Texas, a case which, as Glenn C. Loury puts it, “forbid[s] the practice of affirmative action in college admissions,” seem to know about earlier litigation, the Adams cases, in which those states that had had de-jure—or legally-enforced—systems of segregation were obligated to formulate plans to eliminate the effects of that segregation. The now-reviled dual-admissions program at the University of Texas law school that was outlawed in Hopwood was part of a court-approved agreement between Texas and the federal government to correct past discrimination. That discrimination was neither subtle nor covert, nor all that far in the past. It was within the professional lifetime of some current professors—1947—when the state opened Texas Southern University law school rather than permit Herman Sweatt to attend the University of Texas law school.
In fact, Dr. William S. Livingston, senior vice president of the University of Texas in Austin, was a young faculty member then. He told a reporter some time ago that Sweatt’s exclusion barely caused a ripple of consciousness among the university faculty. Is it any wonder that many black and Hispanic Texans remain suspicious of the university’s commitment to nondiscrimination?
In any event, it is important to realize that the unusual admissions procedures at the University of Texas law school would not have been instituted by any state that had not had a history of legally enforced segregation. That circumstance did not convince the three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit Court that ruled in Hopwood, but many court observers believe it might have held sway with the court en banc.
Those who oppose the kind of affirmative action used by Texas as a remedy for past discrimination have an obligation, it seems to me, to propose an alternative that will ensure that African-Americans and Latinos are not shut out of the educational institutions that are key to developing minority leaders.
Another issue rarely discussed in affirmative-action debates is what the actual numbers are. Dr. Michael Nettles, a professor of education at the University of Michigan and one of the top researchers of the educational experience of African-Americans, has found that of the nation’s 1,808 four-year colleges and universities, only about 120 can be considered “serious affirmative-action” institutions. The rest accept most students who apply or have not had much growth in black and Latino enrollment.
In 1985, those 120 selective institutions had a combined freshman enrollment of 119,937, rising to 126,303 in 1995. Their combined black and Hispanic freshman enrollment went from 8,897 in 1985 to 15,181 in 1995, with most of the growth (4,351) being among Hispanics. Of those black and Hispanic students, only three out of ten may have benefited from affirmative action, in the sense of having somewhat lower grade-point averages and standardized test scores than the median for white students.
This is hardly a picture of affirmative action run amok, with unqualified African-American and Hispanic students crowding out more qualified white students. In fact, during this period the growth in total freshman enrollment more than exceeded the growth in enrollment among African-American and Hispanic students.
Those who believe in the transformative power of colleges and universities to educate students, rather than just sort them, should make sure that the standards that count are not college and university entrance standards but their exit standards. Perhaps they could take to heart the example of little Xavier University. Historically black, Xavier recruits its students from the streets of New Orleans, not known for the high quality of its public schools. Xavier’s incoming students, for the most part, do not have impressive SAT or ACT scores. And yet, because of high-quality instruction and counseling, Xavier manages to get every one of its premed students into medical school. Almost every African-American pharmacist in the nation is a graduate of Xavier.
What matters to those who consult a doctor or pharmacist who graduated from Xavier is not what his or her SAT score was—any more than it is important to know whether he or she walked at ten months or thirteen months. What matters is how skilled and well-educated he or she is. That is what a good university should be in the business of guaranteeing—not its incoming freshman SAT scores.
Frank L. Matthews
Publisher, Black Issues in
Higher Education
Fairfax, Virginia
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To the Editor:
Given space, I would address a number of the arguments made against affirmative action in the COMMENTARY symposium, but for the purposes of this letter, I will content myself with only one: the argument that those who have achieved good positions through affirmative action worry that people will think they have not earned their position. As Joseph Epstein writes: “I cannot gauge how cynical a young African-American academic becomes when he knows that interest in him is not principally for his qualities as a scholar or a teacher but purely for his race.” The error here is the white man’s belief that the black man cares one whit what the white man thinks of him. If, under the auspices of affirmative action, I, a black man, become a professor of philosophy at Harvard, I will never lose a second’s sleep worrying whether white people think I deserve the position.
The question is whether a man wants to achieve great things or whether he wants other people to perceive that he has achieved great things. As for me, people may think what they like. I have found they tend to do so anyway, by my leave or not.
But if I am to argue in favor of affirmative action, I should make very clear the type of affirmative action I think we need. We need a program that gives disadvantaged men and women a chance—once they have decided they want that chance. This last point is so key that I think it worthwhile to spell it out in my own case.
At any time in my life I could have decided not to take this route, to remain impassive to overtures made to me by teachers and friends. It was not until I got into college—and with my SAT scores, my acceptance was undoubtedly a result of affirmative action—that I decided it was time. I began, then, to compete with people much better prepared than I, people who had had calculus in high school, people whose parents had tutored them daily all through elementary school. But disadvantaged as I had been, I was advantaged too, because I had decided I wanted the chance, and I was willing to work. I was willing to work morning, noon, and night. I was willing to work on Friday and Saturday evenings. I was willing to sleep only when I had to, to spend every minute between classes reading, writing, working, always working. And though it has only been two years since I first decided I would put forth the effort, since I first scored so poorly on my SAT scores that I did not legitimately deserve a place at the university, I have already caught up. But I needed two things: the chance and the desire. One would have done me no good without the other.
A disadvantaged person given the chance but without the desire will not succeed; he will never have the fortitude required to catch up. So here is the affirmative action I believe in: universities should take a number of disadvantaged students, regardless of GPA’s and SAT’s, with the understanding that the students have one or possibly two years to earn their spot legitimately. We (read: disadvantaged students with the desire) can live up to the standards—make no mistake about that. But we must be given the chance.
It has perhaps been said too often that racism is a disease in this country. One might then ask: is affirmative action the remedy? No, it is not. This is important to understand, especially for those who support it. Affirmative action will never cure the disease; it may not even help it much. But it can help to alleviate some of the symptoms. The debate over affirmative action seems to have broken into two camps—those who espouse affirmative action only and would do nothing about the underlying disease, and those who disdain affirmative action and would let this patient flail helplessly on the table, operating without administering so much as an aspirin.
Maybe affirmative action is only an aspirin, something to dull the reality of what is really there. Perhaps this is what the more noble of its opponents have recognized. But if that is the case, then let me tell you, brother, this is one patient who needs something for the pain.
Jackson L. White
Bloomington, Indiana
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To the Editor:
It has been my abiding belief that the attempted redress of slavery through racial preferences was the result of Congress’s lack of political fortitude to pay the price in dollars of doing the right thing. In the face of a public tired of costly government welfare, angered by judicially-forced busing (which nearly destroyed our public-school system and from which it has yet to recover), and fearful over the growing national debt, Congress did not have the political will to fund programs needed to provide disadvantaged blacks with the tools to compete in America. It seemed a much easier legislative choice to undo the effects of slavery by placing society’s burden on guiltless and relatively powerless individuals of other races who would be excluded from schools and jobs in favor of blacks. But as we should have known (and many of us did know), this policy simply did not work.
It is therefore curious that, with the problems of slavery far from resolved some 135 years after its abolition, most of the respondents failed to discuss the issue raised by COMMENTARY’s last question, namely, what public policy should replace affirmative action? This is the question that must be addressed. The contributors to your symposium, and other right-thinking and capable people, should offer their skills to find and their voices to support a prompt and proper means of dealing with slavery’s ugly wake, whatever may be the expenditure of treasure.
Once a conscious commitment is made to do what must be done, the task may be found to be less daunting than it now appears. But the development of a policy to replace racial preferences is vital and urgent.
Martin T. Goldblum
Beverly Hills, California
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To the Editor:
By defining people solely with reference to their racial or ethnic group, affirmative action robs its beneficiaries of their individuality and relegates them to the status of mere fungible specimens of one group or another. The result is the reinforcement of group identification, which makes the already arduous task of demolishing the walls that divide our increasingly Balkanized society all the more difficult and thoroughly frustrates progress toward affirmative action’s professed ultimate goal, a society that rewards individuals on the basis of merit.
Because this kind of affirmative action is predicated upon the belief—held, despite their protests to the contrary, even by proponents of preferences—that all members of the favored group are inferior to members of other groups in their ability to compete for these benefits, preferences are intrinsically racist. Preferences thus strengthen negative racial and ethnic stereotypes not only among those belonging to groups affected adversely but also among those they benefit.
I believe, however, that employing preferences only in the process of recruiting workers, students, contractors, and the like into the pool from which selections are then made on the basis of merit will eradicate these objectionable aspects of affirmative action.
Aggressive recruiting targeted at members of racial and ethnic groups that historically have not been meaningfully represented among applicants for particular jobs, educational placements, or contracts, even to the extent of providing mentoring and training services, disadvantages no one.
Granted, the employment of preferences in the recruiting process may not be philosophically pure, but the salutary results that can be expected more than compensate for any academic concern about intellectual consistency.
Barry C. Steel
Towson, Maryland
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To the Editor:
Bravo to COMMENTARY for including in its symposium such principled opponents of affirmative action as Carl Cohen of the University of Michigan and Lino A. Graglia of the University of Texas, both of whom are to be commended for courageously speaking out against a system that has irremediably corrupted the cause of merit in higher education today.
Here at the University of California, Berkeley, the campaign against Proposition 209, the first anti-affirmative-action initiative on any state ballot, reached hysterical proportions. Shortly before the election was held in November 1996, the editorial board of the student newspaper, the Daily Cal—hardly a right-wing journal—voted in favor of the initiative on the grounds that, yes, in fact, black and Latino students had been admitted for years into the university with vastly lower grades and SAT scores than their white and Asian counterparts. This decision apparently infuriated some in the anti-209, pro-preference camp, for the day the issue of the paper announcing it hit the streets, all 5,000 copies were stolen from the newsstands.
This theft of the Daily Cal says a lot more about the attitude of the affirmative-action crowd than any debate ever could: in the minds of the supporters of racial and gender preferences, there should be no debate at all, since the other side is obviously wrong. Even more disgraceful were the numerous threats to the chief architects of the initiative, Thomas Wood and Glynn Custred, with the chairman of the campaign, Ward Connerly, coming in for a fair degree of outright physical intimidation as well.
Such is the climate on our campuses today that those who would dare speak out against the odiousness of mandated preferences are subject not only to verbal censure but also to outright personal abuse, which both Messrs. Cohen and Graglia have endured at their universities. It is odd indeed that the people who began the Free Speech Movement with such fanfare and publicity 35 years ago, and who are now firmly in control of our campuses, should do all they can to squelch any stirring of free speech when it comes from the opposition.
Timothy Seavey
Berkeley, California
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To the Editor:
I have long since stopped trying to fathom how giving special privileges to one group is not unconstitutional, but, alas, I am not alone. We all have our affirmative-action stories. Here is mine.
In 1987, then-Secretary of State George Shultz, while visiting the U.S. embassy in Oslo where I served as press attache, informed the staff that the foreign service would soon “represent all Americans,” and that steps were being taken to bring that principle into reality.
Beginning in the Reagan administration and meeting little or no resistance thereafter, what Shultz prophesized has come true with a vengeance. With the Bush administration doing little if anything to limit the scope of affirmative-action programs, and the current administration wedded to expanding them into all aspects of the foreign service, preferences now include not only admission but assignments, promotions, and even awards.
There is, however, one aspect of these programs that should give people reason to reflect. The fact remains that never in the course of my foreign-service career, which spanned more than a quarter of a century, did I ever meet an officer who would admit that he or she was a recipient of affirmative-action largesse. Most were strident in distancing themselves from such preferences. That, in my judgment, says much more than the absurd rantings of the defenders of affirmative action.
Vincent Chiarello
Reston, Virginia
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To the Editor:
Affirmative action as it has operated for three decades in the field of commercial buyer-seller relations is a fraudulent burden on American business.
In the Nixon and Carter years I was corporate head of purchasing for a household-name Fortune 500 company that had a well-deserved reputation for ethical operations. Because minority (largely black) leaders (many self-described) convinced corporate America that purchasing offices were closed to minority businessmen attempting to sell goods and services, most companies instituted programs to buy from minorities and search for overlooked minority suppliers. Unfortunately, even with our continuing full-court press, we did not run up large purchasing bills with minority businesses. We honestly could not.
Enter the politicians, who were unhappy that reality did not jibe with their preconceived notions of what was out there. I will never forget the day that top management came to me with the message that all federal marketing was dead in the water until a very prominent Congressman was satisfied with our numbers for minority purchases. But, eventually, reality bit this Congressman and others—so a new requirement was mandated: the quota, aided and abetted by the set-aside.
Thus the era of minority “ownership” began. Suddenly the hitherto invisible legions of suppliers materialized. “Ownership” was the operative word: as in, “I [the minority person] own 51 percent of the company.” Ownership was almost always accepted on its face. Who was checking? Certainly not the pols and bureaucrats and certainly not the boards of directors who were proud of their affirmative-action programs.
Michael W. Cunningham
Darien, Connecticut
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To the Editor:
In his symposium contribution, Nathan Glazer perpetuates the myth that blacks need to be admitted to prestigious universities because they are the tickets to power, wealth, and influence.
The falseness of this view is confirmed by looking at the alma maters of the CEO’s of Fortune 500 companies, the vast majority of whom did not receive their undergraduate degrees from Harvard, Yale, MIT, or Stanford. Instead, they were graduated from the many fine state schools around the country, perhaps from schools Mr. Glazer might not even have heard of.
As for the question of what affirmative action should be replaced with, the best answer is that provided by Thomas Sowell, who responded to a similar question as follows: “Nobody asks a surgeon operating on a cancer patient what he is going to replace the malignant tumor or cancerous growth with. He simply removes it and hopes that the body’s natural mechanisms will begin the healing process.”
Mark G. Castelino
Rutgers University
Newark, New Jersey
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To the Editor:
If the purpose of affirmative action is to give disadvantaged minorities an “equal” chance at admission to colleges, its underlying justification must be that after four years of school, these minorities will catch up to their advantaged peers. Unfortunately, this never seems to happen, since affirmative action is still used for postgraduate admissions. How many years of preferential treatment will it take until minorities can compete in a system based solely on merit?
If affirmative action cannot rectify disadvantage through education, then what is its purpose?
Larry Barnes
New York City
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To the Editor:
Contrary to assertions by William J. Bennett (citing William Safire’s New Political Dictionary), John O’Sullivan, and apparently everyone else who now addresses the issue, the term “affirmative action” was officially used as early as 1935, in the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), to designate the action the National Labor Relations Board may require of any “person” it found to have committed an “unfair labor practice.” Affirmative action, according to the NLRA, included measures—like “reinstatement of employees, with or without back pay”—that would “effectuate policies of this Act.” Following decisions by the California appellate court and the U.S. Supreme Court in 1939, the term was defined as “constructive action, rather than mere negation.”
Observing the difference between the way the term was used close to or at its inception and how it is used today suggests that proponents of race, ethnic, and gender preferences are using “Newspeak” to force opponents to acknowledge—by the mere act of discussion—that such preferences are not only constructive (a dubious proposition at best) but required by law (a false proposition by any reasonable interpretation).
Merwyn R. Markel
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
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To the Editor:
The question of affirmative action is not whether racial and gender preferences are discriminatory, because any policy based on group affiliation is discriminatory on its face, but whether or not the state, university, government agency, etc. has any compelling interest in discriminating for or against any sector of the population. Opponents of affirmative action, and I would place myself among them, maintain that no compelling interest exists to justify this sort of discrimination; advocates of preferences claim that they are needed to remedy past discrimination and promote diversity. Yet all this does is aggravate the situation: more discrimination as a solution for past discrimination.
Moreover, the question of diversity clouds the affirmative-action issue as a whole. Advocates of race and gender preferences turn diversity into a one-dimensional concept based solely on skin color and gender. This makes all thought and action dependent on race and gender and coerces conformity of opinion, not allowing for dissenting voices. Assessing people according to group affiliation, and giving preferences to some groups at the expense of others, only serves to reinforce negative and prejudicial stereotypes that affirmative-action programs sought to dissolve.
We do not need to mend a policy based on the Orwellian hypocrisy that the cure for discrimination is more discrimination, or an understanding of diversity that serves to enforce conformity and stifle dissenting opinions with hysterical accusations of racism and sexism. What is needed is a policy that validates individual merit and achievement.
If we continue to implement affirmative-action programs that view opportunity as a zero-sum game and grant access solely according to group affiliation, it will become increasingly difficult to maintain any notion of democracy, equality, social cohesion, or just plain tolerance in the United States. Then all people will lose, regardless of race, religion, and gender, and regardless of the best intentions and efforts of the advocates of affirmative-action preferences.
Scott Glotzer
William Paterson University
Passaic, New Jersey
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To the Editor:
“Affirmative action,” a phrase with “just about as much falsity as one could hope to pack into seventeen letters of the English alphabet,” in Joseph Epstein’s memorable words, has never been the issue: racial preference is the issue. But information about how preferences operate in the real worlds of education, business, and government is extremely difficult and costly to obtain. It is also information that many social scientists and others do not especially wish to obtain for fear of what they might find, as Norman Podhoretz perceptively states. Those who operate such programs are even less forthcoming, and, in my personal experience, downright hostile to inquiries on this subject.
Yet the information gap is slowly closing. I am proud to have co-authored several of the Center for Equal Opportunity’s studies on racial preferences that were cited by the center’s president, Linda Chavez, in her symposium contribution. These studies provide information heretofore hidden from public view on how racial preferences operate in the real world. At the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, for example, we found that admission was denied to at least 500 white students a year with both test scores and grades better than those of the median accepted black applicant. This pattern is consistent for the three years for which we have data, and I see every reason to assume that it has existed for a much longer time.
These are specific, palpable acts of reverse discrimination, which is what affirmative action has mutated into. Individuals with lesser qualifications receive offers of admission, jobs, and contracts because of the color of their skin, or what Carl Cohen has called “naked racial preference.” It is to be hoped that growing public awareness of the immense damage caused by racial preferences will in the end lead to the abolition of racial-preference programs once and for all.
Robert Lerner
Rockville, Maryland
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To the Editor:
The set of twenty statements on affirmative action is magnificent. Each writer presents his points concisely, and together they show the full range of arguments pro and con. I read the symposium carefully, twice, and came out agreeing with the cons. Although sympathizing with the need to help blacks, I must reluctantly conclude that affirmative-action-cum-preference is not an acceptable strategy. It does some good, but necessarily does pervasive harm. It gives practical help, but at the expense of eroding some of our most basic principles. All in all, the COMMENTARY symposium is a major contribution to the debate on affirmative action.
William A. Shurcliff
Cambridge, Massachusetts
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