Affirmative action programs in colleges

I think the following gives great insight into the cause of all of the Black radicalism, violence and foolishness that has occurred on American college campuses over the last 50 years. It is from Thomas Sowell. Inside American Education. Chap. 6.

While troubled by the fact that "what one writes may be seized upon and used by those who seek excuses for doing nothing and thus preserving the present pattern of deprivation, Summers nevertheless went to the heart of the problem of the preferential admissions approach—the systematic mismatching of minority students with institutions, thereby artificially fostering failure among students with the qualifications to succeed. Given that law schools, like the rest of the academic world, have a whole hierarchy of work standards, and a corresponding hierarchy of admissions standards, the issue was not whether a minority student was "qualified" to study law and become a lawyer, but whether his particular qualifications were likely to match or mismatch the institutional pace, level, and intensity of study under preferential admissions policies. While this issue was raised as regards law schools, the principle applies to the whole academic world.

Although institutions at the top of the hierarchy could dramatically increase their own minority student enrollments through preferential admissions policies, Summers warned them not to deceive themselves that they were creating any corresponding increase in the total number of minority students in law schools:

If Harvard or Yale, for example, admit minority students with test scores 100 to 150 points below that normally required for a non-minority student to get admitted, the total number of minority students able to obtain a legal education is not increased thereby. The minority student given such preference would meet the normal admissions standards at Illinois, Rutgers, or Texas.

Correspondingly, when institutions in the second tier of the academic hierarchy lower their standards for minority students, they attract applicants who would otherwise go to institutions in the third or fourth tier. Summers continued:

Thus, each law school, by its preferential admission, simply takes minority students away from other schools whose admission standards are further down the scale. Any net gain in the total number of minority students admitted must come, if it comes at all, because those schools whose admission standards are at the bottom of the scale take students whom they would not otherwise take. . . . In sum, the policy of preferential admission has a pervasive shifting effect, causing large numbers of minority students to attend law schools whose normal admission standards they do not meet, instead of attending other law schools whose normal standards they do meet.

Summers' crucial objection was to the needless academic and social problems created by this "pervasive shifting effect." The "special social and psychological problems" of a preferentially admitted student "are multiplied if the student is not prepared to compete on even terms" with his classmates who enter with higher qualifications. An "intense anxiety and threat to the student's self-esteem" are among the costs incurred "whenever a student is admitted to a school whose normal standards he does not meet, even though he does meet the normal standards of other schools ."

This student does not get a better education because he is at a more prestigious school. On the contrary, he may well get a much worse education at such fast-paced institutions, in the sense of failing to learn things which he is perfectly capable of learning, in a learning environment that proceeds at a normal pace. Such a minority student may end up "confused, floundering and unable to keep up."" As Summers explained:

He is thrust into first year class with students with much greater verbal facility and much more developed skills in manipulating ideas. He is denied the time necessary for him to perfect the process of case analysis or to learn to work through legal problems, for the educational process is not geared to his needs but the needs of students who make up the large portion of the class and who are prepared for the faster pace. . . . The situation almost insures a sense of lostness and defeat.

What are the further consequences of such a situation? According to Summers, offers of remedial help or reduced course loads are further blows to the student's self-esteem and expressions of the institution's lack of confidence in him—and may be rejected for these reasons. The student's escape routes include absenteeism and an attitude of dismissal toward the standard curriculum as "unnecessary and irrelevant" and a redirection of energies toward "community activities.''

The consequences in terms of the reactions of white classmates are likewise negative, for racial mismatching can cause whites to carry with them from law school into the legal profession what Summers called the "monstrous" notion that minority lawyers are substandard." Summers' recommendation was that more money be made available to enable more minority students to go to law schools—but without the preferential admissions which mismatch them institutionally.

While Clyde Summers presented one of the fullest elaborations of the case against preferential admissions policies for minorities, others saw similar dangers. At about the same time as the 1969 conference at which Summers made his remarks, Judge Macklin Fleming was writing to Dean Louis H. Pollak of the Yale Law School to express his apprehensions over the fact that only 5 out of 43 black students admitted to that institution met the normal admissions requirements. Judge Fleming too was concerned about the bad effects he anticipated for both black and white students. Among whites, he said, double standards in admissions "will serve to perpetuate the very ideas and prejudices it is designed to combat." That was because it leads to blatantly different performance levels, which cannot be talked away:

If in a given class the great majority of the black students are at the bottom of the class, this factor is bound to instill, unconsciously at least, some sense of intellectual superiority among the white students and some sense of intellectual inferiority among the black students. Such a pairing in the same school of the brightest white students in the country with black students of mediocre academic qualifications is social experiment with loaded dice and a stacked deck.

In these circumstances, the faculty "can talk around the clock" about the disadvantages of blacks, Fleming said, and it will not erase the personal experience created by this mismatching of students.

Meanwhile, black students cannot be “expected to accept an inferior status willingly." To salvage their self-respect, they "inevitably will seek other means to achieve recognition and self-expression."Those means include "agitation to change the environment from one in which they are unable to compete to one in which they can." He spelled this out:

Demands will be made for elimination of competition, reduction in standards of performance, adoption of courses of study which do not require intensive legal analysis, and recognition for academic credit for sociological activities which have only an indirect relationship to legal training. Second, it seems probable that this group will seek personal satisfaction and public recognition by aggressive conduct, which, although ostensibly directed at external injustices and problems, will in fact be primarily motivated by the psychological needs of the members of the group to overcome feelings of inferiority caused by lack of success in their studies.

Unfortunately, Judge Fleming's prediction of more than 20 years ago turned out to be true not only for law schools, but also for the academic world in general. It is equally enlightening, however, to note the response to his argument by Dean Pollak, for this response was typical of a mindset which pervaded the academic world and which still does, well beyond the boundaries of law schools. Dean Pollak's response was not in terms of incentives, constraints, or circumstances created by preferential admissions policies, but rather was in terms of goals based on assumptions.

The law school admissions committee, according to Dean Pollak, has eschewed "uncritical application of the normal indices of past academic performance" in selecting minority students with "high promise not reflected in formal academic terms." What this "high promise" was based on was not specified, nor were any criteria suggested by which this belief might be tested empirically. Instead, Dean Pollak claimed that the blacks selected were being trained for future "leadership." As alumni, such students have "speedily demonstrated professional accomplishments of a high order"—though demonstrated to whom and by what criteria were likewise matters left unspecified and undefined. Moreover, the "present admissions policies" will be "under continuing review by the faculty," so that presumably such policies could be changed if any negative evidence materialized. He ignored the very possibility that preferential admissions policies might become politically irreversible—indeed, that students preferentially admitted could become a militant pressure group demanding ever-expanding quotas.

Some factual evidence may be in order when evaluating these different views. As of the time of this discussion, admission to the leading law schools usually required a B + average in college and a Law School Aptitude Test (LSAT) score of 650 or more. As late as 1976, the total number of black students with LSAT scores of 600 or more and a B + average in college was 39—in the entire country.

Despite Dean Pollak's disparagement of the predictive value of LSAT scores and assertions of "high promise" detectable in other ways,the law school grades of the black student in the top ten law schools ranked at the 8th percentile—that is, 92 percent of the other law school students outperformed them. When disproportionately large numbers of black law school graduates failed their bar examinations, that simply set off more cries of "cultural bias" in the tests. In short, the prevailing dogmatism remained unmovable and impervious to any evidence.

As for the psychological pressures, a black law student captured that graphically:

Traditionally, first-year law students are supposed to be afraid, or at least awed; but our fear was compounded by the uncommunicated realization that perhaps we were not authentic law students and the uneasy suspicion that our classmates knew that we were not. . . . The silence, the heavy sense of expectation, fell on all of the blacks in the classroom whenever one of us was called on for an answer. We waited, with the rest of the class, for the chosen man to justify the right of all of us to be there. . . . And when the answer came, however poor it was, there would be relief visible in the faces of the white students and the instructor, and audible in the renewed breathing of the rest of the black students.

Not all black students reacted like this young man—and not all white students reacted like those in his class. Many black students organized to make demands on campus authorities, some sought—and received—special favors from professors, and many whites increasingly resented the double standards in academic performance and personal behavior.

Just as these patterns were not confined to law schools, so those who warned against the policies behind such patterns were not all white. Among the early warnings was one in an article appearing in the New York Times Magazine of December 13, 1970, by a black professor named Thomas Sowell:

When the failures of many programs become too great to disguise, or to hide under euphemisms and apologetics, the conclusion that will be drawn in many quarters will not be that these were half-baked schemes, but that black people just don't have it.

Such conclusions are now part of the "new racism" spreading across college campuses from coast to coast.

One of the remarkable characteristics of many discussions of the statistical "representation" of various minority group students or professors on elite college campuses is an utter disregard of the size of the pool of minority individuals who meet the normal standards of such institutions.

Typically, students attending elite colleges average 1200 or above on their composite SAT scores, or 600 each on the verbal and quantitative portions of the test. As of 1985, fewer than 4,000 black, American Indian, Mexican American, and Puerto Rican students in the entire country scored 600 or above on the quantitative SAT and fewer than 2,000 scored 600 or above on the verbal SAT. The specific racial and ethnic breakdown of minority students scoring 600 or above on the verbal or quantitative SAT was as follows:

American Indians	163	320
Blacks	1,032	1,907
Mexican Americans	515	1,230
Puerto Ricans	218	472
	1,928	3,929

If all these 3,929 minority students with quantitative SATs of 600 and above went exclusively to the 58 colleges, universities, engineering schools, and military service academies with composite SATs of 1200 and above, that would still average out to fewer than 70 minority students per institution. Based on verbal SAT scores, the average would be fewer than 35 minority students per institution. Yet, among schools in this bracket, Harvard has not admitted less than a hundred black students alone in any given year since 1970. Stanford has had more than a thousand black, Mexican American and American Indian students combined on campus at a given time—or about 250 per class—this at an institution where 88 percent of the students admitted in 1990 had composite SAT scores above 1200 and nearly half had composite SATs of 1400 or above. Many other elite institutions have likewise had several times as many minority students as the average number with the same median test scores as their other students. Clearly, these elite institutions are going well beyond the pool of minority students who match the qualifications of their other students.

Asian Americans represent a radically different situation, More Asian American students scored above 600, on either verbal or quantative SATs, than these other four racial or ethnic groups combined. As of 1985, 3,572 Asian Americans scored 600 or above on the verbal SAT and 11,903 scored above 600 on the quantitative SAT: Although Asian Americans are a minority—as are Jews, Armenians, and many other groups—they are seldom, if ever, given preferential admission. The term "minority," as it is used in academic admissions policy, is neither statistical nor social. It usually refers to such groups as must be preferentially admitted if they are to approach the same share of the student body as they are in the general population.

Sometimes qualifications are simply not mentioned. At other times, they are dismissed as arbitrary, irrelevant, or biased barriers. But, as the case of the preferentially admitted law students indicates, qualifications make a difference in the end results. When the same pattern was found among the preferentially admitted sons of Harvard alumni, then the effect of lower admissions standards are clear, even if those admitted are predominantly affluent and white.

In those very rare cases where an institution releases its students' test scores by race, the double standards are blatant. At the University of Texas Law School, for example, the admissions office uses an index incorporating test scores and college grades. The median index among black students admitted was lower than the lowest index with which any white student was admitted. There were 81 whites turned down in 1990 with a higher index than all but one of the black students admitted. Only two white students were admitted with an index as low as the median index among Mexican Americans admitted. At Georgetown University Law School, similar data were revealed by a student who had worked in the admissions office. In a sample of more than a hundred white students accepted, none had an LSAT score (new scale) less than 39, while the median LSAT scores for blacks admitted was 36. The student who revealed this was, predictably, denounced as "racist" and his expulsion was demanded. Equally predictably, the dean of the law school said that "median LSAT scores for a group tell nothing about what individuals can and will achieve"—this despite empirical studies to the contrary.

Having admitted minority students mismatched with the other students and with the institution's own academic standards, many colleges and universities have been surprised by results which were not only predictable but almost inevitable. While there have been variations from campus to campus, the general pattern of these results has included minority student academic problems, social problems, and militant political activism centering on demands for special admissions, special programs, and special hiring of minority faculty. Most of the more prominent colleges and universities have not only acceded to most of these demands but have also promoted double standards—both academic and social—for minority students.

The mismatching problem was dramatically demonstrated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where the average black student scored in the top 10 percent, nationwide, on the mathematical portion of the Scholastic Aptitude Test—and In the bottom 10 percent at M.I.T. Nearly one-fourth of these students" failed to graduate at M.I.T., and those who did had significantly lower grades than their classmates." Such wholly needless failures among highly qualified students was the price of M.I.T.'s having a racial "representation" that would enhance its image and keep hundreds of millions of federal dollars coming in, without being jeopardized by charges of discrimination based on "under-representation" statistics. As for the other students at M.I.T., the Wall Street Journal reported "a widespread if rarely stated perception that black students somehow lack what it takes to make the grade." Nor is this perception lost on the black students at M.I.T. "It's not blatant," one of them said, "It's like you're the last person picked as a lab partner, or someone will lean over you and ask the person sitting next to you what the professor said—like you wouldn't have understood it.

M.I.T. is not unique. At Berkeley, where black students' average composite SAT scores of 952 were above the national composite average of 900, though well below the Berkeley average of 1181, more than 70 percent of the black students failed to graduate." Again, these were artificial failures, on an even larger scale than at M.I.T., in the sense that these black students' academic qualifications would have been more than adequate for the average American college or university, though not adequate for competing with Berkeley's white students who scored 1232 or Berkeley's Asian students who scored 1254.

Despite a rising number of blacks admitted to Berkeley over the years—the great majority under "affirmative action" standards—fewer blacks graduated in 1987 than graduated eleven years earlier. What was accomplished by admitting more black students and graduating fewer? The benefits are far more obvious for Berkeley than for the students. The racial body count enabled the university to proclaim that its student body is "wonderfully diverse" and that "we are excited that the class closely reflects the actual ethnic distribution of California high school graduates. It also enabled Berkeley to continue receiving vast sums of state and federal money without being distracted by the inevitable legal and political complications which an "under-representation" of blacks or Hispanics would ha ve entailed.

As for the minority students themselves, many—and probably most—of their academic failures throughout the various levels of colleges and universities can be traced to the systematic mismatching resulting from preferential admissions policies. Certainly that seems clear from the statistical data from those colleges and universities which release data by race and ethnicity—and the secretiveness of other institutions suggests that they have a similar story to hide. Certainly the graduation rate of black students is generally below that of their white classmates at numerous institutions where this information is available. Nationwide, black students' graduation rate is about half that of whites. Yet these explicit failures, large as they often are, do not measure the full damage, either to the students or to the institutions.

Part of the damage is concealed by double standards in grading. Many minority students are helped along academically by what David Reisman of Harvard has called "affirmative grading," either because of the unwillingness of individual professors to flunk minority students, or because of the intervention of minority affairs officials on campus, who ask that failing grades be "reconsidered," or by the creation of courses or programs—various ethnic "studies," for example—where minority students can expect to receive passing grades (or better) without undue effort. At Stanford, a black student who referred to "extreme exceptions" that some faculty members will make for black students used herself as an example: "I did really poorly on this one physics midterm," she said. "I went to see the professor about it. He was really easy with me and said, 'No problem. Don't worry about it.' He said he would drop it off of my quarter grade and that it wouldn't even count, which was against his own rules. Right after I went in, this white student went in to ask him if he would drop his midterm grade because he did really bad too. The professor said, 'No way.' ^"

As preferentially admitted minority students began to turn from academics to activism, including disruption and violence, among their recurring demands were more minority faculty and more "relevant" courses and programs. Both demands were widely met at colleges and universities across the country, as minority faculty, various racial and ethnic "studies," and special minority cultural and social centers all became familiar parts of the academic landscape.

In their haste to meet politically defined demands for minority faculty, colleges and universities again proceeded with an utter disregard of the size of the pool of qualified people. As of the early 1970s, when these patterns were established on many campuses, various surveys and estimates showed that there were fewer than 4,000 black Ph.D.s in the entire country."' That was less than two for each college, even if every black Ph.D. went into the academic world, with not one going into industry, government, think tanks, or other endeavors. Moreover, the number of black doctorates awarded annually still had not reached 1,300 by the mid 1980s .⁷² Hispanics and American Indians, put together, did not earn as many doctorates as blacks, so that all these conventionally defined "minorities," put together, did not receive 2,000 Ph.D.s annually—which is to say, there were not enough of them for each college in the country to add one minority Ph.D. to its faculty annually. As of 1989, these three groups, combined, received fewer than 1,500 doctorates—not enough for half the colleges in the country to hire one new minority Ph.D.