Fight Over Racial Preferences at IHE
Today’s Inside Higher Ed has a piece on a new book lauding “affirmative action” (that is to say, selective racial preferences).
My good friend Roger Clegg of the Center for Equal Opportunity, a strong opponent of preferences posted a comment and all hell has since broken loose.
My thoughts: I haven’t yet read the new book, but what I wish the people who keep demanding racial preferences at elite schools would explain is what is so darned important about going to one of those “elite” schools. The courses aren’t taught any better just because the faculty is loaded with “academic stars.” If anything, it goes the other way. Students at schools where the professors actually handle most of the teaching are likely to get more out of a course than at schools where the profs are mainly preoccupied with their publications.
I don’t think the mania for admissions preferences is really about the students. Rather, it’s about the academic administrators. It makes them feel good about themselves to believe that their little social engineering efforts matter a lot. When mean people like Roger Clegg say that they should drop racial preferences, that’s like telling them to stop playing make believe and grow up.
> I wish the people who keep demanding racial preferences at elite schools would explain is what is so darned important about going to one of those “elite” schools.
I think George Leef has hit on one of the deep-seated issues behind all of these controversies. 90% of it is all about envy. The people obsessed with preferences are, plain and simple, envious of those who went to what they consider “better” schools. It’s unfortunate that they aren’t more concerned with getting the best education they can find wherever they may be, rather than obsessing about someone else’s imagined social status. By being obsessed with social status, they create their own low status.
Government-enforced racial preferences (racial discrimination) are not only against the law (Civil Rights Act of 1964) but a violation of the American Constitution, Fourteenth Amendment. Fundamental to “all men are created equal” is that individuals be judged in their actions on the basis of their individual actions. This principle goes all the way back to Plato’s Republic. The “affirmative action” ploy – which Hubert Humphrey was warned against when he pushed for the Civil Rights Act (he said that he would ‘eat his hat’ if the provisions and the EEOC established to enforce it would lead to racial (and other) quotas – but he never ate his hat. The “vested interests” which Humphrey created, push for these quotas, regardless of their absurdity and their attack on the individual. Thomas Sowell is good on this.