Diversity Is a Crock, Part II

My first post arguing that “Diversity Is a Crock” was written against the backdrop of the forthcoming Supreme Court argument that will re-examine racial preferences in college admissions as they are used by Harvard and UNC (my undergraduate alma mater). The mainstay argument for such preferences is that they are necessary to achieve student body “diversity,” which the Court has chosen, baselessly in my view, to accept as a “compelling governmental interest” sufficient to overcome the Constitution’s proscription against the state’s using race to apportion burdens and benefits among citizens.

“Diversity” conceptualized in that way is indeed a crock, and that’s being polite.

But I might not have made it sufficiently clear that I was referring in particular to the legal backdrop of the pending Supreme Court case. Paul picked up on this, and noted in one of his comments that, viewed more broadly, diversity among students is mostly a good thing, not a crock. He is, as usual, correct. Indeed, his refinement of my post is sufficiently important that I want to repeat it here (with his permission), since the comments section might not have received the same attention as the main entries.

Paul noted:

I've been railing in print against race-based preferences in admissions for more than 25 years. However, I must now take a back seat to Bill (and not for the first time).

I agree with almost everything in his post. However, I believe there's more merit to diversity than Bill allows, though not nearly enough to justify racial discrimination.

Supporters of race-based preferences cite three diversity-based benefits -- to society, to the blacks and Hispanics who are preferred, and to white students who are said to benefit from being on campus with minority groups whose members they ordinarily wouldn't encounter much.

It's actually the benefit to whites that is pushed hardest as the diversity-based rationale for racial preferences. From a sales pitch point of view, you can understand why.

In my view, the benefit to white students from going to college with minority group members is not a crock. I always suspected there was some benefit in this, and talking to students who, in recent years, have attended colleges with racially diverse student bodies has persuaded me that this is so.

The notion that a diverse student body is desirable has been around for longer than race-based preferences have. For as long as I can remember, Ivy League colleges have sought to admit students from rural America and from sparsely populated upper Midwest and Western states. In doing so, they departed from strict merit, though probably not by very much.

I think that as a student I gained a benefit (albeit small) from my college's geographic diversity. The benefits of a racially diverse student body are at least equal to, and in my view clearly exceed, the benefits of a geographically diverse one.

But does this benefit rise to the level of compelling interest, as it must for the discrimination that produces the diversity to pass legal muster? I don't think so. Adding marginally to white students' college experiences is nice, but not compelling. It provides a woefully insufficient basis for the odious practice of race discrimination.

Furthermore, colleges aren't tailoring their race-based admissions policies to the creation of a diverse student body. You don't need a student body with 10 percent black representation or more to confer the benefit of a racially diverse student body on white students. If there's evidence that merit-based admissions entails the virtual absence of blacks at Harvard or UNC, I haven't seen it.

Thus, diversity, while not a crock, is an excuse. Defenders of racial preferences seized on it as a rationale only because Justice Powell endorsed it in the Bakke case.

The real reason why colleges discriminate on the basis of race is because doing so comports with their vision of social justice. And that vision is, I believe, a crock.

I have my own story of how diversity added considerably to my college education, but I’ll tell that later since it’s a more of personal note. Instead, in this follow-up entry to my original post, I want to add to my earlier observations about how “diversity” is a fraud, or worse, when used as it has been by the Supreme Court since Justice Powell first hatched it in his pivotal opinion in Bakke — and thus why it should be jettisoned now.

First, it’s a fraud in the conventional sense: It’s mostly just a pretense, a front-man, for handing out goodies to blacks, who are for the moment the preferred racial group. I suspect almost everyone who follows the diversity debate knows this. But the Court remains leery of embracing anything as blatant and transparent as the racially-rigged handing out of goodies with governmental imprimatur, so we get sweeter-smelling “diversity” instead.

Second and relatedly — and as is often the case with frauds — its bogus character becomes clear once you peel back even the first layer: Who will be the main beneficiaries of student body “diversity”? Let’s ask that a different way: Who mainly goes to college, particularly the more prestigious colleges?

Very good! Overwhelmingly, it’s white people. This is not real surprising, since non-Hispanic whites are roughly 60% of the overall population. So Harvard and UNC, et al., are telling us that by artificially excluding white students, they are improving the education of mainly………….white students.

Does this sound a bit fishy to you?

Back in the day, we all wondered about the fellow who said, during the War in Vietnam, that he had to destroy the village in order to save it. The twisted nature of the “diversity” rationale for racial preference isn’t exactly the same thing, but it’s almost as useful in exposing the fact that the real reason for racial preference remains what it always was, namely, to hand out benefits to members of preferred races and tell non-preferred ones that that’s how the cookie crumbles. Everything else is window dressing, an invention the Court employs to save it from having to say, and having to face, what it’s actually doing.

Third, racial preference with a flimsy pose as “diversity” is the breeding ground of a cornucopia of dishonesty. What else would you expect from the fruit of the fraudulent tree? For one thing, when we incentivize white students to lie on their applications about their ethnicity (that is, to make false claims that they are black or Hispanic or Native American), we’re going to get more students lying. Will this advance their education in any way we want it advanced? Then, when we admit less accomplished blacks simply because America’s Guilt so demands, do we not realize that that same Guilt will produce intense hydraulic pressure that we go ahead and graduate blacks who’ve learned less, and maybe a lot less (see below)? And that in order to disguise the academic gap rather than try to cure it by, say, demanding high standards, we’ll adopt pass/fail to replace grades? Or get rid of grades altogether — they’re so, ummmmmmm, White Supremacyish?

Over the last few years at UNC, there was a major academic scandal in the Physics Department Math Department African-American Studies Department borne of the cheating “diversity”-based admissions is certain to spawn. Here is how it was described by the liberal outlet Vox:

For 18 years, thousands of students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill took classes with no assigned reading or problem sets, with no weekly meetings, and with no faculty member involved. These classes had just  one requirement: a final paper that no one ever read.

The academic fraud in the university's African-American studies department was first revealed three years ago. But a new investigation shows that the fake classes were even more common than previously thought, and that athletes in particular benefited from the classes, in some cases at the behest of their academic counselors….

On campus, the fake classes, which at least 3,100 students took, were hardly a secret. They were particularly popular with athletes, who made up about half of enrollments [and who are disproportionately black]. Nearly a quarter of students who took the classes were football and basketball players. And the classes made a difference: good grades that students didn't have to work for made more than 80 eligible to graduate who otherwise would have flunked out.

Read all the ugly details in the Vox story here; the extent of the rot is breathtaking. Yes, it was partly because of coddling athletes (an old story at big sports schools like Carolina) but much magnified because, under the race-mangled “standards” for which UNC will now launch its wonderfully high-minded defense in the Supreme Court, the “diversity” fraud takes on a life of its own. The proliferation of largely fake courses about largely fake subjects is not a happenstance. It’s a cancer — a cancer we implanted when our embrace of “diversity” demanded the admission of underqualified students. Its corruption of the basics of learning will metastasize everywhere. (I suspect it got outed at UNC to the healthy extent it did only because it threatened Carolina’s prized basketball program).

Finally for now, unfair and toxic racial preference pretending to be bland “diversity” is wrong because it masks the real problem, and thus makes solving it harder.

The real problem isn’t race. There is no difference I ever heard of in the intellectual or productive abilities of one race versus the next. What produces persistent disparate outcomes, whether in education or income (or crime for that matter), is not race but behavior.

For fifty years we’ve tried one form and another of affirmative action tied either candidly or not-so-candidly to race. Where’s the evidence that it works? Have economic differences between blacks and whites narrowed substantially? Not from what I hear, especially from liberals, who chronically bemoan that the gap between rich (disproportionately white) and poor (disproportionately black) is growing. Is racial division and suspicion less now than it was two generations ago? I have no way of knowing that, but it seems to me that the media and the culture at large are now probably more obsessed with, and angry about, race and racial division than they were when I was in law school.

This is not going to get cured by government-condoned racial preference even if it were constitutional. It’s going to get cured, if at all, by changing the behavior that produces disparate outcomes. Andrew Sullivan put his finger on it recently in “The Placebo Of Affirmative Action.”

[T]hese Ivy League performances of “racial equity” are a means of distracting us from the real roots of resilient inequality of African-Americans: single-parent homes, higher rates of poverty and isolation, young lives devastated by crime, poor schooling, overwhelmed, over-worked mothers, and a cultural resistance to learning as a symbol of “acting white.”

It is so much easier for white elites to flaunt their impeccable “diversity” credentials by discriminating against Asians than to tackle these much harder, deeper realities. Restoring the power of black fatherhood, reforming schools, supporting working mothers, providing adequate daycare, better policing: any single one is a challenge. But you don’t reverse racial inequality by ducking the core issues and rigging the educational system on the back end. It’s not morally serious; it breeds racialist thinking; it creates crippling insecurity among beneficiaries and racial resentment among the losers. It’s corrupting to the academic project — because it makes your identity as important as your intellect.

As the Supreme Court has used it, race-based “diversity” is not merely a crock; it’s worse than a crock. It’s patently unconstitutional, dishonest, destructive, divisive, and toxic to our public life. And by misconceiving the real problem, it makes the solution that much harder to reach. Time for it to go.