End Affirmative Action, Don't Mend It
By Keith Boykin, in politics
Tuesday, April 1 2003, 2:45AM
In 1995, President Clinton developed a seemingly clever response to the critics of affirmative action: "mend it, but don't end it," he said. Today, as the Supreme Court hears arguments in the most controversial affirmative action case in a generation, conventional wisdom suggests that Clinton helped save affirmative action. In reality, his policy both ensured and prolonged its inevitable demise.
Clinton's focus on tinkering with the machinery of affirmative action provided vital, but temporary, life support to a dying policy. But he was wrong. Mending affirmative action kept the focus on minority "racial preferences" while failing to examine the numerous examples of white racial privilege. Ending affirmative action, on the other hand, would move the "race card" off the table and enable an important dialogue about the way in which existing "qualifications" perpetuate old privileges.
After eight years of endless legal challenges to affirmative action in higher education, it's clear that mending it won't work. The only way to save affirmative action is to build a powerful, broad-based constituency for it, and the current support base of minorities and progressives is too small to accomplish this. The best way to build that constituency is to eliminate affirmative action as we know it and re-invent it in a way in which more Americans clearly see the benefit.
If the Supreme Court uses the University of Michigan case to ban the consideration of race as a factor in the admissions process, affected colleges and universities should comply by eliminating all "non-academic" selection criteria. That means the big football schools could not consider athletic accomplishments and the Ivy League schools could not consider legacy preferences. Only grades and test scores would be considered. Any other criteria would be considered "affirmative action."
Some activists are already challenging legacy preferences that benefit the children of alumni, and state universities in California and Georgia have banned the use of such preferences in the wake of court decisions that outlawed their affirmative action programs. Those are good first steps, but they don't go far enough. For Americans to understand the true complexity of the admissions process, we need to ban all non-academic preferences and begin an honest dialogue about higher education.
When schools narrow their selection criteria to so-called "objective" academic standards, the rejection rate for minorities will increase dramatically, just as it will for whites. Many white students at selective colleges are admitted with the help of affirmative action. They just don't call it that. Preferences for students with rural backgrounds, alumni parents, or the ability to pay disproportionately benefit white students. Other preferences benefit talented athletes, artists, or class presidents. Critics of affirmative action seldom challenge these preferences.
If affirmative action critics want quantifiable meritocracy, then we should give it to them. Schools should announce that they will no longer give preferences to athletes, artists, class presidents, student council officers, club members, musicians, alumni children, rural students, or anyone else who doesn't have the highest grade point average and SAT score.
Since traditional admissions tools fail to quantify academic talent, athletic scholarships would be banned, alumni interviews would be discontinued, letters of recommendation would be thrown out, and student essays would be discarded.
Students from privileged backgrounds with access to top secondary schools and expensive test preparation courses will continue to benefit from the use of numerical admissions criteria, but that helps to demonstrate the existing class and race bias in the admissions process. In the current system, many students already receive preferences, but only minority students are held accountable for them. In the new system, fewer students would receive preferences, and more students will bear the burden.
When football players, basketball players, band members and legacies no longer get a leg up in selection decisions, it's safe to assume that many of them and their parents will be outraged. But if colleges and universities use this outrage as an opportunity to educate the public about the multiple preferences in the old system, public support for considering diversity in the admissions process may begin to change.
First, schools should begin by better explaining their admissions criteria to the public. Armed with standardized test scores and mathematically computed grade point averages, many Americans have bought into the societal mythology that academic qualifications can be objectively measured. They can't. Standardized test scores often prove poor predictors of admissions decisions, and grade point averages fail to measure valuable skills such as motivation, hard work or the ability to overcome obstacles.
Admissions decisions have never been scientific. How do you measure if a skilled classical pianist is more valuable than a student council president or a straight A student? Which will be more valuable to society? Who has the greatest potential?
Second, schools should use this time to explain the meaning and importance of diversity. Like some black students, I was admitted at Harvard Law School without perfect grades or test scores, but so were many white students. Harvard uses no minimum GPA or LSAT score to rule out applications. With 6,800 applicants for 550 spots, the admissions office could easily fill each first year class with students with the highest grades or standardized test scores, but selecting an incoming class of identical LSAT clones does not contribute to the intellectual exchange that can only be created by diversity.
One way to explain the importance of diversity is to think of schools as baseball teams. If a team already has three or four great hitters but no pitchers, it might pass on an opportunity to acquire another good hitter if it can get a good pitcher instead. Similarly, if a college already has a lot of students with extremely high SAT scores but few athletes or artists, it might want to find applicants with other qualities to help round out the student body.
Selecting a good pitcher with a low batting average instead of a great hitter doesn't diminish the quality of the team. Likewise, selecting an inner city public school student with a 1200 SAT score instead of a suburban prep school student with a 1500 score doesn't diminish the quality of the student body. Both are qualified, and a good school, like a good team, needs diversity to function well.
There's a lot of education that needs to take place about affirmative action, but it can't take place in the context of a debate where minorities are the only identified beneficiaries. When more of us bear the burden of affirmative action, then maybe we can have an honest dialogue about what it really means.
That may be a high price to pay to prove a point, but in the end, the only way to save affirmative action may be to eliminate it, for everyone.