Slavery and Jim Crow are almost irrelevant to the legal justification for AA. You won’t find either mentioned in Judge Burroughs’ opinion. You will see a lot of discussion about the educational benefits of diversity.
See these quotes from the Harvard decision:
‘Diversity’ at this point is mush. It’s meaningless, a lovely-sounding, totally vapid signal of virtue that has no meaningful connection to educational excellence.
It’s not even a code word for restitution for past wrongs, or leveling-of-the-playing-field, as affirmative action was properly understood to mean in the first few decades of its implementation.
Instead, it has become this baggy monster that means anything and nothing, and that serves more than anything else to shield the ever-growng, self-aggrandizing class of university administrators from charges that they are doing nothing to reduce inequality or right past wrongs.
Is it any wonder that, during diversity’s ascendancy, we have seen a sharp DECREASE in genuine diversity i.e. intellectual diversity on the campus?
That we have wtinessed across the country an increase in intellectual suppression and intimidation, in self-suppression for fear of retaliation by anti-diversity professors and denunciation by anonymous online and offline mobs?
This is not to say that those who promote affirmative action aren’t well-intentioned. But it’s not clear why self-aggrandizing university bureaucrats should be tasked with fixing the failures of American society generally or American primary and secondary education in particular. Our elites think it necessary to at least SIGNAL – to both the legislators in DC and the state capitals and to us, the gullible, naively well-intentioned parents – that they are on the side of the angels.
So the result is this BS phrase that, as often as not, means its polar opposite, a stifling of real differences of opinion, of real intellectual variety and vitality.
Agree here, though this was a response to various court rulings.
By what measure has intellectual diversity decreased? Against what decade or era of supposed intellectual diversity in college are you comparing the today? Was there some golden era of diversity at some point that is now gone?
You also will not find references to race in many of the Jim Crow laws of the past.
-Voting laws that required poll taxes or literacy tests didn’t always mention race.
-Prison Labor laws that maintained the practice of slavery well into the 1940s did not mention race.
-Drug sentencing laws that created harsher sentencing for crack versus powder cocaine did not mention race.
The list of instances where a race-based law/rule does not explicitly refer to race is staggeringly long. No sane fair-minded person would now argue those laws were not created with racist intent.
In an age where ridiculous cries of “reverse-racisim” are used by some to justify efforts to stem efforts to level the playing field, it has become necessary to strip those efforts of references to race. Of course fair-minded institutions who benefited from slavery and centuries of racists laws might want to make amends. You can’t correct centuries of race-based hatred and oppression with laws/rules that are not based on race. But, these new decisions have to be written in a manner that prevents bigots from saying “SEE THEY ARE RACE BASED!” It has created a legal battle where one side has to perform with one hand tied behind its back.
Secondarily, some have long tried to muddy the waters by changing discussions of inclusion to become discussions of semantics. It is a trope that became tiring long ago. Either one is for inclusion or one is not. These laws and universities are trying to be inclusive and make amends. It is a horrible shame that some people are doing all they can to prevent inclusion.
OHMom - UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) has been doing exhaustive surveys of professors at hundreds of universities and colleges, three times each year, for thirty years.
HERI’s data conclusively show a sharp swing to the left among university professors generally during this period. This odd swing is especially pronounced in the arts and humanities fields. The imbalance has become ridiculous - especially at top colleges located in New England - and is not worth your gainsaying.
It is a fact, and it is so pronounced that it is alarming even liberal professors and leaders at our best colleges.
One of those who have spoken out against this trend is Michael Roth, a self-described “left-leaning” professor and the president of Wesleyan.
Here’s Michael Roth, referencing the HERI studies’ data and warning of the danger to intellectual diversity and vitality that this trend poses:
http://roth.blogs.wesleyan.edu/2017/05/19/on-intellectual-diversity/
“There is no denying the left-leaning political bias on American college campuses. As data from UCLA’s Higher Education Institute show, the professoriate has moved considerably leftward since the late 1980s, especially in the arts and humanities. In New England, where my own university is located, liberal professors outnumber their conservative colleagues by a ratio of 28:1. …”
@thibault Isn’t the diversity effort we are discussing (AA) concerning college students? If you are now comparing professors, that’s a different discussion.
…and I’m pretty certain we still aren’t allowed to cite blogs here.
HERI is a useful link, though you didn’t cite any evidence for your (or the blogger’s) claim in it.
I did find this: https://www.heri.ucla.edu/briefs/DLE/DLE-2018-Brief.pdf
…which shows far more students happy with the “Atmosphere for Political Differences” than not. (see infographic, page 1).
Possibly. Also, when asked, many immigrants prefer to refer to their cultural or national origin rather than religion . The Persian-Americans I know don’t view their religion as a main focus of their identity.
I’m not 100% sure what you’re getting at here, but I think you’re implying that Harvard is dishonest about the reasons for its admissions policies. I wouldn’t consider prison labor equivalent to slavery, but that’s an aside.
It’s not clear that Harvard wants to make amends for its role in slavery. If Harvard was concerned about making amends, a much more direct route to do that would be to sell off the unrestricted part of their endowment and distribute the proceeds to the descendants of slaves. That would benefit more people than the few hundred slots, which go to AA in each freshman class.
“Dishonest” is a curious word to choose.
Harvard is battling to make amends amid the obstructionist actions of people who do not want integration. When one side twists the law to focus a hard line on letter-of-law and obfuscate the intent of the law, Harvard is fighting with one hand behind its back. You say it is “dishonest”. The same could be said of those who say the lawsuit really is about garnering more seats for Asians at Harvard.
I guess honesty and dishonest are in the eye of the beholder.
A common misunderstanding maybe, but the facts are indisputable. You could start here:
Douglas A Blackmon - Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to WWII
But getting back on track …
My point was, Harvard is trying to make amends and ensure inclusion. Those fighting Harvard’s attempts are trying to fight for exclusion. This is clear to everyone on both sides of debate, but some people are embarrassed to admit this, so we end up in roundabout reasoning to say it is about something else.
Let’s stop dancing around the truth. It simply creates more opportunities to get sidetracked into “asides” that do not forward the true conversation.
This is about inclusion, integration, amends. It is fine for people to argue against inclusion, integration, and amends if they wish. But it is counterproductive to be “dishonest” about the reasons behind that intention. I simply ask those against Harvard’s attempts to be inclusive to be honest. Then we can all have a fruitful discussion.
OHMom - it seemed obvious to me but I guess I have to spell it out for you at length.
The original justification for affirmative action in college and university admissions was primarily compensatory in nature:
These compensatory rationales were knocked down by Justice Powell in the UC vs. Bakke ruling 40 years ago.
In his controlling opinion Powell wrote that colleges weren’t capable of making compensatory judgments but could lawfully discriminate on the basis of race to achieve the broader social benefits of something he called “diversity,” a new term which was never contemplated in any of the civil rights legislation of the preceding decade.
These benefits by definition would flow not to the minorities themselves - note that compensation or restitution was off the table - but to NON-minority students. Powell’s weird logic was that, absent a racially “diverse” class, majority students would presumably be deprived of the unique race-based perspectives that, in this twisted reasoning, only minority students can provide.
In other words, Bakke was being denied admission in favor of applicants with inferior grades and scores so that other non-minority students could gain access to minority perspectives that, supposedly, could only be accessed by having a minority person in the class.
Never mind the warnings of Toni Morrison or MLK or any of our other wise men and women that race is far less important in life than what King called “character.” From this point forward, thanks to Powell’s foolish opinion, under the Supreme Court’s sanction, minority applicants would become designated bearers of predetermined race-based perspectives.
Again, compensation for past wrongs was thrown out the window. In its place was a bizarre and hypocritical notion that turned on its head the civil rights movement’s core insight - the seeking of equality by DIMINISHING the importance in American society of superficial racial attributes.
40 years later, we can see the poisoned fruit of Powell’s twisted and nonsensical reasoning in the ideological conformity that’s been decried by Wesleyan’s president, Michael Roth, and many other left-leaning, sympathetic academics and that resulted in HERI detecting a 28:1 – 28 TO ONE! – joke of an ideological imbalance on New England campuses.
When academic institutions “build the class” around the notion that the black kids in that class are supposed, by the fact of their race, to reliably provide a “black” perspective on what’s being discussed, they suppress intellectual variety and vitality.
Great ideas, or even good and merely valid ideas, have nothing to do with the race of the thinker.
You’ll probably say, But what about life experiences? What about the perspective that comes from experiencing discrimination? Ok, even if one were to assume that only the presence of one who has personally experienced racial discrimination is sufficient to teach non-minorities the perils and effects of racism, then explain to us why our colleges refuse to prefer poor and other underprivileged students of two minority parents. How come – if diverse life perspectives are the goal – Harvard like all of our elite colleges ends up filling its “diversity” quota with overwhelmingly upper middle-class minority applicants? And many if not most of these applicants are born to US elites or to non-US parents drawn from the elite classes of nations where they are part of the racial majority.
What happened to “diversity”? There’s no more diversity to be found in the perspective of a privileged child of Nigerian parents than in that of a similarly privileged child of Taiwanese or Bengali parents.
It’s no wonder that this misguided notion has led us to a university and college intellectual environment that is more conformist, more hostile to free thought and fresh perspectives, than it was 40 years ago. This is what happens when living, breathing above all independently thinking human beings are treated as dumb markers whose function is to allow bureaucrats to hit targets defined by race.
In short, “diversity” is a crock. It’s defeating the purpose of diversity.
Economic-based admissions decisions that actually increased the percentage of students who’ve experienced real hardship would do FAR more to increase intellectual diversity than the current practice of admitting spoiled suburban brats.
I’m well aware of the history of Affirmative Action and how SC rulings over the years have altered colleges’ justification for it.
I’ve said this in this thread several times. The current justification for AA is mainly “so our white students can benefit because they will need to lead in this world and the world is diverse”. And yet as Econpop points out, that’s the argument they HAVE TO make because that’s the only benefit the SC rulings allow them to make. Is it the entire truth? Who knows.
Sure. I believe it’s money. Most colleges can subsidize few kids who can’t pay. However, some of the very wealthy colleges DO have a preference for low income and URM and low income URM is a double plus. Amherst, for instance.
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/27/education/27grad.html
Yay Amherst. But it’s in the minority. Jack believes colleges need to do more for low income students, especially those who didn’t have the advantage he did (a scholarship to a prep school senior year of HS).
I agree with you, and him, that not enough colleges with the money use it to fund low SES students.
You are just opining without any foundation, it seems. If you care to share the HERI study you keep referencing we can revisit this claim you made about students’ political tolerance/beliefs changing so drastically over time.
OHMom, please stop gainsaying. The Michael Roth article referencing HERI’s documented 28:1 ratio of liberals to conservatives was part of a longer piece which is behind the WSJ firewall – hence my link to Michael Roth’s blog, where the piece appears in full.
Again, to repeat, UCLA’s exhaustive HERI surveys are done 3x year, every year, and their data set goes back 40 years.
Everyone with his or her head on straight can see that our campuses have become far more intolerant of opinions that are not far left. The president of Wesleyan sees this, and denounces the suppression of dissenting views that he has witnessed on his own campus.
Cornel West and Robby George of Princeton see this and are actively trying to reduce the stifling echo chamber effect of a lack of diverse opinions and suppression of dissenting views. Academics from many other leading universities are also trying hard to re-introduce real heterodoxy to our campuses.
Please stop this gainsaying. You’re just shutting down rational discussion and failing to engage with the facts.
Still no link provided to the HERI evidence you keep referencing so perhaps time to move on, @thibault .
Edward Blum and the SFFA have been fighting racism for a long time. I think they have been very clear about their goal to eliminate racist college admissions policies.
More rabbit-holing.
Can we simply call a sham a sham? Where else in society is SFFA or its proponents fighting against racism? Usually, groups that are heartfelt in their opposition to bigotry operate on many fronts. The JADL courageously battles bigotry in many forms. LULAC valiantly fights bigotry on many fronts.
Is SFFA (or its leaders) fighting against racist police practices, or in the overall justice system? Has SFFA (or its leaders) mentioned its opinion about voting rights being infringed upon by politicized redistricting using race as a factor? Has SFFA (or its leaders) participated in the efforts to help the primary school education of all children in America?
Even in college education, has SFFA spoken out about the situations in Syracuse, Indiana, Alabama and other colleges in America? If SFFA is such a staunch supporter of anti-racist causes, why does it have no position on the other myriad race-based topics in American society?
We all know why. Because SFFA is not fighting to create a country free of racism. It is fighting to create a country that keeps African-Americans as a pariah. Let’s not dance around the truth. We’re not lawyers in court trying to massage the law’s nuances to squeeze out the juice of judicial decision. Let’s speak openly and plainly. This is the one thread on CC that allows you to do so. Take advantage of the opportunity. Speak plainly.
No one is fooled by the SFFA. Not its supporters. Not its opponents.
Let’s take a close look at Mr Blum’s legal efforts throughout history.
He filed a lawsuit in Texas to eliminate a district that had been created to allow African-American representation in the Texas legislature. He labeled this as a legal battle against racism. Yet has has never (AFAIK) joined forces to fight the other numerous efforts to fight other forms of racism in Texas. And he has not joined in efforts to fight gerrymandering in states like NC where districts were created to stifle the representation of American-Americans. He has limited his activism to efforts that target African-Americans.
He fought in court to remove Voting Rights laws put in place to stop Texas from illegally infringing upon the voting rights of minorities. Nearly every cause he has led has been in opposition to African-Americans.
And now, he decides to lead the fight against African-Americans in higher education, using a “fair” test with students of Asian heritage as his proxy.
His overall goal is obvious to anyone who wishes to view it. It’s almost pointless to argue he has fought a decades long battle against the rights and privileges of African-Americans. He proudly lists his legal history.
So, let’s not pretend Blum is now, suddenly some great crusader in the battle against bigotry. Let’s not pretend that with SFFA, he has suddenly reversed the course of his life and is now fighting for an equal America.
Blum has not spent his life “fighting racism” as you claim. Blum has spent his life fighting against African-Americans. He is an intelligent man and he knows how to use the law to achieve his goals.
He is free to take the course he has chosen. And his supporters are free to follow and support him. But just because he labels his cause as a battle for “fairness” does not mean it is a battle for fairness.
I hate to even go into this rabbit hole. I have not read this entire thread and I don’t know if this has been said before, so I apologize if it has. But, there is no way to present Blum as a crusader for fairness and a warrior against racism. And therefore, it is hard to accept SFFA as anything other than an organization created to forward his overall battle against the rights and privileges of African-Americans.
Well said and can’t agree more.
@econpop we have discussed all that (in hundreds of thousands of posts over the years in this thread, most things related to AA have come up).
Yet some falsehoods rear their head regularly (say it often enough it’s true?), so IMO it’s fine to refute them, again.
Then again some stuff isn’t worth responding to, like twisting MLK’s words to argue that he really didn’t care much about race.