The court's colorblindness scam
Affirmative action decision is damaging both short-term and long-term
This appeared on my blog over at Science.
When the US Supreme Court took up the case of affirmative action policies at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, I wrote an editorial arguing that “Science needs affirmative action.” As pointed out in the piece, I was partly responsible for the policies that were litigated in the UNC case, as I served as the chancellor there from 2008 to 2013, and I was one of many who fully expected that the court would decide to effectively end affirmative action. This finally came to pass last week. Much has been writtenabout many of the implications, which don’t need to be rehearsed here. The court took the position that racism cuts both ways, even against populations that have not been oppressed. In his concurrence, Justice Clarence Thomas stated, “All the while, Harvard and UNC ask us to blind ourselves to the burdens imposed on the millions of innocent applicants denied admission because of their membership in a currently disfavored race.” (italics mine). For more on how Justice Thomas came to this skewed reasoning, I highly recommend the recent documentary on Frontline.
One point worth highlighting is from historian Kevin Kruse, who excoriates conservatives who suggested that Martin Luther King, Jr. would be happy because of his famous quote about a nation where people “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” which Kruse suggests is the only MLK quote conservatives know and always take out of context. In fact, King was alive when affirmative action was started—and was highly supportive of it.
I want to note two particular aspects of the court’s decision that haven’t gotten much attention. The first is the effect on the students currently enrolled at selective universities—all of whom were admitted under existing policies that the court invalidated. In Thomas’s concurrence, he uses these words:
“The Court’s opinion rightly makes clear that Grutter is, for all intents and purposes, overruled. And, it sees the universities’ admissions policies for what they are: rudderless, race-based preferences designed to ensure a particular racial mix in their entering classes. Those policies fly in the face of our colorblind Constitution and our Nation’s equality ideal. In short, they are plainly—and boldly—unconstitutional.”
To students of color, this message could be taken to mean that their presence is “plainly—and boldly—unconstitutional.” We know from decades of research on stereotype threat that the court’s decision is likely to have a substantial effect on thriving and academic performance. It is incumbent on every college leader to emphatically state to their current students that they are not there by mistake or, worse, unlawfully. Most red-state public university leaders stopped short of saying this, maintaining they would follow the law and pivoting to vague statements about why diversity is important and still an institutional commitment. I was proud that the chancellor of another school where I helped shape the admissions policies, Washington University in St. Louis, put great emphasis on reminding students that they belonged and acknowledging the pain of the court’s words and actions:
“To our current and prospective students from diverse backgrounds, our message is this: We want you here. We need you here. We will not waver in our commitment to creating a community where all of our students are welcome, included, and supported on your paths to success.”
This kind of support is vital in the absence of affirmative action.
Another aspect that has received less attention is the fact that the court’s ruling does not invalidate other admission preferences, especially those for legacy applicants whose parents attended the school in question, athletes, children of potential donors, and children of faculty. These preferences predominantly help white applicants (even athletic preferences have a large effect on sports where white students dominate like soccer, lacrosse, tennis, and golf). Thomas’s excoriation to not ignore the “millions of innocent applicants denied admission” must apply to these preferences as well. But perhaps he feels these students deserve consideration because they are part of what he believes is a “currently disfavored race.” By not calling out other special admissions, the court is applying the logic in only one direction when their entire contention is that it is to be applied both ways.
Nearly every college administrator (including me) has been hoping for a window to end these preferences, as recently stated by former Harvard President Lawrence Summers. But the forces propping up these preferences from alumni and other stakeholders are immense. Someone will bring a legacy admissions case to the court soon. If the court leaves these preferences intact, it will prove that their self-appointed color blindness is nothing of the sort.
Dear Professor Thorp, if I may, as you may be aware of, we in India also have an equivalent of affirmative action, which is referred to as reservations. Please allow me a naïve take on reservations, albeit from your (American ;) pragmatic perspective. Admitting a student into a college is not unlike investing in stock market, based on its past performance. This seemingly simplistic assertion needs little unpacking. A student with all A grades is more likely to do well in school and do good for the society compared to one with, say, mostly B grades, a couple of A grades, and even a C grade. This is true if and only if all else is the same for both students; but it ain't! Any capitalist would find it prudent to invest in a venture that went from a garage to a million-dollar market share instead of gambling on one that went from a million to a couple of million (à la Trump ;) More importantly, students who barely passed, while withstanding the tempestuous upheavals that is their everyday, are more likely to not only successfully navigate through the disorienting blooming buzzing confusion that is the onslaught of time, but also make way for those who scored high merely by memorizing multiplication tables, so to speak, in their luxurious enclosures insulated from the reality out there, which is barely sensible and mostly beyond the reach of reason. While I was in college, I visited my friend, who happens to be born into the caste of Relli. Rellis are, not unlike parents changing diapers and cleaning their babies, engaged in cleaning all the dirt and making sure the rest of us get to live in a healthy environment. Unfortunately, my friend's home was, mildly put, not pleasant to be in, leave alone focus on studying. I, on the other hand, didn't know people had to work to live until I left home for college; speak of protected environment: all I did was eat sweets and study and complain to my uncle that the teachers are dumb ;) Summing it all, somebody should school your supreme court braindead justices that affirmative action is no favor to low-scoring students, nor is it undoing past injustices, but a judicious investment by the society for the greater good of all: our future, including that of those smarty pants, who tend to be paralyzed without a protocol to follow. Thank you very much for your patient reading /\ /\ /\
Dear Professor Thorp,
Pardon me for this may read harsh, but the root cause of all American problems that invariably infect the rest of the world appears to be the basic tenet of American epistemology:
Truth is what I can get away with!
One such familiar and comforting (at least for those living in America) truth: America is special/exceptional/unique. It doesn't take any effortful mental acrobatics to see the vacuousness of aforementioned truth; just recollect that every particular is unique ;)
And yet, many writers, who are presumably well-read, unwittingly fall prey to this collective (american) unconsciousness, when they preface everything and anything by bringing into figural salience something about that thing that is unique, which is, simply put, saddening in its wanton display of desperation to be perceived as unique. To see the hollowness of this American wont:
I'm the one and only person in this entire universe to type this, here, and now ;)
Your basic tenet of epistemology has already infected us, thanks to an erstwhile Trump advisor hired by no less evil and cruel Chief Minister of our state of Andhra Pradesh; we are heading straight to hell in a wastebasket: violence, unspeakable heart-wrenching violence, and wholesale decimation of state institutions including schools and judiciary.
Please accept my sincere apologies if this is beyond the pale /\ /\ /\
Thanking you,
Yours truly,
posina