Diversity Yes, Preferences No

Not only is there less support for affirmative action on campus than its advocates claim, but its beneficiaries may not be gaining very much.

By Abigail Thernstrom

That is the (unsurprising) finding of a recent survey by the widely respected pollster John Zogby. While 84 percent of college students said ethnic diversity on their campus was important, 77 percent expressed opposition to giving preferences to minority students in the admissions process. Roughly the same percentage (79) labeled "lowering entrance requirements for students, regardless of the reason," as "unfair to the entire student body."

Moreover, a majority of students don't much like the intellectual orthodoxy on diversity and other matters to which they are expected to conform. In the Zogby poll, 55 percent complained that "political correctness sometimes restricts what people say and learn," and a slightly larger percentage experienced "too much politics in the classroom and colleges." They asked for more "objectivity and intellectual freedom."

Of course it's pretty dismaying that anyone thought a question dealing with intellectual and political coercion needed to be asked. But, alas, it was surely inspired by a real problem: too many issues are viewed by the majority of faculty as having only one morally acceptable answer. Issues of race and ethnicity, particularly, fall into that category. In 1996 the Stanford University faculty senate voted unanimously to continue affirmative action. Ask those same professors whether they are in complete agreement that all students should be required to enroll in a science course, or be familiar with Plato or Shakespeare. Of course, on such important and complicated matters, disagreement would be evident. Diversity of opinion on a race-related policy, however, evidently has no legitimacy. What a sad commentary on the fabric of intellectual life in the Ivory Tower, where tenure is granted to nurture free minds and fresh thought!

Students are less conformist than faculty members, but certainly at the elite schools, few speak out against the prevailing orthodoxy on race-related issues such as preferences. William G. Bowen and Derek Bok, in The Shape of the River, found that graduates of the twenty-eight highly selective schools they studied expressed appreciation for a racially diverse environment and indeed wished their colleges had emphasized racial diversity even more.

And yet, given the prevailing climate on elite campuses, it is remarkable that enthusiasm for diversity was as limited as their actual numbers indicated. Bowen and Bok surveyed approximately sixty thousand students who entered leading colleges and universities in 1976 and 1989. In attempting to tap into student attitudes toward preferential admissions, they posed an innocuous platitude in the form of a question: how important was the ability to "work effectively and get along well with people of different races/cultures"? Only 42 percent of the white students in the 1976 cohort and 55 percent of the 1989 group said "very important." (The figures for blacks were 74 percent in 1976 and 76 percent in 1989.) The authors call colleges a race-relations model for the nation, but surely these figures suggest otherwise. Moreover, the authors never ask how students who attended less selective and more representative schools-like the University of Illinois at Chicago-would respond to such a question. The views of Stanford students tell us little about campus attitudes in general.

Preferences

For example, their survey could have included the following question: "Your school achieved greater racial diversity by accepting substantial numbers of African Americans with much weaker academic qualifications. Do you approve of that policy?" And as a follow-up, it might have asked, "Do you think such policies make the classmates of black students skeptical about their ability?" Perhaps most students would say no, but it is also possible that a sophisticated probing of such delicate matters (such as Paul Sniderman and Edward G. Carmines did in Reaching Beyond Race) might have yielded some of the "disappointing results" the authors profess not to have found in exploring the question of preferential admissions.

Bowen and Bok looked only at highly selective colleges. Zogby polled a national sample of college students, and their views very much reflect those of their parents, as revealed in surveys going back thirty years.

In six polls from 1977 to 1991, the Gallup Organization asked the same question: Some people say that to make up for past discrimination, women and members of minority groups should be given preferential treatment in getting jobs and places in colleges. Others say that their ability, as determined in test scores, should be the main consideration. Which point of view comes closer to how you feel on the subject?

In each survey, only 10 or 11 percent of respondents said that minorities should be given preferential treatment, while over 80 percent replied that ability should be the determining factor. When the black-run Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies asked a similar question in 1997, it discovered that almost half of African American respondents rejected preferential treatment.

Bowen and Bok were less interested in what students actually believe than in what they-and the public-should believe. That is, The Shape of the River is primarily an argument aimed at shoring up lagging public support for preferential policies.

The authors eschew the term "preferences," however. They speak, instead, of "racially sensitive" admissions policies, which (they assure us) take into account a great many factors in addition to race and result in the acceptance of minority students who come well qualified for academic work.

Their data, they claim, show that preferentially admitted students succeed in school. Most collect their diplomas, and an impressive proportion pursue a graduate education and enter well-paying occupations. African American graduates also become unusually active in civic affairs, playing key leadership roles both in the black community and in the larger society. Indeed, the economic success and social commitment these students owe to their elite education have made them "the backbone of the emergent black and Hispanic middle class."

Misleading Data

To begin with, the authors' use of the term "racially sensitive" admissions is both odd and deceptive. No one refers to "athletically sensitive" or "alumni sensitive" admissions in addressing other forms of preference. And those who defend the use of race in deciding who gets into college, if they believe in such a policy, should be candid about how it works.

Much of Bowen and Bok's data came from just five out of the twenty-eight institutions they studied. At those five, race was not just one of many "plus" factors used by admissions committees; admissions decisions were race-driven. These schools were clearly violating the legal standards established in the Supreme Court's 1978 decision in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke. Among applicants with SAT scores in the 1,200 to 1,249 range, only 19 percent of whites, but 60 percent of blacks, were admitted. Among those with scores between 1,250 and 1,299, the percentage of whites accepted was 24, while 75 percent of blacks gained entrance. A third of the white applicants with scores of 1,500 or better were turned down; not a single black applicant who had done that well was rejected. Bowen and Bok drew a picture of flagrant double standards-perhaps justifiable, but unmistakable.

With such racial disparities in SAT scores, it is not surprising that black students at the schools Bowen and Bok studied did not do well academically. We are not told how many African American students ranked in the top quarter or the top tenth of their classes, graduated with honors, or made Phi Beta Kappa. But the authors do say that the cumulative grade point average of all black students at the twenty-eight schools put them at the twenty-third percentile of the group-in the bottom quarter. The picture for the preferentially admitted alone must have been even worse.

Poor Performance

The relatively poor academic performance of black students at elite colleges and professional schools might have led Bowen and Bok to reconsider their support for preferential admissions. Obviously, it didn't. These colleges, they argue, are the indispensable ticket to the middle class. And yet, while the data are thin, all available lists of successful black Americans indicate they went to a variety of undergraduate institutions. For example, a 1996 report by the National Research Council lists the undergraduate institutions that trained most of the African Americans who earned Ph.D.'s between 1992 and 1996. Remarkably, nine of the ten schools that top the list are historically black colleges; the tenth is Wayne State, also a heavily black school. Three out of the next eight are also predominantly black, and only one-the University of Michigan-is among Bowen and Bok's elite.

Although Bowen and Bok collected data on four historically black colleges, they failed to analyze them. That is a serious omission. What happened to the academically strong students who chose Howard over Duke? In fact, what happened to those who went to the University of Connecticut, although their demographic and academic profiles were much the same as those who chose Yale? Almost 90 percent of black students graduate from high school; half go on to college, but only 5 percent enroll in a selective school.

Selective institutions do little to shape the overall structure of opportunity in higher education. While Harvard may have nine applicants for every place in its first-year class, it does not ensure "wondrous economic advancement for [its] graduates," as Nicholas Lemann claims in his recent book, The Big Test. Far from it. Selective colleges, with their high-powered students, are intellectually enriching and thus more fun for those who love school. But as Princeton economist Alan Krueger and Stacy Dale of the Mellon Foundation recently found, selective colleges have no impact on earnings fifteen years down the road. The academically skilled do well wherever they go to college. That makes sense; skills-not schools-make the man (or woman).

Stigmatization

It is indeed awkward to let out the truth about double standards, although it is remarkable that administrators think that students will not make invidious comparisons if the statistics are kept under wraps. The authors call this secrecy one of the "costs" of preferential policies, but they nonetheless deny that the seeming "stigmatization" or "demoralization" of black students is worrisome. The people in the best position to know whether stigmatization is a problem, they say, are the black students themselves, who said they felt fine. Most were "satisfied" or "very satisfied" with the schools they attended.

Bowen and Bok view the elite schools they studied as a model for race relations they hope the larger society will emulate, and they maintain that racial double standards are essential to that mission. "Until now," they say, "there has been little hard evidence to confirm the belief of educators in the value of diversity," but their work, they believe, has filled the void. Their survey data, they maintain, "throw new light on the extent of interaction occurring on campuses today" and reveal "how positively the great majority of students regard opportunities to learn from those with different points of view, backgrounds, and experiences."

They offer as a key piece of evidence the high level of interracial friendships they found on elite campuses. For example, they report that 56 percent of the whites in their 1989 cohort said that they knew two or more black classmates "well," and that 88 percent of blacks knew at least two whites well. They marvel that 56 percent of whites in elite schools have two or more black friends but are evidently unaware that fully 86 percent of all white adults in a 1997 national survey said they had black friends, and 54 percent of whites reported having five or more. Nationally, 73 percent of whites surveyed in 1994 said that they had "good friends" who were African American. And the proportion of blacks with white friends is higher still on every one of these national surveys. The Bowen and Bok data suggest that the elite campuses may be in the rear guard, not the vanguard.

Bowen and Bok did not explore dating patterns, but a 1997 Gallup poll found that 57 percent of teenagers who dated reported having gone out with someone of another race or ethnic group. The black-white line is obviously the hardest to cross, and yet 17 percent of white teens say they have dated a black, while 44 percent of young blacks have dated a white. Moreover, 62 percent of parents have no objection. Asked about these numbers, urban anthropologist Elijah Anderson said he saw signs of "a kind of deracialization of American society," a picture that squares with one drawn in a recent New Republic article by Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson, who has described the "racial divide that has plagued America since its founding [as] fading fast."

Anderson and Patterson may be too optimistic. But if they are at least partly right, if America's obsession with race is slowly fading, perhaps the importance of a "diversity" that is more expansively defined will become evident. The need to have a variety of voices on campus has been a major argument for racial preferences in higher education. Surely the point extends to other groups as well. Colleges appear quite indifferent to social-class diversity. They never seem concerned about a political or religious mix-one that includes Evangelicals and Libertarians as well as Catholics and Republicans. And, in fact, both Tufts and Middlebury have been forced in recent months to confront the question of just how much diversity of viewpoint they want to tolerate on their campuses. Should they allow any organization to discriminate on the basis of professed sexual orientation?

It's the beginning of a healthy debate. Diversity is important, everyone agrees. But what kind and at what cost? These remain unresolved issues.

Abigail Thernstrom is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and the coauthor of America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible (1997).

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