Diversity in Whose Interest?

Color and Money: How Rich White Kids Are Winning the War over College Affirmative Action
Peter Schmidt. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

Reviewed by Paula M. Krebs

Peter Schmidt doesn’t really think rich white kids are waging a war. But although the rich white kids aren’t the ones fighting (their parents are), they are in fact the ones who are winning. 

These rich white kids are winning not because they are white, Schmidt argues, but because they are rich. And therein lies the most important aspect of this book’s analysis of the many battles and skirmishes that have marked the affirmative action wars in the years since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1978 decision in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, which upheld affirmative action but barred racial quotas. Schmidt makes clear, with his thorough historical, economic, legislative, and judicial contextualization, that affirmative action as it is now understood is a far cry from its origins. What originated in the desires of 1960s activists to better conditions for African Americans and the desire of higher education to remedy past injustice has become today a corporate- and military supported idea anchored in assertions that “diverse” college campuses produce better educations—for their elite white graduates.

Schmidt, a Chronicle of Higher Education reporter who has covered race issues in higher education for many years, takes readers through the various milestones in the history of affirmative action, but he is careful to set up his entire discussion by first outlining “How Money Rises Above Merit” (chapter 1) and “How  the Rich Deny Education to the Poor” (chapter 2). He pulls no punches, as his titles indicate, and it is somewhat difficult to see a place for college affirmative action at all once you’ve been forced to confront the bald economic inequities that produced the race gap in higher education in the first place. The remedy needs to start much earlier.

“Class begins shaping children’s fates in the womb,” says Schmidt— poor mothers are less likely to receive good prenatal care, children from low-income families are less likely to be enrolled in preschool and more likely to be moved from school to school, and low-income parents are less likely to read to their children or take them to libraries and museums. How, then, can we even begin to talk about the University of Michigan’s awarding a few extra points to minority applicants in their admissions process? What could that possibly do to make up for the fact that, as Schmidt notes, “The United States is unique among advanced nations in its reliance on property taxes to finance public schools,” thus ensuring that schools in poor districts get less money than schools in rich districts?

Schmidt’s class analysis shifts after his first couple of chapters, however, as he discusses the efforts of the nation’s elite (for the book focuses on selective-admissions schools) to preserve access to privilege for their own sons and daughters in the face of challenges from affirmative action advocates. The plaintiffs in the affirmative action cases Schmidt discusses were not disturbed by the white students who had been admitted with lower scores than theirs: Schmidt points out that “Michigan had accepted plenty of other white applicants with lower grades and test scores, but Gratz and Grutter did not fret over the possibility that they had been elbowed aside by people connected to alumni, donors, prominent politicians, or university employees.” Or athletes. They decided that they’d been denied admission because they were white. And colleges and universities all over the country, Schmidt shows, are performing amazing contortions to avoid modifying admissions criteria that let them privilege the above elite categories.

As it must, most of this volume concentrates on detailed descriptions of the ins and outs of the various affirmative action cases in U.S. higher education. Schmidt relies on his reporting for the Chronicle, and in some ways the strength of that reporting is also the weakness of the main part of the book. Reporting aims to give readers “both sides of the story” and a sense of familiarity with the important issues involved in a story. To his credit, Schmidt makes clear that there are more than two sides to the affirmative action issue, but he nevertheless allows us to feel like we have the whole story, all the important background and context for each case from Bakke to Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger, the two landmark University of Michigan cases in 2003. Gone is that early analysis that made clear the national social and economic contexts for affirmative action and how fuzzy the issues can be. Instead, the focus shifts to the political—to national lobbying organizations and lawyers, lawyers, and more lawyers.
 
But Schmidt’s first two chapters, in which he sets up affirmative action in the frame of the American class system and access to educational advantage, refuse to let us read the rest of the book as about politics that are out of our hands. If you removed his early chapters, the introduction, and the revealing dedication to his father, whose career was sacrificed to his desire for racial justice, Color and Money would be a very different book, one in which class analysis simply means identifying whose interests are served by each lobbying group in the affirmative action debates (the bad guys are the folks who support legacy admissions, arguing that they result in more alumni giving). But because he has trained us to see larger forces at work, we must ask what is left out of the book. What besides political and corporate forces are at work in the shift in affirmative action’s place in the contemporary university?

Corporate forces there are aplenty, as Schmidt makes clear. Why did so many military figures, including Norman Schwartzkopf and Wesley Clark, come in on the side of affirmative action in the Michigan cases? Why did IBM, Boeing, and Texaco? What is the stake of the military and corporate America in giving racial minorities access to selective colleges? Schmidt points out the investments but doesn’t follow his analysis through. Yes, corporations such as Texaco had some making up to do after facing lawsuits by minority employees. But that does not account for why so many companies adopted minority recruiting goals of their own in recent decades—is it all about globalization? About being able to reach all consumers all the time? About the need for officers of color so that the military won’t face racial unrest in its troops? Schmidt hints at such explanations; the book would benefit from deeper analysis of higher education’s stakes in corporate culture and vice versa. But that’s asking more than this book could be expected to provide.
 
Nevertheless, I would like to have seen more of this volume’s tough critique of the class politics of higher education. Where do selective colleges recruit to bolster their minority admissions? Schmidt mentions the international recruiting done by some liberal arts colleges, but what are their procedures for recruiting the children of the black professional classes? Is it possible to recruit from the inner cities at all?
 
That this book calls to mind such questions is a testimony to its power. Color and Money reshapes the way we think about race in the admissions game in higher education. It leads us to think about its logical extensions, about secondary education, about curriculum, about class and race in rural America, class and race in urban America, and class and race in higher education generally. It makes me hope that Schmidt will turn his attention to access issues more generally now that he has examined selective colleges. We need a more thorough understanding of how race and class (and, not incidentally, gender) operate in relation to who goes to community colleges, who to regional colleges, who to flagship or private universities. And who doesn’t go to college at all. An examination of how class works in Deborah Biel’s massively successful Posse Foundation, which supplies elite schools with ready-made critical masses of urban public high schoolers, would fit well into Schmidt’s framework (Biel was awarded a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship for her Posse work in 2007).

Many white working-class high schoolers have no access to a college education because of the costs of higher education and because they are squeezed out by the interests of the monied classes. As Schmidt shows, many white upper-middle-class and upper-class parents would rather see their children in school with uppermiddle- class African American children than with the children of the poor or workers of any race. Peter Schmidt’s nuanced account of the class and race politics behind how affirmative action became a way to provide “diversity” experiences for privileged white students is sobering for anyone who cares about educational access in the United States for students who are not both white and rich.

Paula M. Krebs is editor of Academe and professor of English at Wheaton College in Massachusetts. Her e-mail address is pkrebs@wheatonma.edu.

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