The Winter 2011 issue of The American Scholar has a cover essay by William Chace entitled “Affirmative Inaction” (the cover itself proclaims “Affirmative Action’s Last Chance”). It is a somber plea for continuing admissions policies that grant preferential treatment to certain racial groups in spite of rising skepticism of and activism against them. The essay is worth reading for two reasons. One, it conscientiously spells out various trends and circumstances that have put affirmative action on the defensive for the last 20-plus years. And two, it offers a justification for affirmative action that stretches beyond the limits of factual and rhetorical credibility, indicating just how difficult it is today to argue for affirmative action in open forums.
One must admire Chace for acknowledging several factors inhibiting affirmative-action programs in higher education, including:
- Public opinion polls showing declining support for the practice.
- The fact that affirmative action now supports “hundreds and hundreds of young people who have suffered the wounds of old-fashioned American racism little or not at all. More than a quarter of the black students enrolled at selective American colleges and universities are immigrants or the children of immigrants.”
- “The increasing presence on campus of students from myriad ethnic groups (Indian, Vietnamese, Chinese, Korean, Iranian, and many others) and the consequent reduction of ‘white’ students (witness student populations at the University of California at Berkeley, UCLA, Stanford, USC, Columbia, and other schools) undercut the notion that American higher education is still unfairly monochromatic.”
- And, of course, legal decisions and state laws that hinder race-based decision-making.
In the wake of these pressures, Chace proceeds to say, private institutions have a window of opportunity, not to mention a moral duty, to press forward on affirmative-action policies. Conservative critics don’t like to interfere with private organizations, and so they are less likely to file lawsuits against them when they tip the scales. Furthermore, in states where public opinion runs against affirmative action, private universities don’t feel as much taxpayer pressure as public institutions do.
Those are the practical advantages private institutions share, and they ground the policy thrust of the essay. One might disagree with it, but its tactical orientation is sound.
The moral case comes from another source, however, and when he refers to it the argument veers into dicey assertions. The source is, simply, the fate of young black males. Chace notes straightforwardly two dismaying outcomes.
- College-attendance rates for black males fall well below their proportion of the overall population.
- Once they enter college, black males have abysmal graduation rates.
Chace believes that the student population should be demographically proportionate to the overall population—he says so explicitly—and so private institutions absolutely must use affirmative action to change the percentages.
The urgency of this policy is underscored by the percentages in another realm, not the campus but the prison. One in three black men will “go to prison in his lifetime,” Chace notes, while only one in 17 whites end up there. Affirmative action won’t “free these men from jail,” he admits, but he does insist that “affirmative action is a societal antidote to this and other existing effects of racism.” Indeed, the plight of young black men places “private universities and colleges . . . at the center of this national drama.” Those are the stakes of affirmative action in college admissions. “The burden upon them is great,” Chace concludes, “and so is the weight of energetically sustaining the ideal of a model commonwealth.”
Chace’s argument is, one concedes, high-minded, observant, and concise. It is also flatly wrong, and one doesn’t know whether to attribute its falsity to Chace’s elite-institution parochialism or to rhetorical strategy.
The error that undermines the entire position appears early in the essay when Chace begins his defense of affirmative action with a historical summary:
“The history of affirmative action includes the graduation of thousands of young men and women who otherwise would not have passed within the gates of a college or university.”
Without affirmative-action policies, that is, members of groups covered by them would not have made it into college at all, not any college. The falsity of that point is so obvious that one wonders how it passed the editors at The American Scholar. There are thousands of two-year and four-year institutions of higher education in the United States and only a portion of them practice selective admissions. Roughly one-quarter of them exercise race-based preferences of any kind in admissions. Shift down the ladder and you reach institutions that allow most everybody enrollment if they have a high-school diploma. As Russ Nieli put it in his penetrating commentary on Chace’s essay, “What this means is that virtually all black and Hispanic students in the past who have received affirmative-action boosts in admissions to four-year colleges could have gained acceptance, had there been no racial preferences, to many hundreds of four-year colleges as well as to any of the more than one-thousand two-year colleges.”
Nieli terms Chace’s dire assertion the “Harvard-or-hamburger-flipper confusion” or “Yale-or-jail mistake.” Perhaps it stems from the experience of a person who regards elite institutions as so far superior to average institutions that attendance anywhere else is a curse. Or maybe this is the outlook of a person who has inhabited and, in two cases, led fabulously wealthy private institutions for decades and suffers some discomfort with that privilege. Whatever the cause, Chace believes it, repeating it when he predicts a world without affirmative action admissions:
“Given the probable results of eliminating affirmative action—a student body consisting almost wholly of whites and Asian Americans—no chief administrator of a respectable college or university would happily oversee the erosion of the presence of black or Hispanic students.”
No, the overall student body would not be “almost wholly of whites and Asian Americans.” If affirmative action ended, the racial proportions of the total student population would remain pretty much the same. The difference would be that black and brown students would slip down the ladder of institutions from Tier 1 to Tier 2, Tier 2 to Tier 3, Tier 3 to Tier 4 . . . The slide would pretty much stop at Tier 5. To claim that the loss of affirmative action means the removal of black and brown students from higher education as a whole is either dishonest or uninformed.
That Chace resorts to the prison system indicates the weakness of the “almost wholly white or Asian” contention. The line from Yale admissions to the penitentiary is, for him, direct. If, however, one were to ask black males in or out of prison whether rejection from Yale but acceptance to Gateway-Community Technical College or University of Connecticut-Waterbury would be a disaster that leads to crime, they would look at you and think you were crazy.
There are reasonable arguments to be made for affirmative action, for instance, shifting from race-based preferences to income-based preferences or instituting college-readiness programs in high schools with high black and brown enrollments. And this is not to say that the slide down the Tier-ladder isn’t in some ways damaging. But it would take another argument to back those positions up, not this one.
Most importantly, the debate will not advance as long as proponents (and assailants) operate on false premises and extreme illustrations.
