The recent decision by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals that Michigan’s ban on the use of racial preferences (in university admissions and government hiring) is unconstitutional has stirred up the great controversy over affirmative action anew. Is there any justification for the policy of preferring some applicants to others simply because of their ancestry or family background?
An article that appeared shortly before the court ruling by University of Michigan professor of philosophy and women’s studies Elizabeth Anderson attempts to show a new justification for affirmative action. (Her article, “Affirmative Action Is About Helping All of Us” is available to Chronicle of Higher Education subscribers here.)
She begins by saying that advocates of affirmative action have not done a good job of defending it, resorting to “the same tired arguments.” She doesn’t think that the standard “educational benefits” line is persuasive, for example.
“Why, uniquely among ‘diversity’ factors like having lived abroad or practiced an unusual religion, is racial diversity so important? … If race is a proxy for diverse ideas, why not admit students directly on the basis of their ideas? If diversity of ideas is important, why can’t course materials cover it just as well?” I have asked similar questions myself.
All right—what is Professor Anderson’s new argument in favor of affirmative action?
She starts with the claim that a fundamental mission of higher education is the training of leaders. (I don’t buy that because leadership isn’t a trait that’s taught; furthermore, colleges often instill in their graduates an arrogance that proves harmful if they end up in positions of power.)
Then she notes that most of our leaders are graduates of “elite” colleges and universities. That is largely true, although there is no reason to believe that graduates of schools like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton are any more capable of making wise decisions than are graduates of schools that aren’t perceived as “elite” or even people who haven’t graduated from college at all.
Anderson’s next argument is our leaders need to be familiar with the problems of the whole of society: “A competent elite needs to be so constituted that it is systematically responsive to the interests and problems of people in all sectors of society, to be disposed to serve those interests, and to be able to respectfully interact with people across all sectors.” We see here the central assumption of interventionism, namely that solving social problems is up to “the elite,” who can do so if it is responsive to and can respectfully interact with everyone else.
And now we come to the keystone of Anderson’s case. She thinks that “the elite” doesn’t have enough knowledge of the problems of poverty to do a good job of solving those problems.
The poor, she writes, “bring firsthand knowledge of the challenges of poverty that is vital for elites to know.” Unfortunately, those “elite” students have been isolated from the dire problems of the poor in cities like Detroit. “It is high time,” she writes, “to consider how segregation deprives the more advantaged of knowledge. They are less likely to understand the problems faced by those from whom they are segregated. They are more likely to form stigmatizing stereotypes of the latter.”
Affirmative action, she concludes, can help to remedy that gap in understanding. Minority students “bring firsthand knowledge of racial conditions that it is essential for elites to know if they are to be able to competently serve disadvantaged, racially segregated sectors of society.” Even though Anderson acknowledges that few of the minority students who are preferentially admitted to the elite colleges actually grew up in grinding poverty, they are “vastly more likely to have witnessed gunshots, muggings, and other social disorders, and to have known homeless people, prostitutes, and gang members than their white peers.”
So there you have the new and improved argument in favor of racial preferences. Supposedly, America will benefit from better, more enlightened policy decisions by the elite if future leaders go to college with some minority students, whose understanding of the problems of poverty will rub off on them.
I would very much like to see wiser public policy decisions, but Professor Anderson’s notion that “affirmative action” by elite colleges will lead to that is nothing more than wishful thinking.
Let’s begin with a crucial fact that she overlooks: For several generations, government officials and leaders of great philanthropic organizations have been devoting enormous attention to the problems of the poor.
Starting with Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society,” the federal government has created numerous programs meant to help eradicate poverty, including public housing programs, welfare programs, job training programs, urban renewal programs, educational programs, medical care programs, and much more. Despite all those efforts and prodigious outlays of money, poverty and its many associated problems has not diminished. Conditions in some cities such as Detroit have notably deteriorated since the 1960s.
Philanthropies such as the Ford Foundation have also labored mightily to improve life for the poor in America. Unfortunately, it’s hard to point to any lasting benefits from their many programs. (On this point, Martin Morse Wooster’s Great Philanthropic Mistakes is highly instructive.)
We’ve been fighting the War on Poverty but making little of any progress. Why?
Are we to believe that if only the politicians and program officers who devised all those efforts had gone to college with some (or some more) “minority” students, they would have come up with better ones?
That seems to be the hidden assumption in Professor Anderson’s case for affirmative action. Bear in mind that the decision-makers heard from all sorts of experts and community activists, some of whom had that “firsthand knowledge” of poverty. It’s hard to see how their decisions would have been improved if a few of their college classmates decades before had been black, Latino, or impoverished whites.
The second hidden assumption in Anderson’s case for affirmative action is that students drawn from minority communities have and will impart useful information about the causes of and solutions to poverty to their “elite” classmates. There isn’t any reason to believe that.
Imagine that Harvard admits a student from Detroit who has grown up in the midst of that crumbling city’s manifold problems. Even if he or she wanted to talk about what life is like in the inner city (doubtful) and the “elite” Harvard students absorbed every word, why should we think that this student has any understanding of the reasons for Detroit’s plight?
Very few people have any understanding of the reasons for the persistence of islands of poverty in our sea of prosperity. Among college students the number is probably in single digits. Poverty has been analyzed in depth by some scholars and organizations, but is it likely that our Detroit student will have read, e.g., this report by the Institute for Justice, showing the extent to which the city’s politicians have embraced policies that drive away investment and entrepreneurs?
Is it likely that our student will have read Professor Walter Williams’ book The State Against Blacks, in which he argues that the damage the government does to the poor through its many interferences with market processes?
Is it likely that our student will have read Losing Ground by Charles Murray, showing that the perverse incentives created by Great Society welfare programs arrested the economic progress that minority groups had been making since the end of World War II?
Almost certainly not. The students Anderson thinks are somehow going to enlighten our future leaders might have some idea how poverty feels, but that doesn’t mean they understand what’s wrong with our current policies and how we should change them.
Instead of her roundabout and ineffective method of “helping all of us” through preferences for students who are assumed to be closer to the problems of poverty, I suggest a more direct and effective method. Colleges should institute courses in the political economy of poverty (here is one) and encourage—perhaps as a freshman summer reading assignment—books like Thomas Sowell’s Race and Economics.
American public policy towards poverty has been driven by a mindset that “The government must do something!” Anderson’s “elites” have meant well and done much, but instead of solving poverty, they have perpetuated it.
Colleges can help to foster better understanding of poverty, but that learning won’t happen just because a few minority students are admitted to make the student body more “diverse.”