If ever there was a topic which screams "political correctness," affirmative action has got to be it.
How well I remember when one of my classmates in college asked our English professor if we could set aside the discussion of Sheridan's "School for Scandal" to discuss instead a proposal to insure 12% of the college's next freshman class would be Black students. That would be 77 of the 640 members of the class.
I thought then, and I do now, that finding 77 Black students should not be a problem. Our Dean of Admissions, greeting us on the first day told us he could have filled the freshman class with "qualified applicants" from New York City alone. Typically the college got 5000 applications for those 640 slots and accepted 1,000. The 360 extras went to Harvard, Yale and Princeton. They had applied to my college as a "safety school."
Today, the argument persists that one of the best way to address the problem of systematic discrimination against Black people is to place them in elite colleges, because, you know, all you have to do is get into one of those colleges and your ticket has been punched; you will be handed a lucrative job at the best banks, corporations, or you will move on to one of the best law schools or medical schools. Once you had that name "Harvard" or really any Ivy League school next to yours, it didn't matter if your name was Keesha, or Latisha or Keyshawn, you could start looking for a mansion in any upscale neighborhood and shopping for your Mercedes.
There were a lot of underlying assumptions to that argument, among them, that simply being present in the college would assure later success, that the students selected were no better than those rejected and anyone could be placed on that campus and go on to live happily ever after. When you put it that way, advocates said, "Of course, we don't believe that. But these students of color ought to be given the chance to compete."
Choosing the best musicians for the New York City philharmonic, the candidates are placed behind a screen and the judges listen to the music they make. Nothing could be a better mechanism for choosing for merit than that. But there is no screen like that for college admission. Even if you could devise one, advocates for affirmative action would say the game is rigged: Black students haven't had the advantages of years of private lessons, getting toted from one teacher to the next by "Tiger Moms."
But if you are really interested in a meritocracy, the disadvantages endured by Black kids should not matter. All that should matter is how well they can play that violin at the time you need to choose the best violinist.
But no, the argument goes, that college admission can be the make up mechanism for all those violin lessons never received over the prior 12 years.
Well, if you want to remedy that disadvantage, the reply comes, you have to start 12 years earlier, unless you don't really care about merit so much as about giving some lucky students a break, at least for a few years.
The other outcome, not desired by anyone, is that if there is any advantage to having that Harvard name on your application, if the other name on that application is Keyshawn or Latisha, the person reading the application says, "Oh, she may be Harvard, but she's Black, so we know what Harvard means in her case."
Trying to solve the disparities in opportunity, income inequality and class by admitting Blacks to elite colleges is trying to solve a maze of complex problems with a simple one step solution: As if you had an automobile run off the road, sitting in a ditch on its top, wheels spinning, frame bent, windows blown out and you go down and put on a set of new tires.
It's the old problem of process vs results. If the Civil Rights movement is about process, equal opportunity, right to vote, right to use public accommodation, that's as it should be. But when you look to make the measure of success results, well then, you've got another problem entirely.
How well I remember when one of my classmates in college asked our English professor if we could set aside the discussion of Sheridan's "School for Scandal" to discuss instead a proposal to insure 12% of the college's next freshman class would be Black students. That would be 77 of the 640 members of the class.
I thought then, and I do now, that finding 77 Black students should not be a problem. Our Dean of Admissions, greeting us on the first day told us he could have filled the freshman class with "qualified applicants" from New York City alone. Typically the college got 5000 applications for those 640 slots and accepted 1,000. The 360 extras went to Harvard, Yale and Princeton. They had applied to my college as a "safety school."
Today, the argument persists that one of the best way to address the problem of systematic discrimination against Black people is to place them in elite colleges, because, you know, all you have to do is get into one of those colleges and your ticket has been punched; you will be handed a lucrative job at the best banks, corporations, or you will move on to one of the best law schools or medical schools. Once you had that name "Harvard" or really any Ivy League school next to yours, it didn't matter if your name was Keesha, or Latisha or Keyshawn, you could start looking for a mansion in any upscale neighborhood and shopping for your Mercedes.
There were a lot of underlying assumptions to that argument, among them, that simply being present in the college would assure later success, that the students selected were no better than those rejected and anyone could be placed on that campus and go on to live happily ever after. When you put it that way, advocates said, "Of course, we don't believe that. But these students of color ought to be given the chance to compete."
Choosing the best musicians for the New York City philharmonic, the candidates are placed behind a screen and the judges listen to the music they make. Nothing could be a better mechanism for choosing for merit than that. But there is no screen like that for college admission. Even if you could devise one, advocates for affirmative action would say the game is rigged: Black students haven't had the advantages of years of private lessons, getting toted from one teacher to the next by "Tiger Moms."
But if you are really interested in a meritocracy, the disadvantages endured by Black kids should not matter. All that should matter is how well they can play that violin at the time you need to choose the best violinist.
But no, the argument goes, that college admission can be the make up mechanism for all those violin lessons never received over the prior 12 years.
Well, if you want to remedy that disadvantage, the reply comes, you have to start 12 years earlier, unless you don't really care about merit so much as about giving some lucky students a break, at least for a few years.
The other outcome, not desired by anyone, is that if there is any advantage to having that Harvard name on your application, if the other name on that application is Keyshawn or Latisha, the person reading the application says, "Oh, she may be Harvard, but she's Black, so we know what Harvard means in her case."
Trying to solve the disparities in opportunity, income inequality and class by admitting Blacks to elite colleges is trying to solve a maze of complex problems with a simple one step solution: As if you had an automobile run off the road, sitting in a ditch on its top, wheels spinning, frame bent, windows blown out and you go down and put on a set of new tires.
It's the old problem of process vs results. If the Civil Rights movement is about process, equal opportunity, right to vote, right to use public accommodation, that's as it should be. But when you look to make the measure of success results, well then, you've got another problem entirely.
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