Affirmative Action, RIP

 

Sometimes, losing, like parting, is such sweet sorrow.

So it is with the case of affirmative action, which so many of us for so long have embraced as a necessary evil, but which will not be mourned for long.

Three basic arguments have been made for providing for exceptions to the rules by which meritocracy is supposed to work, namely admitting students to colleges, medical and law schools even though they did not score enough points on their own, by test scores and grades, by awarding them points for being avatars of their race, so they are admitted not because of their own personal merit, but because others of their group--a group defined by White people--have been unjustly treated in the past.

The arguments:

1. REPARATIONS:  Blacks, Negroes, African Americans, whatever you wish to call them, have been denied admission to universities and graduate schools simply because they are black, for generations, for at least 100 years, and now it's time to admit more of them simply to adjust the numbers and to make amends to this group. (Unmentioned in all this, of course, is the far more numerically important discrimination against Blacks being admitted to unions, to trades, to become firemen, policemen and other jobs which would have been numerically far more important to far more more Blacks than admissions to the 0.03% of students who get into Ivy League institutions.) But this is the case of individuals benefiting who would not have been afforded opportunity.

But the case at hand is about Affirmative Action in universities and it's about the small number of students awarded coveted places, "the glittering prize" of admission at the elite institutions of Harvard and University of North Carolina. 

2. SCHOOLS BENEFIT:  The schools themselves benefit from the presence of Black students because they provide a diversity of opinion, perception, experience. This is a harder argument for schools of engineering and medicine, of course, where the science is not much affected by life experience.

3. SOCIETY BENEFITS FROM DIVERSITY:  because schools should look more like the larger society and Black medical students will go practice in Black ghettos and Black lawyers will go help Black communities. This is the test of "a compelling governmental interest."  Under the idea of "strict scrutiny" any exception to equal protection must prove there is a compelling interest and also that the scheme devised to achieve this is "necessary" i.e., there is no other way of achieving this result.

Whenever possible, all citizens should read the actual opinions as written by the justices. When you do that, the opinions become far less jarring, and, in fact in this case, one might argue, the opinion becomes persuasive. 

Reading the opinion by Chief Justice Roberts, one cannot avoid seeing his profound sympathy efforts to end racism in American society. 

1. He begins by excoriating the Supreme Court for aiding and abetting institutionalized racism by embracing "separate but equal" in Plessy v Ferguson."The inherent folly of that approach--of trying to derive equality from inequality--soon became apparent...By 1950, the inevitable truth of the Fourteenth Amendment had thus begun to reemerge: Separate cannot be equal." 

As Roberts outlines the past, as it led to efforts at Affirmative Action, his sympathy for the goal of thwarting racism could not be clearer.

Of course, one of the signal victories for ending racial segregation, in the case in schools, was Brown v Board of Education, but within that decision was contained a real problem for Affirmative Action.

Brown v Board of Education posed a problem for Affirmative Action because it said you cannot use race to justify unequal treatment before the law, as the 14th amendment insisted.

If you could not use race to thwart the aspirations of any race, how could you then turn around and use race to advance the prospects of the members of a race, now favored, while diminishing prospects for members of other groups?

He outlines a series of decisions about busing, the use of public beaches, and even laws forbidding interracial marriage (Loving) which demanded that businesses and institutions serving the public be color blind. "Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it," Roberts concludes. "The guarantee of equal protection cannot mean one thing when applied to one individual and something else when applied to a person of another color." (Bakke)

2. He observes that devising programs which are designed to specifically redress grievances of Black Americans has meant and will mean that other groups, like Asians, will not benefit, and, in fact, will be injured because the spaces they might have had are given instead to Blacks. 

Who are judges to judge which groups should be favored? As he notes, "By grouping together all Asian students, for instance, respondents are apparently uninterested in whether South Asian or East Asian students are adequately represented, so long as there is enough of one to compensate for a lack of the other." 

And he raises other concerns which never occurred to me: "How are applicants from Middle Eastern countries classified?...Indeed, the use of these opaque racial categories undermines, instead of promotes, respondents goals. By focusing on underrepresentation, respondents would apparently prefer a class with 15% students from Mexico over a class with 10% students from several Latin American countries."

He observes wryly, "Universities may define their mission as they see fit. The Constitution defines ours...As this Court has repeatedly reaffirmed, 'racial classifications are simply too pernicious to permit any but the most exact connection between justification and classification.'"

 3. "Our acceptance of race-based state action has been rare for a reason," Roberts observes. "That principle cannot be overriden except in the most extraordinary case."

4. In his Bakke decision, Justice Powell said that trying to right past wrongs meant favoring members of one racial group over another because of their race. The idea this would right past wrongs was "an amorphous concept of injury that may be ageless in its reach into the past." Which is to say, favoring Shamika today does not help her mother or grandmother who were denied college admission. 

And he shrewdly noted increasing Black medical students had never been shown to increase Black doctors in Black communities--Black doctors go where the money is, and that is not ghettos. 

And the idea that Black students added a benefit to a technical school because of their life experience was hard to argue. Your life experience does not help you build a better bridge, calculate the trajectory of a rocket or remove an appendix.

Later Supreme Court cases fretted about "illegitimate stereotyping," which is to say, how do you know a particular Black student will add anything of value to a school, just because he or she is Black?

And then there is the problem of when is enough? Will Blacks still be preferred at Harvard or in medical schools 100 years from now?

5. There is also the problem of whether AA is a classic "wrong end of the funnel" solution. Which is to say, if you want more Black doctors, you cannot begin when students have fallen behind during their 4 years in college and then simply thrust them, unprepared, into medical school, or even earlier, placing unprepared students to compete at Harvard College, where the other 0.3% of accepted students have been competing from grade school and honing their skills for years before they arrived at Harvard.

6. Roberts asserts Harvard and UNC failed "to articulate a meaningful connection between the means they employ and the goals they pursue." If the idea of Affirmative Action is to make today's Black students whole, you still haven't fixed what was lost before they matriculated. If the idea is to improve life on the campus, you have to show how having more Blacks in the engineering department or the medical school has done that. And if you want to improve medical care or legal assistance in the Black community, you have to show how having more doctors at Harvard Medical School or Harvard Law has done that.

                                     ***

Of course, the big loophole Roberts left is the college can admit a person who has personally overcome adversity, shown character and resilience by growing up in a ghetto and still getting good grades, and so the applicant, who comes from the ghetto has a better life story to sell to the Admissions committee. But then he gets in not because he is Black, but because he has overcome the disadvantages of being Black.

So, in the end, Affirmative Action may morph into "Queen for a Day," that 1950's TV show where the person who told the most tear jerking sob story won a slew of prizes from the great American cornucopia if she told the most compelling story of having risen above adversity. The final shot always showed the woman with the crown on her head, tears rolling down her face, smiling through her agony. 

Affirmative Action Miasma: Dept of Politically Incorrect

 

First, allow me to affirm my complete agreement with Dr. Martin Luther King: children from now and forever should be judged by the content of their character, not by the color of their skin.

Second, let me acknowledge that Blacks and other colored folk have been denied membership in labor unions, in apprentice programs, even the opportunity to be fighter pilots when, in fact, experience has shown (viz Tuskegee airmen) they perform every bit as well as whites when given the opportunity in these realms.

Having said all that, I have to believe two things:

1. There are some jobs where all that counts is competence: I don't care about the color of the skin (or the gender) of the pilot when I step on my airplane, nor do I care about the color of who made my HVAC, who wired my house--all I care about is they did their job well.

2. While there have been longstanding wrongs regarding making a wide range of economic opportunities available to people of all races, it is not the job of the medical profession to right these wrongs. The job of the medical profession is to provide the very best medical care to all citizens, which of course begins by choosing, as best it can, the best people to be trained to deliver that care. 

The New England Journal of Medicine published a "Perspective" piece on March 9, 2023 "Diversifying the Physician Workforce," in which Dr. Quinn Capers argued:

1. Diversity (i.e. having more physicians and scientists of color) in the physician workforce would improve the quality of care, at least for colored patients, but likely for everyone.

2. It is the responsibility of the medical profession, namely the admission committees at medical schools, the faculty at residency training programs to be sure much larger proportions of Black and colored candidates are placed into medical schools and internships and residencies, and that failing in this effort, deans, chairmen of departments should be fired if they do not achieve demonstrable goals.

3. The idea of a "meritocracy" should include the idea that being Black is, in and of itself, a form of "merit," where admission to medical schools are concerned. 

"Any selection committee hires or admits candidates on the basis of 'merit,' which should be defined in keeping with the stated mission. For medical schools seeking students who want to serve underserved populations, for example, applicants can be stratified according to their relative past activities and potential for continuing such service in the future."

What he is referring to here is the problem of getting physicians to open up practices in poor, often inner city areas where medical care is scarce, and the idea that Black men and women are more likely to do that. Of course, what he is struggling with here is there is no evidence this actually happens: Black medical students, who have debt, or who simply have worked hard to rise above modest economic origins, have no intention of simply returning to the ghetto's once they have their MD degrees.

Then there is the sticky wicket of what is "merit." 

Dr. Capers says, "Despite compelling evidence that workforce diversity in medicine adds value to decision making, scientific inquiry and care." 

But of course, there are no convincing studies any of this is true.  It would be lovely to think that simply adding Black doctors to the workforce would mean well trained Black doctors returning the the land of their forebears and practicing high quality medicine or going out into the nation at large, in all levels of affluence and poverty, and "making a difference." There is no actual unbiased evidence this happens. 

Capers does address, head on, the old "Bell Curve" argument that Blacks simply test worse on standardized tests, which he says predicts only the likelihood of high scoring students to test well on future standardized tests. This is the old problem of cultural bias of many of the MCAT (Medical College Aptitude Test), and all the series of tests given medical students throughout their years of training.  I would be the last to argue or standardized "board exams" or any of the exams I was subjected to are meaningful or well conceived, but that doesn't mean I agree that if Blacks were judged on the basis if "clinical excellence, collegiality, leadership skills [whatever that might mean in medicine] and problem solving skills, academic curiosity,"  this would result in more Blacks being selected for medical school, residency or fellowship programs.

Another quality Dr. Capers thinks should be weighed in choosing future doctors is "diversity competency" by which he means "potential for advocating for health equity in the field."

So now we have a sort of political test for doctors, which sounds vaguely familiar, as Soviet doctors who did not advocate for "the workers" or who were deemed insufficiently enthusiastic for advocating for the rights of the proletariat were relieved of their jobs and sent to Siberia.

The official bureaucracy Dr. Capers advocates, when brought down to the specifics sounds increasingly like something out of "Darkness at Noon:"

"Best practices for successful bias-mitigations trainings, advising that session be voluntary and recurrent, provide actionable tasks for participants, be framed with positive messaging ('it is human to be biased but we can overcome biases to treat everyone fairly' rather than 'you are racist') and be situated within an institutional framework for mitigating bias and enhancing diversity and inclusion. For medical school admission committees, these training could occur annually; faculty-selection committees could undergo training before nominating and rating candidates," says Dr. Capers.

Presumably, the short summary of this is: You better admit a lot more Black folks here or you're out!

So, the New England Journal of Medicine has lined up to advocate this brand of righteousness, and one can only imagine why.

But this is exactly the sort of advocacy which hands Tucker Carlson and Ron DeSantis their most cherished weapons:  Look, now they are trying to put pilots into the cockpit who will crash your plane; they are trying to put surgeons into operating rooms because they are Black, not because they are good; they want your family doctor to be Black to fill some government quota!

Oh, you can imagine it all, and none of it is good.

One past chairman, who is White, of a department at Duke University Medical School, tells a story which illuminates the complexities, subtleties and difficulties of figuring out what "the Right Stuff" is in doctors and being able to identify it. He operated on his own private, unscientific theory of learning and character, but it strikes me, for all the amateur nature of his approach, it seemed to work.

One year he chose a candidate for his program who had been a tight end on an SEC football team. He was a big Black man, who was overlooked by other residency programs, perhaps because he had gone to a state medical school or perhaps because he was simply physically intimidating, or perhaps because he was Black. His standardized tests scores were not stellar. There were 90 applicants who scored better. But the chairman gave this guy one of the spots for which 100 other candidates from Harvard, Stanford, Hopkins and other elite medical schools had competed. The Chairman "took a chance." 

He did this in part because he had a vague sense of dissatisfaction with the products of top medical schools he had selected previous years: these were men and women who had never had less than an A since elementary school, who had aced all their standardized exams, who had been at the top of their medical school classes.  But, the chairman had noted, they were fragile when it came to being corrected. 

"They'd never got anything wrong in their whole lives. Never dealt with failure, and they'd just fall apart when you'd point out if they had missed something."

Not the doc in this story, different guy

"But this guy, this former football player, was used to being coached, to getting something wrong, getting corrected and the next time, he did not make that mistake again. So he starts off, first year maybe in the bottom third of his class here in the program. But I sit with him and show him stuff he's missed on this chest film, and he says, 'Oh, right! Yeah.' And he never misses that again. And by the second year, he's in the top 25% of his class and by the end of his third year, I'd say he was the best resident in our program by a country mile. He was just so 'coachable.' He'd made all the mistakes you can make, and you corrected them and he did not make them again, and, in fact, he got creative about seeing mistakes coming down the road and so you didn't even have to coach him about that. He was, more than once, mistaken by faculty members as a janitor, sitting there a big Black guy in scrubs, but he never took it personally. He'd sometimes just get up and empty a trash can, and shrug it off and go back to work. I'd take a dozen more like him, if I could find them."

Now THAT is affirmative action.

Affirmative Action: What's It Good For?

 When it comes to Affirmative Action (AA), we tend to see the proposition from the point of view of our own individual experiences or from an eagle's eye view of large numbers and statistics.

August Macke 

Currently, I am working my way through Melvin Urofsky's book, "The Affirmative Action Puzzle," and it has changed my mind in some important ways, but the biggest controversy is over applying AA practices to schools and there I'm not quite moved.

When labor unions excluded Blacks from being firemen or plumbers or electricians, the harm that did Black men and their families could be measured in dollars and cents.

When the Dixiecrats made sure Negroes did not get VA loans and so could not buy houses after World War Two, the effect on family wealth was measurable.

But if a Black kid cannot go to the University of California at Berkeley,  or Harvard or Brown, or Princeton what has been lost is less clear. The Ivy League colleges have guarded follow up data on their graduates tightly for generations. What you would want to know is how much the 4 years at college changed the financial fates of the students who graduate.  After the Second World War, when so many veterans went to college, often the first in their families to go to college, a whole new middle and upper class was established as a college degree became a passport to upper level management jobs. It's not at all clear that going to Princeton does that any more--children of rich parents who send their kids to Princeton tend to become rich and upper class but is that because their families made sure of that or because they were transformed into leaders at Princeton? 

What we assume is that going to a highly selective college is getting your ticket punched and you are launched into the upper classes. Not at all clear this is true.

The concept of admitting people to schools (or jobs) BECAUSE they are members of a particular group, race or ethnicity collides with the notion that, in America, you should advance yourself because of your own personal qualities, your individual drive and willingness to work hard, not because you are White or the son of a rich man. We aspire toward a "meritocracy." 

As Michael Sandel has noted, that idea of meritocracy is not as benign as we thought.  For one thing, the whole idea of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps means if you find yourself poor, working in a dead end job  then it's your own fault because in a meritocracy all you have to do to succeed is work hard. So, if you're poor, you deserve to be poor and miserable.

In my own family academic achievement was the top priority. My parents didn't care if their sons were good athletes or if we could sing or dance or make money; what they cared about was our grades and our test scores.

So, it came as something of a shock, when, in my freshman year at college--an Ivy League college, no less--a student asked the professor of English if we could interrupt our scheduled discussion of the play we had read to discuss the important issue of whether our college should commit to admitting to the next freshman class 12% Black students--as that was the percentage of Blacks in the national population.

This struck me as ludicrous: If Blacks wanted to go to our college, let them apply and compete as we all did, playing by the same stupid rules we had to play by, study for the SAT exams, grind away coloring maps and taking quizzes and exams to earn our "A's" and get in the same way we all did.

Making the goal achieving some outcome, like 12% Blacks in our classes seemed absurd. If 100% of the class turned out to be Asian, I said, that was fine with me, as long as we all played by the same rules.  I noted that nearly 100% of our basketball team was Black, and nobody suggested we have 88% white players on that team to reflect the general population.

The goal should not be 12% Blacks in our classes but the goal should be that every body who got in had the same chance when they applied.

Of course, what I did not appreciate was how thoroughly the Black kids had been disadvantaged and for how long in the training for the races and contests which would "qualify" them for admission to our college.

The other thing which nagged at the back of my brain was the rules, the criteria, the colleges used to judge who was talented and desirable and who was not.

As a junior in college I tried to be exempted from taking a calculus course required for my major (Biology) and I had to see a dean who also happened to be the Dean of Admissions. During our discussion, he reached into a file cabinet and retrieved my admission folder, scanned through it and he expostulated: "How did you ever get in here?"

I wanted to be exempted from that course, so I did not say: "Well, I've been in the top 10% of my class since first semester freshman year, so maybe you're not much of a judge of talent."

The fact is, since the California system eliminated AA, the campuses have seen only minor changes at the state schools, Chico State, Fresno State, which are more like community colleges where kids live nearby and often commute, but the number of Blacks at Berkeley fell by half and Hispanic students fell by about 25%. Asians have increased slightly but not overwhelmingly. 

The loss of places at universities is only important if what happens at those universities really makes a difference in the lives of students.

For me, at least, college was broadening, maybe transformative in some ways, but looking at most of my classmates, I doubt this was true. Apart from the engineers and the pre meds, most of the students I could see who majored in the humanities or arts did not change much or get enough out of college to say that denying them that experience would have hurt them much.