Barone on Affirmative ActionMaimon Schwarzschild

Michael Barone writes about the Report by the US Commission on Civil Rights on affirmative action in law schools.  But Barone is generous - too generous, I think - to the legions of academic administrators fervently devoted to "diversity" and racial preferences.

With affirmative action, says Barone,

Harvard and Yale have in effect skimmed off a lot of [minority] applicants with LSAT scores that would be at the median of less selective law schools. And so forth down the line. So every law school ends up with a cohort of black students with LSAT scores significantly lower on average than its nonblack students. Predictably, students with lower LSAT scores tend to drop out, flunk out, or, even if they graduate, pass the bar examination at a lower rate than students with higher LSAT scores. In the end... you have fewer black lawyers than you would have had if you had not employed racial preferences. So racial preferences end up hurting the very people they were intended to help. Talk about the law of unintended consequences!

Law school administrators, like university administrators generally, nonetheless cling desperately to racial preferences. So does the American Bar Association, which is trying to impose "affirmative action" policies on law schools as a condition of accreditation, a move that seems to have prompted the Civil Rights Commission report. The report gives ammunition to those of us who have criticized these administrators for preening self-righteousness. They want to pat themselves on the back for admitting large percentages of blacks but at the same time seem to have no interest at all in the percentage who actually graduate or pass the bar exam. They can't bear the thought that their institutions will have a lower percentage of blacks than some other institutions they regard as morally inferior (e.g., the United States military and big-city police forces).

But Barone cites Walter Dellinger, a Duke law professor who grew up in segregated North Carolina and who - honourably - supports affirmative action.  Says Barone:

[Dellinger's] passionate belief in Brown and long-standing opposition to the system of legally imposed racial segregation in which he grew up leads him to take the other side. I think it's the wrong position, but I can't say that his motive is unworthy. And perhaps it helps to explain why at least some university administrators are so passionately committed to racial preferences, even though they do the harm that the Civil Rights Commission report documents.

Read the whole thing.

I think Barone is correct to honour Dellinger, a thoughtful, intelligent, and altogether impressive man.  But the dogma of racial preferences among academic administrators is usually, if not almost always, a very different story.  Few, I think, are in the academic preference industry out of deep consideration, or any sort of serious reflection.  It's more a question of group-think, careerism, and easy feelings of moral superiority: all the easier because the costs are paid by other people - black and white - people who have to strive, people who aren't really in the same class as the complacent academics.  Barone mostly had it right the first time about the affirmative action Establishment: "preening self-righteousness" captures it nicely.

Comments

[Bob Hawkins]

If a law school's admission criteria are correct, then deviating from them is by definition suboptimal. To claim that the deviation does not hurt the students affected by it, is to claim either that your criteria are stupid, or that they are not intended for the benefit of the students affected.

As far as I can tell, law (and other) schools that use affirmative action in admissions claim the latter.

[km]

There is a big difference between opposing segregation of schools (and I, as arch a conservative as I know, who traffics with many onthers of my ilk, know no one who supports the concept of segregation), and promoting the admission of unqualified minority students - to their detriment - to schools in order for someone to "feel good" about "doing something" about the problem of race in the US (even when that something is harmful).