Why I Hate Affirmative Action
An all-too-familiar higher-ed tale.

By Mary Eberstadt
Mary Eberstadt’s essays have appeared in various journals and magazines including Policy Review, where she is consulting editor.
March 5, 2001 12:30 p.m.

tanley Kurtz's scathing account of how affirmative action corrupts elite institutions ("Crimson Truths") stands head and shoulders above the usual tired commentary. Citing his own experience, Kurtz zeroes in on a little-discussed but morally crucial element of these programs — namely, how they can backfire on their intended recipients. This is a subject with which I too feel vividly acquainted, even 20 years after being forced to witness the human face of just such "social experimentation."

In the early 1980s, I was an undergraduate at an Ivy League school, living with some 30 other students in a privately endowed scholarship house. To say that this community was "selective" or "elitist" is to understate. Its admissions process was then more competitive than that of any U.S. college or university. Most residents, for example, had only received applications by having scored in the top 0.5 percent of the PSAT. It was the sort of place where a single house team won the national "It's Academic" championship two years running, and where in any given year its graduating class of eight or twelve accounted for a disproportionate share of the university's Mellons and Fullbrights and Marshalls and summas and so forth. Even by the standards of an already demanding university, this house was ground zero for pressure and performance.

But one thing this institution did not have, as it happened — to the recurring frustration of its higher-minded inhabitants — was many black students. This is not to say it had no such students at all. Two years before the story that follows, for example, one young man of African-American heritage, admitted under the usual standards and requirements, had lived there for a year. Though he could have stayed longer and did not — he ended up preferring an apartment of his own to the demands of group life, and was well-off enough to dispense with the scholarship — he was a successful and well-liked member of the community. (Some years ago, incidentally, he was listed in Jet magazine as "one of the fifty richest black entrepreneurs in the United States.")

But that particular scholarship winner, as the saying went (un-self-consciously in those days), wasn't "really" what the moral purists of the community meant by "black." He "talked," "thought," and so on, too much like "us." If this forward-looking institution were truly to prove its dedication to affirmative action, or so the word went down, it would have to find "black" candidates who were not like this one — that is, not performing at the same level as the rest of "us" — but rather, as unlike the house majority as possible.

Thus began a series of experiments by this elite institution in the name of what is now called "affirmative action," meaning the self-conscious practice of holding black test scores to a lower standard than others. As it happened, the first such human experiment came in the form of a freshman to whom I was assigned as a roommate — a black Southern young lady we'll call Amanda (not her real name).

Amanda was from a white-collar middle-class family, herself an aspiring doctor. She was a sweet, serious, wholesome, and religious, enamored of the sorts of things that doted-upon freshman daughters of striving parents are enamored of in other such homes and colleges — cosmetics and beauty routines, letters from friends, the school football team, and stuffed animals. She was also showered regularly with treats and visits and phone calls by her devoted, and obviously very proud, family.

But Amanda also — and she alone that particular year — had been admitted, indeed wooed, by this scholarship house despite the fact that her standardized test scores were significantly lower than those of anyone else there. Though she was an obviously bright student with good grades from her high school, she had nowhere near the intellectual or scholastic range of the other house residents. She could not follow — more to the point, had no interest in following — much of what was said and done by the other individuals there. Even ordinary banter, or what passed for it in such a circle, typically presupposed a great deal that she hadn't ever heard of or read.

As anyone outside a university will have guessed by now — and as practically no one around her did — it did not take long for this mismatch of person and place to prove disastrous. Day by day, Amanda became more intimidated and withdrawn. At first she simply didn't say much, either at breakfast or lunch or parties or bull sessions; then little by little she stopped appearing at them. One incident seemed especially emblematic. A visiting German student entered our room, saw a bear on the wall on Amanda's side of the room (an athletic symbol), and mistakenly began interrogating her about whether she was a Marxist or Leninist. Since neither term made any sense to her, and since he stupidly continued to question her because he assumed otherwise, she first became embarrassed, then grew visibly upset.

How many other such "culture shocks" she endured in that place, I can only guess; but as time went on, her solution to feeling disadvantaged in this way became increasingly consistent. She avoided the rest of us constantly, even to the point of keeping hours so odd that as to minimize any such contact.

And she next started skipping out on requirements of the scholarship itself — house meetings, public-speaking events, committee work. The house's student advisory body solicited her; promises were made of improvement; patience was asked of all. Yet no entreaties changed Amanda's behavior; instead they only formalized the impotence on all sides. She became, in this sense, a postmodern character — one present most powerfully by her absence. Eventually, she was hardly there at all.

What was the institution to do? A passionate controversy ensued. On one side, a minority argued that her scholarship should be rescinded and given to someone else because she was failing to meet its most minimal requirements; on the other, an even more emotional majority responded that, in effect, you can't do that because she's black.

Whatever else may have come of it in the short run, representing the minority faction had the effect of setting my own political compass permanently. In one public meeting, a member of the student advisory committee called me a "racist" — this, for having argued that we should give the same scholarship to some theoretical other person who would actually benefit from it. (My accuser was actually crying as he explained how terrible he felt about being "white.")

But the real issue, and here we circle back to Stanley Kurtz's point, wasn't really — or at least shouldn't have been — what the rest of "us," whatever our views, were enduring because of this twisted experiment. It was rather Amanda, and Amanda alone, whose life had been made a day-to-day failure by the absurd ideological expectations thrust upon her. Here was a young woman of talent and serious mien who was obviously capable of excelling in a broad swath of the country's schools — who for that matter might also have excelled at that particular university apart from the extra academic pressures of the scholarship house. Instead she was being made miserable — and later, defiant and angry — by circumstances no more appropriate to her abilities and goals than, say, spending the summer in Redskins training camp would be for most of the rest of us. Only worse: not only was Amanda's immediate happiness at risk, but of course her very future.

The story doesn't get more uplifting as it goes along. In the course of avoiding the scholarship house where she felt such a failure, Amanda was solicited and befriended by habitues of a campus socialist-separatist black organization. They in turn persuaded her that race and racism and having to live with "whites" were the root of her trouble. Rapproachment, following such counsel, was effectively moot. Perhaps most depressing of all, though this I heard only second-hand, these same friends also persuaded the former aspiring doctor to abandon the pre-med curriculum in favor of — what else? — black "studies."

In the end, the pro-affirmative action majority of the house prevailed, and Amanda's scholarship was left intact even though she spent the last six months of it in absentia. After that she went off to live at the black separatist house. Last I heard she was getting all Cs in her work.

I don't know what happened to Amanda after she left college, or to the parents for whom her admission to this school and scholarship house was once judged a high point of life. I don't know whether their optimism survived events; it's extremely doubtful that hers did. What I do know is that anyone who has attended any major American university in the last 25 years will recognize Amanda's story, because thanks to affirmative action — as Kurtz's tale reminds — such stories abound, even though we are all supposed to be too polite to mention them.