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 he deeper cultural
costs of affirmative action are rarely recognized or debated. Liberals
frame the issue as a choice
between bloodless legal principle and the actual social harm of
racial and sexual inequality. Thoughtful conservatives point to
the toll affirmative action takes on its supposed beneficiaries,
who must always doubt their dessert. But do we really understand
how profoundly affirmative action has already undermined America's
respect for excellence, or our faith in the framework of democracy?
The fateful decision by the president of the University of California
to press for the elimination of the SAT as a requirement for admissions
compels us to face the frightening truth about affirmative action.
When "right thinking" liberals first introduced affirmative action
to our universities, they knew very well that it violated fundamental
principles of individual rights and academic excellence. No one
at the time imagined that these cherished principles — or the
institutions that depend upon them — could truly be threatened.
It was simply thought that, for the sake of racial progress, a small
and temporary exception to the ordinary rules and standards could
be made. Oh what a tangled web they did weave when first they practiced
to deceive…themselves. For at every turn, this small, supposedly
temporary and exceptional program forced deeper and deeper changes
in the fabric of university life.
No one wants to think of themselves as a temporary exception to
proper academic standards. So the beneficiaries of liberal condescension
quickly became the carriers of a new ideology. The rise of academic
postmodernism, with its assumption that classic democratic principles
are just a cover for white, male, heterosexist, first-world power,
is directly attributable to affirmative action. The only way to
preserve self-respect as an exception to standards of academic excellence
and democratic principle was to mount an attack on those very principles
and standards. So affirmative action didn't simply admit a few
disadvantaged people to the academy. It effectively devastated
nearly every discipline in the humanities and social sciences by
replacing the old pursuit of knowledge with the new vogue for political-cultural
"subversion." And through innovations like our ever more vague
and sweeping sexual harassment laws, and the increasingly common
belief (especially among judges) that the courts are entitled to
turn aside established constitutional principle for the sake of
social engineering, these undemocratic ideas have seeped out of
the academy and begun to transform society as a whole.
Only last week, Harvard's distinguished and courageous
| “The
move to dump the SAT is clearly an attempt to circumvent
the decision by the voters of California to ban the use
of affirmative action in college admissions.” |
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professor,
Harvey C. Mansfield, reached a watershed in his long and lonely
battle against grade inflation. For years, Harvey C. Mansfield
was called Harvey C- Mansfield, as he alone refused to change his
grading standards while grades at the rest of the university inexorably
rose. But grade inflation is so pervasive now that Mansfield, so
as not to punish his students, has been forced to give out two grades
— an inflated grade, for the transcript, and a true grade.
Years ago, Mansfield brought down a torrent of criticism upon himself,
simply by telling the truth — that the move toward grade inflation
had come with affirmative action. The right thinking liberals who
wanted to make just a small exception to their own cherished principles
couldn't bear — any more than those they had "helped" could
bear — to face the consequences of their own actions. They
could not hand out bad grades to students admitted under affirmative
action, and so they had to stop handing out bad grades to anybody.
The front-page New York Times story on the move to ban SAT
quoted ex-Harvard president and passionate supporter of affirmative
action, Derek Bok, to the effect that Harvard would resist a change
in its use of SAT. But don't kid yourself, Harvard's standards
have already been dramatically lowered by affirmative action —
through both admissions and grade inflation — for years.
Although the words "affirmative action" never appeared in the Times
story on the SAT, the push to abandon the test has everything to
do with that sadly misguided program. The move to dump the SAT
is clearly an attempt to circumvent the decision by the voters of
California to ban the use of affirmative action in college admissions,
as was all too evident from the coded reference to "diversity" in
the Times's story. Could we ask for more dramatic proof
that affirmative action destroys standards — that a seemingly
harmless exception to ordinary academic requirements ultimately
undermines the very foundations of our belief in excellence itself?
Unhappy with the results of the test, the test itself is now summarily
dropped.
These are dark days in the academy. The sixties radicals who entered
our colleges and universities with the avowed goal of "subverting"
them are now at the apogee of their influence. Whether the Bush
administration or the country as a whole has the courage or capacity
to reign them in is an open question. We simply don't know the
extent to which the sixties generation is the leading edge of a
permanent cultural change, or the high water mark of a destructive
but passing trend. But this much is certain, the misguided attempt
to bring about equality, without going through the hard work of
actually improving early educational performance, can only destroy
the legacy of liberty and excellence upon which our country depends.
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