Academic Postmodernity & the SATs
Dark days in the academy.

By Stanley Kurtz, a fellow at the Hudson Institute
February 20, 2001 9:40 a.m.

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 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.