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 he
year is young, but it is not too soon to declare an early frontrunner
in the increasingly crowded field of Stupid Pseudo-Scientific Reports
in Desperate Defense of Racial and Ethnic Preferences (Subcategory:
Corporate-Academic Partnership). Earlier this month, the Business-Higher
Education Forum's Diversity Initiative Task Force issued Investing
in People: Developing All of America's Talent on Campus and in the
Workplace.
In a remarkably
clumsy and silly attempt to tie the report in with the war on terrorism,
task-force member Roberts T. Jones — president and CEO of the
National Alliance of Business — declared, "Diversity is
another form of national security. As we fight to eradicate terrorism
and maintain safety on our shores, we must protect our economic
stability by investing in our most valuable resource, our diverse
citizenry." But it is unnecessary to consider this statement
in awarding Stupid Frontrunner status to the report. It can stand
proudly on its own.
The thrust
of the report is: (1) American businesses should be racially and
ethnically diverse; (2) a disproportionately high number of blacks
and Hispanics are not academically prepared to enter the workforce;
and so (3) steps must be taken to ensure that these groups are better
prepared, including especially racial and ethnic preferences in
university admissions.
The BHEF might
have written a perfectly plausible report that reasoned, instead:
(1) the American workforce should be academically well prepared;
(2) too many young people are entering the workforce without adequate
academic preparation; and so (3) steps must be taken to ensure that
they are better prepared, including especially improving the educational
opportunities of children whose parents are less wealthy. But such
a report would not have viewed the world through the prism of race
and would not have urged the use of racial and ethnic preferences,
and so it was not written.
Now, it is
undeniable that, the more members of racial and ethnic minority
groups America has, the less it can afford for a high proportion
of them to be relatively uneducated. This is especially true if
the jobs available require more and more, rather than less and less,
education. But it is not at all clear that the best way to address
this problem is by rewarding underperformance or by pretending that
academic disparities don't exist.
The report
insists that all children should have access to high-quality education
and recommends increased financial aid to students who need it.
Fine, but there is nothing in that proposition that requires race-consciousness.
And the reasons that so many African American children reach age
18 with poor educational skills has less to do with the amount of
money spent on public schools than on high illegitimacy rates (seven
in ten blacks are born out of wedlock, versus two in ten for non-Hispanic
whites), the insulation of public schools from competition, and
the too-widespread cultural belief that studying hard is "acting
white."
The report
acknowledges that at many campuses blacks graduate at a much lower
rate than whites. Could this be because the black students who are
admitted are less academically qualified? This obvious possibility
is, predictably, ignored. Finances and unequal quality of elementary
and secondary education are raised as possibilities, but the real
stress is placed on "find[ing] ways to improve the campus climate
and mak[ing] positive efforts to ensure that all students feel a
sense of belonging." This can be done, the report suggests,
by sensitivity training, offering more courses about "American
subgroups," increasing the number of minority faculty and administrators,
and "[t]he development of a 'safe harbor' on campus, where
groups can meet and interact and share their cultural experiences
with students from other groups."
Sorry, but
such tripe will be seen as the condescending nonsense it is.
There is, in
addition, the problem with defining which groups we will single
out for preferential treatment. The report talks about "minorities,"
but of course it has to concede early on that it isn't really talking
about, for instance, Asians. It also has to concede that the numbers
for African Americans and Latinos often don't match up; and sometimes
it talks about Native Americans and sometimes it doesn't. A rigorous
study would also have to distinguish among various subgroups of
Latinos (Cubans versus Puerto Ricans, for instance), and among African
Americans as well. And even subgroups are not monolithic, so that
there is, for instance, no reason to give preferential treatment
to middle-class or wealthy African Americans (even though they are
the typical beneficiaries of such preferences).
A central argument in the report is that students need to attend
campuses that look like the workplace, because otherwise they won't
learn how to work with people from other racial and ethnic groups.
The immediate problem with this argument is that it is empirically
shaky whether there are any educational benefits to diversity in
the first place. The report relies heavily on a study prepared by
University of Michigan psychology professor Patricia Y. Gurin. It
does not mention the devastating critiques of the Gurin study published
by Thomas Wood and Malcolm Sherman of the National Academy of Scholars
(Is
Campus Racial Diversity Correlated with Educational Benefits?)
or by Robert Lerner and Althea Nagai (A
Critique of the Expert Report of Patricia Gurin in Gratz v.
Bollinger).
But the problems
with the argument go deeper than this. It rests on a whole series
of very dubious premises: (1) that black people tend to be quite
different from white people, and that therefore the way one works
with a black person is very different from the way one works with
a white person; (2) that these differences cannot be learned on
the job quickly; (3) that they also cannot be learned directly,
but are instead learned best by going to a campus that happens to
have a particular racial and ethnic mix, where they will magically
seep into the student's mind, as by a sort of osmosis; and (4) that
it is so important to learn these differences that it justifies
deliberate racial and ethnic discrimination in order to ensure this
racial and ethnic mix on campus. If any of these premises are false,
then the argument collapses; in fact, they all are.
Even more improbably,
the study suggests that such discrimination can be justified because
it produces "better critical thinkers" and people with
superior "problem-solving skills" and more "openness
to new ideas." Such talents are significantly less likely to
exist, we are supposed to believe, among blacks who have not spent
enough time with whites on campus, and vice versa. Pity the poor
ancient Greeks. What a struggle they must have had to become critical
thinkers, to hone their problem-solving skills, to be open to new
ideas, when they could talk only with other ancient Greeks (I suspect
women were underrepresented at the Lyceum, to boot).
Here is more
Stupid Stuff:
 The
report asserts that diversity is also essential for businesses "to
adapt their services and products, as well as their marketing strategies,
to appeal to customers from a wide range of cultural backgrounds."
This is why, for instance, Jews have always done so poorly in the
retail trades, where most of their customers are non-Jewish. And
it is obvious that, in order to understand how to market to foreigners,
companies must hire more African Americans, the quintessential Americans.
Would the BHEF allow companies that do little business in, say,
Asia to limit the number of Asians they hire?
The
report argues that the "proliferation of workplace diversity
programs attest[s] that many American business leaders believe that
in their world, racial and ethnic diversity brings value to their
enterprises." More likely, it makes them less likely to be
hounded by the federal government, sued by greedy plaintiffs' lawyers,
and mau-mau'ed by Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton. This, incidentally,
also explains why businesses sign on to reports like this one. They
don't really believe them — no intelligent person could —
but they are useful public-relations insurance.
The
report says that education preferences will make their beneficiaries
richer, and this will help the economy. But in the United States
those who do not get into one college will still be able to go to
college somewhere else, and
recent data suggest that the correlation between going to a
selective school and earning a lot of money is weak or nonexistent.
Even if this link did exist, the GNP is not increased by robbing
Peter to pay Pablo.
Another
doozy: "There is some evidence suggesting that companies that
invest in diversity are rewarded by their investors," because
when they received awards from the Department of Labor for exemplary
affirmative action programs, their stock prices went up, and when
they agreed to settle discrimination cases, their stock prices went
down. You see, investors know that diversity is good business, so
they reward it when they see it and punish companies that don't
have it. But isn't the more plausible explanation — assuming
there is anything more than coincidence at work here — that
investors get skittish when they learn a company has run afoul of
the law and has to pay out millions of dollars, and are comforted
when they learn that a company is in the good graces of the feds?
Ed Blum of
the American Civil Rights Institute created a diversity fund out
of the companies that signed an amicus brief supporting the University
of Michigan's race-based admissions policy, and found that the group
was badly underperforming all the major stock-market benchmarks.
And, he and I pointed out in an article for Investor's Business
Daily, that's no surprise. Economics Nobel Laureate Gary Becker
pointed out years ago in his seminal 1957 book The Economics
of Discrimination that those who indulge a "taste for discrimination"
and refuse to hire and promote on the basis of merit will have to
pay for it.
The report
presents survey data that purports to show how pro-diversity America
is. But there is all the difference in the world between a general
agreement with the proposition that "diversity is nice"
and the proposition that, in order to achieve it, it is okay to
favor some and disfavor others on the basis of skin color and ancestry.
In fact, such preferences are decidedly unpopular, among individuals
of all races. A
recent survey — conducted by the Washington Post, Henry
J. Kaiser Family Foundation, and Harvard University, no less —
found that 84 percent of Asians, 88 percent of Hispanics, 86 percent
of African Americans, and 94 percent of whites thought college admission
"Should be based strictly on merit and qualifications other
than race/ethnicity," explicitly rejecting the answer "Race
or ethnicity should be a factor."
Finally, the
report urges schools to stand fast and "intensify efforts"
on behalf of "results-oriented approaches to enrolling greater
numbers of minority students in higher education," "despite
the uncertainty resulting from recent court rulings and referenda."
Schools are thus urged to try to find "creative ways"
around such legal niceties as a prohibition on racial and ethnic
discrimination.
But such laws
reflect what the report elsewhere, and hypocritically, declares
as a "basic, compelling" principle: that "America
needs and promises equality of opportunity." Likewise, William
E. Kirwan, president of Ohio State University and co-chair of the
BHEF Diversity Initiative, announced: "This report helps move
us closer to equality for all American citizens, regardless of their
race, creed, or color." The truth is exactly the opposite.
The report is an attempt to ensure that Americans are sorted according
to skin color and where their ancestors came from, and treated differently
depending on which category they fall in.
By all means,
improve the education that our children get. But the targeting should
be based on substandard schools, not the color of the children attending
them. There's nothing wrong with racial diversity, but it has little
intrinsic value, and it is certainly not worth the sacrifice of
excellence or abandoning the principle of fair treatment.
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