Diversity Nonsense
The year is young, but we're already knee-deep in silliness.

Mr. Clegg is general counsel at the Center for Equal Opportunity.
January 21, 2002 9:10 a.m.

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.