And they have good reason to be upset.
And they have good reason to be upset.
W e can find some of the reasons for last week’s conservative victories in the Virginia governor’s race and in school-board elections across the country in the recent uprisings over “woke” education policies. Such policies range from mask mandates in schools, to the lowering of admission standards at Thomas Jefferson High School (a top-ranked magnet school in Virginia), to the use of curricula infused with critical race theory to indoctrinate students and teachers across the country.
What is called “affirmative action” by its supporters in the education establishment and “racial quotas” by its opponents also plays a role in this broader voter revolt. That was seen most clearly last year when 57 percent of California’s liberal electorate rejected Proposition 16, an attempt to repeal the state’s constitutional prohibition against preferential treatment based on race.
A post-election survey of California voters run by the Institute of Governmental Studies at Berkeley found that while there is widespread support for diversity and outreach to minority groups among the general public, there is also broad skepticism about allowing government officials to use race, ethnicity, or gender in making decisions.
That skepticism extended into all racial groups. Among Latinos, only 30 percent said that Proposition 16 was a good idea, compared with 41 percent who called it a bad idea. Among Asian respondents, 35 percent called the proposition a good idea while 46 percent said it was a bad idea. Whites were only slightly more opposed, with 32 percent thinking Prop 16 was a good idea, and 53 percent a bad idea.
Proposition 16 was backed by a majority of African Americans. But only 56 percent of them called it a good idea, 19 percent said it was a bad idea, and a surprisingly high 25 percent weren’t sure.
With so many members of minority groups and liberals questioning the wisdom of “woke” education policy, a wholesale revaluation of programs such as affirmative action in education is long overdue.
Encounter Books has just published a new anthology that lays out the false promise and dangerous outcomes of affirmative action in universities: A Dubious Expediency: How Race Preferences Damage Higher Education, edited by law professors Gail Heriot and Maimon Schwarzschild.
The two have assembled an impressive list of authors. John Ellis was dean of the Graduate Division of the University of California-Santa Cruz when he helped start its affirmative-action program. He mournfully totals up the costs of the Frankenstein monster this kind of affirmative action has created:
It has spawned mischievous new pseudo-disciplines that are in reality little more than collections of political activists who undermine the academic integrity of their institutions; it has damaged the campus climate for free expression. It has led to rampant grade inflation that is in large part a response to the problem of students mismatched with academic environments for which they are not prepared and in which they cannot compete; it has damaged the prospects and the morale of countless numbers of those mismatched students. It has been the largest factor among pressures to dumb down college curricula. . . . And, paradoxically, it has severely damaged the chance for its intended beneficiaries to enjoy the excellent education through which previous groups of “have-nots” (e.g., Italian Americans, Jews, Irish Americans) have been able to climb the social ladder to achieve full equality of opportunity.
Education scholars Lance Izumi and Rowena Itchon detail just how much the affirmative-action game hurts Asian Americans. Article VI of the Civil Rights Act prohibits educational institutions that receive federal aid from discriminating based on race. There is now clear evidence that racial preferences also can hurt a minority group; namely, Asian Americans. That’s why 64 Asian-American special-interest groups filed suit in federal court in 2015, complaining that Harvard and other elite universities employ veiled racial quotas as part of their admission process.
Heather Mac Donald, a Manhattan Institute scholar known for her searing prose, shows how much race-conscious policies have devalued the STEM (sciences, technology, engineering, and math) disciplines that are so important to America’s future economic progress. She documents how universities as well as grant-making bodes like the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation are lowering standards in the hard sciences to accommodate identity politics. In her 2018 book The Diversity Delusion, she writes:
We are to believe that scientific progress will stall unless we pay close attention to identity and try to engineer proportional representation in schools and laboratories. The truth is exactly the opposite: lowering standards and diverting scientists’ energy into combating phantom sexism and racism is reckless in a highly competitive, ruthless, and unforgiving global marketplace. Driven by unapologetic meritocracy, China is catching up fast to the United States in science and technology. Identity politics in American science is a political self-indulgence that we cannot afford.
Naturally, left-wing supporters of identity politics have a response. The cleverest and at the same time the most infuriating is to attack the very idea of a society built on merit. Daniel Markovits, a Yale Law School professor, uses his recent book The Meritocracy Trap to argue that meritocracy itself is the problem.
Vox described Markovits’s findings on “how meritocracy imprisons us all”:
It produces radical inequality, stifles social mobility, and makes everyone — including the apparent winners — miserable. These are not symptoms of systemic malfunction; they are the products of a system that is working exactly as it is supposed to.
Attempts to destroy the idea of meritocracy — a concept that is front and center in everyone’s concept of how the American dream can better people’s lives and ensure progress — are part of an intellectual toxic-waste dump that could undermine the very ideals that are the essence of America. That’s why it’s important to read books like the one by Gail Heriot and Maimon Schwarzschild. Through them and others, we can make sense of both the threat of woke educational theory and the voter revolt against it that is animating our politics.