Arguments that American colleges and universities must continue to practice “affirmative action” (more accurately, racial preferences for students from certain groups) are becoming more strident now that the Supreme Court has agreed to review two cases challenging the legality of such preferences.
Recently, Holden Thorp, formerly chancellor at UNC-Chapel Hill and now editor of Science, blasted opponents of racial preferences and contended that science “needs” affirmative action.
In today’s Martin Center article, Duke University professor John Staddon offers his thoughts on Thorp’s case. He doesn’t buy it.
If anything, Staddon writes, racial preferences work to reduce the number of minority students who make it through college and into scientific fields. That’s because they tend to put good minority students in competition with superb students at the top schools. They sometimes lag behind, earn low grades, and decide to go into less competitive majors. Mismatch is real and has adverse effects.
Staddon concludes, “Justifying affirmative action as a benefit to science is a grotesque distortion. Science does not ‘need’ it and universities are harmed by it. It is disgraceful that a pillar of the scientific establishment has chosen to defend racially biased admission policies in a dishonest way, echoing a get-along educational establishment and undermining some things essential to science: honesty in argument, openness to facts—and the ability to separate fact from good intentions.”