Lots of reactions to the threatened boycott of the African-American members of the Missouri football team have been giddy declarations that we are entering a new era of campus racial politics, in which at last students have found the proper clout to rapidly implement the quite radical changes they demand.
Among student demands are calls for a 10 percent increase in black faculty positions on campus and in other areas that seem to be based on the idea of proportional representation (e.g., a need to correct underrepresentation of African Americans on campus, commensurate with perhaps either their enrollment percentages or population numbers in the nearby community.)
Yet isn’t the football team way out of whack in terms of proportional representation and classic definitions of diversity?
Asians and Latinos are not adequately represented on the football team. Why is that? Were they even seriously recruited? Was there any cultural outreach even attempted? Mentoring? Tutoring? Are such imbalances true of the basketball team as well? Based on the racial composition of the campus, is the football or basketball team more or less representative of the campus community than, say, the faculty?
Even whites (e.g., 52 percent of the team?) seem underrepresented according to the doctrine of proportional representation. Why is a prestigious sports team alone exempt from affirmative action — as if so-called “merit” is suddenly a paramount, tangible, and definable quality in only this instance?
Disparate-impact theory long ago, we were told, shredded the ossified notion of benign unintended overrepresentation of one racial group over another in a given instance, defended by supposedly bogus notions of individual merit.
Once sports teams, both professional and college, start joining the argument outside of sports for proportional representation, de facto quotas, and more diversity, should they be the first to suffer the consequences of their own ideology? Or should the logic of Orwell’s Animal Farm: All hiring, admission, and participation shall reflect the racial diversity of the campus — except sports teams, given that sports is a far more important activity than scholarship and teaching and thus alone requires selection solely on legitimate criteria of merit.