Some Thoughts On Affirmative Action

The Supreme Court arguments in the Harvard and University of North Carolina affirmative action cases took place on Monday. I listened to some substantial portion, although it was not possible for me to listen to the whole thing (some 5 hours in total). From what I heard, I agree with most commenters that affirmative action in the form currently practiced throughout academia is not likely to survive.

Affirmative action is one of those issues on which the opinions of our intellectual elites diverge almost completely from the opinions of normal people. In a piece on Tuesday (November 1) discussing the likely outcome of the Harvard/UNC case, the New York Times took note of the broad public opposition to affirmative action in college admissions, even extending to heavily Democratic constituencies:

[A] majority of Americans oppose the policy. Nearly three-quarters of U.S. adults said in March that race or ethnicity should not be a factor in college admissions, a Pew Research Center survey found. . . . Even in liberal states, most voters do not support affirmative action. In 2020, about 57 percent of Californians rejected an amendment to the state’s Constitution that would have let government and public institutions, including public universities, adopt affirmative-action policies.

According to the cited Pew survey, even majorities of blacks and Hispanics oppose affirmative action in college admissions:

A majority of Black, Hispanic and Asian respondents opposed the consideration of race or ethnicity.

Meanwhile, among the great and the good, affirmative action is one of the two principal pillars of today’s secular religion (the other being climate alarmism). Check out the list of amici curiae here at the Supreme Court docket supporting the Harvard/UNC position. It includes essentially all of elite academia and plenty of other high-browed institutions and individuals in the category of those that presume to instruct the little people on correct morality. Some readers may also remember my post back in November 2017 that covered the official declaration of fealty by Yale University to the catechism of “diversity, equity and inclusion.”

The principal claim of the plaintiffs in the cases at the Supreme Court appears to be that affirmative action as practiced operates to the disadvantage mostly of Asian American students. They definitely have evidence to back up their claim, in the form of statistical analyses showing that Asian American students must achieve much higher grades and test scores than members of other racial groups to have a comparable chance of admission to the defendant institutions. Plaintiffs must establish harm to themselves in order to have what is called “standing” to sue, and I have no doubt that this harm qualifies. On the other hand, this claimed harm is not the most important reason that affirmative action is a bad idea. If a highly qualified applicant to Harvard or UNC gets rejected in favor of a less-qualified applicant, it is very likely that the highly qualified candidate will be accepted into one or more schools with very nearly equivalent educational quality. Yes, it might have been nice to go to Harvard (the physical facility of the campus is remarkable), but the long-term damage to the person’s life and career are probably not substantial. In fact, the rejected applicant might even avoid some leftist indoctrination, which intellectual elites fall for in disproportionate numbers.

The more important reason that affirmative action is a bad idea is the effect on the supposed beneficiaries. This is something that I have had the occasion to observe personally.

As I have mentioned on this blog several times, I was involved for many years in the recruiting efforts of my law firm, including efforts to recruit more candidates from minority groups. One experience stands out in my memory, and I don’t believe that I have ever previously written about it here. It occurred in about 1981 or 1982, when I was asked to join a group of lawyers from our firm on a recruiting trip to Columbia Law School, which is in Northern Manhattan. About five of us went, to interview in excess of 100 students, about 25 interviews each for the day.

I was an associate at the time. The designated head of our group for the day was a relatively new woman partner who incidentally was active in Democratic Party politics and some years later became an important player in Bill Clinton’s campaigns for President. When we arrived, the Columbia recruiting office gave us the pile of 100+ resumes of the students that we would be interviewing. These resumes included transcripts of the students’ grades. Columbia had divided the resumes into five “schedules” for the five interviewers, but we were allowed to re-allocate the resumes among our team if we wanted. Our team leader then expressed the view that it might be best to have one of us interview all the black candidates, the reason given being that that would enable them to be compared among themselves, and we could select the best candidates to invite back to the firm. She asked me if I would take that job, and I said sure. So she went through the resumes and identified all the ones of black candidates, of which there were seven if I recall correctly, and she handed them to me.

So on that day I interviewed seven black candidates, as well as about 18 of other ethnicities (mostly but not entirely white). I saw the grades of all of them. This was a very eye-opening experience. The eighteen non-black candidates had grades in varying ranges. Some had mostly As, with perhaps a few Bs. Others had more Bs than As, although every one had at least one A-. Some had almost entirely Bs. Only a few had a C in any course, and none more than one or at most two. None had a D.

And then there were the seven black students. Their transcripts consisted of almost entirely Cs and Ds. Some had mostly Cs, and a couple had a least a B or two. But several had almost entirely Ds. The grades of every black student were worse than those of any non-black student, and by a wide margin.

Holy sh-t! Before this, I had had no idea that this was going on.

I quickly realized that these people were being humiliated at Columbia Law School. The school had intentionally set them up for humiliation in order to create a campus aesthetic that somehow made the people running the place feel morally superior. But at least to this point the humiliation had been relatively private — nobody knew about the grades other than the faculty members who gave them out and the students themselves. But now these students were being forced to go public with the humiliation. In the law firm environment, they would have to perform publicly, and sink or swim.

That was the only time that I had occasion to see all the resumes of the black candidates from a law school. I should mention that over the years we did see many black candidates with decent and even good resumes, and in those cases we generally put on big recruiting pushes to try to get those candidates to come to our firm. More often than not we failed, because the competition for the few good candidates was always intense. There are hundreds of major law firms in this country.

Obviously I came away from this experience understanding that affirmative action, at least as practiced at this and other schools, was no favor to the supposed beneficiaries. These were nice young kids, and they could have done well in a different environment. They had been lured here with the promise that the parchment from Columbia Law School would transform their lives. But it would not.

David Lat is the long-time proprietor of Above the Law, who now has a new Substack called Original Jurisdiction. He has a piece from yesterday echoing some of my sentiments, titled “Affirmative Action Is Going Down—And It’s A Good Thing Too.” Lat is an Asian American (I think Filipino). He tells this anecdote about a relative applying a kid to one of the elite New York City private schools:

[I]n preparing to send their oldest son through the gauntlet of Manhattan private-school admissions (for which I had to write a recommendation letter for a four-year-old!), my Asian-American cousin and her white husband talked to an “admissions consultant.” The consultant told them that elite preschools value “diversity.” My cousin excitedly told the consultant that she’s from the Philippines, her husband’s from Australia, and their son at his tender age had already lived in multiple countries and been exposed to many different cultures and languages. “I’m sorry,” the smiling consultant said to them about their white-looking son, “but that’s not what these schools are looking for. Your child does not offer visual diversity.”

Lat notes that Harvard and UNC (and for that matter the rest of academia) are no different:

So in the end, what Harvard and UNC are arguing is that visual diversity is a compelling state interest. Having classrooms and admissions brochures that look like Benetton ads can justify resorting to racial classifications that we have justifiably banned in pretty much every other area of American life. The idea would be laughable if it weren’t so wrong.

It’s all about keeping up appearances for the institutions, no matter how fake the appearances may be. They don’t care who gets thrown under the bus along the way, least of all the black students.

I’ve been looking for years to try to find data on the career success or average incomes of black graduates of elite institutions. If anybody knows where to find some, let me know. But I strongly suspect that nobody gathers this information because they don’t want to know what it would show.