In a Washington Post OpEd today, Fred Hiatt argues that Texas’s “Top 10%” plan is not producing sufficient “diversity.” Adopted as an attempt to preserve access of minorities after affirmative action was outlawed by the Fifth Circuit, the plan guarantees university admission to the University of Texas at Austin, the flagship campus, to the top 10% of the graduating class in every high school. Hiatt notes, however, that “Hispanics and African Americans continue to be underrepresented, with blacks making up only 3.4 percent of the entering class this fall.”
Of course, African Americans, or any group, are only “underrepresented” if the organizing principle of the institution is that groups (all groups?) should be proportionally represented. That is certainly not an inherently unappealing value, but it conflicts with another deeply held value, judging everyone according to the same standard, whatever the standard is. Achieving racial and ethnic diversity, which in practices means to its defenders achieving something closer to proportional representation, requires different standards for different groups. Thus Hiatt quotes the chancellor of the University of Texas system, Mark Yudof, lamenting the inability “to seek out minority candidates with the potential to succeed who fall just short of the top 10 percent.”
Also today, in the Chronicle of Higher Education (link requires subscription), Roger Clegg points out that courts have been much less tolerant of the preferential hiring of faculty than of preferential admissions. After summarizing the current legal standing of each of those forms of discrimination, he concludes with a question that defenders of discrimination to achieve diversity should ponder:
Whether the law allows it or not, is it fair to refuse to hire or promote someone because she has the wrong skin color or because his ancestors came from the wrong part of the world?
Good question.
It is interesting to note that under the 10% plan the lack of “diversity” that many people bemoan would exist if the schools were racially segregated. If, for example, the population was split up as 20% black and 80% white, and everyone was in segregated schools, then it follows that the makeup of the University of Texas would mirror the racial ratio precisely, since the top 10% of each group would be eligible for enrollment.
The fact that minority eligibilty under the 10% plan is so low tends to indicate that there are cultural differences regarding the value of education which are responsible for this disparity. Rather than blaming rascism, perhaps the minorities might start addressing flaws in their own cultures, in which education is not deemed to have a high priority. Not all minorities are disadvantaged. Asian-Americans tend to be over-represented in colleges, not (I think) because of some genetic cause, but because education is highly valued
in those cultures.
Unless the “disadvantaged” minorities have the honesty to look at the flaws in their own cultural models and attempt to change, they will be doomed to exist as second-tier citizens, and they have no one to blame but themselves.
Elavating a person to a position because of race (“affirmative action”) that he/she would never have been considered for had objective standards been applied is a disservice to us all. When competence and merit are thrown out the window in the name of political correctness what can we expect except mediocrity and incompetence in business and government?
Think about it. Would you rather be operated on by a heart surgeon who attained his position because of talent or one who was “appointed” because their ethnic group was historically “under-represented” among heart surgeons?
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