The Los Angeles Times has another woe-is-us lament about what will happen to quality education if the Supremes rule against racial preferences. (Link via Howard Bashman)
Although many diversiphiles — students and administrators — are quoted, once again it seems never to have occurred to any of them that if “diversity” is as important as they say, they could drop the admissions requirements that exclude minorities. If “SAT scores are a far better predictor of your parents’ income than anything else,” as a 19 year old Pomona student said, then drop them, but drop them for everyone. But we’ve been through all this before.
The twist this time is that the article focuses on the particular plight of small colleges, like Pomona.
Pomona’s freshman class of 375 students is picked by admissions officers who often get to know applicants personally.
[….]
William C. Hiss, a vice president of Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, said his school seeks to admit a class with “radically different backgrounds” such as those from French-speaking parts of Maine and home-schooled students from remote, rural parts of New England.
Here’s an (unoriginal) idea: if what you want is “radically different backgrounds,” why not look for … radically different backgrounds? Looking only skin deep, assuming skin color reflects radical difference, is lazy and superficial. Unlike the University of Michigan, the Pomonas and the Bates have the luxury of looking pretty closely at each individual applicant. Why not require them all to write an essay on the “difference” they would contribute to the mix?
Even that wouldn’t erase all the disturbing elements of the current fixation on “diversity.” As Hiss of Bates explained,
The college also considers race in admissions partly because “Maine is one of the two whitest states in America…. We have to work very hard to get [minority students] here.”
Maybe Bates would have more luck trying to recruit Eskimos or Aleuts who might feel more at home there. How many are there now? Wouldn’t they provide some “diversity”? In any event, what are the consequences of failure? That the whites at Bates are deprived of the benefit of being exposed to the “difference” supposedly exuded by the minorities. Instead of legitimizing racial double standards, what if the prospective Bates students who cared passionately about “diversity” simply decided to go to a more diverse school. Why would that be so bad?
I don’t think the market is a solution for every problem, but the intrusive, pervasive, and permanent racial and ethnic regulation required to produce the proper mix everywhere surely does make it look appealing here (governed, of course, by strict rules prohibiting discrimination).
I don’t recall Bates recruiting at my tiny Montana high school. We were white, poor and very isolated. I think they say they want diversity, but really, they want colorful students who they can parade like Mardi Gras floats to show how “liberal” they are. You know, like decorations.
R.D., frankly, if you had heard of Bates and applied to it, you probably would have been a shoe-in. I visited Bowdoin once (a very similar school in both attitude and location), and there was indeed AA for poor white rural Maine applicants. I think it very likely they would have viewed a rural Montanan not quite as favorably (accepting locals was good policy) but favorably enough.
None of this, of course, addresses the legality or morality of the system, but it’s highly likely you would have been on the plus-points part of the scale.
I got Ivy League degree back when the SATs were fairly hard. Why would I want to go to a tiny little place like Bates?
I’ve come up with THE SOLUTION: All black and Hispanic students with SATs over 1000 will be admitted to their college of choice provided they agree to transfer every year to a new college that needs non-white faces. One black student could diversify four colleges like Bates.
Or Bates could be content to reflect the racial make-up of Maine.
Years ago, I read about a federal construction program in North Dakota that was held up by the fact that no black workers had been hired. Judging by statistics, the project should have had 1.2 black employees. The contractor crunched the numbers for black males between the ages of 18 and 62. Excluding blacks serving at an Air Force base and blacks enrolled at University of North Dakota (on basketball scholarships), there were three black guys in the state. And none of them wanted to work construction.
I think Joanne is on the right track, but doesn’t go far enough. Because everything is “socially constructed,” we must remember that “choice” is usually a self-delusion, and thus must always be used between quotation marks. With that in mind, I think Joanne’s otherwise commendable solution genuflects too much in the direction of individual “choice.” Since everyone now knows (Michigan, after all, has told us so) that the fate of the United States depends on the leaders trained in elite schools, and since the educational enterprise of elite school compellingly requires the presence of a “critical mass” of minority students, I don’t think serving in this new minority corps should be voluntary. Given the stakes involved, why don’t we draft minority students, especially out of historically black colleges, and require them to attend majority majority colleges for at least one year? After all, there’s no reason their choice of where to attend should be accorded greater weight than the thwarted choices of the white/Asian students who were excluded to make room for them.
i find that into todays life i think that it’s sad that we can’t look past the skin and into the heart and love one another. (me coming from a white family and african american i see no difference..) i love my family regardless of there skin color.!
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There is something I don’t see addressed here. It is often said that the intelligence of different races is non-existent. If that is true, why have ‘affirmative action’? If that fella over there has just as much sense as you do, why do colleges give him a second look and often deprive you of the privilege of being a student? I want to see who has guts enough to answer this without a bunch of meaningless drivel.