Something dramatic appeared on Inside Higher Ed today, but it was not the Q & A interview with Notre Dame philosophy professor James P. Sterba about this new book, Affirmative Action For the Future.
Indeed, Sterba’s answers to Inside Higher Ed’s pedestrian questions were so vapid that — even though I argue about this stuff daily as an avocation — I couldn’t work myself up to criticize it. It just didn’t seem worth the trouble. Here, for example, was the first exchange:
Q: How do you define affirmative action?
A: Affirmative action is a policy of favoring qualified women, minority, or economically disadvantaged candidates over qualified men, nonminority or economically advantaged candidates respectively with the immediate goals of outreach, remedying discrimination, or achieving diversity, and the ultimate goals of attaining a colorblind (racially just), a gender-free (sexually just) and equal opportunity (economically just) society.
Refuting the argument that we must engage in racial discrimination in order to achieve colorblindness, which the arguer defines as racial justice, would be akin to winning a marksmanship award for shooting fish in a barrel. Besides, the fish are already dead; why waste the ammo?
Here’s one more example (I promise I’ll stop after this one), where the only interesting question is who sounds more conventionally vapid, the interviewer (Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed’s editor) or the interviewee?
Q: Do you think opponents of affirmative action can be convinced to change their views?
A: Most opponents of affirmative action can be convinced to change their minds because they have formed their opinion about affirmative action knowing no more than half the facts and half the arguments that are relevant to an assessment of the practice. Once they get a fuller picture of what is relevant to an assessment of the affirmative action, they are confronted with good reasons to change their view. For example, once opponents do a comparative evaluation of diversity affirmative action against two other preference programs in higher education – legacy preference and athletic preference – each of which is twice the usual size of the college or university affirmative action program, it is difficult for them not to see the superior moral and educational justification of diversity affirmative action.
Presumably Prof. Sterba’s book provides the “fuller picture” of affirmative action that we critics have been missing all these years, and once we read it the scales will be lifted from our eyes and we’ll see the (or at least his) light.
Don’t hold your breath.
Regular readers of this blog already know that I hold Roger Clegg, president and general counsel of the invaluable Center for Equal Opportunity, in high regard, not only for his knowledge but also for his style and wit — and, after today, I must add his unflappability when confronted with dead fish arguments. Unlike yours truly, he was not deterred by their smug vapidity, and thus (at 7:00 A.M.!) he posted a four-point comment that utterly devastated Sterba’s argument, and he did so without a trace of the snarkiness that I (as you see) couldn’t avoid even as I avoided taking Sterba seriously enough to argue with him. Read Clegg’s comment, and others, here.
Clegg’s comment (also published this morning on National Review Online) was so effective that something noteworthy happened: a stream of comments actually agreeing with him followed (see them at above link), which may be a first for a publication read mainly by higher ed wonks. An unusually impressive one deserves to be quoted in full here, and so is:
I would like to thank Roger Clegg for his cogent thoughts on affirmative action, many of which are shared even by political liberals. At one point in my career I was general counsel to a state agency that, among other things, oversaw a minority- and woman-owned business certification process, part of an affirmative action program to increase the number of state contractors from certain racial and ethnic groups. Administering this process involved such activities as having to get the opinion of a professor of geography as to whether Afghanistan is part of “South Asia,” as South Asians were a statutorily-designated affirmative action minority and an Afghani applicant claimed Afghanistan is part of South Asia. The case that caused me to wake up at night shaking with anxiety involved an applicant with Hispanic first and middle names who had been born and raised in Cuba as a Cuban citizen, was a native Spanish speaker, escaped from the Castro regime without a penny to his name, became a professional engineer and started his own successful business. But his Jewish parents had escaped from Nazi Europe, having been sent alone as young teenagers by their families to Cuba, where they built their lives from scratch by hard work while the rest of their families perished in Nazi concentration camps. The “bloodline analysis” on this applicant indicated he did not have ”Hispanic blood,” and he was denied minority certification, a decision upheld by an administrative law judge. I had a hard time distinguishing between the process used by the state agency and that used by the Nazis. This kind of analysis is utterly distasteful no matter what the ultimate purpose, and, in my opinion, is fraught with moral problems. I am glad Roger Clegg continues to articulate these concerns.
I’m glad, too, and so should you be.
