The Cost of Affirmative Action

How Race Preferences Damage Higher Education

Gail Heriot

• Publisher: Encounter Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781641771337
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Education
• Index: Business

This book will consist of seven or more essays, critical in different ways of racial "diversity" preferences in American higher education. Unlike many more conventional books on the subject, which are essentially apologies for racial reverse discrimination, this volume forthrightly exposes the corrosive effects of identity politics on college and university life.

NOTES

STARTING DOWN THE SLIPPERY SLOPE

1 These federal grant programs were administered by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (as it was then known), and later the Department of Education, under the auspices of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, 42 U.S.C. §§2000-2000d-7.

A DUBIOUS EXPEDIENCY

1 18 Cal. 3d 36, 62-63 (1976).

2 The justifications that were thought appealing in the past are sometimes forgotten. For example, in the decades following the American Civil War, anti-Chinese mobs in California used both physical and political force against Chinese laundry businesses. See, e.g., Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 118 U.S. 356 (1886). It was apparently their view that Chinese laundry businesses, of which there were many, were unfairly depriving white women, particularly widows, from earning a respectable living as laundresses and disrupting families by taking over traditional women’s work. See David Bernstein, Lochner, Parity, and the Chinese Laundry Cases, 41 WM. & MARY L. REV. 211, 224 (1999); Paul Ong, An Ethnic Trade: The Chinese Laundries in Early California, J. ETHNIC STUD. 95, 96 (Fall 1981).

3 ALLAN SINDLER, BAKKE, DEFUNIS AND MINORITY ADMISSIONS: THE QUEST FOR EQUAL OPPORTUNITY (1978).

4 Id. at 64.

5 Harriet Chiang & Bob Egelko, Stanley Mosk, 1912-2001, State Supreme Justice Dies at 88, S.F. CHRON., June 20, 2001.

6 438 U.S. 265 (1978).

7 See Peter Schmidt, U. of Colorado at Boulder Is Criticized for Its Diversity Expenditures, CHRON. HIGHER ED. (Jan. 17, 2007) (citing a report that states that “of the $21.8-million that the campus has reported spending on diversity programs, just $4-million goes toward student scholarships” and noting that “Chancellor Peterson has acknowledged that the $21.8-million figure is ‘not even close’ to a full total for the campus’s diversity expenditures.”), https://www.chronicle.com/article/u-of-colorado-at-boulder-is-criticized-for-its-diversity-expenditures. See also Heather Mac Donald, Multiculti U: The Budget-Strapped University of California Squanders Millions on Mindless Diversity Programs, CITY JOURNAL, Spring 2013, https://www.city-journal.org/html/multiculti-u-13544.html.

8 Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003).

9 See, e.g., STEPHEN COLE & ELINOR BARBER, INCREASING FACULTY DIVERSITY: THE OCCUPATIONAL CHOICES OF HIGH ACHIEVING MINORITY STUDENTS (2003); Frederick L. Smyth & John J. McArdle, Ethnic and Gender Differences in Science Graduation at Selective Colleges with Implications for Admission Policy and College Choice, 45 RES. HIGHER EDUC. 353 (2004); Richard H. Sander, A Systemic Analysis of Affirmative Action in American Law Schools, 57 STAN. L. REV. 367 (2004); Rogers Elliott, A. Christopher Strenta, Russell Adair, Michael Matier & Jannah Scott, The Role of Ethnicity in Choosing and Leaving Science in Highly Selective Institutions, 37 RES. HIGHER EDUC. 681 (1996).

10 Things are evidently not very different in medical schools. This is consistent with the results of a 1994 JAMA study, which reported that an astonishing 51.1% of African American medical students failed the Part I exam, as contrasted with only 12.3% of white medical students. See B. Dawson, C.K. Iwamoto, L.P. Ross, R.J. Nungester, D.B. Swanson & R.L. Volle, Performance on the National Board of Medical Examiners Part I Examination by Men and Women of Different Race and Ethnicity, 272 JAMA 674 (Sept. 7, 1994). Racial preferences almost wholly accounted for the gap. When African American medical students competed against white exam takers with similar academic credentials, they fared about the same.

R.C. Davidson & E.L. Lewis, Affirmative Action and Other Special Consideration Admissions at the University of California, Davis, School of Medicine, 278 JAMA 1153 (Oct. 8, 1997), has been touted by its authors as proof that relaxing academic standards in medical school admissions to admit more African American and Hispanic students is harmless—that it does not affect the quality of the doctors who graduate. The actual data, however, support the opposite conclusion. See Gail Heriot, Doctored Affirmative Action Data, WALL ST. J., Oct. 15, 1997.

11 Sander, supra note 9, at 427.

12 Id. at 431.

13 Id.

14 Id. at 427-36, Tables 5.1, 5.3 & 5.4.

15 See Ian Ayres & Richard Brooks, Does Affirmative Action Reduce the Number of Black Lawyers?, 57 STAN. L. REV. 1807, 1807 (2005) (“Richard Sander’s study of affirmative action at U.S. law schools highlights a real and serious problem: the average black law student’s grades are startlingly low”).

16 WILLIAM G. BOWEN & DEREK BOK, THE SHAPE OF THE RIVER: LONG-TERM CONSEQUENCES OF CONSIDERING RACE IN COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY ADMISSIONS 72 (1998). The figures presented in Bowen & Bok for elite undergraduate institutions are not quite so alarming as the figures for law schools. But there are two ways in which they understate the problem. First, they report the average GPA for African Americans and not for African Americans who needed a preference to attend the school they attended. Second, the lack of a common undergraduate curriculum makes comparisons misleading. Minority students are less likely to choose tough majors like physics and chemistry, which are notorious for both their competitiveness and their low curve. See Peter Arcidiacono, Esteban Aucejo, & Ken Spenner, What Happens After Enrollment? An Analysis of the Time Path of Racial Differences in GPA and Major Choice, 1 IZA J. LAB. & ECON. art. 5 (2012). This artificially inflates pe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Starting Down the Slippery Slope
• A Dubious Expediency
• Diversity’s Descent
• Segregation Now
• Breaking the STEM
• The Sausage Factory
• Race Preferences and Discrimination against Asian Americans in Higher Education
• A Class Act? Social-Class Affirmative Action and Higher Education
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Notes
• Index