Rethinking affirmative action

This is not an easy thing to do. The goals of affirmative action are seldom made clear. Reading Professor Thomas Espenshade GS ’72’s 2005 study of elite colleges, we learn that it has had the benefit of increasing the number of (non-Asian) minority admissions; in other news, economists have discovered that rent caps place limits on rent. Clearly, such tautologies will not do. Meanwhile, affirmative action’s historical roots in the African-American civil rights movement have generally been abandoned through its application to such minorities as Hispanics.

What we hear today is that affirmative action is important for two reasons: because minorities add to the diversity of campus life and because members of minority groups still tend to face more disadvantages in their upbringing than whites do and thus deserve to have their merit considered in light of these disadvantages. Each of these statements is factually true; each also misses something important.

As far as the first argument, everyone seems to agree that diversity is A Good Thing. In fact, it’s not clear that that’s always true — Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam’s study of the subject, prudently published in a Scandinavian journal, shows a negative correlation between community diversity and measures of civic health, even after controlling for such factors as income inequality and crime. But I am willing to concede two things: Diversity has long-term benefits in fostering human flourishing, and a college campus is a special kind of community, one that emphasizes the exchange of ideas.

Unfortunately, the actual benefits of diversity are rarely thought through. In my first column, I made the distinction between culture as a consumer product and culture as a way of thinking about the world; diversity, it seems, follows much the same pattern. To those who view diversity in quasi-aesthetic terms, it makes perfect sense to focus exclusively on race, on the visual markers that dominate the way race is conceptualized. To those who view it in terms of ideas and values, such an exclusive focus is grossly reductive.

We can list any number of nonracial categories — political ideology, religion, sexual orientation — that are intimately connected to one’s experience of the world. But to me, the most perverse oversight is that of class, a factor that leaves its imprint virtually everywhere. No one would seriously argue that the perspective of a lower-middle-class white teenager from a dying industrial town contributes nothing that is comparable in uniqueness to the perspective of a black student at Exeter; but this is exactly what a purely race-based policy implies. Diversity — true diversity — is evidently not an important goal.

To repeat a point that has been made elsewhere, the issue of class also demonstrates universities’ lack of seriousness about the second argument. We haven’t heard louder calls for class-based affirmative action for the very same reason that we have never heard calls for a “national conversation on class” or been called “a nation of cowards” on the subject. Class simply hits too close to home. Racism (at least in its less sophisticated treatments) is an easily locatable evil. Instances of racism, real and perceived — Duke Lacrosse, the Jena Six, Don Imus — can be used as opportunities to vilify individuals and to make public displays of contrition. Right-thinking people can decry the prejudices held by the country’s more backwards elements.

Class, of course, is more subtle than that. “Latent classism,” lying in the murky depths of individual psyches, is not what really stands in our lower-middle-class teen’s way. The opportunities are simply not there, due to a long list of causes. This is unsettling, because, well, they were certainly there for many of us, and we were happy to take advantage of them. We can comfortably tell morality tales about race, replete with bad men driven by evil ideas; class is not so simple.

A truly forward-looking affirmative action policy would take its own justifications seriously. It would move past the safe, cliche-worn territory of “cultural heritage” and into the darker territory of economic circumstance. Such a policy would not have to disregard race, which still plays an undeniable role; even if it did, it would nonetheless address many of the concerns about poverty and educational opportunity raised by proponents of the status quo. Until it finds such a coherent purpose, the policy will continue to stand on ever-shifting ground, sustained in the end by its own inertia.