35 Higher Education Organiazations Repeat Diversity Fallacy

9/24/2015
35 Higher Education Organiazations Repeat Diversity Fallacy
Stilloutonalimbaftermorethantenyears...
ABOUT
HOME

12 January 2003
The leaders of 35 higher education organizations have sent President Bush a letter urging
Subscribe
Enter your email address:
him to support Michigans use of racial preferences to promote diversity.

Diversity is not defined in the letter, and claims for its benefits are vastly overstated:
Delivered by FeedBurner
researchfindingsshowthattheinteractionsdiversityallowsandinstitutionalcommitmenttodiversityare
associatedwithsuccessincollege,growthinacceptanceofpeopleofdifferentraces,lowracialtension,
retentionofminoritystudents,andothereducationalbenefitsforwhiteandminoritystudents.
What I continue to find most striking, however, is the largely unchallenged claim that
[t]he freedom to pursue diversity is especially worthy of protection because diversity
benefits all students.
Recent Comments
CaptDMO on Hillarys Emails: The Silence
Of The Historians
CaptDMO on Obama Administrations
Sides With Palestinians Over Terror
Victims
As I have argued here and here, whatever benefits derive from diversity are provided by
CaptDMO on If Reagan Were Alive
the preferentially admitted minorities, not to them. They may well receive some benefit
George Shen on If Reagan Were Alive
from being admitted to more selective institutions than they would have absent the
LTEC on Roger Clegg On The Lefts
racial preference they received (or course, they are also less likely to graduate), but the
Pathetic Racial Agenda
diversity benefit they receive cannot justify those preferences because the preferentially
admitted minorities would have received the same diversity benefits at the less selective
institutions they would otherwise have attended.
Not to put too fine a point on it, the elite institutions that offer racial preferences are
using minorities to provide diversity to their non-minority students. In return, those
students are allowed entry into institutions whose requirements would have excluded
them if they had been judged by the same standards as the other students. This bargain
may or may not be beneficial to the instiutions or to the preferentially admitted, i.e.,
differentially treated, minorities, but it is a fallacy to point to diversity benefits allegedly
received by the preferred to justify the preferences extended to them. If diversity
justifies racial discrimination, it is because of the benefits received by the non-minorities
who are exposed to the preferentially admitted minorities. To claim otherwise is less
than honest.
UPDATE Two posts below I discussed how the Associated Press (and the Washington
Post, which ran the AP story) badly misreported the case of Taxman v. Piscataway, which
involved a school board using race as the sole criterion to fire a teacher in order to
preserve faculty diversity.
The American Council on Education, joined by the same large host of familiar suspect
educational organizations, filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court defending the
race-based firing.
The higher education establishment has put all of its eggs in the diversity basket, and, it
http://www.discriminations.us/2003/01/35-higher-education-organiazations-repeat-diversity-fallacy/
1/5
9/24/2015
would appear, is willing to justify just about anything to achieve it, even firing someone
based on nothing other than race. What is perhaps even more striking about its brief in
this case, however, is its obliviousness. It refers on a number of occasions to the fact that
racial preferences are designed to benefit whites by exposing them to minorities without
recognizing the grating condescension to minorities this entails.
Some examples:
Students,particularlywhites,whosocializeacrossracialgroupsexpressgreatersatisfactionwiththecollege
experience.(Emphasisadded)
Thus,ithasbeenshownthatapersonsprejudicetowardsstigmatizedgroups,suchasmentalpatientsor
peoplewithAIDS,islessenedbypersonalcontactwithmembersofthegroup.
Suchstudiessupportearlierfindingsthattheinteractionsmadepossiblebydiversitylessenprejudice.
Recruitmentandretentionofminorityfacultymemberscontributestoanenvironmentofracialtoleranceand
equalityonourcampuses,byexposingnonminoritystudentstominorityfaculty.(Emphasisadded)
Of course, the brief also quotes studies purporting to show benefits to blacks from
diversity.
Attendanceataraciallymixedschoolaffectsdecisionsthatstudents,bothwhiteandblack,subsequently
makeconcerningwithwhomtheychoosetoworkandsocialize.
Blacksfromraciallydiverseelementaryschoolsaremorelikelytohavewhitesocialcontacts,liveinintegrated
neighborhoods,andevaluatewhitecoworkerspositively.
[Ten]or20blackstudentscouldnotbegintobring
totheirclassmatesandtoeachotherthevarietyof
pointsofview,backgroundsandexperiencesof
blacksintheUnitedStates.
It is worth emphasizing, however, that none of these alleged benefits of diversity to the
preferentially admitted blacks requires admission to highly selective institutions. If the
University of Michigan were forced to abandon its race-based preferences and the
minority students who would have been admitted under the abandoned program instead
attended Michigan State Univ. or Eastern Michigan Univ. or Wayne State Univ. or
Northern Michigan Univ., they would receive all the diversity-specific benefits they
would have received in Ann Arbor. It is only the non-minority students at Michigan who
would have experienced any loss.
In short, it is disingenuous to suggest as virtually all the established higher education
organizations do that racial discrimination is justified at elite, selective institutions in
order to provide otherwise unobtainable diversity benefits to the preferentially admitted
minorities. If such discrimination is to be justified, it is only because of the benefits that
accrue to the non-minorities from being exposed to the preferentially admitted
minorities.
I dont like the sound of that, and Im continually surprised when others do.
Posted in Politics
2/5
9/24/2015
Say What? (7)

RogerSweeny January 13, 2003 at 4:35 pm | Permalink | Reply
I hope this doesnt sound snotty but John, youre being oblivious here. I think
every supporter of diversity would say that black students admitted to U.
Michigan instead of MSU or Wayne State are getting an advantage. Graduates of
UM generally have more opportunities and make more money than graduates of
the others.
The diversity supporters may believe this is because of better teachers, or more
aggressive students to interact with, or contacts made, or just the fact that people
think UM graduates are smarter or better. Whatever, they think minorities
who go get an advantage.
This, of course, isnt an advantage to the black students from diversity itself. Its
an advantage from going to a more selective school than they otherwise would.
White students may get the advantages of diversity but in return for giving
these advantages black students get higher incomes and higher self-esteem (I got
into UM!). I think thats how many people in the 35 higher education
organizations see it.
JohnRosenberg January 13, 2003 at 4:59 pm | Permalink | Reply
Roger I have received some snotty comments, and so please believe me when I
say that yours is not one.
Now in my defense: I may be wrong in my argument, but I am not oblivious at all
to the point you make. I specifically acknowledged that preferentially admitted
minorities may well receive some benefit from being admitted to more selective
instiutions than they would have absent the preference they received.
I certainly agree that, perhaps with certain exceptions for specialties at other
places, in general attendance at the University of Michigan generally provides
advantages not available at Wayne State, Northern Michigan, et. al. My point was
that these advantages are not derived from diversity, since those other
insitutions are every bit as diverse.
Racial preferences may be justified on many grounds, but the only ground that is
being argued in the Supreme Court is diversity.
A bargain, in short, that admits less qualified minorities to selective institutions
so that non-minorities may benefit from being exposed to them may well be
justified (although I dont think it is), but not based on the argument that it is
necessary so that the preferentially admitted can benefit from diversity.
RogerSweeny January 14, 2003 at 10:44 am | Permalink | Reply
Okay.
3/5
9/24/2015
So the argument is Whites get the benefit from diversity; blacks get the benefit
from going to a better school. Thats fair. How could you say such a wonderful
thing is unconstitutional?
The argument is simple and emotionally appealing to a lot of people.
JohnRosenberg January 14, 2003 at 1:51 pm | Permalink | Reply
Roger I dunno. I guess Id be reduced to repeating the tired old former truism
that discriminating on the basis of race is wrong.
Anyone who thinks this bargain fair should pause to consider that the benefits
extended to minorities as payment for their providing the experience of diversity
to whites are a byproduct, not the purpose, of the bargain. Proof of that can be
found in school transfer policies, discussed here, where precisely the same
diversity justification is used to prevent minorities from transferring to schools
of their choice when doing so would reduce the diversity enjoyed by whites at
their base schools.
M.Lynx January 15, 2003 at 1:59 pm | Permalink | Reply
The benefit a minority student gets from the perception that UM is an elite school
is diminished by the widespread assumption that a minority student at an elite
school probably didnt belong there, and probably took a watered down
curriculum specializing in grievance collection.
MartinKnight January 15, 2003 at 2:59 pm | Permalink | Reply
Another thing is the amazingly high drop-out/failure rate among minority

students in elite schools with racial preference policies in operation. The more
aggressive the preference policy, the higher the failure rate. Of those that do
make it to graduation, only a depressing few make it in less than six years for
four year degrees and a lot do so with truly atrocious GPAs. The prestige
gained from graduating from an elite school is largely negated.
This little fact is something you will never see any preference proponents ever
highlighting. Thousands of black students who could have graduated from a
much less intense academic setting have had their life plans seriously derailed
because they were put somewhere where they were in way over their heads. Id
sooner graduate from CSU Northridge than drop out from UC Berkeley. And Id
rather get a 3.4 from Northridge than a 2.4 from Berkeley.
Its not that black students are less intelligent or even less diligent than students
of other races. Its primarily because the K-12 education recieved by a huge
number of black children is incredibly substandard. Huge numbers of black high
school graduates, even the best ones, are seriously underprepared for tertiary
academics. Racial preferences are a band-aid on a serious deep flesh-wound.
Ineffective at best, incredibly harmful at worst.
PS: I happen to be black.
4/5
9/24/2015
MichelleDulak January 17, 2003 at 6:05 pm | Permalink | Reply
Roger,
I think John is right on this one. Its the disingenuousness that bothers me, at
least. I doubt that anyone advocating diversity in education is primarily thinking
of its beneficial effects on white and Asian students. I am not claiming that there
are no such effects, but I have great difficulty believing that they are the actual
point. The point is to benefit underrepresented-minority students, and the
diversity line is Bakke-mandated boilerplate.
If universities were serious about exposing all students to a variety of viewpoints,
they would do two things they havent done to my knowledge. They would try
actually to measure the difference in viewpoint affirmative action has made;
and they would use many factors that they havent. Parents occupation and
parents religious affiliation come to mind. (I think it would be unfair to ask an
applicants own religious beliefs, but parental affiliation would surely provide
some sort of clue to upbringing, culture, viewpoint?)
If any university has shown the slightest interest in this sort of thing, I havent
seen it. The closest things are the geographical distribution preferences that
some schools have, and these (I think) long predate affirmative action, let alone
diversity as an explicit goal.
Say What?
Name*
Email*
Website
Comment
PostComment
Previous Entry: New Blog Discusses Michigan AA Cases
Next Entry: A Speech For President Bush
Discriminations Copyright 2015 John Rosenberg.
Blogging support by JSW4NET Inc.
5/5

35 Higher Education Organiazations Repeat Diversity Fallacy

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

35 Higher Education Organiazations Repeat Diversity Fallacy

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

9/24/2015