But perhaps a concession to black anger had to be made to clear some space for a defense of the Arcidiacono paper? Not a chance. The deanlets and provosts followed their invocation of “negative stereotypes” with an anodyne generalization about academic freedom: “At the same time, our goal of academic success for all should not inhibit research and discussion to clarify important issues of academic choice and achievement.” In other words, don’t blame us for what these wacky professors might say.
The bureaucrats went on to explain the origins of the student database that the professors had used for their study, as if the very gathering of information had been called into question by the paper. (The Duke data repository was a response to William Bowen and Derek Bok’s 1999 study of college affirmative action, The Shape of the River, which had exposed the low grades of preference beneficiaries nationwide; the Duke data project was intended to identify and help resolve similar problems of underachievement locally. In other words, the Arcidiacono paper was squarely within the mandate of the Duke student database.) Duke has worked to create an “empowering, safe, and stigma-free environment” for students to get help in science, the administrators added, implicitly acknowledging that the administration has known for years about minority students’ struggles with science.
Finally, as is de rigueur in all such flaps over “diversity,” the administration pledged to try even harder to be sensitive to Duke’s black students. “We welcome the call to action. Many people have been working for a long time to create a positive climate for African-American students. We look forward to ongoing conversations with BSA and others about ways that we can improve,” Schoenfeld penitently announced. Of course, as Schoenfeld meekly hinted, Duke has been engaged in color-coded programming and funding for decades, pouring money into, to name just a few endeavors, a black student center, a black student recruiting weekend, and such bureaucratic sinecures as a vice provost for faculty diversity and faculty development and an associate vice provost for academic diversity, who, along with the faculty diversity task force and faculty diversity standing committee, ride herd over departmental hiring and monitor the progress of the ongoing Faculty Diversity Initiative, which followed upon the previous Black Faculty Strategic Initiative. But no college administration in recent history has ever said to whining students of any race or gender: “Are you joking? We’ve kowtowed to your demands long enough, now go study!” And why should the burgeoning student services bureaucracy indulge in such honesty? It depends on just such melodramatic displays of grievance for its very existence.
The BSA may have misunderstood the paper’s argument, but it was right about one thing: The Duke administration had completely ducked the substance of the study. Referring to the bureaucrats’ open letter, the BSA’s executive vice president told the campus newspaper: “They didn’t mention the words ‘race,’ ‘black’ or the phrase ‘affirmative action’ in their response, and we feel that this was a deliberate attempt to avoid directly addressing the issues at hand.” No kidding. The Duke hierarchy uttered not a word on whether the school’s black students were dropping out of the sciences because of their relative lack of preparation. It was as if Arcidiacono, Spenner, and Aucejo had committed a social transgression so embarrassing that the only polite thing to do was to ignore it.
A handful of scholars have been documenting the negative consequences of so-called academic mismatch, but the scourging of Arcidiacono and his fellow authors cannot encourage many others to enter the fray. Nevertheless, the evidence is already strong that preferences are contributing to the undereducation of minorities. In 2004, as we have seen, UCLA law professor Richard Sander demonstrated that blacks admitted to law schools because of their race end up overwhelmingly in the lowest quarter of their class and have much greater difficulties passing the bar than students admitted on their merits. A working paper by Sander and UCLA statistician Roger Bolus extended the Arcidiacono analysis of students at Duke to a comparative setting: Science students with credentials more than one standard deviation below their peers’ are half as likely to graduate with science degrees as students with similar qualifications attending schools where their academic preparation matches that of their peers.
As such findings mount, the conclusion will become inescapable: College leaders who continue to embrace affirmative action do so simply to flatter their own egos, so that they can gaze upon their “diverse” realm and bask in their noblesse oblige. Faced with the Arcidiacono analysis and other research like it, the responsible thing for Duke administrators to do would be to admit all students on the same basis, so that all would stand an equal chance of success in the most challenging majors. Getting rid of racial preferences would reduce Duke’s black population, now 10 percent of the student body, by half, but the half that remained would be fully competitive with their peers. Admittedly, such a drop in the black student census would trigger charges that Duke was hostile to minorities. And unless other schools reformed their own admissions policies, the students whom Duke would have admitted through racial preference would simply go to other elite institutions, where they would be just as handicapped by deficiencies in their academic preparation. All the more imperative, then, to air mismatch research as widely as possible. But until it becomes possible to discuss the effects of preferences without being accused of racial animus, it may be impossible to dislodge academic affirmative action, no matter how discredited its purported justifications.
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A DEVASTATING AFFIRMATIVE ACTION STORY
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In 2013, the Los Angeles Times published a case study in the malign effects of academic racial preferences. The University of California at Berkeley followed the diversocrat playbook to the letter in admitting Kashawn Campbell, a South Central Los Angeles high school senior, in 2012: It disregarded his level of academic preparation, parked him in the black dorm—the “African American Theme Program”—and provided him with a black studies course. The results were thoroughly predictable. After his first semester, reports the Times, Kashawn had barely passed an introductory science course.
In College Writing 1A, his essays—pockmarked with misplaced words and odd phrases—were so weak that he would have to take the class again. His writing often didn’t make sense. He struggled to comprehend the readings. “It took a while for him to understand there was a problem,” his instructor said. “He could not believe that he needed more skills. He would revise his papers and each time he would turn his work back in having complicated it. The paper would be full of words he thought were academic, writing the way he thought a college student should write, using big words he didn’t have command of.” His grade-point average was 1.7, putting him at risk of expulsion if he didn’t raise it by the end of the year. The one bright spot in his academic record? Why, African American Studies 5A, of course! Kashawn had received an A on an essay and a B on a midterm, the best grades of his freshman year: Kashawn reveled in the class, a survey of black culture and race relations, in a way he hadn’t since high school.
He would often be the first one to speak up in discussions, even though his points weren’t always the most sophisticated, said Gabrielle Williams, a doctoral student who helped teach the African American Studies class. He still had gaps in his knowledge of history. But, Williams said, “you could see how engaged he was, how much he loved being there.”
Did Kashawn’s good grades in African American Studies 5A mean that he had suddenly learned how to think and to write? Not at all. He was advancing little in his second go-round at expository writing: “On yet another failing essay, the instructor wrote how surprised she was at his lack of progress, especially, she noted, given the hours they’d spent going over his ‘extremely long, awkward and unclear sentences,’” reported the Los Angeles Times. His (to him) unforeseen academic struggles took a psychological toll: “He had never felt this kind of failure, nor felt this insecure,” wrote the Times. “Each poor grade [was] another stinging punch bringing him closer to flunking ou
t. None of the adults in his life knew the depth of his pain: not his professors, his counselors, or any of the teachers at his old high school.”
He tried to rally his spirits with heart-wrenching pathos: “‘I can do this! I can do this!’ he had written [in a diary]. ‘Let the studying begin!… It’s time for Kashawn’s Comeback!’” A counselor in the campus psychologist’s office urged him to scale back his academic ambitions. “Maybe he didn’t have to be the straight-A kid he’d been in high school anymore,” the counselor advised him. This “be content with mediocrity” message sums up the attitude that many a struggling affirmative action “beneficiary” has adopted to get through college.
The black-themed dorm and student center also operated exactly as one would expect, confirming their members’ belief in their own racial oppression: “Sometimes we feel like we’re not wanted on campus,” Kashawn said, surrounded at a dinner table by several of his dormmates, all of them nodding in agreement. “It’s usually subtle things, glances or not being invited to study groups. Little, constant aggressions.” Of course, the only reason that Kashawn and many of his fellow dormmates are at Berkeley is because the administration “wants” them so much, regardless of their chances of success.
It is unlikely, however, that African American Studies 5A discussed the academic-achievement gap in Berkeley’s admissions between black, white, and Asian students. That gap, not racism, explains why Kashawn was not a sought-after addition to study groups. (Kashawn came to Berkeley through one of the University of California’s many efforts to evade California’s ban on governmental racial preferences: an admissions guarantee for students in the top decile of their high school classes, regardless of their test scores or the caliber of their school.) As his freshman year drew to a close, Kashawn was on tenterhooks waiting to learn if his second-semester grades would allow him to continue into sophomore year.
Which course gave him an A–, to pull his GPA over the top? Hint: it wasn’t College Writing. The Times could not have produced a more resounding confirmation of mismatch theory if it had tried. But the Times story conveys a subtler point as well: Racial preferences are not just ill advised; they are positively sadistic.
It is primarily the preening self-regard of University of California administrators and faculty that is served by admitting such underprepared students.
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4
THE MICROAGGRESSION FARCE
In November 2013, nearly two dozen graduate students at the University of California at Los Angeles marched into an education class and announced a protest against its “hostile and unsafe climate for Scholars of Color.” The students had been victimized, they claimed, by racial “microaggression”—the hottest concept on campuses today, used to call out racism otherwise invisible to the naked eye. UCLA’s response to the sit-in was a travesty of justice. The education school sacrificed the reputation of a beloved and respected professor in order to placate a group of students making a specious charge of racism.
The pattern would repeat itself twice more at UCLA that fall: Students would allege that they were victimized by racism, and the administration, rather than correcting the students’ misapprehension, penitently acceded to it. Colleges across the country behave no differently. In the process, they are creating what tort law calls “eggshell plaintiffs”—preternaturally fragile individuals injured by the slightest collisions with life. The consequences will affect us for years to come.
UCLA education professor emeritus Val Rust was involved in multiculturalism long before the concept even existed. A pioneer in the field of comparative education, which studies different countries’ educational systems, Rust spent over four decades mentoring students from around the world and assisting in international development efforts. He has received virtually every honor awarded by the Society of Comparative and International Education. His former students are unanimous in their praise for his compassion and integrity. “He’s been an amazing mentor to me,” said Cathryn Dhanatya, a former assistant dean for research at the USC Rossier School of Education. “I’ve never experienced anything remotely malicious or negative in terms of how he views students and how he wants them to succeed.”1 Rosalind Raby, director of the California Colleges for International Education, said that Rust pushes you to “reexamine your own thought processes. There is no one more sensitive to the issue of cross-cultural understanding.”2 A spring 2013 newsletter from UCLA’s ed school celebrated Rust’s career and featured numerous testimonials about his warmth and support for students.3
It was therefore ironic that Rust’s graduate-level class in dissertation preparation was the target of student protest just a few months later—ironic, but in the fevered context of the UCLA education school, not surprising. The school, which trumpets its “social-justice” mission at every opportunity, is a cauldron of simmering racial tensions. Students specializing in critical race theory play the race card incessantly against their fellow students and their professors, leading to an atmosphere of nervous self-censorship. Foreign students are particularly shell-shocked by the school’s climate. “The Asians are just terrified,” says a recent graduate. “They walk into this hyper-racialized environment and have no idea what’s going on. Their attitude in class is: ‘I don’t want to talk. Please don’t make me talk!’”4
Val Rust’s dissertation-prep class had devolved into a highly charged arena of competing victim ideologies, impenetrable to anyone outside academia. For example: Were white feminists who use “standpoint theory”—a feminist critique of allegedly male-centered epistemology—illegitimately appropriating the “testimonial” genre used by Chicana feminists to narrate their stories of oppression? Rust took little part in these “methodological” disputes—if one can describe “Chicana testimonials” as a scholarly “method”—but let the more theoretically up-to-date students hash it out among themselves. Other debates centered on the political implications of punctuation. Rust had changed a student’s capitalization of the word “indigenous” in her dissertation proposal to the lowercase, thus allegedly showing disrespect for the student’s ideological point of view. Tensions arose over Rust’s insistence that students use the more academic Chicago Manual of Style for citation format; some students felt that the less formal American Psychological Association style conventions better reflected their political commitments. During one of these heated discussions, Rust reached over and patted the arm of the class’s most vociferous critical race-theory advocate to try to calm him down—a gesture typical of the physically demonstrative Rust, who is prone to hugs. The student, Kenjus Watson, dramatically jerked his arm away, as a burst of nervous energy coursed through the room.
After each of these debates, the self-professed “students of color” exchanged emails about their treatment by the class’s “whites.” (Asians are not considered “persons of color” on college campuses, for reasons that no one seems willing to explain.) Finally, on November 14, 2013, the class’s three militant students of color, accompanied by at least eighteen students of color from elsewhere at UCLA, as well as by a reporter and photographer from the campus newspaper, made their surprise entrance into Rust’s class as a “collective statement of Resistance by Graduate Students of Color.” The protesters formed a circle around Rust and the remaining four students (one American, two Europeans, and one Asian national) and read aloud their “Day of Action Statement.” That statement suggests that Rust’s modest efforts to help students with their writing faced obstacles too great to overcome.
The Day of Action Statement contains hardly a sentence without some awkwardness of grammar or usage. “The silence on the repeated assailment of our work by white female colleagues, our professor’s failure to acknowledge and assuage the escalating hostility directed at the only Male of Color in this cohort, as well as his own repeated questioning of this male’s intellectual and professional decisions all support a complacency in this hostile and unsafe climate for Scholars of Color,” the manifesto asserts. The Day of A
ction Statement denounces the class’s “racial microaggressions,” which it claims have been “directed at our epistemologies, our intellectual rigor and to a misconstruction of the methodological genealogies that we have shared with the class.” (Though it has only caught on in recent years, the “microaggression” concept was first coined in the 1970s by a black psychiatrist.) Reaching its peroration, the statement unleashes a few more linguistic head-scratchers: “It is, at its most benign, disingenuous to the next generations of Scholars of Color to not seek material and systematic changes in this department. It is a toxic, unsafe and intellectually stifling environment at its current worse.”
The PhD candidates who authored this statement are at the threshold of a career in academia—and not just any career in academia but one teaching teachers. The Day of Action Statement should have been a wake-up call to the school’s authorities—not about UCLA’s “hostile racial climate,” but about their own pedagogical failure to prepare students for scholarly writing and advising. Rust is hardly the first professor to be called a bigot for correcting students’ grammar and spelling. “Asking for better grammar is inflammatory in the school,” said an occasional TA. “You have to give an A or you’re a racist.” Rather than examining their pedagogy, the authorities chose a different course.
The Diversity Delusion Page 7