X-Percent Plans : After preferences, more race games - guaranteed percentages of minority students are latest affirmative action strategy

National Review, Feb 7, 2000 by Shelby Steele

WE are a society exhausted and polarized by the affirmative-action impasse. So it was not surprising to see excitement over Florida governor Jeb Bush's new best-of-both-worlds plan to have diversity in Florida's state universities without racial preferences. In place of the usual preferences, Bush proposes to make the top 20 percent of graduates in each Florida high school eligible for university admission. This, he argues, may bring in even more minorities than the current regime of preferences. In Texas, where racial preferences were eliminated by court decision, the University of Texas already claims some success with a 10 percent plan implemented last year. In California, despite a system-wide increase in minority enrollments after Proposition 209 ended preferences in that state, the University of Cali fornia still hopes an upcoming 4 percent plan will bring more minorities into its two most selective campuses, Berkeley and UCLA. So, do "X-percent" plans, with their promise of minority inclusion without racial preferences, offer the longed-for relief from our withering affirmative-action debate?

Sadly, I think not. Some problems with these plans are immediately obvious. Under racial preferences, lower academic standards were effectively isolated to minorities, so that standards elsewhere were not much affected. But X-percent plans spread lowered standards far past the minority track where low grade-point averages and high dropout rates have long been tolerated. These plans lower the academic norm of the entire student body so that schools must come down in standards simply to meet their students. The University of Texas has already had to come up with remedial classes for pre-med students with SAT scores as much as 200 points below the university average. When competitive admissions give way to guaranteed percentages, great universities-as the famous decline of CCNY after open enrollments makes clear-slide into mediocrity. Good faculty go elsewhere. Research money follows. Graduates become less competitive. Funding declines.

This diminishes precisely the first-rate state universities that have historically offered superb educations to hard-working students from modest backgrounds. And, over time, these plans will be yet another pressure to relegate equality to the public sector and excellence to the private sector. This could extend to universities the sort of class divide and white flight that has already taken hold in K-12 education. Unencumbered by a percent requirement, private universities and colleges could simply continue to maintain competitive admissions for whites and Asians by targeting only blacks and Hispanics for lowered standards. This capacity to isolate (or seem to isolate) academic mediocrity strictly to a minority track would give even second- and third-tier private institutions a great advantage over their public competitors.

All of this raises a timeless question: Must equality always come at the expense of excellence? My answer is no. I believe it is quite possible to have racial equality without destroying our public institutions. Moreover, this can be an equality not just of rights but also of performance levels. This does not happen now because we have pursued equality in education more by engineering unequals into institutions than by insisting on their development to parity with others. We have conceived of equality as mere "inclusion" rather than as an equality of skills between the races.

And this engineering works by one all-important mechanism: a tolerance for levels of academic mediocrity in blacks and Hispanics that are rarely tolerated in whites and Asians. The racial preference is simply a willingness to tolerate more mediocrity in some races than in others. Thus the engineering method can relegate many minority students to an academic limbo in which there are neither serious expectations nor serious consequences. And in this limbo there is no clear link between one's skill development and one's advancement. One's presence on campus is tied at least as much to a racial politics as to one's own efforts. Which does one do: develop skills or hone a politicized racial identity?

Conversely, a developmental model-in which minorities are asked to become competitive with others-restores the natural incentives of life. Excellence becomes the mechanism of inclusion and academic weakness the reason for exclusion. In this model, disadvantage is not exculpatory; it is a prod to excellence. Where this model prevails-sports, music, entertainment-blacks thrive.

So why do we keep trying to engineer rather than asking for development? Because American institutions and their largely white leaders lack the moral authority to insist on true excellence from blacks in the way that they insist on it from whites and Asian-Americans. These institutions and leaders must seek racial moral authority-must prove the negative, that they are not racist-simply to function in a society greatly shamed by its racist history.