Counting Asians - affirmative action - Back to School: Dumb and Dumber - Cover Story

National Review, Sept 25, 1995 by Peter Shaw

EARLIER this summer the University of California at Berkeley released figures on affirmative action that make clear the degree to which Asians, and to a lesser extent whites, are being excluded from that university. Berkeley's estimates of what would happen to white and especially Asian enrollment if affirmative action were done away with are quite conservative. Yet they yield the following indications: Asians would go from 40 per cent to 55 per cent of the student body. Whites would go from 30 per cent to 35 per cent. Hispanics would go from 15 per cent to 5 per cent. Blacks would go from over 6 per cent to under 2 per cent.

Such an outcome makes clear the extent to which Asian-descended students are currently discriminated against. Why, then, did Berkeley reveal the truth?

Because, it would seem, its administration realized that the changes predicted by the university's figures would come as a shock to even the most decided opponents of affirmative action -- such as Ward Connerly, the black University of California Regent who had called for an end to affirmative action earlier in the year, provoking the Regents' stormy July meeting. By suddenly telling the truth about how discriminatory the university actually was, the administrators could hope to preserve affirmative action.

Evidently they took their cue from the shocked reactions to estimates similar to theirs in a study done for the Board of Regents. Once that earlier study indicated the results of eliminating affirmative action in admissions, the burden of proof shifted to that system's critics. They became obliged to show how the resultingly low representation of blacks and Hispanics could be defended. Such became the dilemma of Ward Connerly. Two weeks after release of the Berkeley study, the New York Times reported that Connerly 'now says he sees merit in some cases of preferential treatment for black and Hispanic students.' In the event, although the Regents voted to end affirmative action based on sex or race, they inserted an escape clause concerning socioeconomic factors that will surely preserve affirmative action almost as we know it.

But what if the unthinkable did actually take place? What would be the consequences of actually allowing a student population over 50 per cent Asian and under 2 per cent black?

At Berkeley, Stanford, the Ivy League, and other prestigious colleges, the change would amount to a distinct loss of prestige. Why? Just as one of the old measures of prestige was not having too many Jews in attendance, one current measure is not having too many Asians. (Blacks and Hispanics admitted under affirmative action pose no problem, since they can be viewed as charity cases, and the dispensing of charity boosts esteem.) If the prestigious schools were ever in any doubt about the connection between their own standing and the social standing of their student bodies, they had only to consider the counterexample of New York's City College. Thanks to its unfashionable, working-class, largely Jewish student body, that school never could gain prestige. Its students were regularly going on to win Nobel Prizes and to otherwise distinguish themselves in society, yet their successes could not produce prestige.

An unfettered admission of Asians would not make Berkeley as unfashionable as City College of New York used to be. But the place would undoubtedly become academically more like the old City College. The feminist, homosexualist, ethnocentric, and other narrow and politically conceived courses that now make up an important part of the curriculum would hardly be of interest to the Asian majority. To accommodate them, departments would have to shift from the intellectually disreputable back to traditional learning. Nor would inflated grades any longer prevail, since these students would be strivers wanting objective measures by which they could be seen to have excelled others. Among other things, then, the feared flood of Asians would lead the prestige schools away from some of the intellectually disreputable ways into which they have fallen.

At the same time, other colleges in the nation, most of which have labored to keep up with the worst practices of the day, would also feel free to back off from them. Their resolve would be strengthened, moreover, by having in their student bodies many highly qualified students who could not get into the prestigious schools under the new admissions policy. The best of these students would find places in schools of the second rank. Yet this apparent step down would not constitute a tragedy for these students. After all, the so-called second-rank schools do not lack academic excellence so much as prestige.

Now these colleges would be in a position to compete with their former betters in both areas. First, the influx of better-qualified students would gain them higher intellectual reputations. Second, the influx of socially well-connected students pushed out by the Asians would raise the second-rank schools' quotient of the impalpable, formerly unattainable kind of prestige. There would, in short, take place what might be termed a democratization of prestige.