Where the races relate

National Review, Nov 27, 1995 by Steve Sailer

As the universities struggle with growing racial tensions, they ignore the lessons of the battlefield, and of their own playing fields.

Mr. Sailer is a Chicago businessman and writer.

Much ink has been spilled bemoaning the rancorous state of race relations on our nation's elite campuses. Yet our colleges have barely considered any new solutions to the problem. Rather than look beyond the cloisters for novel approaches, administrators merely resort to ever greater doses of the hair of the dog that bit them -- more affirmative action, more diversity workshops, more victims' studies -- with predictably dire results.

They have not noticed, for example, that while colleges have been exacerbating racial tension among 18-to-24-year-old students, the U.S. Army, using radically different techniques, has tremendously reduced racial tension among 18-to-24-year-old soldiers.

Astonishingly, though, colleges have overlooked an even more obvious source of guidance on how to manage race on campus. University presidents methodically ignore the techniques for forging solidarity among their black and white stu- dents that are successfully used by their own best-paid, best-known employees: their football and basketball coaches.

What could colleges learn about race from the Army and from their own athletic establishments? To begin with, they might discover the importance of specialization and critical mass. One little-appreciated reason for the impressive record of accomplishment by blacks in the Army (e.g., after Desert Storm there were 26 black generals) is their lack of success in the Navy (only 2 black admirals). Achievement in one field naturally breeds more success in that same field as initially arbitrary variations self-perpetuate.

According to Charles Moskos of Northwestern University, the leading sociologist of military life, one key to the strong performance of black Army officers has been a self-help organization for black officers called Rocks. In it, senior officers act as mentors to younger men learning how to live up to the demands of being an officer and a gentleman. In the Navy, however, a lack of critical mass hampers similar efforts: if, say, you are the only black officer on a nuclear submarine, you can't turn to another black officer for advice. Thus, it may make more sense for an ambitious young black to join the Army.

On campus, however, the automatic reaction to a shortage of blacks in any field is another affirmative-action campaign. For example, architecture schools have been attempting for years to recruit more blacks and Hispanics. Now, I commend a career in architecture to any young person with a trust fund, but the less privileged must remember that architecture pays wretchedly for the first decade or two (or three or four). Conservative critics of quotas often argue that lowering entrance standards for minorities is Bad, but that more intensely recruiting minorities is Good. Yet seldom does any race-based recruitment campaign stem from a hardheaded analysis of what's in the best interest of the minorities. Instead, affirmative action is an automatic response by white leaders to their discomfort over their Black Lack. Blacks have enough problems of their own without taking on this new Black Man's Bur- den of helping whites feel better about themselves.

Before affirmative action, unpopular but "unprotected" minorities tended to congregate at certain congenial schools: e.g., Mormons at Brigham Young, Catholic ethnics at Jesuit colleges, lesbians at Smith, and free-market economists at the University of Chicago. At these havens, the minorities could be confident of ample role models, freedom from snubs, fair shots at leader- ship positions, courses addressing their interests, responsive audiences for their ideas, and opportunities for their future leaders to get to know one another. The most striking example of this occurred during the Depression, when the Ivy League enforced anti-Semitic quotas. As a result, brilliant Jews congregated at City College of New York (three Nobel Prize winners came from the class of 1937 alone). This critical mass of talent set off chain reactions that energized American intellectual life for decades.

Today, though, a black high-school senior looking for universities where blacks account for a significant fraction of the best minds on campus would end up with the same list as his grandfather: the historically black schools like Howard. In fact, these colleges still appear to produce a dis- proportionate share of black high achievers, despite debilitating competition from far richer colleges for the brightest black minds.

Why doesn't any wealthy mainstream university acquire the critical mass of top black talent that would make it a nurturing environment for black students and professors? Paradoxically, the lock-step obsession of elite colleges with appearing "diverse" has scattered the finest black thinkers in a thin and lonely diaspora across every college town in urban and rural America. Consider the career path of the outstanding scholar of black literature, Henry Louis Gates. A few years ago he publicly mused about going to Princeton, where he could have teamed with Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, philosopher Cornel West, and other leading black humanists. But hiring Professor Gates is a quick (though not cheap) way for a school with few first-rate black professors to advertise its Commitment to Diversity. Bidding wars have thus carried Dr. Gates instead from Yale to Cornell to Duke to Harvard.