Campus racism - Race, Scholarship, and Affirmative Action

National Review, May 5, 1989 by Walter E. Williams

Affirmative action is presented as a heroic attempt to atone for past racial sins.

Like most such heroism, it has its victims:

white and Asian students,- independent-minded scholars;

and the minority students who are its supposed beneficiaries.

THE DECADE of the 1980s has seen a rise in racial incidents on America's campuses. At Smith College, "NIGGERS, SPICS, AND CHINKS QUIT COMPLAINING OR GET OUT" was painted on a campus building. In a UC Berkeley building, "NIPS GO HOME" was scrawled on the wall. The University of Michigan's Ann Arbor campus radio station featured ethnic jokes aimed at blacks. The Danmouth Review, an independent conservative student newspaper, published an article satirizing black language titled, "Dis Sho' Ain't No Jive, Bro." A leaflet opposing Holocaust studies and a swastika painted on a wall were found at Stanford University. At Philadelphia's Temple University, a White Student's Union was formed. Since 1986, the National Institute against Prejudice and Violence has documented racial incidents on 160 college campuses, including some of the nation's most prestigious. In addition, more and more colleges are becoming the focal point of membership recruitment by the White Aryan Resistance, Skinheads, and the Ku Klux Klan.

Racial incidents have not been a one-sided coin. A black full professor at Dartmouth College frequently uses the term "honky" in his classroom in reference to whites. A black student at Vassar College hurled anti-Semitic insults at a Jewish student which included "dirty Jew," "stupid Jews," and "f------ Jew." At the University of Pennsylvania campus, three black non-students crushed the skull of an Oriental student. On the campuses of Drexel University and the University of Pennsylvania, black nonstudents have been alleged to systematically seek out white students to extort and rob.

Civil-rights advocates, affirmative-action officials, and politicians see the increase in campus racial incidents as the result of an "atmosphere" created by the Reagan Administration. Their reasoning is that by its attacks on affirmative action, the Administration created a perception of a tolerance for racism. To counteract this "atmosphere," there have been calls for more affirmative-action recruitment programs, mandated Black Studies classes as part of the college curriculum, more "cultural diversity," and more resources devoted to race relations.

Here we might explore the opposite line of causation and ask instead, what role has current campus racial policy played in the build-up of resentment and bitterness, and the consequent rise in campus racial incidents?

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION in recruitment makes the assumption, implicit or explicit, that a pool of black academic talent exists and that the paucity of blacks enrolled in the nation's colleges, medical schools, and law schools is a result of racial discrimination in admissions. Whether colleges currently engage in discriminatory policies against blacks is a matter for speculation; however, the question of just how large is the pool of black academic talent that meets standard college admissions criteria is not.

Black students score well below the national average on every measure of academic achievement. In 1983, fewer than 4,200 black college-bound high-school graduates, out of 75,400, had grade-point averages of 3.75 (B ) or better, compared to 7,858 out of 36,048 Asians, and 115,722 out of 701,345 whites. That means that 5.5 per cent of black college-bound seniors earned B averages, compared to nearly 22 per cent for Asians and 16.5 per cent for whites.

Standard Achievement Test (SAT) scores tell an even more dismal story about college preparation. In 1983, across the nation, 66 out of 71,137 black college-bound seniors (less than a tenth of 1 per cent) achieved 699, out of a possible 800, on the verbal portion of the SAT, and fewer than a thousand achieved scores of 600 or higher. On the mathematics portion of the SAT, 205 blacks had scores over 699 and fewer than 1,700 achieved scores of 600 or higher.

Of the roughly 35,200 Asians taking the test, 496 scored over 699 on the verbal portion (1.4 per cent) and 3,015 on the mathematics. Of the roughly 963,000 whites taking the test, 9,028 scored over 699 on the verbal (just under I per cent) and 31,704 scored over 699 on tbe mathematics.

An important debate wages over just what SAT scores measure and predict, and how reliably they do so. Regardless of the outcome of the debate, the tests do say something about academic achievement in the tested material. Black performance on them has important implications concerning the availability of academically qualified black students for college recruitment.

At some of the nation's most prestigious schools, the SAT scores of the student body are as follows: at Amherst, 66 per cent of the students score above 600 on the verbal and 83 per cent above 600 on the mathematics; at Bryn Mawr, 70per cent above 600 on the verbal and 70 per cent over 600 on the mathematics; at Haverford, 67 and 86 per cent; at MIT, 72 and 97 per cent. The median student SAT scores for the verbal and mathematics portions are 600 at Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Georgetown, Harvard, Oberlin, Princeton, Williams, Yale, and other colleges ranked as most competitive. Student SAT scores at schools ranked very competitive, such as Franklin and Marshall, Lafayette, Brandeis, and Lehigh, range in the high 500s and low 600s.