The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions - Review

Reason, Feb, 1999 by Richard A. Epstein

by William G. Bowen and Derek Bok, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 472 pages, $24.95

The debate over affirmative action in college admissions has often been couched in terms of moral imperatives. On one side stand the advocates of a color-blind world, who take their cue from Justice John Marshall Harlan's powerful 1896 dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson, which protested judicial acquiescence to racial segregation in the South. Today the opponents of affirmative action hark back to Harlan's theme: Race is irrelevant; only individual merit should determine the distribution of awards and honors in society.

Pitted against the opponents of affirmative action are the equally vocal and passionate educators and social leaders who view with abiding skepticism any abstract moral commitment to color blindness. They believe that affirmative action is necessary in many walks of life. Some of them insist that race-conscious policies must be used to rectify the many forms of discrimination - some invidious, some unconscious - that have scarred the American past and continue to shape its future. Others, including William G. Bowen and Derek Bok, do not emphasize this backward-looking justification. Rather, they advocate diversity in admissions to ensure minorities a meaningful place in the university community, not only for their benefit but for the benefit of everyone else as well.

Much is left unsettled in a debate that takes place at so high a level. The opponents of affirmative action too often sound dogmatic and absolutist in their attacks on what has become a widespread social practice. For their part, the defenders of affirmative action come off as special pleaders who always manage to advance some convenient social justification for policies from which they reap enormous benefits. The constant struggle between this white applicant who has been passed over (or claims such) and that black applicant with inferior academic credentials adds a sharp, human edge to the controversy, which is only partially blunted by the reassurance that affirmative action policies (sometimes gussied up as "race-sensitive" admissions) make everything work out in the long run.

Into this maelstrom have waded two formidable defenders of affirmative action, both with impeccable academic credentials. Bowen, a former president of Princeton University, now heads the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Bok, a former president of Harvard University and dean of the Harvard Law School, now teaches in Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. Both men presided over great American universities noted for their unwavering commitment to affirmative action. In The Shape of the River, they defend in principle the policies that they implemented in practice. They do so in a low-key, measured fashion, with all hyperbolic observations carefully excised. Like Jack Webb, they ask for "just the facts." They believe that once these have been assembled, their detailed account of affirmative action programs will speak for itself.

Bowen and Bok's odd title is consciously lifted from Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi, where that great author notes that any riverboat pilot has to "know the shape of the river perfectly" for navigating both up and down the Mississippi, day or night. That image does not quite work, however. The riverboat pilot has to proceed from detailed firsthand knowledge precisely because maps and charts offer fallible guides. But Bowen and Bok do not rely primarily on experience, anecdote, hunch, or intuition to make their case, even if they intersperse their book with some well-chosen remarks of black and white devotees of affirmative action (without once offering any opposing voices). Recognizing that pleasing testimonials will not win over the determined doubters, Bowen and Bok appeal to data. The data come from surveys of black and white students who enrolled in the freshman classes of 28 selective private and public universities in 1976 and in 1989. The schools covered by the study are mostly private, with only three public institutions among them, all of which rank in the third (lowest) tier of selectivity. Bowen and Bok measured selectivity based on the combined math and verbal SAT scores of the students who enrolled. The first tier, with average scores over 1300, consists of Bryn Mawr, Duke, Princeton, Rice, Stanford, Swarthmore, Williams, and Yale. The second tier, with average scores between 1151 and 1300, consists of Barnard, Columbia, Emory, Hamilton, Kenyon, Northwestern, Oberlin, Pennsylvania, Smith, Tufts, Vanderbilt, Washington University, Wellesley, and Wesleyan. The third tier, with average scores of 1150 or below, consists of Denison, Miami (Ohio), University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill), Penn State, and Tulane.

Bowen and Bok chose two widely separated dates to represent different eras. They excluded more-recent years because there was not enough opportunity to follow these students after college graduation. They also omitted any assessment of affirmative action for Hispanic or Native American populations. In addition, the study leaves out some highly selective universities (Harvard and the University of Chicago among them) and, more important, most major state universities, including those in the California and Texas systems, whose affirmative action programs have been curbed by external pressures. (California's programs were brought to a halt by its Board of Regents, whose decision was ratified in a 1996 state referendum. The Texas system reached the same result through a 1996 ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit.) Nor does the book tackle the thorny problem of affirmative action in faculty hiring - a critical omission.