Re-examining racial preferences

Using student newspapers to ventilate has become a rite of passage for young journalists. And few subjects invite ventilating better than the racial preferences of our Law School's admission policy. Still, last week's personal attack begs reply.\nThe author accuses me of cowardice for timing my Op-Ed piece in the Indianapolis Star while the University was on vacation. This charge was first advanced by the Black Law Student Association which deemed my timing a "calculated, cowardly move." In fact I learned of the Star's invitation to write that Op-Ed piece on Wednesday, Dec. 4, just after the Supreme Court agreed to hear the attack on Michigan's racial preferences. The deadline the Indianapolis Star gave me was 5 p.m. that day, Dec. 4, and I was told the piece would appear Friday, Dec. 6. It was the Star's decision, without any input from me, to postpone publication to Dec. 27. An inquiry to the Star or to me would have instantly revealed this, had the authors any regard for whether the accusation they were about to publish was true. \nThe author also claims I lacked "the courage to address the IU community directly" before turning to a wider audience. I accept the importance of seeking change internally first. But what does the author claim I should have done, that is, apart from what, over the last 15 years, I have done -- calling for change inside the Admissions Committee, resigning from the Committee on the ground our policy was morally wrong, speaking at workshops inside the Law School and circulating my remarks to the faculty, monitoring over the years how severe our preferences had become and sending those reports to the faculty and on to the University administrators, publishing those reports in a low circulation journal and urging the local paper to discuss our policy, or at least not to publish uncritically the University's assurance that because we have never discriminated on race, the Michigan case has nothing to do with us? By that point the refusal of the "IU community" to even acknowledge our policy was clear.\nThe negatives of racial preferences demand center stage: Racial preferences impede minorities' progress toward equality. The person society considers incapable of competing on equal terms is not a person society will view as equal or will respect. To the extent preferences are defended on the ground of past racism, they send the deeply offensive message that minorities lack the resilience to overcome their special obstacles. In writing against racial preferences, Professor John McWhorter of Berkeley, who happens to be African-American, writes of his disgust with defenders of racial preferences telling him that his child must be held to a lower standard because some women will have held their purses closer as he passed, or because a grade school teacher will not have called on him as much as on the non-minority sitting next to him, or he might have added, because a policeman will have pulled him over while driving for no reason, or because a taxicab driver will have refused to pick him up. Non-minority applicants, in contrast, are expected to overcome any obstacles they face and still meet the normal standard. The non-minority immigrant arriving here as a teenager speaking no English is held to the normal standard but not the middle class minority raised in the suburbs.\nAnd the standard to which minorities are held is sharply lower. In the Michigan undergraduate case the evidence showed that a record of grades, test scores and other factors that gave a non-minority only a 1 percent chance of being admitted gave a minority a 64 percent chance. And a somewhat better record that gave a non-minority a 10 percent chance of being admitted gave a minority a 95 percent chance. The evidence in the Michigan Law School Case was more dramatic yet. Professor Kinley Larntz, a statistics professor at the University of Minnesota, analyzed Michigan's law school admission data from 1995 to 2000. His calculations show that, averaged over those six years, the relative odds of acceptance for minority candidates were 234.5 times better than those for non-minority applicants with the same GPA and LSAT scores. (For comparison, the relative odds of heavy smokers getting lung cancer are 14 times the odds of non-smokers.) The difference in Michigan's odds ratios is, in effect, the difference between a presumptive admission for all but the worst minority candidates and a presumptive rejection for all but the best non-minority candidates. \n Plainly, race is hardly just one of many factors in admissions. It is a factor given singular and stunning weight.\n Racial preferences also create unwarranted suspicions about those minority students who would have won admission without them. Preferences lead non-minority fellow students, for example, to suspect, incorrectly, that all minority students are less qualified than themselves. \n Much is made of how many minorities admitted through preferences graduate. But modern law schools are structured so barely one percent of students who persist will fail to graduate. As McWhorter asked, if an orchestra performs a symphony, should the audience and performers be content that the orchestra managed to finish it? \nRacial preferences also serve as a substitute for efforts to prepare minority students better. One of the effects of banning racial preferences in California was the creation of programs like the Berkeley Pledge devoted to preparing minority and other high school students so they can present competitive applications to schools. But this effort only came to the fore after racial preferences were banned.\nI have not begun to list all that's wrong with racial preferences. The corrosive effect on the institutions employing them, the needless stereotyping on which they rest, the disconnect between racial preferences and either poverty or poor schooling, and the injustice preferences inflict on displaced non-minorities justify books in themselves. That one cannot oppose preferences here after all these years, except at the cost of being labeled a racist, is a profound sadness.