The changing shape of the river: Affirmative action and recent social science research

Academic Questions

Volumn 17, Issue 4, 2004, Pages 7-59

  Nieli, Russell K ^a  

^a PRINCETON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 57349086730     PISSN: 08954852     EISSN: 19364709     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1007/s12129-004-1040-3     Document Type: Article

References (51)

1. William Bowen and Derek Bok, The Shape of the River (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).
2. NBER Working Paper # 7322, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA, August 1999; "Estimating the Payoffto Attending a More Selective College: An Application of Selection on Observables and Unobservables," The Quarterly Journal of Economics (November 2002): 1491-1527. The page numbers in the text refer to this latter journal article unless otherwise indicated.
3. In a highly unusual procedure, the Mellon Foundation designated the results of its College and Beyond survey as a "restricted access database," and to date it has not made the database available to any scholars known to hold views critical of affirmative action in higher education. Robert Lerner, a distinguished sociologist who has written one of the most intelligent scholarly criticisms of The Shape of the River, was specitically turned down in his request for access to the Mellon data. [See I,erner's article "The Empire Strikes Back," available online at www.ceonsa.org/bok.tmnl].
4. The C&B database contains information on students entering the following schools as freshmen in 1976 and 1989. Liberal Arts Colleges: Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Denison, Hamilton, Kenyon, Oberlin, Smith, Swarthmore, Wellesley, Wesleyan, Williams. Research Universities: Columbia, Duke, Emory, Miami, Northwestern, Pennsylvania State, Princeton, Rice, Stanford, Tufts, Tulane, University of Michigan-Ann ArBor, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, University of Pennsylvania, Vanderbilt, Washington University, Yale.
5. Stephen Cole and Elinor Barber, Increasing Faculty Diversity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 206.
6. ThomasJ Kane, Racial and Ethnic Preference in College Admissions, in The Black/White Test Score Gap, ed. Christopher Jencks and Meredith Phillips (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1998), chapter 12.
7. Abigail Thernstrom, Retlections on the Shape of the River, U.CL.A. Law Review, volume 46, number 5 (June 1999): 1583-1631.
8. This article presents a wealth of empirical material critical of the Bowen and Bok position on affirmative action.
9. Robin Wilson, The Unintended Consequences of Mfirmative Action, Chronicle of Higher Education, 31 January 2003; available online at http://chronicle.com.
10. Robert Klitgaard, Choosing Elites (New York: Basic Books, 1985).
11. Claude M. Steele and Joshua Aronson, Stereotype Threat and the Test Performance of Academically Successful African Americans, in The Black-White Test Score Gap, ed.Jencks and Phillips, 401-430.
12. Claude Steele is reluctant to acknowledge the obvious anti-affirmative action implications of his own research--one suspects out of a desire to maintain good relations with his affirmative action-supporting friends and colleagues. In the spring of 2001, Steele gave a public lecture on the Princeton University campus in which he discussed his research on stereotype vulnerability. In the question-and-answer period that followed the lecture, the present writer specifically asked Steele if it was not likely that the negative stigmas and negative stereotypes that black students must labor under would be "reintorced, strengthened, and perpetuated" at the elite colleges and universities by the affirmative action policies at these institutions.
13. At first Steele tried to evade the question by answering a related but different question--i.e., whether affirmative action policies have created the negative stigmas and stereotypes that exist about blacks in America (answer: they don't, the stigmas and stereotypes existed long before affirmative action). I immediately saw where he was going with his response and abruptly interrupted, "Wait a minute! I'm not asking whether affirmative action creates negative stigmas and stereotypes but whether it reinforces and perpetuates those which already exist in the culture.
14. Isn't it likely that affirmative action policies will have this effect?" Recognizing that he had to give a direct answer to an obviously disturbing question, he conceded that "some" affirmative action policies probably have this harmfid effect, though he made no effort to distinguish which ones would and which ones would not fall into the stereotype-reinforcing category. On this issue, would it not be unreasonable to speculate that the lower the level of racial preference at an institution, and the closer that entering black and Hispanic students are to their white and Asian classmates in terms of test scores and high school grades, the less stereotype vulnerability the black and Hispanic students will face? The mismatch hypothesis seems commonsensical here.
15. For those who doubt this, ask yourself this question: Would a black student with, say, a 1200 SAT score and a 3.5 GPA face the same level of stereotype vulnerability at a school like Rutgers, where students typically have SAT scores in the 1100s and GPAs around 3.4, as at Princeton or Yale, where SAT scores average around 145(I and most students have GPAs of 3.8 or higher?.
16. Shelby Steele, Second Thoughts about Race in America (New York, Madison Books, 1991), 87, 89.
17. Many years before Steele's remarks, Thomas Sowell had similar comments on the psychological harm that racial preference policies would exact on their intended beneficiaries. In his book Black Education: Myths and Tragedies, Sowell gave eloquent wfice to the devastating effect that affirmative action policies would likely have both on black sell'confidence and on the image of blacks in the minds of whites: The actual harm done by quotas is tar greater than having a few incompetent people here and there--and the harm that will actually be done will be harm primarily to the black population.
18. What all the arguments and campaigns for quotas are really saying, loud and clear, is that black people. just don't have it, and that they will have to be given something in order to have something. The devastating impact of this message on black people--particularly black young people--will outweigh any few extra. jobs that may result from this strategy. Those black people who are already competent, and who could be instrumental in producing more competence among this rising generation, will be completely undermined as black becomes synonymous--in the minds of black and white alike--with incompetence, and black achievement becomes synonymous with charity and [political] payotts.
19. Frederick E. Vars and William G. Bowen, Scholastic Aptitude Test Scores, Race, and Academic Performance in Selective Colleges and Universities, in The Black/White Test Score Gap, ed. Jencks and Phillips, 457-489.
20. Klitgaard, op. tit., 188.
21. Since there are not enough white students at the HBCUs with which to compare black performance, the HBCU "underperformance" figure given by Cole and Barber is determined by comparing HBCU blacks of a given SAT interval with similar whites at the predominantly white institutions. That the greater success of high-SAT blacks in getting A and A- grades at the HBCUs is not an artifact of differing grading policies is shown by Cole and Barber by the fact that the grade distribution at the HBCUs is much lower than that at the more grade-inflated state universities and elite institutions.
22. A black student with a 1200-1299 SAT is more likely to get an A or A- GPA at an HBCU than a comparable white at one of the predominantly white institutions in the Cole/Barber study despite the fact that, proportionally, there are many more A and A- range grades given out at the predominantly white institutions.
23. Johnson's 1965 Executive Order 11246 would be effectively transformed in 1971 by the Labor Department's Office of Federal Contract Compliance into a vehicle for the promotion of racial preferences. The original executive order, however, mandated the strictest color-blindness by federal contractors in all employment practices.
24. The term "affirmative action" appeared just once in the executive order: "The contractor will not discriminate against any employee or applicant for employment because of race, creed, color, or national origin. The contractor will take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color or national origin" (emphasis added). On the movement from colorblind to color-conscious theories of racial justice.
25. Nathan Glazer, Affirmative Discrimination (New York: Basic Books, 1975).
26. Herman Belz, Equality Transformed (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1990).
27. John David Skrentny, The Ironies of Affirmative Action (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
28. Stanley Rothman, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Neil Nevitte, Racial Diversity Reconsidered, The Public Interest, (Spring 2003), 4 online at www.thepublicinterest.com.
29. Stanley Rothman, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Neil Nevitte, Does Enrollment Diversity Improve University Education, International Journal of Public Opinion Research, volume 15, number 1 (2003): 8-26.
30. A less technical version of this paper appears as "Racial Diversity Reconsidered," in The Public Interest, Spring 2003 (available online at www.thepublicinterest.com). The quotations in the text are taken from the online version of The Public Interest article.
31. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987).
32. Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America, (New York: Free Press, 2000), 89, 229-230.
33. McWhorter's solution to the problem is the same as Bloom's: "Black students often come to a selective campus wary that white students suspect them of being affirmative-action admits and thus not equally qualified. A simple solution would be to eliminate the policy that makes the white students' suspicion--let's face it--usually correct." (236).
34. The figures are taken from the College Entrance Examination Board, 1995 National Ethnic/Sex Data, as tabulated in Stephan.
35. Abigail Thernstrom, America in Black and White, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), 399, Table 4.
36. Abigail Thernstrom, America in Black and White, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997)., 407, Table 7.
37. Discussion and evaluation of some of these theories is presented in The Black/White Test Score Gap, ed. Jencks and Phillips.
38. The Bowen and Vats article in Ibid., 475n (footnote #27). Against those who see racial preference policy as creating disincentives to work hard for those in the beneficiary categories, Bowen and Vars respond: "Even if affirmative action were to shift upward career prospects for black graduates, the marginal payoffs to academic achievement should remain constant." This is true, of course, and if black students acted like profit-maximizing business firms in a competitive market--or like Weber's inner-worldly Puritan ascetics--one would expect no falloffin their efforts to strive relentlessly to gain admission to the most prestigious graduate and professional schools possible, even ones well out of reach for their equally smart or smarter Asian and white classmates.
39. However, if the ultimate goals that black students set for themselves in terms of graduate and professional schools is heavily influenced by the goals and aspirations of their white and Asian classmates, and if they can attain these goals with less study and more leisure time than these classmates and peers, then one would expect a considerable falloff in black effort in response to the racial preferences they receive.
40. I'll let the reader judge for himself whether the typical American teenager and young twenty-something he knows who has academic talent conforms more to the profit-maximizing-firm model presupposed in the Bowen/Vars response or to the account of John McWhorter in the text describing his own education. In deciding this issue, it should also be kept in mind that blacks on average receive much less pressure from home to get good grades than whites and Asians.
41. There is litde or no racial preference given at the lower-middle level institutions; modest preferences given at the middle level schools; but large preferences given at the top of the selectivity pyramid (elite and upper middle level schools). See on this the article by ThomasJ. Kane cited in footnote #6.
42. Shelby Steele, A Dream Differed (NewYork: HarperCollins Publishers, 1998), 126-127.
43. John U. Ogbu, Black American Students in an Affluent Suburb: A Study of Academic Disengagement (Mahway, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2003).
44. Signithia Fordham, Black Students' School Success: Coping with the Burden of Acting White, Urban Review, volume 18, number 3 (1986): 1-31.
45. Laurence Steinberg, Beyond the Classroom, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1996.
46. Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom, No Excuses (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003).
47. His conclusions on this score are thus different from the studies of affirmative action policies at undergraduate institutions where preference polices seem to be important primarily at the more competitive schools.
48. Lawrence E. Harrison, Who Prospers? How Cultural Values Shape Economic and Political Success (New York: Basic Books, 1992).
49. A Dream Deferred, op. cit.
50. Shelby Steele, White Guilt, in the American Scholar (Autumn 1990): 497-506.
51. All the subsequent page nmnbers in the text refer to this article.