Amardeep Singh of No False Medicine comments on a very interesting NYT article on affirmative action, "Diversity's False Solace". (Discriminations doesn't yet have any commentary up on this article, but I'm sure some soon will be.)
Anyway, NYT reporter Walter Benn Michaels believes that AA policies are a "solace" to society because they suggest that racism is the real problem. But Michaels believes economic inequality is the real issue:
...the real value of diversity is not primarily in the contribution it makes to students' self-esteem. Its real value is in the contribution it makes to the collective fantasy that institutions ranging from U.I.C. to Harvard are meritocracies that reward individuals for their own efforts and abilities -- as opposed to rewarding them for the advantages of their birth. For if we find that the students at an elite university like Harvard or Yale are almost as diverse as the students at U.I.C., then we know that no student is being kept from a Harvard because of his or her culture...
We are often reminded of how white our classrooms would look if we did away with affirmative action. But imagine what Harvard would look like if instead we replaced race-based affirmative action with a strong dose of class-based affirmative action...If the income distribution at Harvard were made to look like the income distribution of the United States, some 57 percent of the displaced students would be rich, and most of them would be white. It's no wonder that many rich white kids and their parents seem to like diversity. Race-based affirmative action, from this standpoint, is a kind of collective bribe rich people pay themselves for ignoring economic inequality. The fact (and it is a fact) that it doesn't help to be white to get into Harvard replaces the much more fundamental fact that it does help to be rich and that it's virtually essential not to be poor...
In the end, we like policies like affirmative action not so much because they solve the problem of racism but because they tell us that racism is the problem we need to solve. And the reason we like the problem of racism is that solving it just requires us to give up our prejudices, whereas solving the problem of economic inequality might require something more -- it might require us to give up our money...
This, if you're on the right, is the gratifying thing about campus radicalism. When student and faculty activists struggle for cultural diversity, they are in large part battling over what skin color the rich kids should have. Diversity, like gout, is a rich people's problem. And it is also a rich people's solution.
Singh finds Michaels' arguments to be provocative but wonders where the solutions are:
There is no question that Benn Michaels is pointing to a real problem with affirmative action as it is currently conceptualized by left-leaning academics. But what Benn Michaels doesn't, or won't, address is how to realistically respond to the problem of economic disparity.
To begin with, he himself is well aware of the fact that the there is a correlation between the ethnic diversity at UI-Chicago and its relative poverty. So his attempt to lable ethnic diversity "false" and class diversity "true" strikes me as a little thin...
An obvious solution (to the larger problem) is to use multi-variable affirmative action, whereby wealthy universities would aim to achieve both economic and racial diversity, preferably not with the same students (i.e., admit wealthy students of color and poor caucasian students)...
Some might suggest a socialized university system, similar to European models, to fix this problem, but it's unreasonable to believe that this could happen in our society:
Sorry, but I don't see it happening. Call it false consciousness, but most Americans (and many people abroad) have a great deal of pride and awe about the wealthy universities, precisely because they are so powerful and elitist. Economically and politically, these universities have never been stronger and more influential -- and that includes the university where Benn Michaels himself taught for many years, the very wealthy and elitist Johns Hopkins University.
The system may be ugly, but it is surprisingly healthy.
I remember the first time I took a Canadian friend on a tour of Princeton University's campus. I thought he'd appreciate the grand buildings, historical sense, and gothic flair of the surroundings. Instead, all he did was puke and whine about "rich people" for an hour. As though everyone who ever attended Princeton (a) was filthy rich through inherited funds and (b) never gave anything back to society by, say, doing research, starting businesses, or creating jobs. As though everyone at Princeton should have given all their money to the poor, dressed in rags, and built a campus out of plywood. As though the money flowing around at Princeton didn't help stellar research organizations like the Institute for Advanced Study develop (even though it's a separate non-profit organization).
No, to him, Princeton was just the playground of the rich, and rich persons were to be hated. But to me, the university is a symbol of a healthy and truly diverse American college society that has a variety of college options for our very heterogenous population. The fact that some of our elite colleges are priced out of the range of most Americans is, to me, not bothersome, because while a college degree is important for advancement in American society, this is not a country in which the particular alma mater determines the rest of one's life.
Posted by kswygert at April 13, 2004 01:12 PM