Getting Under the Skin of “Diversity”

Most people thought it settled the issue.

“It” was The Shape of the River, a 1998 book by Derek Bok (former Harvard president) and William Bowen (former Princeton president) and the issue was whether racial preferences in college admissions are justified. The authors claimed to have proved that racial preferences by elite schools had paid off handsomely because a large number of minority students had completed their studies and gone on to important careers.

“See, diversity has a great benefit for the country!” was the message, and it was enthusiastically received. Advocates for racial preferences (they prefer the euphemism “affirmative action”) were overjoyed at The Shape of the River. Two of the nation’s most respected names in higher education had studied the effects of preferences and found them to be good. End of argument.

Now along comes author Larry Purdy with his book Getting Under the Skin of “Diversity”: Searching for the Color-Blind Ideal. Purdy is a lawyer who worked on the 2003 University of Michigan cases in which the Supreme Court approved the use of racial preferences to realize some vague “educational benefits,” as long as the school takes account of a student’s race in a “nuanced” way. Purdy’s book leaves The Shape of the River in tatters. It’s like a good trial attorney cross examining a witness and tearing his testimony apart.

He hasn’t just mauled the book, though; he has mauled the whole idea that racial preferences are justifiable. If more states consider banning racial preferences, or if the Supreme Court should again take up the issue, Purdy’s strong case that racial preferences do no good and considerable harm should be right in the thick of the battle.

Let’s begin with Purdy’s demonstration that Bok and Bowen’s book is both dishonest and deceptive. It’s dishonest because, contrary to accepted scholarly conventions, the authors (and the foundation that supported their work) will not release the data they used for independent analysis. No scientist would try to get away with a “just take my word for it” gambit, but Bok and Bowen want Americans to do that with regard to their supposed proof of the benefits from “diversity.”

The deception is in the way the authors give the impression that they carefully documented the careers of hundreds of graduates of elite schools who would not have been admitted except for racial preferences. In fact, as the authors have admitted elsewhere, they did not know what number, if any, of the minority graduates actually were “affirmative action” admits. Some of the minority students at the schools Bowen and Bok included were admitted without any preference, but the authors say—again, elsewhere—that it would have been “impossible” for them to know which ones.

Nevertheless, the authors proclaimed that a remarkably high percentage of the minority students who supposedly wouldn’t have been admitted without racial preferences went on to successful careers. But as Purdy explains, “As it turns out, the so-called ‘70 doctors,’ ’60 lawyers,’ ‘125 business executives,’ and ‘well over 300 leaders of civic activities’ who reportedly came from the ‘retrospectively rejected’ group turn out not to be real persons at all. They were mere statistical projections, and highly suspect ones at that.”

With those revelations, The Shape of the River begins to look like a house of cards.

Purdy’s next point on cross-examination is to show that Bowen and Bok left out something very important—the many success stories of students who graduated from historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). HBCUs are not regarded as “elite” institutions and they practice no “affirmative action” to achieve “diversity.” But somehow they also have a very good record of placing their graduates into important jobs and top graduate schools. Why not discuss that?

The reason why, Purdy says, is that it badly undercuts the notion that minority students need to graduate from schools like Harvard or Princeton if they’re to succeed in life.

Quite right, but I wish Purdy had gone just a bit further here to question what is so great about attending an “elite” university. Does the teaching at Harvard or Princeton differ so much from the teaching at, say, Howard University or Spelman College? Do students learn their calculus, physics, economics, history, and so on better at the “elite” schools than at HBCUs (or other institutions)? There is nothing to prove that. In fact, there is good reason to think that the opposite may often be true, since students at smaller schools tend to benefit from more contact with professors, rather than teaching assistants.

The truth of the matter is that minority students succeed without the supposed benefit of admissions preferences. For people like Bowen and Bok to suggest that attending an elite university such as theirs is somehow critical to their chances in life is reminiscent of the story about the rooster who thought that his crowing caused the sun to rise.

Here’s another gaping hole in Shape of the River: Not all of the schools in the group studied (if that’s even the right word) by Bowen and Bok actually use racial preferences. Bryn Mawr College, Purdy points out, is a highly esteemed women’s college that does not consider race in its admissions decisions. Its successful black graduates show that there is no need for any supposed “critical mass” of minority students, which was the University of Michigan’s argument that Justice O’Connor swallowed whole in her majority opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger.

In summary, Purdy demolishes the idea that there are educational and societal benefits from the use of racial preferences. Furthermore, he makes a strong case that there’s a heavy price for allowing public institutions to discriminate on the basis of race. That price is the abandonment of the key principle of Brown v. Board of Education: government must not treat citizens differently because of their race.

Getting Under the Skin of “Diversity” is a direct challenge to the enormous racial preferences industry in America. Purdy says clearly that we can and should be a color-blind society but we can’t get there as long as government colleges and universities insist on favoring some people simply because of their race.