June 23, 2003

HORSEFEATHERS RECOMMENDS: CAROL IANNONE ON AFFIRMATIVE ACTION

        The Supreme Court is about to hand down its ruling on affirmative action in education. All the legal arguments for and against have been heard. None however, directly address the underlying assumptions about human nature held by its advocates. Carol Iannone describes the disastrous effects on higher education of pursuing the unrealizable utopian fantasy of equality of results. She writes:

"...supporters of affirmative action tried to reconcile racial preferences with traditional American ideals of liberty, equality, and individual merit. They insisted that it would not mean reverse discrimination, that it would not bring quotas, that it would not require the lowering of standards, that it was simple justice to compensate for slavery and segregation, that it was only a temporary measure, and that race would be just a tipping factor to help schools or employers choose among equally qualified individuals. As those who have followed the issue know, every one of these arguments has been proven false. Affirmative action did mean reverse discrimination, it did mean quotas, it did require the massive lowering of standards, it was not justified by slavery and segregation, it was not temporary, and race was not just a tipping factor but the decisive factor."(Read the whole article here)

        Why do supporters of affirmative action continue to argue their case in the face of overwhelming evidence of its pernicious effects? In part because they are in the grip of a utopian, therapeutic fantasy that they can impose a shared group identity on variegated individuals. They view human nature as infinitely malleable and improvable through social engineering. Thus we learn of "whiteness studies" to go with "black studies", "chicano studies", "womens studies", etc. etc. designed to enhance or diminish self-esteem, and to make young people think of themselves as members of a victimized or oppressor group, rather than as individuals with unique talents and deficits. How much easier to believe my struggles mastering calculus are caused by oppression. Or perhaps, if I'm a member of a certain minority, I won't even try to master calculus because it was the creation of a dead white male, Sir Isaac Newton. The failure of utopian enterprises always requires scapegoats. In this instance the rational arguments of critics like Carol Iannone are dismissed as "racist". Still, in the end the effort to re-engineer human nature will fail. In the meantime, however, great damage has already been done to higher education. It is no longer surprising that graduates of India's Institute of Technological Training, where admission is strictly based on merit, are widely regarded by our own graduate schools as better educated in the sciences than Ivy League graduates. Given what has happened to our elite liberal arts colleges, those Indian scientists are probably better off for not having their heads filled with the PoMo cant that passes for today's liberal education

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