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Wednesday, July 4, 2018

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION


Among today’s news stories was a report that the Trump administration, not surprisingly, will oppose considerations of race in college admissions.  As I walked this morning, I carried out an argument in my head, as I so often do, this time against a defender of the administration position arguing in typical self-righteous fashion for college admissions based solely on merit, on demonstrated academic accomplishment or promise.  Rather than key my discussion today to the fact that it is the Fourth of July [we anarchists are not big on national holidays], I thought I would put in some coherent form the substance of my imagined argument.  As always, I find it useful to begin with some statistics and some history [save when talking about Kant, but that is another matter entirely.]

Higher education on the North American continent is 382 years old, if we take the 1636 founding of Harvard College as our terminus a quo.  Over that time, there have been four significant changes in the undergraduate portion of American higher education, all of them taking place in the fifteen years or so after World War II.

The first change was the explosion of public higher educational institutions, dramatically and permanently changing the balance of private and public institutions.  Until the end of WW II, the private sector dominated, even though, as a consequence of the Land Grant Act of 1862, a sector of state universities came into existence.  Although private colleges are created only rarely, so many state university campuses and state college systems have come into existence in the past sixty or seventy years that there are now more than 2,600 college and university campuses in the United States offering four year degrees.

The second change was the transformation of regional colleges and universities into national [and even international] institutions.  Before the war, schools like Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Princeton, Chicago, Michigan, et al. served mostly local clientele.  It was unusual, for example, for someone from the Midwest or far west or deep south to go to college in New England.  Starting after the war, schools actively sought nationally representative student bodies.

The third change was the dramatic rise in the number of applicants to the most highly sought after colleges, a change in part resulting from the sharp increase in the number of young people seeking higher educational degrees [I leave to one side the deeper question whether they were seeking higher education.]  A few anecdotal statistics will illustrate this change.  In 1950, when I started my undergraduate education at Harvard, only 5% of adult Americans had college degrees.  Ninety-five percent did not.  Sixty eight years later, 35% of adult Americans have college degrees, still a small minority, but seven times as many proportionately.  When I applied 1949 for admission to Harvard, 2200 young men applied, 1650 were admitted, and 1250 of us showed up to form the class of ’54.  It was much easier to get into Harvard when I applied than it is today to get into the University of Massachusetts.

There was a fourth change, the change that has given rise to the debate about so-called Affirmative Action.  It was a response both to the dramatic rise in the number of high school graduates seeking college degrees and to the transformation of colleges and universities from regional to national aspirations.  Let me explain, again by the use of an anecdote.  By 1960, I had my doctorate, had done a stint in the army, and was an Instructor at Harvard, living in Winthrop House as a Resident Tutor [free room and board in return for talking to undergraduates.]  One day McGeorge Bundy stopped by to visit the Senior Common Room.  He was then Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, before he went off to Washington to be Jack Kennedy’s National Security Advisor and oversee the Bay of Pigs and America’s entry into Viet Name.  He remarked that Harvard now was getting 5000 applicants a year [two and a half times as many as a decade earlier, but of course nothing like the 42,742 who applied this past year.]  Bundy said, “One thousand are clear admits, one thousand are clear rejects, and the real problem is making decisions about the remaining three thousand, every one of whom has something to be said for him.”

In short, elite colleges went from having admissions requirements to designing and implementing admissions policies.  Until that period, colleges had simply specified the preparation required for admissions – so much Latin, so much mathematics, and so forth.  But the flood of applicants at the elite schools presented a problem.  Many more young people were applying for admission than there was room for, so some deliberate choices had to be made about what one wanted the entering class to look like.  This was not a problem at the majority of colleges and universities, be it noted.  They were fighting to fill their classrooms.  But with the competition for good jobs in the economy and the rising educational credentials for those jobs, made possible by the increase in the number of college graduates, the value of a degree from an elite college soared, and so did the pool of applicants.

The first result was an expansion of the college bureaucracies.  Entire Admissions Departments, headed up by Deans of Admissions, came into existence.  Little by little, decisions were made at the administrative level that translated in to admissions policies.  A number of admissions criteria were put in place around the country, not only in the private higher educational sector, but in the elite public sector as well.  Everyone these days is aware of at least some of these criteria, but it is worth enumerating them to focus our attention on just how much of a change in admissions practices they involved.  Here are just a few:

1:         Private colleges adopted the policy of giving preference to applicants one of whose parents had attended the college – so-called “legacies.”
2:         Co-educational colleges sought to establish and maintain a rough gender balance.
3:         Colleges actively sought to achieve geographical distribution, sending admissions personnel on recruiting missions to secondary schools in underrepresented regions of the country.
4:         Colleges sought to achieve and maintain a balance of undergraduates pursuing degrees in the Arts and Humanities, in the Social Sciences, and in Natural Science and Mathematics.
5:         Colleges sought to restrict the number of Jewish undergraduates [now a somewhat less popular criterion of admissions or rejection.]
6:         Colleges sought to recruit young men with special gifts or potential in intercollegiate sports.  Later, this policy was extended to young women as well.
7:         Colleges sought to maximize their impact on the larger society by recruiting students who gave evidence of a desire to go into public service of some sort.

NOT A SINGLE ONE OF THESE POLICIES HAS ANYTHING AT ALL TO DO WITH ACADEMIC ABILITY OR ACCOMPLISHMENT.

In the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement, northern elite colleges began admitting, and then even recruiting, students of color.  And all hell broke loose.  People of the highest and most unimpeachable principle, who had caviled not at all at admission preferences based on legacies, on gender balance, on regional distribution, on fields of concentration, on religion, on sports ability, or on ambitions for public service, suddenly discovered that they were academic purists, concerned that admission be based on academic accomplishment or ability alone.

It would be otiose to observe that these objections are transparently racist.

What in earth would an undergraduate body be like that was recruited solely on the basis of academic considerations?  My personal example, which may of course be dated now, is the contrast I observed between the students walking the halls of Harvard and of MIT.  The Harvard students looked as though they had responded to a call from central casting for a TV advertising gig:  handsome, pulled together, neatly dressed, pleasingly varied in their racial and cultural diversity.  The MIT students were utterly different: tall, short, fat, thin, geeky, black, white, red, brown, yellow, weird.  Pretty obviously one could see that all they had in common was smarts.

The case giving rise to the dispute about affirmative action is the manifest effort of Harvard to hold down the proportion of Asian students, who are the new Jews.  I have no doubt the new assault on affirmative action will succeed, but I do not think I can bear the smug assertions by the supporters of this assault that all they care about is academic ability.  Puleeese.




12 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thank you again for a refreshing and candid analysis. More need to read this. I had to chuckle at "...Asian students, who are the new Jews..."

On a related note, I had read how middle America is having a tough time accepting that spelling bee winners at the local, state, and especially at the National level are all mostly Asians now.

LFC said...

I haven't read the court filings, but presumably the plaintiffs in the Harvard case are not arguing that the only admissions criterion shd be academic ability. The framing of the lawsuit presumably accepts that diversity is one legitimate goal of admissions policies but argues that Asian-Americans are being disproportionately and impermissibly affected by Harvard's admissions policies. Harvard of course denies that. Will be interesting to see how it plays out.

s. wallerstein said...

What is the current legal status of affirmative action in the U.S.?

Is it legally binding on all universities or just on public universities?

Is its current legality the result of a previous Supreme Court decision or series of Supreme Court decisions?

Thanks.



David Palmeter said...

It's a series of decisions that do not progress in a consistent pattern. Roughly, what you get is that in case A the Court holds, for example, that the discrimination is unconstitutional. In case Z, it reaches the opposite conclusion. The arguments that are made for B through Y are whether the case is more like A and should follow that precedent or like Z and should follow that. Over time, the more and more fact situations emerge and are decided by a court whose membership changes. It usually is difficult, in these situations, to predict how the next case will be decided. Much can be read by the membership that is deciding the current case. Kennedy was the least predicable member of the Court. It is assumed that his replacement will be anything but unpredictable.

LFC said...

@ s. wallerstein
The current baseline doctrine, although as D. Palmeter says it's not altogether consistent, is roughly (and as it relates to this post) this: public universities may (but are not required to) take race into account as one factor in a multiple-factor or multiple-criteria admissions process w/ a view to achieving the permissible aim of diversity (this goes back to the 1977 Bakke case). Similarly, private universities may (but are not required to) take race into account as one factor, though the cases afaik mainly deal w/ public universities b/c their policies are more easily subject to constitutional challenge.

I don't know v much about the Harvard case and haven't read the ct filings, so I don't feel that comfortable opining on it. But in general, universities are allowed to take race into account as one factor of many factors. The disputes arise over specific situations and allegations that the permissible use of race as one factor has tipped over the line into impermissible quotas or otherwise impermissible discrimination.

s. wallerstein said...

David Palmeter and LFC,

Thank you both very much...

Jim said...

Professor Wolff --

Let's try and make an effort to get back on the Tigger bandwagon. Does not the primary election of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez give you hope? It sure as hell gives it to me.

-- Jim

Anonymous said...

I'm surprised that an anarchist would speak well of the 'central casting' dimension of Harvard's 'diverse' admissions policy. I can't think of anything more grotesque than the nice looking, well groomed, well spoken'representatives' of each race and ethnicity being groomed to lord it over the masses (at Goldman, J P Morgan, or wherever); trained up to be the spokespeople and role models for 'their' identity group. The Roman Empire was less smugly managed than this.

As an alternative I would go for something like 75% academic achievement only entry to elite colleges, with applicants being given randomized entry to colleges in particular tiers of eliteness. Then supplement that with the Texas system (top x % of public school students in lower income areas get entry) to enable actually lower class persons to access elite colleges.

Robert Paul Wolff said...

WHAT???!!! You thought I was "speaking well" of Harvard? Can't you read?

LFC said...

It's one thing to argue that one function of elite universities is to transmit or reproduce the assumptions and attitudes of the dominant classes or strata and to sponsor research that, at least in part, rationalizes the current system and its distributive outcomes.

It's quite another thing to draw a caricature of such places as merely assembly lines pumping out cookie-cutter graduates for positions on Wall St. Yes, some go on to those kinds of jobs but others do other things. That's one thing 'diversity' results in: students w different interests and goals.

I don't think outward appearance in terms of attractiveness is an admissions criterion at these schools. And in the old (cough) days, at least, few people cared what you wore; as long as you weren't running through the campus naked (cf. 'streaking'), no one really gave a sh*t.

LFC said...

P.s. my comment is directed to anonymous, above.

Dean said...

This post is aging, I know, but I've just this moment read an early passage in Ray Monk's recent (2012) biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer that made me think of this paragraph from your post: "The second change was the transformation of regional colleges and universities into national [and even international] institutions. Before the war, schools like Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Princeton, Chicago, Michigan, et al. served mostly local clientele. It was unusual, for example, for someone from the Midwest or far west or deep south to go to college in New England. Starting after the war, schools actively sought nationally representative student bodies." Monk's passage refers to the development in NYC of the private school of the Ethical Culture Society, which Oppenheimer attended as a child, beginning in fall 1911. Monk writes, "Having by this time [Monk's referent is ambiguous--he means either 1911 or 1902, when the school first occupied a building at Central Park West] added a high school to the original elementary school, the Ethical Culture School was seen--by an increasing number of middle-class gentiles as well as by the German Jewish community--as an ideal preparation for admission to the top universities in the country."

Monk cites no source for this statement, which isn't impossible to square with your own. There could have been a few clusters, certainly in NYC, of high demand for a "top university" education regardless of location even while those universities "served mostly local clientele." But I can also read a sense, perhaps Monk taking it for granted, that even in the earliest decade of the 20th century higher education attracted a national clientele. Anyway, if nothing else, it's a fun coincidence to have read these two passages within days of each other.