A DUBIOUS EXPEDIENCY: HOW RACE PREFERENCES DAMAGE HIGHER EDUCATION.

• Author: Allan, James

A DUBIOUS EXPEDIENCY: HOW RACE PREFERENCES DAMAGE HIGHER EDUCATION.

By Gail Heriot and Maimon Schwarzschild* (eds.). New York: Encounter Books. Pp. 248. $28.99 (hardcover).

For a native born Canadian who has spent his working life in pre-handover Hong Kong, London, New Zealand and, for the last decade and a half, Australia (with a few U.S., Canadian and British law school sabbaticals thrown in), this book was in part informative, eye-opening, superbly contrary to the Zeitgeist that pervades virtually all of today's university managerial class, and able to engender an overwhelming sense of exasperation with what passes for good policy-making in academia. The book is an edited collection of chapters on the issue of racial preferences in higher education, with much of that focus on law schools. The authors include two professors of law (also the editors), a professor emeritus of German literature who was there as a dean of graduate studies when these preferences--or, as he more bluntly describes it, affirmative action--first came in and made inroads on his campus, a bestselling author and thinktank fellow, and the President of the National Association of Scholars. Though all the proffered views are nuanced and distinct, none of the authors thinks the benefits of the last half century or so of racial preferences come near to their costs. Indeed, John Ellis, in the very first sentence of the very first chapter of the book, enumerates what he thinks the full extent of those costs have been:

We have now had some fifty years of affirmative action on college campuses, long enough for the full extent of its destructive impact on higher education to become fully apparent: affirmative action has sharply increased the professoriate's normal leftward tilt;... it has spawned mischievous new pseudo-disciplines that are in reality little more than collections of political activists who undermine the academic integrity of their institutions; it has damaged the campus climate for free expression, both through speech codes designed to protect the sensibilities of minorities and through the creation of a campus political monoculture; it has led to rampant grade inflation that is in large part a response to the problem of students mismatched with academic environments for which they are not prepared and in which they cannot compete; it has damaged the prospects and the morale of countless numbers of those mismatched students; it has been the largest factor among pressures to dumb down college curricula ...; and, paradoxically, it has severely damaged the chance for its intended beneficiaries to enjoy the excellent education through which previous groups of "have-nots" (e.g., Italian Americans, Jews, Irish Americans) have been able to climb the social ladder to achieve full equality of opportunity. (2)

Readers of this book will not die wondering what its authors think. My guess, as a non-American, is that many American academics who pick up this book will hold strong proclivities in favor of affirmative action in general. As they work their way through the book, they will find the arguments of the nine authors quite confronting. Such, at any rate, is the normal human response when something we take to be a force for good in the world is challenged point-by-point, from all directions. Hence, many will be tempted simply to put the book down and move on to more congenial reading. My advice is to resist that temptation. Whether readers end up being convinced by this book's anti-affirmative action stance and conclusions or not, this book makes a powerful case against such racial preferences. And that case is well worth understanding for anyone who still subscribes to the John Stuart Mill ideal that we get closest to truth after hearing both sides, after experiencing the free-flowing cauldron of competing ideas--not just in instances where our minds happen to be changed by the competing view we hear being put in its most powerful light, but just as much, and importantly, in instances where our minds are not ultimately changed but we now see far better the weaknesses, defects and fragilities in the position to which we still cling. If that ideal still commands much allegiance amongst America's professoriate, then take my advice and read this thought-provoking book.

The rest of this Review will consist of two parts. In Part One, I will give a brief overview of the book's chapters, with slightly more focus on three of them. Of those in the special focus category, two can be thought of as "the constitutional law chapters" (one more than the other) that make reviewing this book in these pages warranted. The other deals with some of the effects of jettisoning unapologetic meritocracy. Then in Part Two of this Review, I will turn to take a short look at three themes or issues that this book--directly or indirectly--brings forward.

PART ONE

John Ellis's chapter starts the book and is in large part a personal memoir of his time as the newly appointed dean of the Graduate Division of the University of California-Santa Cruz in 1977, when he oversaw the first introductory steps of an "affirmative action [that] seemed so modest and circumscribed" (p. 8). In his words, it "is a story of how a monster grew from seemingly innocuous beginnings" (p. 8). Gail Heriot's chapter comes next. Heriot reveals the source of the title of the book; it is taken from the opinion of Justice Stanley Mosk, writing for the California Supreme Court in Bakke v. Regents of University of California^ who held the racially discriminatory admissions policies to be unconstitutional on the basis that to uphold them "would call for the sacrifice of principle for the sake of dubious expediency." (4) As a non-American I learned that this Justice Mosk was a liberal icon. More importantly, Heriot sets out a case for why preferences do not work; why entering grades matter; why affirmative action students are unlikely to catch up with the rest of their cohort; she provides the evidence for thinking it is better for students to be a big frog in a small pond rather than a tiny frog struggling to stay afloat in a very grand pond; and more of the same. Heriot reveals just how secretive U.S. law schools are about all of their racial preferences admissions data and practices. (5) She notes (initially surprising this non-American) that law school accreditation can depend on embracing affirmation action (p. 53). And there is a very powerfully persuasive dissection of the William G. Bowen and Derek Bok claim, in their book, The Shape of the River, (5) that they had disproved the mismatch hypothesis (pp. 55 ff.). Not according to Heriot, and she provides chapter and verse for her thinking.

Peter Kirsanow, who attended Cornell University in the 1970s when these things were just getting started, first looks at racially focused programs and residential colleges at private universities. Then he looks at them at public universities. He is not kind about them in either context. One thing...