Scholars increasingly treat the issue of race with kid gloves. As the cancel culture accelerates, race—always a sensitive topic—has become nearly taboo. Any serious exploration of the correlation of intelligence and race is met with denunciations of racism, as political scientist Charles Murray can attest. Murray’s 1994 magnum opus, The Bell Curve, co-authored by Richard Herrnstein, was met with hysterical criticism from the left, earning him the label “extremist” by the demagogic Southern Poverty Law Center. To the leftists who dominate academia, racial disparities in crime statistics, economic performance, academic achievement, and school discipline admit of only one permissible explanation—systemic racism.
Yet intrepid scholars have (at least for the time being) been able to talk about how affirmative action in higher education—a euphemism for racial preferences in admissions—hurts the very groups those policies were intended to benefit. Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor, Jr. addressed this subject with their powerful book, Mismatch (2012). The data, they argued, show that giving minority students an artificial boost into higher-echelon universities actually hurts their long-term prospects compared to similarly-qualified students attending schools to which they were admitted without preferences. “Mismatched” students learn less, earn lower grades, and gravitate away from rigorous STEM majors to “easier” disciplines in the social sciences and humanities.
