Thomas Sowell was Right As Usual
A conservative U.S. Supreme Court seems likely to strike down decades old “race-conscious admissions” at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina. Such a decision could bring protests, even civil unrest. Is it worth it?
I’ve long supported closing K-12 racial achievement gaps and wider recruitment to increase diversity in universities. Most hiring or admissions committees have someone pushing to expand the pool to seek well qualified candidates from underrepresented groups. I was and will remain that person.
Yet decades of watching higher education’s racial preferences in action have convinced me that, as usual, Thomas Sowell was right. Contrasting successfully integrated organizations like the U.S. Army, where no soldier thinks the officer bossing them around got there due to their race, higher education bureaucracies have prioritized symbolic “equity,” meaning quotas, over merit, reinforcing white privilege in the process. Real world experience says it’s time to end racial preferences and reembrace merit admissions.
A half century ago, in 1972, Thomas Sowell published Black Education: Myths and Tragedies, still the best book explaining how affirmative action in higher education went horribly wrong.
As Sowell documented, white admissions staff at elite universities chose to admit academically struggling “real” blacks fitting leftist stereotypes over top black scholars. Bureaucrats sidelined merit-oriented critics, particularly black critics like Cornell economics professor Sowell and assistant dean Pearl Lucas. Cornell terminated Lucas for the farcical offense of using accrued vacation time during spring break without prior notice, something literally everyone did. Academia’s dissenters still face such dangers from bureaucrats.
Sowell explains the genesis of diversity bureaucracies, which eventually developed what Dion Pierre and Peter Wood term “neo-segregation” at elite schools like Yale, with separate orientations, majors, housing, even graduation ceremonies, a sort of postmodern Jim Crow which has damaged race relations.
Sowell details how leftist white professors saw black students less as individuals than political symbols. One medical school dean confided that after Martin Luther King’s assassination, his white faculty proposed admitting unqualified blacks to promote equity. Sowell objected that these white professors would never “send their children to be operated on by those ‘doctors’ that they maneuver through medical school,” so “why should my children be operated on by such doctors?” The dean agreed, saying “I held them off, this year. How many more years they can be stopped from doing this is another story.”
Sadly, in the half-century since, universities have often sacrificed academics on the altar of equity, disproportionately harming blacks. As Sowell observed, elite academic work moves fast. Whatever their race, students admitted under lower standards struggle to keep up, often dropping out or switching to easy majors. Many would have succeeded at other institutions, so race preferences create black failure, reinforcing negative stereotypes.
This may explain why, as law professor Gail Heriot writes in “A Dubious Expediency,” historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) produce 40% of black scientists despite serving just 20% of black college students. Likewise, in Mismatch, Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor document how after a public referendum forced University of California campuses to curtail racial preferences, black four-year graduation rates rose over 70% once universities stopped admitting less prepared students to fill racial quotas.
Ironically, race-based admissions at schools like Harvard solidify white privilege, decimating Asian Americans by 40-50% while leaving white enrollments nearly intact. As the National Association of Scholars documented in its recent Amicus Curiae brief in the Harvard and North Carolina cases, Harvard admissions staff systematically lowered the “personality” ratings of Asian applicants they had never met, actions fitting textbook definitions of prejudice.
This amounts to an institutional hate crime against Asian Americans.
Americans of all races oppose such bigotry. A recent Pew Research Center survey found that while more than nine in ten want high school grades to influence college admissions and more than eight in ten want standardized testing to play a role, “nearly three-quarters of Americans or more say gender, race or ethnicity, or whether a relative attended the school should not factor into admissions decisions.”
Even in liberal states, voters agree. Despite near unanimous media and corporate support and outspending the opposition 15-1, a 2020 referendum to return formal racial preferences to California public universities lost 57-43%. Prior referenda on race based preferences in states like Washington met similar fates.
Fifty years of prejudiced, politically unpopular, constitutionally suspect bureaucratic practices are enough. We now know that Thomas Sowell had it right back in 1972. It is time for the Supreme Court to rule that legally, in the words of late Justice Antonin Scalia, “we are just one race here. It is American.”
Robert Maranto is the 21st Century Chair in Leadership in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas and has done considerable research on closing achievement gaps.
