Are Racial Preferences Dying?

by Jeffrey Hart

Looking back from a time when preferences based upon skin color no longer exist, an article in the July 5 Time magazine may seem to have been of striking importance. Startlingly for a mass media organ it says that racial preferences have lost the battle for survival and—hold your breath—that it's a good thing.

The article takes a look at what has happened in the University of California system during the two years since Proposition 209 went into effect banning racial preferences. It likes what it sees.

Contrary to dire predictions about blacks and Hispanics being denied a college education and locked out of opportunity—Jesse Jackson even referred to “ethnic cleansing”—the end of racial preferences has not appreciably affected the enrollment of such minorities. What it has done is effect a redistribution of black and Hispanic applicants among the universities of the California system. The effect is to place students at the university for which their record qualifies them academically.

The entering class at Berkeley this fall will be only 9 percent Hispanic and 3 percent black. This vividly demonstrates how preferences were distorting the profile of the student body.

The California university system has three tiers. The most selective are Berkeley, UCLA, and, moving up fast, San Diego. In the middle are Irvine, Davis, and Santa Barbara. In the third tier are Santa Cruz and Riverside.

The end of racial favoritism has had the effect of moving many formerly favored applicants down the scale. In California this is now called “cascading.” At the most selective campus, Berkeley, freshman enrollment of Hispanics has fallen 34 percent in the past two years, and it's down 57 percent for black students. The least exclusive campus, Riverside, has seen black admissions rise more than 54 percent and Hispanics 66 percent.

Is this a good thing? In the days before the end of racial preferences the drop-out rate of black students in the California system was 42 percent, twice the rate of whites. That stands to reason says Abigail Thernstrom, a scholarly opponent of preferences: “As students are better matched to their institutions, as they cascade to places where they are prepared to the average level, the graduation rates should go up for minorities.” What California is calling “cascade,” other scholars such as Thomas Sowell have called correct “fit.”

The Time article focuses on the second tier university at Irvine, and, significantly, is very upbeat. Things are very good at Irvine. “The African-American science majors eating lunch in a University of California Irvine dining hall are on the brink of brilliant careers. Aisha Kennedy, a chemistry major, has done ozone research with a Nobel Prize-winning professor. John Williams, a biology major, is off to Kenya this summer for a project on malaria transmission. And Brian Curtis, a computer science major with a summer job at Novell, is seeing years of hard work pay off. `I'd say my biggest problem is sifting through the job offers,' he says. `There's no job hunting for me.'”

The illustrations run by Time have editorial content. The largest one depicts eight very happy-looking Irvine students of black, Asian and Hispanic appearance. It is accompanied by a no-Affirmative Action symbol, one of those red-circled signs with “Affirmative Action” written on it, and a red bar across it.

Some students, according to Time, are even choosing Irvine over Berkeley, finding Irvine more welcoming and more supportive. “A lot of my friends said, `Berkeley, Berkeley, Berkeley,' Tiger Dunams, a junior at Irvine recalls of her college choosing days. `I went there and looked at it, and it didn't seem it was the thing for me. My friend goes to Berkeley and she doesn't really meet people. I'm interacting with professors and graduate students, and I've met the chancellor. You can tell the faculty is really reaching out to students.'”

Time goes so far as to speak of our “post-Affirmative Action era,” but focuses on the California system, admitting that so far “cascading” affects mainly California and Texas, where racial preferences have been abolished. “But other suits challenging racial preferences are under way elsewhere in the U.S., notably at the University of Michigan. Other states are considering Prop. 209-style initiatives, among them Florida, where a drive is on to put an anti-Affirmative Action referendum on the 2000 ballot. If cascading goes national, what impact will it have on America's college students? The answer is unfolding in California, on campuses like Irvine.”

In an editorial box in the Time article, a defender of racial preferences named Jack White writes an epitaph: “I hate to admit it, but the battle over Affirmative Action in higher education is over, and Ward Connerly won. The developments at the University of California since Connerly's Proposition 209 banned racial preferences will be repeated all over the nation if similar laws are adopted in Texas and Florida, where Connerly...plans to bring his crusade.”

Mr. White quotes a Rene Redwood, executive director of the Washington-based Americans for a Fair Chance, a preferences lobby. Redwood is resigning. She now says preferences created an atmosphere of entitlement, which discouraged hard work. “Between 1988 and 1998, the gap between average black and white SAT scores widened slightly, from 189 points to 194 points.”

Well, to cite Winston Churchill, this may not be the beginning of the end, but it is certainly the end of the beginning in the struggle against reverse discrimination. The Time article is a clear signal of that.

Of course it deals only with public educational institutions. Why do the private selective universities resist “cascading” and “fit”? The Ivy League claims that it does not use quotas, but the black admissions each year, as if by magic, are always within a tenth or so of 7.5 percent. A drop of .5 percent throws an Ivy admissions office into spasms of shame. Yet why does Harvard have to have 7.5, as if it were the oxygen content of the atmosphere? There are individual injustices to maintain that, yes, quota: applicants who deserved admission but were denied it because of skin color. Why not let the minority applicant cascade to the equivalent of Irvine? Some institutional pathology is involved in such racially preferential policies.

And, I have found, that “Affirmative Action” pervades the culture of such selective institutions, affects the curriculum and hiring and promotion.; Abolishing it may turn on a court decision that these selective universities are no longer “private” in the relevant sense, so dependent are they on federal tax money.