Stephen
Kershnar
Missouri and Yale: Race-Based Takings
Dunkirk-Fredonia Observer
November
21, 2015
The
academic world is focused on recent protests at University of Missouri and Yale
University.
At
the University of Missouri, black students and their allies claimed the
administration was racially insensitive. This led to protests, a threatened
boycott by the football team, and a single student going on a hunger strike,
which in turn led to the resignation of the chancellor of the university and
the president of the University of Missouri system. The movement was led by a
group (Concerned Student 1950) that demanded quotas (10% of faculty and staff
must be black), mandatory diversity training, and fewer black students flunking
out or leaving.
At
Yale University, a protest over two married professors’ mild replies to the
university’s sensitivity hectoring on Halloween costumes led to students angrily
confronting one of them over his strong support of free speech. In response to
the confrontation and related protests, Yale decided to buy off the protesters.
It promised to spend $50 million to hire more black and Hispanic faculty, implement
mandatory diversity training for supervising professors and staff, increase
financial aid to low income students (they already pay little to no tuition),
and put more money into its racial and ethnic cultural centers.
Other
universities are being hit with similar protests. An elite and traditionally
Jewish University (Brandeis University) has been hit with protests demanding,
you guessed it, quotas (10% of faculty and staff and 15% of students must be
black), mandatory diversity training, and increasing funding for black student
organizations and programs. Similar protests and pressured resignations have
occurred at Princeton, Dartmouth, and Claremont-McKenna College.
The overall
pattern is stunning. First, even if all the alleged acts of race hatred at
Missouri did occur, they are so few and minor as to not warrant much attention,
let alone a panicked response, by top-level administrators running massive universities
(their budgets and resources are sometimes in the billions).
Second,
many, if not all, of the high profile acts of race hatred probably didn’t
happen. Over the years, many of the high profile acts of alleged race hatred,
and probably most, have turned out to be hoaxes. By this I mean that the
perpetrator was black, Hispanic, or a liberal white trying to make a statement
rather than an expression of white hatred.
As
Ashley Thorne writing for the National Association of Scholars points out,
there have been a series of documented campus hoax crimes in recent years, such
as those at Trinity International University (2005), George Washington
University (2007), the University of Virginia (2007), the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill (2011), Central Connecticut State University (2012),
University of Wisconsin at Parkside (2012), Montclair State University (2012), and
Vassar College (2013). Overreactions and hoaxes have also occurred at elite
institutions, such as Bowdoin, Dartmouth, Princeton, and Williams.
Third,
some of the protests have been accompanied by thuggery. Witness, for example,
the shoving and physical intimidation of reporters at the University of
Missouri and the violence that broke out at Dartmouth. The toleration of
thuggery to intimidate faculty and students and lever the administration is an
ominous sign.
Fourth,
the hypocrisy is troubling. As Victor Davis Hanson in National Review points out, the black Missouri football threatened
to boycott games based racial underrepresentation when blacks were 50% of the
team, roughly four times their percentage of the population. Apparently,
overrepresentation of blacks in football is not an issue but overrepresentation
of whites and Asians in theoretical physics is.
The
real issue, though, is the attempt to use dubious racial grievances to replace white
and Asian students and faculty (and especially Jews at elite institutions) with
blacks.
It
is uncontroversial that, on average, black (and Hispanic) students at elite
institutions have significantly less academic ability than their white and
Asian counterparts. Consider, for example, University of Michigan. In 2005, University
of San Diego law professor Gail Heriot reports that the average black student
had SATs roughly 200 points lower than the average white student and 250 points
lower than the average Asian. Were a white or Asian student to have the scores
of the average black student, he would have a 1% chance (if white) and 0% (if
Asian) of being accepted. This matters because IQ scores correlate with SATs and
are a strong predictor of academic and job performance. Having (on average)
lower scores predictably leads to black students having worse grades, lower
graduation rates, and switching from rigorous majors (for example, hard
sciences) to easier ones.
UCLA
law professor Richard Sander and others have shown that ratcheting up black
students into schools in which their competition outclasses them hurts them. It
leads to their failing or dropping out more often than they would were they to
attend schools in which they were better matched with their peers. It also
leads to their being unable to pass professional entrance exams (for example, medical
boards and the bar) more often than would occur if they were better matched.
For
example, Sander showed that the average black law student was in the bottom 10%
of his class. This is entirely unsurprising given that they had an academic
index score more than two standard deviations below their average white
competitor. How would you do in a race in which your best times going into the
race were well below those of most of the other runners? Is it any wonder,
then, that black students get discouraged and firms and clients are wary of
black lawyers and doctors?
The
lowered standards also lead to executives, engineers, doctors, and lawyers who perform
worse than would a white or Asian who would otherwise have received the
educational slot. This leads to worse decisions in these fields and thereby
hams consumers and employers. For example, putting a subpar teacher in the
classroom, on average, harms decades of students. The same is true for subpar
executives and doctors. The ratcheting effect also leads to wasted resources as
black law and medical students flunk the entrance exams with disturbing
frequency and sometimes never end up passing, thereby wasting the resources
that went into educating them.
Perhaps
the harm is outweighed by the benefits that come about through role-modelling,
diverse ideas, or improved interracial relations, but I am unaware of any study
that shows these benefits outweigh the costs. In addition, it is implausible
that this is true. No one thinks that the New England Patriots would do better
if they replaced black and Hispanic players with less meritorious Jews or
Asians. There is little reason to think that boardrooms or operating rooms are
different.
The
protesters are trying to use racial grievances, dubious and in any case
infrequent, to implement quotas and to shift money, educational spots, and jobs
from whites and Asians to Blacks. This is not good for the country or academia
and probably not even good for blacks.
