By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
In this space in The Wanderer on January 7, in a column entitled “Out of Context,” we offered a discussion of the unfair criticism made by leading liberals of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s comments in a speech late last year. Scalia told the audience that “it does not benefit African-Americans to — to get them into the University of Texas where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less-advanced school, a less — a slower-track school where they do well”; that it does not serve blacks for them to be “pushed into schools that are too advanced for them.”
Scalia went on to point out that “most of the black scientists in this country don’t come from schools like the University of Texas….They come from lesser schools where they do not feel that they’re — that they’re being pushed ahead in — in classes that are too — too fast for them.”
The liberal critics’ response? Democrat Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada said that Scalia “endorsed the idea that African-American students are somehow inherently intellectually inferior from other students.” A headline on the website The Huffington Post read: “Scalia thinks black students belong in ‘slower track’ schools.” A reporter on Yahoo News said Scalia “believes blacks shouldn’t go to good schools because they’re dumber than whites.”
Clearly this is not what Scalia meant, and his critics know that. They were engaging in demagoguery for political purposes. His point was not that all blacks are incapable of attending elite universities. There is nothing in his comments to indicate he is talking about the entire black race. His focus is only on those blacks who are not ready to compete in elite schools, and that pushing them into those schools through affirmative action programs will do them more harm than good. Which is undeniable.
What is better, to go to a less prestigious university and graduate with a degree that gains you a successful career, or to flunk out of an elite school to which you were admitted when you were not ready for the challenge?
I was pleased to see that leading conservative commentators weighed in to make sure that the cheap shots against Scalia did not go unnoticed. Syndicated columnists Mona Charen and Thomas Sowell were among the most effective in pointing out the dishonesty of Scalia’s critics. Charen stated emphatically that “Scalia has nothing for which to apologize (though his critics do). He was referring to a perfectly plausible theory about the effects of affirmative action.”
Charen called our attention to a book by respected social scientists Stuart Taylor Jr. and Richard H. Sander, entitled Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It, to underscore her point. The book provides evidence, writes Charen, that “black students who ‘benefit’ from affirmative action in admission, and thus attend schools for which they are less prepared than their peers, are less likely to major in difficult but remunerative subjects such as engineering and science, and more likely to wind up in the bottom 10th of the student body, and, most important, less likely to graduate than their peers…and thus set up to fail.”
Thomas Sowell took things further, corroborating Charen’s views by offering his personal experiences while teaching at Cornell University over 40 years ago, where he “discovered that half the black students there were on some form of academic probation. These students were not stupid or uneducable. On the contrary, the average black student at Cornell at that time scored at the 75th percentile on scholastic tests,” with scores “better than those of three-quarters of all American students who took those tests.”
Why then weren’t they doing well at Cornell? “Because,” writes Sowell, “the average Cornell student in the liberal arts college at that time scored at the 99th percentile.” And “the classes taught there — including mine — moved at a speed geared to the verbal and mathematical level of the top one percent of American students.”
Sowell underscores what this means: “The average white student would have been wiped out at Cornell. But the average white student was unlikely to be admitted to Cornell, in the first place. Nor was a white student who scored at the 75th percentile. That was a ‘favor’ reserved for black students. This ‘favor’ turned black students who would have been successful at most American colleges and universities into failures at Cornell.”
Sowell understood what Justice Scalia meant: “Justice Scalia was not talking about sending black students to substandard colleges and universities to get an inferior education. You may in fact get a much better education at an institution that teaches at a slower pace that you can handle and master. In later life, no one is going to care how fast you learned something, so long as you know it.” Bull’s eye!
Sowell joins Charen in pointing to Mismatch’s analysis of what happened when affirmative action policies were banned in the University of California system. The result, writes Sowell, was that “instead of failing at Berkeley or UCLA, minority students” are “now graduating from other campuses in the University of California system. They are graduating at a higher rate, with higher grades, and now more often in challenging fields like math, science, and technology.”
The question that must be asked is why none of this matters to the liberals in the media, government, and the academy? Why did they jump all over Justice Scalia in a manner that can be interpreted in no other way than as deliberately dishonest? Sowell: “Do the facts not matter to those who are denouncing Justice Scalia? Does the actual fate of minority students not matter to the left, as much as their symbolic presence on campus?”
And, I would add, how that symbolic presence can be used by liberal politicians as talking points at election time to mobilize minority voting blocs.
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Readers are invited to submit comments and questions about this and other educational issues. The e-mail address for First Teachers is fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net, and the mailing address is P.O. Box 15, Wallingford, CT 06492.
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