On the Affirmative Action Decision
Friday's Child Has More to Say About Academia This Week
Three major immediate thoughts on a decision most of us have been expecting for years.
First, as I wrote in Substack Notes yesterday, there is an inevitable tension in decisions about allotting much-wanted resources that are scarcer than the people wanting them.
Market systems handle that tension by allowing price (and thus wealth) to determine who gets the resources. Non-market allotment has to depend on some other criteria. Classic systems include randomness, qualifications, worthiness, or deciding that some pre-existing class or subset of people should be protected or favored.
So, for example, if a ship is sinking and there’s only 12 places on the one lifeboat for one hundred passengers, you can draw straws, you can favor the people with the most valuable skills to society, you can (quickly) try to establish some way to decide who will use the life they are given in the most morally or socially laudable way, or you can go with women-and-children first.
All of these are agonizing (and potentially difficult) systems to employ when the scarce resources make an enormous difference not just to the people who obtain them but to the wider society.
But note that some of the most equal ways to decide—a lottery in particular—will likely produce outcomes that almost everybody thinks aren’t quite fair or right. (It’s one reason that drawing straws in many stories is such a favored way to create drama.)
More importantly, however, note that the entire situation becomes far less fraught when the resources are less scarce or when there are other ways besides those resources to the same end. So if the ship going down has almost enough lifeboats for everyone, the pain of selection is much less. If the ship is going down slowly right next to an easily accessible coastline in warm and calm waters and there are sufficient life jackets on board, then not getting in a lifeboat is not an instant sentence of death. (Indeed, there’s a different selection process that can prioritize people capable of surviving in the water and swimming to safety not going on the lifeboat.)
With higher education—or jobs—fixing the scarcity problem eases one of the pressures of the selection. Making elite higher education a less directly essential portal to certain kinds of labor markets is another way to ease the pressure. Having labor markets that provide a good living for most people does that as well.
It’s a mistake to focus on the scarcity side of the entire issue and conclude that extreme inequality is inevitable and that the best we can do is choose between and thus furiously argue about certain kinds of mutually exclusive systems for mediating the allocation of scarcity, as if we’re on a ship that just has too few lifeboats and that’s all there is to it. We can do a lot more to make sure all the ships have enough lifeboats for all the passengers.
To free this point from its metaphor, the focus on highly selective admissions, as many people have observed, is a terrible distraction from the fact that most Americans who go to college attend non-selective or barely selective institutions which don’t employ any affirmative action policies in the first place—and that in the case of public universities, are now badly underfunded. If equity is what you care about most, what you should care about first is vastly increasing public spending on public universities with the particular aim of lowering tuition for those institutions to a very substantial extent. But we also need to restore a labor market—and socioeconomic hierarchy—that is built around a large middle-class who have access to secure, good-paying employment.
Second thought. In a New York Times story today, the director of undergraduate admissions at the University of Maryland is quoted as saying that applicants to selective institutions right now write about “their soccer practice” and “their grandmother dying” and they don’t write about “their trials and tribulations. They don’t write about the challenges they’ve had to experience”.
One of two things is true about this statement: either the University of Maryland gets admissions essays that are really different than other selective institutions or this admissions administrator is badly out of touch with most selective institutions.
Aya Waller-Bey observed how much applicants from underrepresented groups already have to share their worst traumas and challenges in order to get a good look from selective institutions. In today’s NYT, Tyler Austin Harper at Bates College underscores this point. This is likely a product of the long preparation many selective institutions have been making for this expected decision by the court, at least in part, and the majority ruling leaves room for intensifying the “adversity narrative” part of selective admissions.
I have a big problem with what this does to the applicants who are forced to reduce their lives to more and more intense stories of prior suffering—if nothing else, there’s an unequal burden of compelled intimacy falling on different applicants. It’s also an example of the ideology of the “deserving poor” that is now resurging in American public policy generally—the idea that poverty or discrimination as general conditions cannot be and should not be addressed through policy but that individuals coming from poverty or discrimination should be helped if they step forward and prove themselves unusually or distinctively worthy.
As Waller-Bey and Harper observe, the process is already perverse; it is likely about to become even more so. I think there’s also an imminent collision between what is likely to become a strong claim of idiosyncratic evaluation surrounding selective admissions (already marked by a discourse of ‘holistic’ assessment) and an opposite drive on many selective campuses towards aligning consistency with equity. We’ve seen that at Swarthmore in the way we approach hiring now—consistency has become the administrative religion, backed by a faith that rigorous consistency is the best protection against bias in hiring, that any attention to the individual distinctiveness of candidates is a way to let the devil of “he seems like a good fit” back in the door. But what that does is feed a kind of robotic credentialism—e.g., all you’re doing is matching candidates with more and more specialized and specific credentials, in a way that forces you to overlook a person with general skills and insights who could clearly grow into the job quickly. You end up preventing any discussion about a candidate who has overcome adversity, racial or otherwise, with the thought that their history demonstrates strong motivation or strong individual capacity.
I understand why both discourses seem like appealing ways to structure the distribution of scarce resources (admission to a selective university and jobs at that university) but they are for one at complete odds with one another—and I think it’s always a bad idea to be using two contradictory logics to make decisions within the same institutional framework. For another, both ways of allocating scarcity end up unable to talk about why equity in allocation is a goal in the first place—and intensify existing incoherence in higher education about the intensification of inequality and hierarchy in the wider society and our role in producing it. (As well as inhibiting us from talking forthrightly about how it is that most faculty jobs in most universities became bad jobs over the last four decades, and about how nickel-and-dimed many other jobs at universities have been since the 1970s.)
The most complex and inchoate thought I have is that everyone inside the world of higher education who favors affirmative action in some form has just got to reckon with the ambivalence of a significant majority of Americans about the specific practices that defined that concept over its lifespan.
That ambivalence shows up consistently in polls. Folks on the liberal-left end of the political spectrum know that almost all of what the current Republican Party is slinging is unpopular with a majority of the electorate, and are prepared to make up as much political ground as possible because of that. But in this one case, the shoe is on the other foot.
That doesn’t mean we should give up on the goals embedded inside affirmative action, but it’s time to rethink that program of action and not just because of a need to adapt to the Court’s ruling. We have to understand what it is that makes a majority uncomfortable—including more than a few Americans from underrepresented racial groups.
Several issues seem worth looking at. One is coming up in a lot of analyses of the Court’s decision, which is that the move that the SCOTUS majority made in the Bakke decision in 1978 to save some form of affirmative action might have been a Pyrrhic victory. By giving up on the idea that the goal of affirmative action is social transformation and accepting instead the narrower idea that diversity made for better education (or better work outcomes), universities and employers argued that any preferences in admissions or hiring were strictly for their own internal benefit—that whatever might come of their practices in a larger sense was not the purpose of those preferences and not a conscious goal. That made it much easier for selective institutions to ignore their role in the acceleration of economic inequality after 1980 and for employers to embrace pleasing their shareholders by gutting their own workforce. It made diversity into a kind of affect—which is precisely what made many BIPOC people inside and outside of the academy look with some suspicion on “multiculturalism” and its successor in DEI (and the new trendy variation of “belonging”)—it was hard to shake the sense that this was all just about providing whites a better experience that also eased their guilt rather than something intended to really change a racially and economically unequal society once and for all.
A point that goes alongside this thought is that preferencing diversity in higher education ended up tightly tied to the professional and personal trajectories of individuals, which is precisely where a logic of preferencing categories (which are socially real and have a major impact on all individuals tied to them) collides with the ways that almost everyone has a fundamentally liberal and individualist self-understanding of their own aspirations and achievements. E.g., a lot of social policy aimed at improving the lives of disadvantaged communities is enacted at scales that match the targets for improvement. Rural electrification or improvements in water quality in poor post-industrial towns aren’t highly individuated even when their impact is visible in individual lives and households. But affirmative action in its various forms can’t help but cross into domains that we otherwise intensely individuate and thus to create unease even for the beneficiaries.
I think even if somehow the original sense of affirmative action as deliberate social transformation had survived Bakke, we might have a majority who were still uncomfortable with it for the same reason that condemnations of “big government” often resonate with Americans—there is a sense that no one trusts in social transformation by government fiat both because the state is not trusted to do so competently but also because of a remnant suspicion that the tribunes of such a transformation favor it because they will control its implementation and make permanent their own role in doing so. This might speak to a problem that the modern left has (in both the US and elsewhere), which is figuring out how to narrate its own devotion to transformation in a way that makes sense to anybody outside the sacred circle. If it’s not just about taking control of political authority for the benefit of leftists themselves, then either there is a different kind of self-interest involved (most typically, the classic idea that an unjust society is a deeply unstable one, and thus that even the relatively well-off should favor social justice), there is a deep kind of moral reason involved, or leftists are just smarter and better-informed and folks ought to trust them.
All of those properly make people who advocate social transformation a bit uncomfortable, but refusing to say why you want things to change when right now you are doing fine and will keep on doing fine is an even worse choice, because it makes people who are not already on board suspicious. Affirmative action is vulnerable to this point because its most ardent activists are precisely people who are doing well within the system as it exists. Sometimes the explanation is simple: because they recognize that their present flourishing is a result of affirmative action. (Something that Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson highlights in her dissent, but it’s also a thought that Judge Clarence Thomas has spoken to angrily in his career: the thought does not automatically occasion gratitude.) Sometimes it is self-interest: that diversity is better for education and personal growth, that a more even distribution of wealth and a more stable society is the only way to make education a sustainable long-term project. Sometimes it is a moral belief as deep as any other, and sometimes it is about a view that it’s the only rational thing to do. But any of those reasons means to some extent that those of us who support social transformation—and thus supported affirmative action—need to be more open to the moral and evaluative heterogeneity of opposition to affirmative action, to sort out people who are against it because they believe in racial hierarchy and those who are against it because they think it’s the wrong way to attack racial hierarchy.
At least one of the things we might tease out with that kind of openness is that there is deep support among Americans or so I believe for strong attacks on unfairness but discomfort with trying to repair or recuperate unfairness too long after it occurs. So, for example, if the persistence of structural inequality that includes racial discrimination begins essentially at birth (in unequal natal health care, in early childhood education, in the existence of neighborhoods with high levels of pollution and poor access to nutrition), policy solutions like college admissions that are explained as later compensatory corrections feel too little, too late, as badly matched to the critique of structural inequality. If we argue that racial preferences are required because the harms of racial inequality extend even to people who have grown up in materially favorable circumstances, we leave some people puzzled about how those harms accumulate in a way that amounts to systematic unfairness. Even when we can point to hard empirical evidence of how they accumulate—say in bad health care outcomes for Black Americans even if they are in the upper 10% and have been for three generations—it’s hard to concretize the singular moments of unfairness that call out for concrete remedy.
That was the hope behind the original conception of affirmative action, really—that if we could put a thumb on the scale at every single moment that discrimination had an unfair impact on meaningful life outcomes (secondary school, college admissions, employment, access to housing, access to services, voting and political participation, etc.) we would have a fair society. It’s a liberal understanding of social transformation centered on the formal interactions between individuals, the state and society, but none of that could cover consciousness, subjectivity, deep cultural formations. Moreover, it turns out it’s fairly easy to discriminate in many of those discrete moments and not get caught, that gathering the evidence of discrimination takes tremendous amounts of attention and expenditure. So we ended up putting a lot of weight on those interactions that were open for various reasons, like selective admissions to higher education, to having a thumb on the scale and looking to them to carry the weight of all those other kinds of unfairness, all those other moments of structural reproduction. Not only could they not carry that weight (again, so few people go to selective institutions!) but that ended up tripping over that feeling that correcting for unfairness too far from the instance of unfairness was itself unfair.
The problem that preferences were trying to address remains deeply real and it remains a moral and practical imperative to repair it. But it may be time to fundamentally rethink where and how that might happen, and what the particular and limited role of higher education might be within that rethink. At the very least, the action should be first and foremost around the institutions that have the most potential for widespread social transformation, and that’s not a small handful of elite private institutions no matter what the Supreme Court might rule.
Image credit: "Washington DC ~ Supreme Court of The United States ~ One of two identical self-supporting elliptical spiral staircases." by Onasill ~ Bill - 81 M is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.