Two Points on Affirmative Action

Yesterday was the big affirmative action argument at the Supreme Court, with Fisher v. University of Texas being argued for the second time. It's long been suspected that the case could bring about the end of race-based affirmative action in America, anywhere within the ambit of the Fourteenth Amendment's "state action doctrine" at least. Not surprisingly, the oral arguments were rather high-profile, and some remarks by Justice Scalia have become especially controversial. I just have a couple of points I'd like to make, both about Scalia's comments and about those of one of his colleagues.

First, concerning Scalia, a discussion of whose remarks and the theory behind them you can find here. He was, in a rather clumsy way, invoking so-called "mismatch" theory, the idea that affirmative action ends up putting black students in schools that are too advanced for them. A sophisticated version of this analysis might focus on the fact that, as a result of unequal policies at various lower levels of the American education system, black people are in general not prepared as well for the rigors of elite universities. Scalia, of course, did not make the sophisticated version; his remarks seemed rather to suggest that black people are actually just not as smart as white people, and will therefore be overwhelmed by going to white people schools. 

One thing to say about this is that it's not true, as the Vox explainer makes clear. Anothre thing to say about it is that it's racist. But I'd like to go a little further on that last point: in a lot of ways, Scalia's remarks, and to a certain extent the broader "mismatch theory" on which they're based, were channeling the basic logic of educational segregation. Of course, the actual logic of segregation was that it was bad for black people and that this was good because white people should be kept in a position of social supremacy over black people. But the avowed logic, the "it's good for everyone" logic, would have been a lot like this. Black people, for whatever reason, whether their innate talents or a legacy of admittedly unfortunate discrimination, just aren't prepared to compete with white people on an equal basis. It wouldn't be fair to them to push everyone into integrated schools. They need separate but equal.

This isn't to say that Scalia favors segregation (though honestly, who among us really doubts that if Scalia had been around in 1954 he would've been condemning Brown v. Board of Education as a lawless judicial usurpation?). It's just to say that some of the logic and rhetoric behind the anti-affirmative action movement can very plausibly be seen as a slightly watered-down version of the arguments against racial integration in the first place.

My other comment concerns an offhanded remark from the Chief Justice. The supposed benefit of affirmative action, since just improving the status of the African-American community is apparently not good enough, is diversity, and specifically the idea that diversity on campus will be good for everyone. (Obviously, affirmative action is only okay if it benefits white people.) One of the ways in which the state of Texas was arguing that the diversity fostered by affirmative action was good for everyone was about the dynamic within individual classrooms. John Roberts was skeptical of this idea, and at one point asked the lawyer for the state, "What unique perspective does a minority student bring to a physics class?"

Mr. Chief Justice, may I humbly submit that a minority student brings to a physics class the perspective that black and Hispanic people are also, y'know, people, and might actually be smart, or have something to say about physics? A "perspective" that is too often lacking? Along with its close cousin, the "perspective" that women are also people and might actually be smart or have something to say about physics; lord knows that one's been all too absent from the classroom for ages. I've never had the opportunity to experience it directly, but my sister has, and my impression is that that feeling of being not welcome does an awful lot to discourage everyone other than white men from even trying to participate, or pursue a career in these fields. That probably has an awful lot to do with why the historically black colleges are so much better at producing black scientists. They are, to use the cliched term, a "safe space" for black people to pursue science. And unfortunately, an awful lot of science classrooms just aren't safe, in that way, because there are just so goddamn few black people or Hispanics or women or whatever already there.

You might think that, in something like math or physics, there would be no such thing as the "black perspective" or the "female perspective." You might especially think that if you really didn't have much sense of how to empathize with the plight of the oppressed. And in a way, you would be right. But it's a funny thing about science: insight can come from anyone. Even if there's no "black perspective" or "female perspective," an individual black person or woman might turn out to have an insight that could change the world, or at least be kind of interesting. And if the world is set up in such a way that they're all strongly discouraged from even bothering to try to contribute, that insight might be buried forever. Sort of like how there isn't a black way to hit a baseball, but Jackie Robinson was still damn good at it. And so was Josh Gibson, it's just that he never got the benefit of someone willing to say, hey, maybe we should give these guys a chance.

You Can Always Count on Goodwin Liu

More affirmative action. I'm only a very little bit into the reading from Goodwin Liu, published in 2002 i.e. while the Michigan cases were matriculating through the federal courts, and he's already made a great point. The plaintiff (well, okay, defendant by the time it got to the Supreme Court, but still, he was the plaintiff) in the Bakke case alleged that he was better-qualified, in terms of MCAT scores and science-courses GPA, than students admitted under the racial quota program. This is true; indeed, it is dramatically true. But he was also better "qualified," along these axes, than most of the people granted "normal" admission, i.e. who were given one of the non-quota slots. Despite being so extremely well "qualified," in terms of test scores and grades, he went 0-11 in applying to medical schools. As Liu puts it:

"Whatever Bakke's weaknesses were, there were several reasons, apart from affirmative action, that might have led the medical school to reject his application. Grades and test scores do not tell us the whole story."

In this particular case, apparently someone who gave Bakke an admissions interview thought him "rather limited in his approach" to medical problems. Liu then goes on to note that removing even the rigid quota of the California system, where 16 of 100 spots were reserved for minorities, would only increase the odds of acceptance extremely modestly for an applicant not benefiting from the quota: from 2.7% to 3.2% among all applicants, and from 16% to 19% among applicants who advanced to the interview stage. It's an extremely important statistical point, that because minorities are, you know, minorities, the boost in admissions-likelihood given to each beneficiary of racial affirmative action is significantly larger than the damage done to the admissions-likelihood of each non-beneficiary. And that sends us back to the point that college admissions is finicky, there are always lots of really good applicants, and you are almost certainly getting rejected (or wait-listed, in Ms. Gratz' case) for some reason idiosyncratic to you, or because they just can't take everyone, or whatever. You probably wouldn't have gotten one of the spots that went to an affirmative-action beneficiary. So get over it.

Thoughts on Affirmative Action

I have the occasion today to do some reading about affirmative action, including selections from Charles Ogletree, Goodwin Liu, Glenn Loury, Carol Moseley-Braun, and, uh, Clarence Thomas. (The last of which is just an excerpt from his dissent in Grutter v. Bollinger.) These selections tend to focus on the 2003 University of Michigan cases, Grutter and Gratz v. Bollinger. I may have more thoughts later, but right now I have what I think basically forms one overarching one: the arguments against affirmative action rely on a deep sense of entitlement. No, not racial entitlement, not the entitlement of white people to own the world, although that is probably a component for many opponents of affirmative action.

It's a more complex form of entitlement than that, and it's well-illustrated by the details given in one of these readings that's basically a biography of Jennifer Gratz, the successful plaintiff in the suit against Michigan's undergraduate admissions system. The University of Michigan had always been her dream school (as she was born and raised in Michigan), and she devoted all her energies toward getting into it. She had a 3.8 GPA, good test scores, loads of extracurricular activities, etc. And apparently, she was "so confident that she'd make the cut at Michigan that she applied to no other colleges." Now, from my own experience of applying to college a few years back, I recall being told over and over by my high school's college prep people that nothing was ever a guarantee. 1600 SAT's and a 4+ GPA (we had GPA's that went above 4.0) weren't a guarantee, anywhere really but especially at the most selective schools. Anywhere you apply, you might be rejected, so be prepared for this both practically (by applying to lots of places) and emotionally. Jennifer Gratz was apparently not emotionally prepared, and sued.*

This is the attitude, the sense of entitlement. It's the idea that, if you have GPA X and Test Scores Y, and you don't get admitted to a school where most people with those numbers did get in, you've been mistreated. Seriously, who the hell sues because they don't get in to college? College admissions are far more subtle capricious than that. Ogletree's contribution to this reading mentions this point, that everyone on the right talks like a "meritocracy" is a) desirable, and b) a simple matter of making admission dependent upon nothing but test scores and grades. That isn't how it works, that's never been how it works, get over it.

Define "Learning"

I am not going to respond in-depth to today's David Brooks column about college, for various reasons. But I was struck by this early paragraph:

Colleges are supposed to produce learning. But, in their landmark study, “Academically Adrift,” Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa found that, on average, students experienced a pathetic seven percentile point gain in skills during their first two years in college and a marginal gain in the two years after that. The exact numbers are disputed, but the study suggests that nearly half the students showed no significant gain in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills during their first two years in college.

There's a bit of conflation here, isn't there, between "leaning" and "skills"? Okay, learning skills is often an important part of learning, but learning stuff is also a big, important part. Not to brag or anything, but I think my critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills were all pretty damn good when I got to college. I'm not really sure they've improved all that much. But, have I learned anything? Hell yes! I've learned a whole big bunch of stuff, knowledge, facts, and also, by the way, some more specialized skills and techniques like abstract algebra and complex analysis. I've learned about scores of legal cases, I've read thousands of pages of political philosophy, I learned a bit of astronomy and a bit of economics and bits of history. I've learned plenty. Other people have learned plenty, too. And I bet that in most career-preparation graduate schools, like medical schools or law schools, almost everything you learn is either facts or specialized skills, not broad-based skills like the ones Brooks mentions. Arguably the idea behind the educational system is that the pre-college levels help you learn how to do the basic thinking stuff he's describing, and then once you get to college you use those basic skills for higher learning. If people don't improve in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing while at college, maybe that's because they've been getting better at those things before they walk in the door.

Now, I don't know that that's the correct explanation for what's going on. And I certainly don't dispute the basic idea that judging education institutions on the quality of their inputs is silly. But it doesn't make sense to expect colleges, in an ideal system at least, to be the place where people learn the basics of how to think. That should have already happened, and in college you should get to learn stuff.

Learning Styles

I know I saw some article recently saying that the famed "learning styles" idea has been overhyped, but whatever. Here's the story. For a variety of reasons, including a class that kicked out half of its 680 students and a lingering stomach bug, I have myself set up to take a midterm in a high-math-content microecon class this Thursday, having gone to only two lectures of that class thus far. This has inspired me to disregard my roommate's advice that the textbook was really not necessary for him when he took the class, and seek out a copy of said textbook; for more various reasons I don't have my hands on it yet.

But when I was explaining to my roommate what I want the textbook for, namely, to see a few examples of each of the several algorithms we're supposed to know how to use, he responded that he doesn't think the textbook has examples. It has problems, but you're supposed to do them for yourself. I think it's possible that there's sort of an ideology that this is a good thing, that you're not supposed to show someone how to do it but rather make them figure it out, and they learn it better. But I know that I at least feel that the quickest and easiest way to learn an algorithm like the kind that a microecon class uses lots of, and I do mean learn it, quite properly, is to see it done. Once I've seen what's supposed to happen, it's rather easy for me to remember what I am then supposed to do. Trying to figure it out for myself, though, is often just really, really frustrating, and takes a hell of a lot longer. I'm not sure what that says about my learning style, but I definitely think that a textbook that just presents you with an algorithm and never shows you examples of using it is not targeted to me. (Also, this might tie in with a post I'll be writing shortly, also about learning.)