There will be a commotion in affirmative action cases before the Supreme Court, both before and after the court makes its decision. This is similar to the uproar that followed the Dobbs case regarding abortion. The Dobbs decision declared an end to “situation ethics”, as a principle in constitutional law. The Students for Fair Admissions may also do so for “leveling down” such a principle.
To be sure, affirmative action advocates make opportunistic claims for institutional autonomy. These claims are false given the pressures of federal civil rights agencies above and often violent militant students and faculty who benefit from the present policies.
There will be outrage at the disruption to so-called “settled laws,” which is an unprincipled and time-limited law that was thought to be a legislative function, but not a judicial one. It is important to remember that Thurgood Marshall, in his brown argument, stated that he believed there was nothing wrong with separating talented and less skilled students on academic grounds. It is also forgotten that Senator Hubert Humphrey was the Senate manager for the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
These cases involve not only college admissions offices, but also a vast apparatus at all levels. This regime is a challenge to selective admissions, subject and intelligence testing, ability tracking and effective school discipline, not just for students in underperforming groups, but all students. These doctrines of “disparate Impact” also undermine faculty appointments, promote grade inflation, and attack academic tenure.
For good reason, the Brown decision had few serious critics. It ended the South’s impermeable caste system. This was the antithesis to an open society. However, it did not take into account cultural and racial differences. Justice Robert Jackson noted that while a 10 percent black population was literate in 1865, it became almost universal literacy in 1954. It used to be illegal in some states to teach slaves to read. In 1968, University of Chicago President Edward Levi warned that universities could become “a mirror image of the political system”. He said that if we want to make universities “a kind of mirror-image of the political order”, then we need to create new institutions that are weak enough to be independent, but strong enough to support ideas that can change the world.
Martin Luther King had warned in the last chapter in his Stride Toward Freedom in 2008:
We must not attempt to move from a disadvantageous position to one that is advantageous in order to promote freedom in America, Asia, and Africa. This would lead to injustice. We must strive for democracy, not the substitution for one tyranny by another…We cannot let the fact we are victims of injustice fool us into abdicating responsibility for our lives. Negro leaders need to develop a positive program that helps Negro youth adjust to urban life and improve their behavior through religious institutions and community agencies.
In 1968, George Kennan was criticized for suggesting in his Democracy & the Student Left that black Americans should be considered as subjects as well as objects. Under the poor leadership of Thurgood Marshall and King, a gospel promoting self-pity was spread among black leaders. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, despite their abilities as orators, often appear as protection men and confidence men, who are, according to Ta Nehisi Coates to “self-parody.”
The Obama administration failed to address this problem despite occasional concerns about America’s dominant values and culture among its black youth. Instead, it propagated “disparate Impact” doctrine, challenged school discipline systems, failed to promote vocational education, or revive Civilian Conservation Corps. It also left race relations worse than they found them.
Americans have suffered a heavy price from the Civil Rights revolution’s misdirection. College students are now being taught to work ten hours less per week than their peers in previous generations. Free discussion on social and political topics has become a frenzy on campus campuses.
People who believe in “diversity” actually want uniformity. Diversity is the only thing that is desired. The supposed educational benefits of diversity would be greater if student bodies were built on the principle Noah’s Ark, rather than proportional representation. For example, there could be two Ascension Islanders and two Pitcairn Islanders. Because of its educational benefits, the demands for proportional representation of all Americans have not been met.
Our emerging political leaders share a poor education. They are not like the Progressive Era’s “learned presidents”, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, or Theodore Roosevelt. As more minority groups, such as Hispanics and Asian Americans, enter the fight for preferences, the exaltation on equality of result could lead to a war between all.
Even if they are realized, the new egalitarian ideals could lead to a society that John Buchan, a British author, had eloquently predicted in 1940.
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[M]ankind would not be as well provided for as inmates in a well-managed orphanage…everyone will be unrestful, as there would be no spiritual discipline. A mechanical philosophy of politics would have won, and everyone would get his little piece in the state machine. It would have been a bustling, feverish world that was self-satisfied but also malcontented. There would be death at bottom of this world. A world that claimed to be a victory for the human personality would actually have killed it.
Although the obvious consequences of affirmative action are well-intentioned, many people support it. Like the Dobbs repudiation of “abortion upon demand”, it will be repudiated. However, these efforts will not only produce private, state, and local evasions, but they will also be pluralistic and diverse.
Jacob Burckhardt was the greatest prophet of twentieth century totalitarianism. He wrote that there were many good, brilliant liberal people who didn’t know the boundaries between right and wrong, and where duty of defense and resistance begins. These men are the ones who open doors and make the roads safe for the horrible masses.
