I’m sorry to spoil the party, but the premises underlying this discussion and its anti-affirmative action conclusions are wrong, and they are wrong because based (it appears) on a caricatured notion of how the affirmative action process at the University of Michigan actually works. There are no specific applicants who can be identified as the victims of affirmative action, and the beneficiaries aren’t always identifiable either.

I am not familiar with the specifics of the U-M law school affirmative action policy, but I do know how the undergrad policy works. Applicants eligible for affirmative action consideration are given so many points, which are added to the points the applicant is granted for various other factors: grades, SAT scores, quality of high school attended, etc. The point scale runs, as I remember, from 0 to 150. (I had to learn the ins and outs of this process when helping a math-challenged colleague with a story on various aspects of U-M admissions procedures for an Ann Arbor paper we both work for.)

Anyway, the process works like this: almost nobody (except football players, etc.) who scores under 80 gets admitted; Almost everybody who scores over 130 is admitted. The applicants in the middle range go into a pool of applicants the admissions department scrutinizes, more or less one by one, in some detail. In filling the admitted class from this pool, they both look for individual features that may make the applicant a more viable candidate for admission than the rating system reveals--i.e., find the pick of the litter--and try to balance the class they are assembling for a number of factors, which include getting a fair share of students from all over Michigan as well as from various ethnicities. Various other factors are involved here, including, for example, getting a certain mix of students with projected majors in physics, English, engineering, etc. In other words, there are lots of institutional purposes--the most self-serving of which are “legacies” and the ability to play football--on the basis of which putatively “qualified” applicants are discriminated one from the other, none of them “fair” to the individuals who end up denied admission.

Moreover, the U-M routinely admits more than twice as many students as it can accommodate--most of those admitted end up going elsewhere. In other words, by definition more than half of those admitted are NOT the best X-number qualified students for the X-number of slots available in the incoming class.

In this context, it seems simply foolish to get all exercised about the supposed advantage a few minority applicants are being given. Affirmative action--at the U-M--does not get anyone admitted, though it does allow many minorities to be considered for admission who would otherwise have been overlooked.

And I can say from personal experience that this can be a good thing. I used to be a college professor myself, at Swarthmore College. I taught American literature there in the 70s. At that time Swarthmore had a (smallish) affirmative action program. One year, in my freshman class, I had an African American student from Pittsburgh. His first paper was awful--I had to stretch to give it a D. It read like an inebriated parody of academic writing, lots of big words tripping over each other, none of them really knowing what they were supposed to be doing there. It was torture grading it: trying to figure out what he might imaginably be trying to say so I could write comments suggesting how he might have said it. I remember spending over 2 hours on this 2-page paper.

Anyway, next paper--on Moby-Dick--4 pages, he gets an A. A no-brainer, pre-grade-inflation A. I was of course horrified: I assumed he had somebody else write it for him. So I asked him to see me in my office, and told him I was startled by his improvement. I didn’t accuse him of what I suspected, but I managed to draw him into a discussion of the issues raised in the paper, extending the discussion well beyond what was in the paper itself. His conversation was as good as the paper. He had actually written it! I was amazed. I later learned a little about his background--a ghetto kid who had been befriended and encouraged by the then NBA star Maurice Lucas. And he is the poster boy for affirmative action: a bright, motivated kid who’s been deprived of a good education but who is perfectly capable of performing to standards of scholarship his resume says are beyond him.

My problem with the U-M’s affirmative action is that it looks cynical to me. I might be wrong, but I get the sense that while it does no harm to anyone, it also does little good. I don’t think they search assiduously for diamonds in the rough like the kid I described. I think they simply follow practices that seem to work for making the U-M look good on its resume--and I’m not talking specifically or especially about the affirmative action here. To be honest, I don’t think that as an institution it’s especially interested in undergraduate education, any more than MacDonalds is interested in nutrition. And I don’t mean to single out the U-M on this score; this seems to me to be generally true of American higher education these days.

I don’t think most universities could answer this question in any kind of satisfactory way: How do you want to change your students during their time here, in ways that would be evident to them and to anyone else the day they graduate--without reference to whatever job they may use their diploma to get.

But I could be wrong.

Posted by: John Hinchey on February 25, 2003 5:06 PM

Mr. Hinchey: I appreciate your lengthy and thoughtful response. If you would care to go digging through our archives, I think you would see that you and I agree that universities are remarkably indifferent to undergraduate education (although your comparison with McDonalds is far more eloquent than anything I've managed.)

However, I think your discussion of how Michigan's affirmative action program works misses the point. If some of the applicants in the pool are getting extra points, then those applicants are being favored, and those who are pushed out of contention by that process are being disfavored. That's why the extra points are in there, to skew the decision making in favor of certain groups, e.g., football players.

I guess the larger questions involved here are (1) why the Michigan legislature leaves so much of this up to the university administration to determine, given the significant role of public funding in the Michigan university system, and (2) why we haven't seen legal challenges to the non-racial and ethnic-preference policies of state universities (one would think these would be rather vulnerable to "equal protection of the laws" arguments.)

Again, that's why I support a "buy out" system for non-academic preferences--every admitted student should submit a dollar figure for how much they would demand in order to NOT go to the U. of M. (or other school.) Thus, to make room for football players or minority students, the school would "buy out" enough places for them. That would provide an interesting piece of transparency for how much these non-academic agendas cost, and eliminate resentment of these preferences.

Posted by: Friedrich von Blowhard on February 25, 2003 6:00 PM






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