The Left Case Against Affirmative Action

Time for the center-left to get serious about class based not race based policy

July 7, 2023

By Marc Cooper

This is what “Diversity” in America really looks like.

Hope you had a good holiday weekend.  I did!  

Some important newsletter housekeeping before we get into the sticky issue of Affirmative Action. 

1.  Truthdig.com just published Part One of my long in-depth and I would say definitive interview with historian Peter Kornbluh on the role of the CIA and Henry Kissinger in Chile.  Part Two coming early next week and will be also be posted here. And your assumptions might be wrong. Kissinger was terrified by the Allende government not because it was too radical but rather because it was too democratic and was a bad example, in his twisted view, for Western Europe where massive left movements might also come to power democratically.  Here’s the link. Read it.  

2.  I am starting to use Zuck’s new “Threads” social media. I will be reposting the newsletter there. And I encourage you to sign up.  It’s a lot cleaner and easier than Twitter and muddle-headed oligarch Elmo Musk is not in charge or even visible!. Sign up and retweet! Re-thread!

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Why University Affirmative Action Failed

Now… about that affirmative action (AA) ruling.  Unlike most of my friends, I am not upset at all about it even though I think the Supreme Court majority are actually extremist right wing politicians in robes. Their majority argument is deeply flawed but the decision itself is complicated but not as earth shattering as some say. Indeed, I find it a great opportunity for the Democrats, progressives and leftists to revise course in a positive way.

Let’s start with some clarifications. Affirmative Action has its early roots in some initial measures by JFK. But AA as we know it today, was mostly shaped by none other than Richard Nixon.

President Nixon signed the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972 giving the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) greater power to enforce against workplace discrimination. Between 1969 and 1972, the EEOC staff had increased from 359 to 1,640 and budget from 13.2 million to $29 million.

AA was initially a boon, mostly for women and some minorities in public and private employment. It made a great difference. It still does. And that workplaces should be racially and gender integrated is now well established in American culture and there are very few work places who today would want to risk a class action discrimination suit.  I would argue that piece of American culture, while not optimum, is now settled and stable. The court ruling in now way lets employers off the hook from legal recourse if they engage in a pattern of discrimination (though the current GOP-led anti-LGBT crusade runs counter to that trend).

In case you missed it, the court ruling on AA last week ONLY applied to university admissions.  And before we go any further, it will probably not have much effect on who is actually admitted. The court ruling bars admissions if they are based primarily or strictly on race.  But Harvard and every other similar school has long practice in devising complicated admission formulae which do and WILL include race.  Make no mistake. And the majority opinion written by Justice Roberts, while contradictory and jumbled, nevertheless leaves the door cracked open for schools to innovate or devise ways to factor race into admissions.

The sad irony here is that our current society is pulling on opposite ends of the issue.  Liberals and Progressives believe that AA is crucial to “diversifying” elite schools like Harvard.  But elite schools like Harvard do everything in their power to limit and decrease admissions overall, for all races. 

Most all American universities (who do not strut as “elite”) have room to admit most anybody who meets minimum requirements and AA is irrelevant in those cases.  But Harvard, for example, admits only a ridiculously small 3.5% of its applicants.  And too many of these are “legacy” admits, the worst and most racist stripe of admission.  It allows the spoiled kids, of mostly wealthy White alums, to gain entrance.  That’s based not on skin color but on net worth of the parents who are expected to generously donate so Harvard can add yet another layer of overpaid bureaucrat administrators, rely more on adjuncts and construct more buildings as monuments to itself.

Where I was on faculty for 15 years at the less prestigious University of Southern California, admissions have been pushed down from around 20%  a dozen years ago to about 11% today as a conscious and stated policy to make the school more “elite” in the words of its now discredited former President C.L. Max Nikias (who was so fixated on funding and building monuments he ignored two glaring scandals that will now cost USC as much $2b which of course, over the long run, will be paid off by even higher tuition) . 

While USC admissions were going down on purpose, of course tuition (now about $60k a year) kept going up, and new buildings were sprouting like mushrooms.  One had to laugh when the school built an entire new $150 million, 90,000 square foot building just for its J School when it already had a great space for it and when the profession was collapsing.  But, hey, Nikias loved the project and personally designed the new building windows to look like the Ivy League (he did make a $2m mistake in the design but who’s counting anyway?). I predict that 20 yrs from now one of those two buildings will be turned into a skating rink as just how many students ten years from now are going to fork out $250 million to get a B.A. in journalism? Or another $60k for a year of grad school? (Didn’t Jeff Bezos buy the whole damn Washington Post for that same $250 million?).

So while the rest of society is grappling on how to get more people of color into elite universities, those same universities are doing everything they can to keep out as many as possible of all races and rely for financing on the elites. 

Check this chart out.

By contrast, and chosen totally at random as I write, UNLV which is a pretty good school (ranked in the top quintile at 85th out of 440 national universities) has an acceptance rate of 81%. I just chose a more prestigious school, Michigan State (ranked 77th) to look at to make sure I did not choose a ringer, and lo, it has an 83% acceptance rate. Bless them. Even the much higher rated and arguably elite Irvine campus of the University of California (ranked 14th among all public universities) admits about 30% of applicants—that’s ten times the percentage of Harvard. Not fabulous. But better than the Ivy League restrictionists.

I think, then, going forward with any new substitute for AA and, by the way, for any new initiative by the admin to redo student loan forgiveness, the universities themselves must be forced to get onto the same page and take greater responsibility in democratizing higher education in lieu of their current narcissistic crusade to be ever more restrictive, ever more elite and ever more expensive, and ever more bloated with wildly overpaid and generally useless administrators, paper pushers, “diversity officers” and other flotsam. 

Just as an anecdote, I have to mention that when USC former president Nikias –still raking in very big bucks from his tenured salary and pension from being president (though he had to give up the modest $25 million (!) residence USC put him in) took over in 2010 he vowed he would hire what he called “superstar” professors as if the school was one big football team (which is not that far from reality).  Note: USC is ranked 25th among top schools but assumes if it can push its admit rate down a few more points its rank will increase.

Who are the star professors Nikias hired?  One was Arnold Schwarzenegger who was also given an institute to administer (I supported his hire because it meant I was no longer the least qualified USC prof!). The other big star was the genius who figured out how to lose in both Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as getting criminally convicted for, um, sharing classified government reports with his mistress…General David Petraeus who is today the Judge Robert Widney Chair Professor at USC.  I’m curious how many student applicants who carry a federal criminal conviction on national security issues are admitted to USC or any other four-year school — with or without affirmative action?

USC Supertsar Professor Arnold

Further, I took a lot of time with my students and got to know them well. I grant USC credit for maintaining generally small classes— some with only 10 or 12 students.  I had a number of Black students who generally performed wonderfully and today are employed as serious journos including at NBC and The New York Times among other outlets.  But…I don’t think more than one came from the working class. Their families were universally middle and professional class, their parents were professors, doctors, lawyers etc.  It’s good that they got to go to a school they wanted to.  But it did nothing for 99% of the minorities they theoretically represented.

The income based achievement gap is now twice the size of the race-based achievement gap or more, reports The New York Times.

Now, in analyses of long-term data published in recent months, researchers are finding that while the achievement gap between white and black students has narrowed significantly over the past few decades, the gap between rich and poor students has grown substantially during the same period.

“We have moved from a society in the 1950s and 1960s, in which race was more consequential than family income, to one today in which family income appears more determinative of educational success than race,” said Sean F. Reardon, a Stanford University sociologist. Professor Reardon is the author of a study that found that the gap in standardized test scores between affluent and low-income students had grown by about 40 percent since the 1960s, and is now double the testing gap between blacks and whites.”

What better proof of the obsolete and obstructive nature of racialist university affirmative action? And this report is from 2012 when that inequality was much less intense than today.

And get serious. Do you really think that elite universities really care about “diversity” in its most essential meaning? Hell no! If they did, they’d be expanding overall admissions, not reducing them, raising tuition and not hiring overpaid ex-cons like David Petraeus or clowns like Arnold as professors. Universities care primarily about money, about raking in funding. And to them, “diversity” (one of the most meaningless terms I can think of) means only making sure there are some faces of color in the photos and warding off class action lawsuits. It’s about image, not effectiveness. And certainly has nothing to do with democratizing higher education.

In the current issue of The Nation, Black columnist and activist/academic Adolph Reed is systematically blowing up all the liberal mythology about AA. I strongly suggest you check him out. He is the leading voice on the Left decrying AA as a very poor substitute for economic rather than race-based AA.  He’s co-author of the book, “No Politics But Class Politics.” And the subtitle of this recent column tells it all. “The left used to believe that reducing inequality across the board was the best way to combat racial justice. What happened?”  How about this for a meaningful graph:

Today, public voices like Ta-Nehisi Coates claim that the War on Poverty failed Black Americans because it did not address the supposedly special nature of Black poverty. In reality, that is precisely what it did, thereby failing Blacks and everyone else. MSNBC talking head Joy Reid dismisses universal social policy as resting on a discredited belief that “a rising tide [will] bring the races together.” Her stance conflates universalism with the growth politics that, since at least the John F. Kennedy administration, has been centrist Democrats’ alternative to a redistributive policy that would provide universal, non-marketized access to necessities like health care, education at all levels, and housing, along with a commitment to a full-employment economy. This sort of misreading is what happens when history is reduced to the equivalent of a fortune-cookie factory.

Prof, Adolph Reed. “It’s all about class, stupid.”

Indeed, the rise of AA has actually helped erode and crush the original social democratic and socialist politics of the early civil rights movement – one that was deeply intertwined with the labor movement and socialists (and certainly some Communists). 

That period is long gone.  Instead of policies that served all poor people, and almost all of the intended targets of AA are relatively poor, educational AA is focused only a small population of not so poor people.  To paraphrase another piece by Reed, AA has changed the focus from systemic and progressive economic and social policy reform into something that requires only a simple psychological response: Be tolerant. Accept diversity. And maybe feel guilty enough to be a White “ally.” Be “anti-racist,” learn the PC lingo and you have done your part. If you are White and living on welfare, then damnit, become an “anti-racist” and become an “ally” of the Truly Oppressed because you are not and ain’t nobody gonna help you get into an elite university.

Wise crackers like Coates, and 1619 project chief Nikole Hannah-Jones are hailed as anti-racist leaders by activists and universities when, in fact, they both essentially argue that racism is inborn to White Americans and is pretty much permanent, meaning the only “remedies” are psychological repenting or behavioral reform of these automatic racists rather than universalist policies that build toward an egalitarian multi-racial democracy. Their theories have been accepted without any questioning or skepticism or rebuttal from academia and by almost most of the Regressive Left who just assume they are valiant heroes. They are not. The 1619 crapola is being adopted in high schools as if God wrote it and without contending points of view or incisive critiques by other progressive historians.

What we should be talking about is a serious push to eradicate poverty and close the equality and achievement gaps by investing billions in early childhood intervention, free and accessible day care, universal free health care, higher wages, more accessible housing, rebuilding urban centers, deep policing reform, and more aggressive unionization among other universalist social policies.  These are the kinds of measures that will not only benefit people of color, but also poor White people who are completely ignored by AA and have pretty much been abandoned by the Democrats for the last 40 years (and people wonder why Trump resonates with them).

I understand that all that above sounds like pie in the sky and it probably is, given the attitude of our elected leaders and the relative cluelessness of the general population (a recent poll shows that 30% of Americans believe the current US Supreme Court was appointed by “Democrats.”) Meanwhile,  class-based reforms which would most benefit people of color, are just considered quaint, or outdated or anti-American.

So, tell me, if AA as we know it was worth saving and has done so much good then why is it that during the same life span as AA inequality has not only increased but also at an alarming rate?  Getting a couple dozen POC into Harvard or UC is ok for those few but does not even register on the scale of Overall Social Justice.

When you are born into poverty, when —perhaps— English is not your first language, if your family is under or unemployed, when you are having problems in high school, when your neighborhood is a shooting range, when there are no books in your house, when you have to take a night job to pay for the medical care of your uninsured mom, when you Dad is absent or in prison, do you really think university affirmative action is going to compensate for any of that baggage?

Now comes the really controversial part.  The dunking of AA for university admissions should be seen as a golden opportunity for the liberal left instead of a crushing defeat.  All the negative emotion that the ruling generated should now be channelled into a strong push for a new class-based socio-economic AA program that will not only wind up getting more minorities into college, but will also lift them out of poverty, make it much easier to go to any school, and just might help spark a political re-alignment where White workers can see Democrats fighting for them as well and not just for loyal minorities (who are not so loyal anymore because they are also experiencing the stress and turmoil of existing in the lower quintiles of the American economy and they are not that pleased with empty Democratic rhetoric).

Progressive Democrats and self-proclaimed leftists seem just as much out to lunch on this issue. Looking at the current issue of The Nation…it is loaded with sky-is-falling lefty takes on the wonders of affirmative action. Only Adolph Reed’s column (not promoted on the cover of course) takes a dissenting and much more constructive view.

The regressive progressives at places like The Nation have gone SO nuts over AA that the mag actually has a piece titled: “Asian American Conservatives Have Become Key Allies of White Supremacy.” Its subtitle: “As the death of affirmative action showed, Asian American conservatives are active, militant co-conspirators with white conservatives.”

An article in The Nation. Not National Review!

Blatantly racist. Blatantly stupid and dead on obvious at the same time. Hey, ALL conservatives, Asian, White, Black, Latino and Greek are all key allies of what Princeton-based English professor and article author Promise Li calls White Supremacists. Why single out conservative Asians? Nothing special about their support but I suspect some dark motives here on the part of Li and maybe an editor or two at The Nation. Because many opponents of AA correctly argue that high performing Asian students are discriminated against by AA, it seems like Prof. Li, an Asian, felt it his left wing political duty to muddy up other Asians lest we dare think of them as losers in affirmative action. (And BTW his piece is wrong. Affirmative Action did not die. It was struck down for university admissions only).

But this rather useless article is anyway an excellent read on the intellectual decay of so many progressives and academic progressives when it comes to race and the continued decline of left outlets like The Nation. Frankly, the “anti-racist” social justice warriors who prioritize race over class are political idiots and… headless lemmings (LOL, the admission rate at Prof. Li’s school, Princeton, is an anemic 4% this year…in my mind depriving anyone affiliated with that school the right to offer positive opinions on AA admissions without mentioning that 96% of all applicants are shut out).

The American Left –whatever that is—must not choose to die on the hill of a flawed, obsolete, well-intentioned but ineffective and obsolete race-based affirmative action policy though it seems determined to do exactly that. If it does not quickly adopt a much more effective, a much more democratic, a much more popular,  a much more inclusive strategy based on economic need and class, then it will be guaranteeing its death and might as well erect a couple of crosses on that ill-chosen hill…while it’s still barely breathing. ++

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