Affirmative Action Reconsidered | OLD PARKLAND CONFERENCE

[Music] all right hello everyone my name is monet ukebarua i am a writer at the wall street journal editorial page i'm going to be moderating our discussion entitled affirmative action reconsidered do blacks need special treatment to succeed and so i wanted to give a little introduction to the topic because i think it would be almost impossible to overstate the importance that affirmative action was meant to have in the post-civil rights push to advance the place of blacks in this country you can think of affirmative action as one of two twin pillars that sort of racial progressives proposed in the aftermath of the civil rights movement of course the first pillar is wealth redistribution and the anti-poverty programs of the great society those were supposed to essentially lift the floor um bring blacks out of poverty and give better prospects to at the least among us and uh in this crowd i don't think i have to work too hard to convince people that that first pillar has already crumbled and we've seen that the great society programs have not had the effect that they were intended to have we can say the same thing about affirmative action you know 50 years on we have seen that it has failed to create a sort of stable black upper class proportionate to the size of blacks in the american population but not only has it failed to do that it also has opened up significant problems in american society there is an ongoing legal debate about whether affirmative action is even legal at all about whether it comports with the civil rights act and with the constitution there is a debate over how effective it is even for the people it's trying to help and finally there's a debate over whether it's fair to discriminate against whites and increasingly against asians um in the push to include more blacks in elite academic institutions and in the workforce and so today i'm going to be joined in this discussion by three panelists here directly to my left we have gail harriet who is a professor at the university of san diego school of law and also as a member of the u.s commission on civil rights we have next to her kenny shu who's president of colorist united which is an advocacy group that pushes for meritocracy and colorblindness in the workforce and elsewhere and finally we have devin westhill who's president of the center for equal op opportunity which monitors civil rights across different sectors of public life so please join me in welcoming our panel [Applause] so the issue of affirmative action has been very timely as of late because we are finally seeing a return to federal litigation which is going to question whether it's legal to begin with there is a case being brought by an advocacy group called students for fair admissions which is suing harvard university and also the university of north carolina for their discriminatory actions they just last week filed their brief to the supreme court an oral argument is going to be heard this october kenny is actually involved with that case sort of as an advocate and so i was wondering if you'd be able to describe to us what is the argument that student for fair admissions is making about affirmative action from a legal standpoint and what is your perspective on the prospects of that case so i am kenny shue i am the author of the new book an inconvenient minority the attack on asian american excellence in the fight for meritocracy i'm also on the board of students of fair admissions so we are we are litigating that case we are in the supreme court we are fighting tooth and nail for equal rights and meritocracy and ultimately that's what this this that's what this case is about right there's a reason why this case got so much attention and it's not just because it's just one school in the most popular school in the entire world harvard university but it's because of what it stands for so students for fair admissions filed a lawsuit against harvard university way back in 2014 alleging that asian americans are discriminated by harvard in the name of so-called diversity and harvard who wants to admit a preferred ratio of blacks and hispanics and also wants to keep their white legacy core intact and children of donors intact as well in fact i think 10 of the admits to harvard um last year were children of it donors or influential alumni so they want to keep all of that part so they have to cut out somebody right they have to somebody has to be cut out if you're going to prefer blacks you're going to prefer hispanics you're going to prefer legacies you're going to prefer children of donors and you're going to prefer athletes somebody's got to be cut out well who's going to be cut out well it turns out the people that they decided was the easiest to cut out of the equation are high achieving asian americans and in fact asian americans have to score 440 points higher on the s.a.t to have the same chance of admission as a black person and 150 points higher to the same chance as a white person and and basically this case is is asserting that hey you have no right to abandon the principles of meritocracy for the sake of your preferred ratios um and right now that case is um is being litigated in the highest court of the land so to continue on the sort of the legal dimension of affirmative action i wanted to ask if if gail would be able to follow up by talking about some of the history of how the court has treated it because this is essentially round three in several what landmark supreme court cases we had uc versus bacci 1978 which basically said affirmative action is constitutional that was affirmed by grutter versus bollinger in 2003 and i know that through your work you have studied these legal questions so i wondered if you could be able to sort of inform us what are the trickiest parts of uh getting a a stable legal solution solution in terms of should affirmative action even be allowed whatsoever alas it's all tricky um i should footnote before i start though and i'm required to say this ladies and gentlemen it won't shock you nothing that i say should be construed as the opinion of the u.s commission on civil rights um so i've said it they're going to be happy now in washington um so what's the law in this area if you look back to 1964 title vi is very clear it bans race discrimination in any federally funded activity and just about every university not quite but almost every university in the country receives federal funds so you would think this is easy you cannot discriminate on the basis of race but it's not so easy um alas in the bucky case in 1978 we had a a split decision four one and four four justices um said look you know you look at title six it's easy it says no race discrimination it was very very clear that the university of california davis medical school was discriminating on the basis of race and those four justices said you know this is simply illegal under title vi um they didn't even have to get to the constitutional question then there were four justices who said well you know it says that you can't discriminate on the basis of race but it doesn't really mean that uh what it really means is is that you can't violate the constitution and the equal protection clause is a little bit you know it's more general it doesn't say specifically you can't discriminate in the basis of race instead it says equal protection under the laws and those four justices took the position that hey if it's the good kind of discrimination um then then you know we're willing to put up with it and one justice the man in the middle justice lewis powell um had kind of a quirky position um he went through several possible reasons that a university might be willing to discriminate and said hey if you're doing it because you are trying to improve the education for all the students do you have a pedagogical reason uh to get to engage in discrimination as long as you're not doing it on the basis of of clear quotas and the university of california was so so pow powell took the side of alan baki but he said hey you know in the future though if a university does it on a more of an abstract seeking diversity of all kinds including race including maybe athletics including people who visited other countries people have been in the circus people who've been you know had any any sort of a background that would be different he said that could be okay and i think when he made that decision he thought he was talking about sort of a narrow exception and that it wouldn't be abused but boom as soon as it was it was possible for for a university to say we're not doing this because we're trying um to benefit a particular group a particular race we're doing it for diversity's sake every office at every university that had used the term you know racial justice or affirmative action they switched the name to diversity but the door was opened wide to i'm sorry to say rather large rather large preferences based on race and i think we'll talk a little bit later about the effects that had but as for the law it meant for them for the next 20-some years universities felt that they could discriminate and they could discriminate quite a lot quite a lot the gaps were quite large um but that was just one justice's opinion just one um it wasn't the majority of the court um and so those who who were opposed to such preferences decided well we'll bring another case and in the year 2003 i believe two such cases reached the supreme court grudder versus bollinger and grotz versus bollinger both of them were against the university of michigan bollinger was the president of the university of michigan at the time one case was the college the other case was the law school the college was being very numerical it was adding 20 points to the to the admission score uh of all students uh who were african-american um and it was 20 points sounds like oh it's not that many it was huge basically it meant that each african-american student was treated as if they had gotten perfect s.a.t scores so it was a very large number and that you know that was numerical and the court didn't like that you know justice o'connor who ended up being the the vote that mattered here uh she was not willing to tolerate um something that was that blatant but the law school had a somewhat different process um they they could claim because they're small law schools aren't large law schools are small you know you can look at every admissions package and look for everything that's in it and they would just sort of eyeball it and decide whether or not to admit the student but the preferences were actually just as large at the law school as they were at the college uh they are again very very large preferences um that especially benefited african-american students but also um native american students and also latino students but at the law school they could say that they weren't they weren't engaged in a particular number they would just eyeball it and decide who to admit and who not to admit and so i think sadly justice o'connor on that one decided that she thought that lewis powell was basically right that this should be tolerable although weirdly she said i she said that she only expected this to be something that would have to be done for the next 25 years we're getting very close to the end of that 25 years um mr west hills organization the center for for equal opportunity did some investigation of whether or not those those gaps were closing and whether or not the the level of preference was going down at the university of michigan a few years back before you started working there but still the gaps were getting larger instead of smaller larger and there were two more cases that reached the court bishop versus the university of texas one and fisher versus the university of texas number two i won't bore you with the details on those two um suffice it to say that in one the court sounded like it was gonna start you know closing the door a little bit and getting towards the the deadline of 25 years that justice o'connor had in mind um [Music] but it didn't turn out that way and fisher 2 um nothing happened um so now now it's before the court one more time um is the court going to be true to the civil rights of 19 act of 1964 to title vi and say there is no race discrimination in federally funded activities or will they punt again i am not taking bets on this i did take a bet on gretter and i lost so um i will just leave it there well gail invoked me so if i could just start yeah so i'm devon westhill i'm i'm the president and the general counsel of the center for equal opportunity it's been around for almost 30 years and the mission of the organization has been to advance colorblind equal opportunity in every sphere of american life public and private in the higher education sphere employment contracting and the like where affirmative action or we like to call it exactly what it is race preferences is is rampant one of the things that we've done really well and often at the center for equal opportunity over that period of time is to produce studies that report to the public on what exactly is going on in higher education when it comes to these preferences and to circle back to something that gail said i think we have to be kind of careful about how we talk about affirmative action all of these issues that we've been we've been discussing over the last day and a half because i don't think that race preferences in college admissions is actually a benefit to those individuals who receive them those quote unquote underrepresented minorities on campuses i think we'll get into a little bit more about this uh and further discussion but on its face it sort of looks like it right wow you know um i had lower than stellar credentials i got into this school by the skin of my teeth i've really accomplished something but at the end of the day we'll see and i think in some of our our conversation here that uh it actually is just the start of something that's actually really not good uh for those individuals who get those sorts of preferences um and one additional thing before um i i stop here in my initial remarks is what what is affirmative action who is affirmative action for anyway is it for the blacks the hispanics the native americans legally speaking no as gayle suggested it's for the the benefits that flow from a diverse student body it's for whites it's for whites to study quote unquote underrepresented minorities blacks hispanics native americans and so on and so forth uh like so many zoo animals that's that's what affirmative action is actually for not for black americans and so the suggestion that affirmative action even in the first instance legally speaking might be this special treatment for the advancement of blacks or for black success is hogwash i'll stop there for sure well i wanted to follow up a little bit because right at the end you got to a point that gail was making which was that the justification that's presented from affirmative action has changed through the years both coming from the courts and then coming from the university administrators in the very beginning it was portrayed as a temporary action that was needed to undo the harms that discrimination had caused this was coming right in the wake of jim crow and so the idea is there's been explicit discrimination against blacks they have attended subpar schools by law and so we are going to basically have an affirmative action literally that sort of that pulls more of these blacks into um selective schools and then puts them on a platform into sort of a higher realm in the workforce as the legality of that theory started to break down and also as the results weren't panning out you saw this pivot to the purpose of it is just for the enrichment of the students you know that that's exactly why we have it we want to have a diverse student body and i do wonder to push back on your point a little bit devin um you do you really think that there there's no benefit to having uh sort of the white students who are going to go into elite positions of power in this country many of whom have never experienced a black community who might have negative stereotypes about blacks would you really say it would be a bad thing to have you know four years um in these institutions where students from a background like that are are gaining exposure to high caliber sort of black students and and learn that you know there are a variety of experiences that these skills do exist among black people and to sort of create this melting pot in our universities a lot of what you just said presupposes a lot um so one of the things that it presupposes is that the individuals who are getting into these elite institutions is the terminology that you use or really the students that should be in those institutions that are going to be able to display those qualities that are important to dispel stereotypes that other students might have when they attend these institutions uh just by being around them um the problem is when you're given these massive preferences for underrepresented uh minorities for individuals who are academically uh not prepared uh for the coursework at these institutions taking mit for example these are the best of the best of the best of the best uh science mathematics technology students in the country like dr lowry who went to mit um when you put students who have given been given a massive preference next to those students who have lived breathed slept mathematics and science and so on and so forth all their lives it only reinforces pernicious stereotypes about black people and brown people that they are lazy that they are actually stupid um and i don't think that at all is beneficial i think that's actually really harmful um so no i i i think it presupposes that you actually are going to have students who are on par with other students at these elite institutions and that is just not the case when they're given these massive preferences to attend those schools now i think there's a case that can be made for students who make it on their own you know i i i i am not against diversity i'm not against inclusion per se i am against racial discrimination and i am against um anything that's going to perpetuate the pernicious stereotypes about black and brown people which race preferences massive race preferences on college campuses do well mine just went real quick you say that the whites don't know the black experience at harvard the blacks don't know the black experience at harvard 71 of the black students admitted at harvard are from upper middle class or higher backgrounds and 48 of the black kids admitted at harvard are children of black immigrants meaning that they do not have bear any resemblance to the american slave trade they don't they don't have that lineage so this is this this goes into the discussion we've been having the entire day the entire afternoon but the kind of manufactured cosmetic experience that harvard is trying to create for black people is a caricature is a caricature of what blacks in america are really going through yeah i mean i i want to follow up with you kenny for a moment i think one of the the justifications for affirmative action from the universities is that they're able to give a leg up to these underrepresented groups blacks and also hispanics too um theoretically without necessarily hurting sort of students who come from the more privileged groups this was this was the rationale at the beginning it's not that we're discriminating against and the courts are very careful to probe this um but we're just giving a leg up to other students obviously we all know that the math doesn't work there you have a fixed number of spots that you can give up if you're going to boost the representation of one group that means you're necessarily going to have to take away from another group but it's it's gotten even worse than that and that's one of the points of the students for fair admissions case we've seen in this country the levels of asian immigration increasing over the past few decades to the point that they're a much larger share of the american population than they historically have been they continue to achieve at quite high levels and yet looking at the admissions records of a school like harvard you've seen that there's essentially been a cap on the number of asian students who they're able to admit um and so i wonder can you have have you would you say that you've seen a kind of um a change among asian americans and so in the mindset towards affirmative action where they might have been less kind of offended by this racial balancing but are becoming more vocal and more politically active about the lack of fairness from the practice yes and none of this should be construed as the official argument of students for fair admissions um but asians in america have have have rel have unique needs and i you know this is like you know i get it i'm generalizing i get it but in general asians in america are not lacking of um you know two-parent family structures or some of the things that we talk about culturally that plague some of the lower you know income communities we we arrive here with strong two-parent family structures we arrive here with values of hard work asian americans study twice as many hours as the average american they study 13 hours a week the average white person studies seven the average black person studies five so asian americans have values built on meritocracy on meritocracy meaning that they count on the united states generally being a meritocracy for them to succeed they count on the idea that talent and competence is rewarded in this country and for a while that that that's worked you know for a while that asian americans have become the highest income earning social group in the united states they have um been the most educated recently but at the same time what we have with this harvard case is harvard saying and harvard's saying to asian americans well your talent and your hard work is going to fall in comparison to your race and and and what you bring to the table we're going to look at you based on characteristics that you cannot control about yourself and and and to asian admin to asian americans that speaks to a i think the reason why asian americans have become more emotional about this case is because it speaks to one of their frustrations about in this country which is their frustration for status you know their frustration for well we have worked really hard in this country but you know still culturally speaking it seems like we lack that cultural capital that political capital to really take that step forward and there's anxiety there's there's a lot of anxiety among asian americans for that you know and that that really pains a lot of asian americans and it pains a lot of asian americans to see what harvard did with the personality score that's another thing um a lot of asian americans that i've talked to who otherwise would not have cared about the harvard case or would have even supported harvard when i bring up the fact that harvard rated asians lowest on the personality score out of all of the races despite the fact that asians got the highest teacher recommendations highest alumni recommendations second highest council recommendations personality score according to harvard means likability good humor leadership skills a harvard man and asians just don't make the cut they just don't make the cut and to asians that speaks directly to the heart because man they're working so hard they're studying they're putting the hours day after day they're doing everything right and and and and harvard uses that against them they say they're test taking robots with no personality you know an essay that peter sidiakino read who is the lead witness in the harvard case for students for fair admissions who couldn't join us today but there is an essay of a girl who is asian who grew up in foster care and you know just was was devastated in families and had that story that that that um that rise from deprivation that supposedly is coveted by harvard admissions officers and they gave her the standard strong personality score which means good but not good enough and i can tell you 100 guaranteed if that girl's race was changed to black or latino that would not happen so that's one of the issues that i think is at the heart of this for asian americans this craving this desire to be accepted and harvard throwing that in their face can i add something here and that is that history repeats itself if you look back at harvard university in the 1920s same story the jewish quotas at harvard were so similar to what kenny is talking about now and lewis powell in the bakke case evidently didn't understand that in the bakke case he actually says you know harvard has this program where they're looking for well-rounded people and that that makes sense to him that actually was was proposed as a way of keeping jewish students out of harvard um that the president of harvard in the 1920s was a man by the name of a lawrence lowell uh and he was also president of an organization that was an anti-immigration organization and he went to the harvard faculty first and said we've got too many jewish students i wasn't wasn't subtle about it at all um and he asked the faculty to adopt a policy under which they could strictly limit the number of jewish students and jewish students then as today uh do quite well on the sort of tests and the sort of academic credentials um and so there were a large number of jewish students that wanted to get into harvard and were qualified under under harvard's rules the faculty to its credit that first time when lowell came and just asked for us flat quota they said no they refused and he came back the next year um and said well we should be considering you know whether students are well-rounded um this was not you know this was not a a an issue of well-roundedness this was a this was a ruse uh to limit the number of jewish students um and but the faculty heard that and they thought well that sounds nice yeah we want we do in fact want students who are well-rounded and today we want students who are well-rounded um but it was actually a way in which lowell was attempting to to limit the number of jewish students it was quite clear um there is there's documentation at this point that that once harvard did this and once other ivy league schools did it and they all did it and very very quickly they did it that the number of jewish students plummeted plummeted nothing else happened everything else was pretty much business as usual but they simply cut the number of jewish students then as now the argument you know is well they weren't well-rounded or asian-american students don't have good personalities uh but that's not what's going on so so far we've covered a couple of the key failures of affirmative action over the past 50 years we started with the question is it legal answer maybe but probably not and the second question is it fair and it seems like our answer is a resounding no i wanted to finish on a final question which is does it even work for the blacks who it's intended to help and i wanted to go to you devin for that question i'm curious i mean it seems like affirmative action helps to entrench a couple of harmful narratives one is a narrative in the eyes of sort of whites basically where every time they encounter a black student at school or a black employee in the workforce they always have to wonder is this person only here because they were given a special privilege and it also entrenches a negative narrative in the eyes of blacks in the sense that it helps to create a mindset that our our group is being locked out we need these special privileges in order to be able to compete and so i wonder either you know speaking personally speaking from your work uh what do you think about sort of the role that affirmative action plays in entrenching these negative narratives yeah thank you for the question uh so you know one of the questions is what do you mean by does it work you know do do you get more uh underrepresented minorities blacks hispanics et cetera on your campuses because of affirmative action i think that's the you know the answer is yes probably um does it actually help blacks and other under represented minorities succeed um you know i would say no as i suggested that the organization that i run the center for equal opportunity has been studying this for a long period of time and what we've seen is that when applicants are given these major preferences to go to schools a number of really bad things follow from that we've talked about a few of those things already but other things that we haven't talked about and one of the biggest things is that these individuals who are full of you know energy and passionate about various sometimes hard subjects like science technology engineering math stem subjects get into a situation where they are not academically qualified for that this is called mismatched theory and we've seen that they disproportionately change their majors right they they run into a brick wall these students who would have been fantastic at slightly lower tier school you know we're talking going from cal tech right to uc davis or or something like that and would have otherwise been a black scientist would have been a black mathematician would have been a black engineer would have had a fantastic career you know end up settling for you know and there's no knock on this but uh you know a sociology degree or an english degree um and and and and again we need sociologists we need we need folks who who understand those disciplines as well um but when you're talking about uh black advancement into white-collar uh high-level positions and so forth which they otherwise would have been able to obtain and wanted to obtain um that is a scandal it's a scandal to know that we would have had more well i don't know about more lawyers we would have had more scientists we would have had more uh technologists uh you know more doctors and so on and so forth if these folks had been paired properly um with the school that would have made more sense for their preparation um that that's that's that's number one there's another thing i wanted to mention as well what we've seen on campus um very much accelerated over uh the last 10 or 20 years is this racial separatism on campus right folks see themselves as being different right blacks other underrepresented minorities who are by and large given these massive preferences don't feel like they're fitting in well the folks who are not getting these preferences feel like those individuals aren't fitting in well they feel like there's something about them that is different than others they are the other that's on campus and so they create these affinity groups right and they separate themselves from the rest of the campus um because in part they think there's something that's uh either wrong with them um or there's something wrong with the institution or the people there um and oftentimes you know these things um fall along race lines and so i think it's actually furthering racial strife and division um uh you know when when we we wouldn't otherwise to quite the same extent have that yeah go ahead yeah i'd like to add a little bit about hbcus historically black colleges and universities who i think help prove the point that devon was just making and that is we would have more black scientists more black physicians more black engineers if colleges and universities simply engaged in in race neutral admissions policies um that way disproportionately black students who have terrific credentials you know to get within a million miles of mit you have to have great credentials but then there are some of these kids who've been like living and breathing science and engineering since they were like two years old and then there are other you know black students who who haven't been doing that their parents are not scientists or engineers they've got great credentials but not quite what mit usually gets that student had been just you know a little bit lower in the pecking order they have done splendidly and they have their nobel prize by now probably but hbcus they produce significantly more than their share of the black scientists and engineers these are people who often go to college at an hbcu they do well they go to graduate school maybe in a mainstream university get their phd at a mainstream university but they weren't thrown in initially with students who have higher academic credentials so they were able to get you know to to learn what they needed to learn uh maybe they didn't get an even break in high school maybe the high school they went to did not you know really really cover their needs but the college did and by the time they're in graduate school they're doing fine um and i think that's that's an important thing uh that these schools have have fulfilled that role um you know one may think gosh you know do we really want to have uh colleges that are disproportionately african-american so that we have that kind of separatism um and you know it doesn't really matter what we think about that what i think is important is that these schools are not um you know they are not giving preferential treatment to african americans uh they're not doing it you know you can be in the top of the class uh at these schools and it's not just sciences and sciences and engineering um there are also studies that show just overall black students are less likely to go and become college professors of any kind um when they go attend to school where they've gotten preferential treatment because the sort of person that decides hey i love college i want to stay here forever um those are the people that think you know and i'm good at this and you know some students will outperform their entering credentials when they get into college some students will underperform theirs but most students are going to going to perform in the general range their credentials say um and if schools are giving large preferences that means that part of the african-american experience in college is not getting the best of grades but those students that do go to a school where their credentials put them in the ballpark and they get good grades they think hey i like this i like this they go on to graduate school they get a phd in some subject and they go on to become a college professor which i can attest is a great job [Laughter] so so kind of as one final closing point before we move to questions i thought i'd ask if any of you have a response to this which is that if you look at polls of affirmative action today generally you find that a large majority of blacks aren't even necessarily in favor of some of these policies or i should say it's not a large majority but you'll find for example things like ballot measures should the university of california use racial preferences and its admissions and you'll have about 53 percent of blacks saying no and so it seems like this is one of many situations where affirmative action is not something that's being demanded by blacks in as much as it is something that's being pushed by a kind of a progressive elite which includes many blacks of course um and sort of these policies aren't necessarily in the best interest of the people who they're intended to serve and i wonder if any of you have a quick response to that i i have a response i'm sorry go ahead all right go ahead yeah i have a response uh so the organization that i run the center for equal opportunity just released a study a few weeks ago analyzing some 2019 pew research data that pulled over 7 000 people from black people hispanic people asian people and and native american i think but what came out was exactly what you suggested when we analyzed this large majorities of the respondents thought the very first thing that should be considered when you're determining whether or not someone should be admitted to a university is test grades scores these sorts of measures of of academic merit the very last thing on the list most of the individuals of all racial uh categories thought that race and gender should not at all uh being in relation to this person uh yeah in relationship to a famous person and a relationship to a famous person um um i have a couple of statistics here so whites thought that by a 78 78 to uh 22 margin that race should not at all be taken into account blacks 62 a good majority said don't take this into consideration at all now it does beg the question um whether or not the statement that you may money is actually true or whether or not it's mutually exclusive with the statement i'll make here and that is you know is is this sort of a factor of not wanting to carry a stigma for the rest of your days that you were you know and be demeaned as a diversity admit uh to a school or diversity higher uh right uh at the at the employment level i think about that myself as an alumnus of the university of north carolina at chapel hill which is now being uh challenged alongside harvard in their racial preferences scheme um i don't know whether or not i was admitted in part to that university based on uh being a black man but it very well could be the case based on their zeal for race preferences and and admissions and i have to carry for the rest of my days this asterisk on my resume line that suggests that i could be just a diversity admin that that was some uh dispositive factor and admitting to the university um it's not fair um and and you know goes back to the you know the fairness issue i'll just close with this which is um jason reilly said yesterday that wokeness is a response to shield white people from being called racist and that's the purpose of harvard's race preferences it's not to help blacks it's not it doesn't it's to it's to tell it's it's so that harvard administrators can tell the world how great and creative and diverse they are that's what it's about take some questions over here hi thanks i'm uh i'm glad you're all working on this issue and i acknowledge the importance of it but part of me also thinks that this is a um you know a perfect example of the way in which elite interests dominate the policy making conversation a couple of years ago i went through the archives the new york times and looked at how many stories they did on disputes about admissions at harvard versus how many stories they did on the dropout rate of high schools in new york city where they're based it was 24 to 1 or something like that and the people in this country that i worry the least about to be honest are the ones who are maybe right on the verge of going to harvard or otherwise have to suffer the indignity of going to stanford or god help them being english majors at the university of texas don't you think that this is to a great extent um a problem or a conversation that is really dominated by the desire not to talk about other problems we have all sorts of problems related to education who goes to harvard law and who has to go to you know ucla is not a huge problem i think in our society those people are going to do pretty well in either case well i'll tell you numerically why why i think that even at the top level this is such an important discussion because there's a cascading effect in um black top black talent in in the country so what i mean by that is sat scores of math above 700 are 55 percent asian 40 white and maybe 2 black and and so basically um the the the top tier math talent in among black americans is unfortunately um quite low comparatively to other races and so that that means that if harvard uses and and the ivy leagues use affirmative action um race preferences to bring in the the the most talented the elite black americans into the ivy league campuses and then also takes the ones that are maybe second tier or third tier in terms of elite i'm and i'm talking about this in math and science here um black math talent stem talent then the second tier universities who also practice race preferences have an even smaller pool of really really top tier and then the third tier have basically no have basically no pool so basically what happens because of this policy is you have the top tier universities facing problems in competitiveness the second tier universities facing large problems in racial differences in competitiveness and the third tier universities facing these extreme extreme problems that are nearly impossible for them to mask without getting rid of things like the sat which they're now doing yeah i suppose maybe i'm just being a little bit of a class warrior about this but um i just tend to worry more about the social problems of the 70 percent of americans who don't go to college at all versus the 30 who do and the 3 percent who are in ivy league schools and involved in these uh disputes and i think one of the problems here is is that this has been sort of the centerpiece um you know progressive policy for the last you know several decades uh and as a result you know there hasn't been enough emphasis on for example what's going on in k-12 schools when proposition 209 passed in california in 1996 and i should point out that under ward's leadership here i was involved in that campaign i was co-chair to his chairmanship when it passed in california one of the really good effects and there were lots of good effects but this one was my favorite was that there's suddenly progressives started caring about what was happening at k-12 in particular for students from disadvantaged backgrounds regardless of race um and for example the university of california at san diego finally you know got around to thinking about well what can we do to help and they started a school the pre-school uh that is is particularly aimed at disadvantaged students so people sort of woke up to the notion of we are not making the world better uh through through race preferential admissions at elite colleges that is not the answer to our problems and we really need to start talking more about k through 12. uh i would add and i think everybody in this room may agree we need to be talking about family structure as well uh and that that's that's the center uh i think of what we need to do and basically uh that devin kenny and i are up here talking about the issue that should have been put aside long ago and we should have just said look you know race shouldn't enter into this let's start looking at where the problem really is um and i you know so basically i agree with both you and kenny and can i just say i i like the question too and i wanted to respond just to say that um you're exactly right and and everyone else is exactly right that just responded to you um you know what one another bad thing about race preferences is that it papers over those things that we ought to really be thinking about and focused on and and reflecting on my own life and thinking about this panel and thinking about the other part of the the question which was do blacks need special treatment to succeed i i thought well how did i get here right to be giving this presentation here to have a law degree etc etc etc when um you know i i was born a poor black child in the south um raised by a single mother uh with two siblings who didn't graduate from high school neither one of them graduated from high school i went to the united states navy when my brother went off to prison and my sister was raising a son as a an unmarried single uh uh teenager et cetera et cetera you know what is the special treatment that i received right that made me get to the point that i'm at today and i think it's less special treatment actually i think that um many many years ago my hero frederick douglass said it right um you know essentially you know don't do anything with us right you know what we're going to do with the new or don't do anything with us um you know let us let us alone i i think it's more of a i think mcdonald's got this right a special sauce and not a special treatment there are ingredients that you can put into the soup to make the atmosphere is such that you can create um someone like me who came from poverty you know single parent black et cetera et cetera et cetera to actually be someone who is now a lawyer and and runs a think tank and speaks in an amazing place like this to really smart people and it's not special treatment really affirmative action really papers over what we really should be focused on so great question up here i i wanted to address really quickly what he was saying because i know we're focused on this case because it's a high profile case but it has bigger ramifications you know you know solving education wasn't enough for me so i got another job and i'm a government contractor and part of what i do is make sure their contractors meet these requirements they have so hiring certain number of minorities and and women and there's a push to and these this would affect regular people because they would either own these companies or work for the companies and so there's a push to try to change these minimums which is like 25 and five percent to mirror this the society in the city where it is so if you're in chicago and it's 33 33 33 you need to have 33 of your minority contractors be black right so the one it has bigger ramifications but beyond that where are you going to get them from right so there's no incentive to make an engineer who's makes good money there's very few black engineers he's doing well to start his own firm so i see it because i do it so what happens is they have this minimum which is not 33 it's 25 let's say they can't meet it so they get charged a fee so they get an exemption they say look we tried to hire as many black engineers we could we only found a couple and they signed off on it so until you make those changes it won't make a difference and this this case is important because when they talk affirmative action even though this is the elite school affirmative action if this will have ramifications across the board so they would be able to do it if it's legal in all facets so it's going to affect those other things and that's what i think why it's important beyond just harvard and other places like that over here a couple of points one is i guess i'm the poster child of what you are the antithesis of what you're talking about um having been the first black to go to an ivy league school and then walk into congress and also during my three or four year five year period of time four other blacks walked into congress who were black and guess who else walked into this one person walked into the supreme court who was black and one person walked into the cabinet who was black i don't think any of us thought of ourselves as being preferential treatment i think we're looking at it as fairness asians represent about three percent of the population correct me if i'm wrong you get 12 or 13 percent of the people in all of these schools blacks represent about 15 percent of the population we have eight percent of people in school talking about fairness also i used to kid cheney all the time i said dick cheney it's easy it was easy to go to yale for you why because you're from wyoming there's geographical preferences for people it's easier to go to yale if you're from north dakota it's easier to go to yale or harvard if you're from south dakota the interview is a factor the interview is a factor in many instances references are a factor essays are a factor interviews are a factor there are a number of factors and not just the test score leadership of worlds that you had in your school whether you're class president or whether you were you stood out by writing a book or something of that nature there are a number of qualifications my sisters could not go to a white school it was against law it may may as well have been but one went on to penn state university years years later was the first black to teach at the university of tennessee another one talked at the uva another one was a retired colonel my father could barely read or write he learned how to drive the north carolina by memory we all learned differently he was brilliant i taught at georgetown for nine years you know i was told that georgetown and i know there's a person representing george down here i was told that i had to not grade asian students based on their class participation because they don't participate historically and i had to judge them by allowing them to submit their paperwork and writing it for encountered as class participation fact so i'm touching upon your other your other point and the biggest concern okay [Applause] can i get a response i'm sure that many of you have thoughts that's a critique of the the fairness question a couple of thoughts here um one you're right that it's easier to get into these ivy league schools from wyoming or south dakota and that was because that was part of the way in which they were trying to keep jewish students out um and so that is that is very much a a a black mark um against ivy league schools that went down that road that's why i'm a partisan for the university of chicago which didn't do that um so that's correct on the other hand you sound rather angry about it uh and it's it's it's yeah okay passionate but but part of the passion i fear comes from like uh you know people's fear that somebody's perceiving that they got a preference and i think that's one of the problems with affirmative action [Music] good good that's i'm i'm in favor of thick skin um but you know the notion that groups should have you know their fair share of ivy league positions there's no group that has uh its fair share um you know there there are some groups that are over represented some groups that are underrepresented and you know people tend to see it in terms of you know black white or sometimes they see it in terms of black white latino asian but the truth is all of these groups have subgroups uh if you break whites down into religion um unitarians you know unitarians do splendidly um at ivy league schools i mean they're like some tiny fraction of one percent of the population uh but they're like you know they're they're over represented massively uh on the other hand scott's irish um no you're not going to find too many scots irish or too many if you look at it in terms of religion too many too many um white baptists you just won't find them there they aren't there um you know as as um jd bats has written and in his hillbilly elegy uh that's a group that you just don't find on on on ivy league campuses and if we were to say all of them should be you know there according to their percentages in the population the world would look very very very different and then harvard would not be harvard um and if it's a good thing to have a harvard uh and you know that's something we can debate maybe we don't want to lead schools at all but i tend to agree with kenny that we have to have schools that are at least elite with regard to science and engineering i i can see an argument against the level of eliteness that we get in our colleges today that maybe it's not so great uh maybe we should have something that's a little bit different from that uh but if you know if you're looking for like representation by race it's just just just one i think you you and i want the same thing you and i want the same thing we want a more meritocratic process that evaluates people on the content of their character not the color of their skin you and i want the same thing and it's tough meritocracy is tough like what are we really gonna what are the things that we really are gonna use to determine who should get into this who should get into that i think there should be an objective component i think sat should be part of it some people disagree with me i think i think that an interview there should be an interview component absolutely because you need to test whether a person can do those kinds of things i think you would agree with that too you and i want the same thing and the only thing that i think that is at the core of this discourse here is you pers we we are perceiving different different aspects and we're weighing them in different ways we're weighing them in different ways but one thing is for certain race has no impact on your personal merit it does not it shouldn't sometimes okay we have time for one more question i'm gonna go over here yep i appreciate it um because um you know when charles murray did that book the bell curve it got a lot of negative attention but i think that he was trying to explore the root of some of this problem i mean i i cannot accept that black people just don't have the capacity to get to where they can buy their american into these schools so i'm against the firm of action of course but i'm just wondering gail you mentioned family when are we going to get to where we talk about the traditions that gentlemen i'm not sure your name yet because i just met you kenny kenny said they the asian population already came in with these core values that are passed through family gail you mentioned the jewish population they're passed through family and yet when it comes to americans we pretend that this is not relevant to why we are so disproportioned in the ill of everything to allow them politicians and or schools or judges to come up with a solution so i just want to put that on the table that if we really believe that african americans have capacity and latinos that sound like you said or fallen behind to get into these ivy leagues and i'm just really going to reject that we should all just go to historical black colleges because we just don't and i don't i didn't even know about them until i moved i went to dc because they're concentrated more on this east coast and southern and i'm from california so i'm just wondering if you can speak to that what what what needs to really be done at core if we got rid of all racial preferences if we got rid of all welfare policy can we agree that this people group can excel of course you know there are successful african-americans everywhere you know you couldn't go out on the street uh here in dallas without running into people who've never received any sort of preference uh they're black and they've been very successful uh you know the world is full of them uh and we need to be able to pass on that secret sauce and that secret sauce i believe um is mainly to be seen uh in issues of of inculcating notions of personal responsibility the notion that that a two-parent family uh is superior not always possible my parents were divorced that was not a great thing uh but like you know it's it's something that we need to try uh to achieve uh i'm afraid this is something that is not easy to do from the top down it's something that has to be done um you know it's gonna have to be done from some sort of great awakening here uh we need people to to you know do this from from the grassroots level uh that includes preaching from the pulpit uh and it's extremely important um and it's not gonna it's not gonna come from the government uh it's gonna require some ability for the government to step back from these things and not try to force solutions because when people are are left to their own devices they tend to figure out the issue of personal responsibility and you know we need to be passing on this notion that hey you know graduate from high school get a job any job you know something to learn the basic skills of of of being on time and getting the job done you know get married have children after you're married that's it's a simple message and i think it's it's hugely important and we've got to figure out how to get it to young people um and i don't know the best way to do that but i am utterly confident that if we get that message out uh we're going to change the world please one of the reasons we wanted to hold this conference is to have sort of dispassionate discussions about emotional issues and when we were having that up until this point um uh we all realize that these are emotional issues and we don't want to pour gasoline on the fire we want to sort of bring more more light than heat to these discussions i do want to say though that it's quite a spectacle to watch you berate an asian man for what whites did to blacks your grievances that you're lecturing him on uh had nothing to do with asian americans doing anything to black people and and and the idea that that discrimination against asians is okay because of what whites did to blacks which is what affirmative action is sold in the name of makes no sense whatsoever i didn't think i did that and if i did i apologize for that all i did was state my personal experience and share them with this audience and it was no personal offense to the gentleman the gentleman or gentle lady up there i was just stating everything i talked about was on my personal experience period well thanks everybody glad to be able to end on that conciliatory note and uh please join me and thank the panel for our discussions

Channel: American Enterprise Institute

Views: 23,274

Keywords: AEI, American Enterprise Institute, politics, news, education, old parkland, old parkland conference, affirmative action, civil rights

Id: 6iv3EQDZhBk

Length: 64min 29sec (3869 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 12 2022