Bell Curve

448 Living Together Affirmative Action in Higher Education 449portions of the student population but high proportions of the students doingpoorly in school. The psychological consequences of this disparity may be partof the explanation for the increaqingracial animosity and the high black dropoutrates that have troubled American campuses. In society at large, a college degreedoes not have the same meaningfor a minority graduate and a white one,with consequences that reverberate in the workplace and continue throughoutlife.It is time to return to the on'ginal intentions of affirmative action: to cast awider net, to gi~~e preference to members of disadvantaged groups, whatevertheir skin color, when qualifications are similar. Such a change wot4ld accrrrdmore closely with the logic underlying affirmative action, with the nee& of today'sstudents of all ethnic groups, and with progress toward a health? multiracialsociety.e come to national policies that require people to treat groupsw d ifferently under the law. Affirmative action began to he woveninto American employment and educational practices in the 1960s asuniversities and employers intensified their recruiting of blacks-initiallyon their own, then in compliance with a widening body of courtdecisions and laws. By the early 1970s, affirmative action had been expandedbeyond blacks to include women, Latinos, and the disabled. Italso became more aggressive. Targets, guidelines, and de facto quotas"'evolved as universities and employers discovered that the equality ofoutcome that people sought was not to be had from traditional recruitingmethods. As it became more aggressive, affirmative action becamecorrespondingly more controversial.Affirmative action creates antagonism partly because it affects thedistribution of scarce goods-university places, scholarships, joh offers,and promotions-that people prize. But it is also problematic for reasonsthat reach into deeply held beliefs-most fundamentally, heliefsabout the ideal of equal opportunity versus the reality of the historicalexperience of certain groups, preeminently blacks, in this countv. Asthe rhetoric heats up, the arguments about affirmative action hecomeblurred. Affirmative action raises different questions in different contexts.What, people ask, are the proper goals of affirmative action, theproper methods? Which groups are to be benefited? What are the costsof affirmative action, and who should bear them? Is affirmative actiona temporary expedient to correct past wrongs, or must the Americanideal of individualism be permanently modified for the collective needsof members of certain groups?Affirmative action is part of this book because it has been based onthe explicit assumption that ethnic groups do not differ in the abilitiesthat contribute to success in school and the workplace--or, at any rate,there are no differences that cannot be made up with a few remedialcourses or a few months on the job. Much of this book has been givenover to the many ways in which that assumption is wrong. The implicationshave to be discussed, and that is the purpose of this chapter andthe next, augmented by an appendix on the evolution of affirmative actionregulations (Appendix 7). Together, these materials constitute alonger discussion than we devote to any other policy issue, for two reasons.First, we are making a case that contradicts a received wisdom embeddedin an intellectual consensus, federal legislation, and SupremeCourt jurisprudence. If the task is to be attempted at all, it must be donethoroughly. Second, we believe affirmative action to be one of the mostfar-reaching domestic issues of our time-not measured in its immediateeffects, but in its deep and pervasive impact on America's understandingof what is just and unjust, how a pluralist society should beorganized, and what America is supposed to stand for.In this chapter, the topic is the college campus. In Chapter 20, wediscuss affirmative action in the workplace. In both chapters, we providedata as available on Asians and Latinos, but the analysis centerson blacks, as has the debate over affirmative action.THE "EDGE" IN AFFIRMATIVE ACTIONPeople may agree that they want affirmative action in higher educationuntil they say more precisely what they mean by it. Then they may disagree.But whatever the argument, it would help to have some dataabout how colleges and universities have translated the universal desirefor greater fairness in university education into affirmative action programs.Our first goal is to inform the debate with such data.At first glance, ours may seem an odd objective, for certain kinds ofdata about affirmative action are abundant. Universities and businesseskeep detailed numbers about the numbers of minorities who apply andare accepted. But data about the core mechanism of affirmative action-