What's the Opposite of Diversity? University!

The current official justification for "affirmative action"--that is, racial discrimination--in university admissions in the US is that it is needed in order to create "diversity." "Diversity" in turn is held to be an important learning goal. There is no justification in terms of righting past wrongs--first, such past wrongs were done to other people, not the ones now advantaged; and second, such programs do not discriminate between more recent immigrants, whose ancestors were never discriminated against and/or whose ancestors never discriminated, and those whose ancestors genuinely were or did. There is no justification in terms of ending poverty or preventing the development of an elite class: studies show that, on balance, racial preferences hurt the poor and help the rich, systematically excluding poor whites while mostly aiding upper-class minorities. If income level were the criterion instead of race, black participation in the best colleges would fall from 8 to 4 percent, Hispanic from 8 to 6.

But at least there's "diversity." Or is there? Granted that "diversity" in itself is a good thing--something that could easily be debated--a study by Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Radford, calculating the effects of "affirmative action" at eight elite US colleges, suggests that the current practices actually reduce ethnic diversity at said campuses. (Robert VerBruggen, "Racial Preferences by the Numbers," National Review Online, November 30, 2009).

This is not a conclusion of the study; and this fact itself makes the data presented seem more reliable. There is no axe honing here. But it is clear in the figures. Stay with me here.

If racial preferences were eliminated at the private colleges studied, Espenshade and Radford calculate that the number of "white" students would not go up--it would go down. "Whites" would drop from 60 to 53 percent of the student body at the most prestigious colleges. So would the number of "black" students: from 8 to 3 percent. "Hispanics" would drop from 8 to 5 percent. But "Asians" would jump from 24 to 39 percent.

Look at those numbers, and one fact is clear: the major effect of current racial preferences is not to help blacks or Hispanics--the numbers there are trivial--but to harm Asians. These quotas, whatever the official justification, work exactly like the earlier quotas against Jews.

Taking "whites" as the mainstream, the raw "diversity" without racial preferences is seven percent greater--the difference between 40 percent and 47 percent "other." But that is only a partial picture: for the categories traditionally used are themselves fairly arbitrary. In America, there is a great deal more cultural diversity within the category "Asian" than within "black." With all due respect, as Martin Luther King insisted, most American blacks differ from most American whites in little more than skin colour. They speak the same language, belong to the same religion, eat the same foods, play the same sports, listen to the same music, and watch the same TV.

But "Asians" are fairly likely to be fresh-off-the-airplane immigrants, or first or second-generation immigrants, with genuinely different attitudes and life experiences. Different religions, different mother tongues, different foods, different sports, different cultures. And within this group is a-near-infinity of further differences: an "Asian" might be Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Filipino, Indian, Sri Lankan, Bengali, Indonesian, Thai, Vietnamese, Pakistani, Iranian, Central Asian, Burmese, Arabian; a wide variety of very different countries and cultures, covering half the world's population and three of the four traditional world civilizations.

Really, trust me, guys: all foreigners are not the same.

That's what we are blocking out with racial preferences. Given their international reputation, if America's most exclusive colleges stayed strictly with merit, they would draw the best and the brightest from the entire world, and be about as diverse. By cheapening their degrees with racial preferences, they prevent this.

The same is true for less-well-known institutions: if you want real diversity, the surest path is to concentrate on merit and merit alone as your entrance criterion.