Balkinization  

Saturday, March 25, 2006

Affirmation Action for the Privileged

Mark Graber

Interesting oped in today's New York Times by an admissions officer at Kenyon College, noting that liberal arts colleges are routinely rejecting better qualified women in favor of lesser qualified men in order to maintain some reasonable gender balance on campus. My three daughers are reporting similar experiences. Dramatic differences between men and women in the resume you need to get into a good liberal arts school. Most of us have been aware of this phenomenon for at least half a decade. All that is missing is the conservative outcry about merit. Indeed, the outcry seems particularly necessary because clearly guys do not need compensation for past wrongs. And when will some conservative man complain that he feels inferior knowing he may have been accepted to a liberal arts college only because of his gender.

Comments:

Jonah Goldberg actually acknowledges that he only got into his school because of affirmative action for men:

I went to an all-women's college. I am not making this up, or reading you my screenplay for a HBO After Dark movie. I started at Goucher College the year it became coed. There were about 1,000 women and roughly 37 guys my freshman year. Just under 10% of the male student body came from my high school and close to 7% of the male student body was Korean-American and named Derek...

Anyway, it was a pretty good school and I still enjoy the irony that I got in because of affirmative action -- they needed guys with okay SAT scores.


Dave
 

Are the schools that do this justifying the practice on 'diversity' grounds? If so, what do you think of the justification? Or are they making a 'best graduates' argument, such as the one Malcolm Gladwell surveys (not quite completely unfavorably) in "Getting In"?

I've noticed in my own pro-affirmative action arguments that I've supported diversity rationales on constitutional grounds while criticizing attempts to extend them beyond existing 'protected categories' of people. I've been quite willing to argue that critics of affirmative action on merit grounds alone ought to be just as critical of admissions policies on legacies and athletes. Am I open to similar inconsistency charges by not signing on to the "intellectual diversity" movement's agenda?

In short, am I relying on an unconstitutional 'restitution for past discrimination' model for my justification of affirmative action? I know I agree with it--Ira Katznelson's When Affirmative Action Was White and the co-authored Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society, among many others--help confirm my views on this. Any thoughts on theirs or others' perspectives on historical and contemporary white privilege as a justification for affirmative action?
 

On the conservative outcry tip: Tierney's Saturday Op-Ed in the NY Times was about this.
 

I saw let the meritocratic cookie crumble.

But...who is to say that "men" are privileged. According to leftist logic, if a natural gender imbalances systematically result in more women and less men at a college, then men are the victims in need of redress.
 

There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.
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