Campos: Affirmative action dishonesty

Published October 17, 2006 at midnight

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Last week I had a few late-night beers with a former professor of mine. Bill has been an academic for 30 years - nearly twice as long as I have - and the conversation inevitably turned to the politics of the academy. Specifically, we talked about affirmative action.

Bill is a contrarian by nature, and he has never been able to stomach the combination of moral sanctimoniousness and rampant dishonesty that often characterizes the most aggressive supporters of affirmative action, especially in the academy. He spoke with open contempt about several of his colleagues who had been hired for affirmative action purposes, and with even more contempt for his white colleagues who had made these hiring decisions.

But Bill's views on the subject are complex. He spoke of an African-American woman he considered one of the five best students in a class of 90, yet who did poorly on the final exam (Bill and I are law professors, and law school grades are usually determined largely or wholly by one's performance on the final).

He suspected her performance was a product of test anxiety and, sure enough, when she took a seminar from him in which the grade was based on a research paper, she received the best mark in the class.

On the one hand, such experiences are merely anecdotes. On the other, as the economist Ronald Coase has pointed out, data is the plural of anecdote - and indeed psychologists have documented how African-American students tend to do significantly worse on a test if they're told it's designed to measure intelligence than they do on exactly the same test if they aren't told this.

We also spoke of how uncomfortable it made us to teach racially charged subjects - a common experience in law school - in classes in which there were no or almost no black students. (This makes about as much sense as discussing the law of rape in an all-male class.)

We talked about President Bush's use of affirmative action. To my mind, Bush has been the worst president since at least Warren Harding, but I admitted Bill had a point when he argued that Bush seems genuinely free of any race prejudice. He made an even better point when he charged liberals with refusing to give Bush credit for putting more minorities in positions of real power than any of his predecessors, because they assume that only liberal minorities count in the affirmative action calculus.

(I pointed out that Bush, of all people, should have a deep appreciation of how absurd it is to assume that merit is the main criterion for appointing people to important jobs.)

In the end, both of us remain deeply conflicted on the issue. I suspect what bothers us most is the sheer dishonesty that marks every aspect of the matter. Consider a scale from one to five that represents the following positions: race should never be taken into account when distributing social goods; race should only be used as a tiebreaker between substantially identical candidates; race should give a black candidate (for example) a small advantage; race should give the candidate a big advantage; social goods should be handed out on the basis of racial quotas.

Many supporters of affirmative action claim to support the second position. In a candid moment, they might admit they sincerely believe they support the third position. In fact, they typically behave as if they support the fifth position.

As for affirmative action opponents, they all naturally claim to adhere to the first position, when in fact quite a few behave as if being black (for example) should be considered a negative factor when evaluating candidates. This is hardly surprising: It's extremely difficult to grow up in America without absorbing some racist beliefs.

Good luck getting anyone to admit to any of this, however.

Paul Campos is a professor of law at the University of Colorado. He can be reached at paul.campos@colorado.edu.

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