Dominating today’s New York Times front page (above) is a report headlined “How It Feels to Have Your Life Changed By Affirmative Action” online and “Inside the Lives Changed by Affirmative Action” in the print version of the Times. The piece is naked and blatant advocacy for the Constitution- and U.S. law-violating policy that has been given temporary pass by a conflicted Supreme Court multiple times despite an unavoidable fact: it’s discrimination, and the Constitution doesn’t distinguish between good discrimination and bad discrimination. By the principles and values this nation was founded upon, all discrimination on the basis of qualities like religion, race, gender and ethnicity is wrong.
The Times approach to the subject is similar to its coverage of the illegal immigration controversy. In that matter, as periodically pointed out by Ethics Alarms, the Times has given readers frequent heart-warming tales of “the good illegal immigrant,” a hard-working immigration law violator who is the salt of the earth, a wonderful parent, and yet cruelly held accountable for his or her law-breaking anyway. The motive of such articles seems clear: use emotions to overcome and blot out law, ethics, fairness and common sense. As the Supreme Court seems poised to finally call college and university affirmative action programs what they are: illegal, the Times is trying to build support for its favorite party’s inevitable accusations of racism and illegitimacy against the five or six justices who will have simply done their jobs.
The headlines tell it all. Affirmative action changed the lives of its beneficiaries for the better, so obviously, affirmative action is good, and ending it would be unethical. What is striking about the article is that none of the affirmative action beneficiaries—all black—interviewed appear to have given a second’s thought to the individual whose opportunity they seized because of their “better” color. Some express regrets because they faced, or felt like they faced, skepticism about their degrees or career accomplishments because they were presumed to be “undeserving” affirmative action beneficiaries. None hint at any regret that someone who deserved to be accepted to an elite school or program was not so they could be.
The article’s author, Amy Harmon, doesn’t seem to have even considered this. Nor did she consider it worthwhile to examine how the victims of affirmative action, like the victims of “diversity/equity/inclusion” policies today, feel that their lives were changed by the “good discrimination.” This is a typical method of advocacy that ought to be considered anathema to ethical journalism, but isn’t. A legitimate discourse on the benefits and deficits of a policy is avoided and rigged by a reporter presenting only one side of a complex equation. An egregious example is abortion, which must be seen as ethical and desirable because of its benefits to the woman who has one. No article about how the life of the unborn child is “shaped” by being wiped out of existence is possible, because the victims are not available for interviews. Harmon assembles statistics showing how many affirmative action admittees have achieved success in their careers and life. What happens to the students who would have been accepted if color-blind criteria were applied but were not?
Huh? Who???
Those who lose opportunities because of affirmative action also have some strong feelings about how their lives have been shaped. My life would have been completely different in virtually every respect had I not been passed over for the Assistant US Attorney job I had applied for, because I was a white male. I’m not speculating about that being the reason I was the last cut in the final part of the hiring process: I was told quite candidly why I didn’t get the job.
I wasn’t crushed; I’m not bitter. I don’t look at life that way: I always figured that I would find interesting and productive things to do, and I have. That doesn’t mean that losing that job because of my race was fair or right. (The lawyer whom I believe got my slot is a judge now. I’d love to be a judge…) It also doesn’t mean that others like me (well, not exactly like me) didn’t find their race-based failure more of a life handicap than I did.
What difference does it make how someone who benefits from an unethical policy feels about it? What difference should it make? Harry Reid felt good about the fact that his lies about Mitt Romney not paying taxes helped Obama win re-election; that doesn’t make his lie any less despicable. I’m sure San Francisco shop-lifters and looters feel good about getting free stuff that other people have to pay for: frankly, I don’t care how good they feel, and it certainly doesn’t make me sympathize with their conduct.
So most of those who were able to avoid merit-based college admissions and jump ahead in line because the Supreme Court allowed racial discrimination despite the Constitutional hypocrisy it represented feel like affirmative action is a good thing. Well of course they do. And they are so biased that their feelings should have no bearing on the issue at all.
Ethics Alarms 
This issue brought to mind the book by Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson, where he states:
“The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.”
It is an easily accessible explanation of economics that is worth checking out.
-Jut
Sounds like he’s paraphrasing Frederic Bastiat. “The good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen, and those effects that must be forseen.”
Phlinn,
Yes, he credits Bastia (and others). I think he was just trying to provide a popularized explanation of economic issues.
I did not mention Bastia as: 1) I have not read him; and 2) it seemed a little too Inside Baseball.
-Jut
Makes sense. I read a translated copy of That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen” a long time ago, and it’s kind of stuck with me since.
While attending my 50th college graduation reunion earlier this month, I and my fellow classmates were informed very proudly by the president of the college, ranked tenth among colleges by US News and World Report (just as an indication of selectivity), that the student body is twenty-nine percent black (Isn’t that double the percentage of blacks in the country and aren’t all our institutions supposed to “look like America?” You know, like the way the NBA looks like America. But I digress.), the school is need blind, i.e., “All you alumni who are foolish enough to give money to us are paying the tuition for all these kids whether you want to or not. Suck it up.”), and even though the Supreme Court is about to declare affirmative action as we’ve been doing for years unconstitutional, “we are working on ways to ‘work around’ the anticipated ruling so we can continue what we’ve been doing for years now.”
As a fellow classmate and University of Chicago Law School graduate and retired corporate counsel for various Fortune 500 companies remarked, “President Blank is a lawyer, isn’t he? Shouldn’t he know he shouldn’t go on the record saying out loud that he and his fellow college presidents are planning IN CONCERT to intentionally ignore a binding Supreme Court decision?” What an asshole.
You know southern white plantation owners also benefitted by legalized racial discrimination.
Nuff said.
For the all focus on blacks when it comes to affirmative action and its expected ending, it’s actually women (especially white women) that benefited much more from it, and that partially explains how our college administrations and most of the useless majors/departments became dominated by “progressive” women. Must of the uproar about ending affirmative action is the fear that it will end or curtail their grip on higher education; all the talk about blacks is a distraction
That’s a really interesting observation, Ron. You’re right. Women students are the majority throughout the American academy. And in faculties as well, I suspect. And it’s probably not because boys are being over treated with adderall or being misunderstood.
Women were 50% of the college population in 1974. Their percentage has increased ever since. We still hear that we need to encourage girls to go to college even though men are only ~1/3 of the college students. So, about 35% too many students in college are men.
For the all focus on blacks when it comes to affirmative action and its expected ending, it’s actually women (especially white women) that benefited much more from it, and that partially explains how our college administrations and most of the useless majors/departments became dominated by “progressive” women. Must of the uproar about ending affirmative action is the fear that it will end or curtail their grip on higher education; all the talk about blacks is a distraction
I wonder if the end of Jim Crow reduced White enrollment in colleges.
I wonder how it would compare if we were to interview legacy admissions?
Never know if you never ask. Legacy admissions were/are a holdover from the idea that elite institutions are clubs, and mutual loyalty is expected: getting donations was the main objective.
If we’re taking a survey, maybe we should ask how many legacies complain about affirmative action?
That is exactly like women in sex segregated sports teams opposing racially segregated sports teams.
Legacy admissions are not the same as race-based admissions.
I wonder how many people – or how may institutions – would admit that anyone was a legacy admission unless it was obvious (i.e. son of a long line of alumni whose qualifications are well below average, but still got in anyway). Princeton did admit it during a lecture on admissions there, that being a legacy was one factor that could count in your favor on an application. Actually, both guys from my high school class who got into Princeton got in for sports. That’s of course another question – just what about those folks who wouldn’t have gotten in but for the fact that they could throw a ball? Just how did it play out for the majority of them whose time on the gridiron or the court ended the day they got their degree? Some did ok, but what about those guys who didn’t hit it big and had to go back to the ghetto.
This is similar to an argument I’ve been hearing in favor of student loan forgiveness. “If borrowers no longer need to pay their loans, it will free them up to spend money on other things, like homes and cars, which would be good for the economy.” But of course any group can increase its spending if the government shovels free money to them, why student borrowers are so uniquely deserving is never explained.
Forgiving student loans is attractive to progressive politicians because it is a twofer. It buys the votes of a young voting block and bails out their Marxist buddies in academia. Bailing out student loans also subsidizes academia allowing Marxist professors to continue to earn higher and higher salaries.
⬆️ what he/she said. I’ll add that it will also allows many of those receiving that loan forgiveness to make donations to Dems and their causes
Those borrowers are disproportionately upper-class white women. Universities have been falling over themselves to implement master’s degree programs of ‘questionable market value’, shall we say. The reason is that there are rules about the maximum amount of student loans you can get for undergraduate studies, but there are none for graduate studies. So, to get the cash, money-strapped schools can offer some rather easy master’s degree programs in things that don’t matter, charge $60,000/year for it and people will do it on student loans. Who will do this? Well, I have noticed a trend in women who want to appear educated to state that they ‘have a Master’s degree’. Now, they don’t state the field of that degree, and sometimes I wonder if they actually could tell you if you asked.
So, predominately women are getting high-priced, but substanceless Master’s degrees that do little to nothing to improve their job prospects. Then they have to pay them back. I saw a study about 10 years ago that said, historically, men paid back almost all the student loans in America. Men pay back their own student loans, then when they get married, they are the ones that actually pay off their wive’s student loans. This makes sense, because most women won’t marry a man who makes less money than they do, so the high-earner is the one who pays off the debt. Well, these women are focusing on their careers, taking out much more debt, and not getting married. Without the high-earning men to pay off these loans, they don’t get paid off. Without men in college, there aren’t high-earning college-educated men that women want to marry. College-educated women is the only demographic that overwhelmingly supports the Democrat Party agenda right now.
When I was in high school, I was fairly well indoctrinated with leftist thought. Then, I went to a lefist university and my eyes were opened. I may have had some misgivings about affirmative-action in high school, but it had been thoroughly beaten in to me that it as an absolutely necessary evil, if it was evil at all. Then I met an affirmative-action college admit and my attitudes about affirmative action and leftist ideals changed dramatically.
In my second semester, I was in French II. The TA teaching us was terrible and the grading was nit-picky to say the least. The class was graded on a Gaussian curve (mean was a C+) and 3 students were from Quebec. I was taking Organic II and Intro to Differential Equations and this class was made more difficult than both of those classes put together. I didn’t know anyone in the class and paired up with a girl from Chicago that also didn’t know anyone else in the class. Well, she was under immense stress. She had a 24 ACT score and I was shocked. The mean at this school was 30 and all the classes were graded on a Gaussian curve. She had been given a full-rid academic scholarship despite being in the bottom 10% of the class. One of the conditions of this scholarship was that she maintain a 3.5 GPA. Well, work it out. On 12 people out of 10,000 people in the freshman class had a 4.0 GPA after one semester and that number was 0 after 2. She somehow had managed to pull off a 3.1 GPA the first semester (which put her on probation), which means she needed a 4.0 the second semester to keep her scholarship. This destroyed her. She felt humiliated, she felt worthless, and she probably wasn’t going to continue with college. Everyone had been so proud of her that she had received a full-scholarship and that scholarship was going to be revoked despite the fact that her GPA was in the top half of the school. If she had gone to a less intense college, she would have done quite well, graduated with a good GPA, and probably been successful. Affirmative action destroyed her life, at least temporarily. I hope things worked out better for her later.
Now for the more corrosive feature of affirmative-action. How did any of these affirmative-action admits survive at the school? Well, my friend made the mistake of picking a real major (I think hers was biology). Most affirmative-action admits realized they needed to band together if a few majors, excluding all others, so they could keep decent GPA’s. They needed departments that would intentionally skew their grades so they could keep their scholarships. Enter the ethnic and women’s studies departments. If you were an affirmative-action admit, you almost had to be an African-American Studies, Women’s Studies, or Latino Studies major just to keep you scholarship. These fields then pounded the idea that minorities were victims of society into the heads of people who were victims of affirmative-action. Most became hate-filled and resentful.
Alternate title of this post: How Affirmative Action Made Today’s Society A Reality