Inside American Education (24 page)

The problem starts at the most selective institutions, because that level is where there is the most extreme shortage of minority students matching the prevailing academic standards. That is also the level at which there is the greatest pressure
to have a visible minority presence, both for maintaining “appearance” and academic “leadership,” which are part of the mystique of prestige institutions, and for the very practical purpose of maintaining the continued in-flow of large amounts of government money, uninterrupted by any charges of “discrimination” based on minority “under-representation.”

As for the minority students themselves, many—and probably most—of their academic failures throughout the various levels of colleges and universities can be traced to the systematic mismatching resulting from preferential admissions policies. Certainly that seems clear from the statistical data from those colleges and universities which release data by race and ethnicity—and the secretiveness of other institutions suggests that they have a similar story to hide. Certainly the graduation rate of black students is generally below that of their white classmates at numerous institutions where this information is available.
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Nationwide, black students’ graduation rate is about half that of whitest.
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Yet these explicit failures, large as they often are, do not measure the full damage, either to the students or to the institutions.

Part of the damage is concealed by double standards in grading. Many minority students are helped along academically by what David Reisman of Harvard has called “affirmative grading,”
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either because of the unwillingness of individual professors to flunk minority students, or because of the intervention of minority affairs officials on campus, who ask that failing grades be “reconsidered,” or by the creation of courses or programs—various ethnic “studies,” for example—where minority students can expect to receive passing grades (or better) without undue effort. At Stanford, a black student who referred to “extreme exceptions” that some faculty members will make for black students used herself as an example: “I did really poorly on this one physics midterm,” she said. “I went to see the professor about it. He was really easy with me and said, ‘No problem. Don’t worry about it.’ He said he would drop it off of my quarter grade and that it wouldn’t even count, which was against his own rules. Right after I went in, this white student went in to ask him if he would drop his midterm grade because he did really bad too. The professor said, ‘No way.’”
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Even at the Harvard Medical School, there have been instances where pressure has been put on professors to find
ways to pass black students who have failed examinations repeatedly
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—though one of the medical school’s own professors called it “cruel” to “allow the trusting patients to pay for our irresponsibility.”
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Some institutions have organized sessions to make faculty members become more “sensitive” to the problems of minority students, and an untenured faculty member, especially, can hardly fail to understand the possible consequences for his career of becoming known as “insensitive” for being hard-nosed about applying the same academic standards to minority students as to everyone else. Neither black nor white students or faculty are unaware of these double standards, nor are any of them likely to be unaffected by that awareness. This is another ingredient in the backlash known as “the new racism.”

Highly qualified minority students can also lose. They are often offended and resentful when their white classmates and white professors betray surprise at discovering that they are quite competent. Nor does it end there. Employers may be skeptical about taking at face value the grades which a minority student has fully earned by four years of hard work, because employers cannot be sure which grades are real and which have resulted from pressures for double standards. All this is part of the price of preferential admissions policies and the consequences to which they lead.

Minority Faculty and Programs

As preferentially admitted minority students began to turn from academics to activism, including disruption and violence, among their recurring demands were more minority faculty and more “relevant” courses and programs. Both demands were widely met at colleges and universities across the country, as minority faculty, various racial and ethnic “studies,” and special minority cultural and social centers all became familiar parts of the academic landscape.

In their haste to meet politically defined demands for minority faculty, colleges and universities again proceeded with an utter disregard of the size of the pool of qualified people. As of the early 1970s, when these patterns were established on many campuses, various surveys and estimates showed that
there were fewer than 4,000 black Ph.D.s in the entire country.
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That was less than two for each college, even if every black Ph.D. went into the academic world, with not one going into industry, government, think tanks, or other endeavors. Moreover, the number of black doctorates awarded annually still had not reached 1,300 by the mid 1980s.
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Hispanics and American Indians, put together, did not earn as many doctorates as blacks, so that all these conventionally defined “minorities,” put together, did not receive 2,000 Ph.D.s annually
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—which is to say, there were not enough of them for each college in the country to add one minority Ph.D. to its faculty annually. As of 1989, these three groups, combined, received fewer than 1,500 doctorates
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—not enough for
half
the colleges in the country to hire one new minority Ph.D.

Nevertheless, various colleges and universities have set up numerical goals for hiring minority faculty—sometimes without regard to whether these faculty members’ professional fields matched the institutions’ vacancies. Bucknell and the University of Iowa, for example, have done this. At other institutions—including San Francisco State, Ohio Wesleyan, and Wayne State—administrators have specified that existing vacancies were to be filled solely by minority candidates.
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More circumspect institutions have gone through the motions of considering non-minority, and non-female candidates, while in fact setting the position aside for minority or female faculty members.

The size of the qualified pool may be resolutely ignored, but its consequences remain inescapable. Black faculty have lacked a Ph.D. more often than white faculty, received Ph.D.s (when they did) later in life, and published much less than white faculty.
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Those teaching in white colleges and universities have often complained that they were not taken very seriously by their colleagues, and were not often asked to coauthor scholarly studies.
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Clearly, intellectual interaction with colleagues is part of the individual’s own development, so that being perceived as substandard becomes itself a barrier to the full realization of one’s potential. By the same token, others cannot afford to waste time with someone hired for racial body count purposes, if they wish to develop their own potential to the fullest.

Given the widespread political demand for minority faculty
and the very small supply of individuals academically qualified to meet those demands, it can hardly be surprising that both the people hired and the programs they set up have often been a painful embarrassment, even at highly prestigious institutions. A report on an Afro-American Studies course at Princeton, for example, noted that some students found it “simply a three-hour ‘rap session,’” where the assigned readings “were certainly not necessary,” for there was only “nominal discussion of their content during seminar discussions.”
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Another Afro-American Studies course at Princeton was described as being “a lot of fun” and to have a workload that was “very light.” In yet another course in the same department, students reported that the topics for class discussion “were seldom related to the topics on the outline” and the required reading was both “light” and “easy.” Harvard’s Afro-American Studies department was likewise described by the students’
Confidential Guide
as a department in need of repair—one with “fading student interest and faculty discontent”
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and a department which was “a touchy subject” because of “its political history.”
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More explicitly, David Riesman said, “the program was widely recognized as of poor quality by black Harvard undergraduates as well as by black and white faculty members at other leading universities.”
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Here again, what happened had been predicted many years earlier. Black civil rights activist Bayard Rustin warned back in 1969 that “black studies must not be used for the purpose of image-buiding or to enable young black students to escape the challenges of the university by setting up a program of ’soul courses’ that they can just play with and pass.”
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The same year, NAACP Executive Director Roy Wilkins condemned the creation of “sealed-off black studies centers” for “racial breastbeating.” While sympathetic to “the frustrations and anger of today’s black students,” he nevertheless said:

In their hurt pride in themselves and in their outrage, they have called retreat from the tough and trying battle of a minority for dignity and equality. They don’t call it a retreat, of course. They have all sorts of fancy rationalizations for their course.
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Today, those rationalizations are now an established part of the racial dogmatism in academia.

Across the country, black studies programs arose in the wake of black student demands and fell as many of those same students declined to major in the subject, or even to enroll in sufficient numbers to keep many of the programs alive. It is hard to explain this apparently inconsistent behavior, except on the ground that the demands were symbolic, expressing an emotional need rather than a serious interest. In any event, there were about a thousand black studies programs in the country in the early 1970s but these had declined to no more than 500 by 1988.
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Looking at this from the standpoint of the incentives and constraints facing minority faculty members in black (or Hispanic or Native American) studies, their careers were precarious and their futures uncertain if they were either wholly in these racial or ethnic studies, or if they held joint appointments split between some traditional department and such programs. A Carnegie Foundation study by David Riesman found “nonscholarly black faculty members who seek to maintain their precarious hold on academic life by building up a cadre of militant followers, threatening to charge the institution with racism if it releases them.”
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Clearly, the jobs of these minority professors are more secure the more minority students are on campus, the more politicized those students are, and the more of a credible threat of disruption or violence they represent, should anyone seek to scale back the racial and ethnic studies programs.

Finally, as increasing evidences of white backlash became apparent, racial and ethnic studies courses were promoted as a
requirement
to be imposed on all students, as the “solution” to intergroup hostility. Ironically, such programs were now being promoted as a way to help “de-ghettoize the university as a whole,”
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when in fact they were part of the process which produced campus ghettoes in the first place. Moreover, to believe that imposing substandard courses taught by substandard faculty will improve race relations strains credulity.

Whatever the rhetoric, the brutal reality of ethnic studies programs is a struggle to preserve turf and jobs. This was perhaps epitomized by a controversy which erupted at San Francisco State University in 1990, when the political science department offered a course on black politics. Although the course was taught by a black professor, the School of Ethnic
Studies staged a disruptive protest demonstration. One faculty member described it as a “life and death” issue and saw the overlapping course as an attempt by the administration “to destroy the School of Ethnic Studies.”
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More than job security is involved, however. Minority faculty hired preferentially face exactly the same problem of self-respect as the students admitted under double standards. It is fundamentally the same mismatching stituation: A professor who would be a respected member of a department at an average college or university may be completely overshadowed in a department where colleagues are publishing regularly in the leading scholarly journals of the world, writing landmark books in their field, and receiving national and international recognition, honors, and prizes.

In these circumstances, for mismatched minority faculty to accept the intellectual standards around them and the scholarly thrust of their colleagues means losing their own self-respect. But to denounce the standards they do not meet, and decry as “irrelevant” the scholarship they cannot match, at least enables them to hold their heads up and to achieve some recognition as a force on campus. However, to maintain even this tenuous respectability requires that they have behind them the support and implied threat of minority students—which in turn requires that they promote among those students not only a sense of separatism but also of paranoia, a sense that white professors are out to “get” minority students, that low grades are symptoms of repressive racism, etc. Bizarre as some of these notions might seem to an observer, they appear to be far more plausible to minority students who have sailed through substandard high schools with A’s and B’s, and who now find themselves struggling to get C’s—and often losing that struggle.