Two excellent books are coming out soon, each of which ought to be of particular interest to the Supreme Court justices as they take up the issue of racial admission preferences in Fisher v. University of Texas this term (the case will be argued on October 10).
The first, by Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor, is Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended To Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It. As the title suggests, it focuses on the overwhelming empirical evidence that has accumulated showing that African-American and Latino students have been set up for failure in a variety of ways by matriculating at schools where their academic qualifications are substantially lower than the rest of the student body’s. This problem was the subject of a conference at the Brookings Institution last month, by the way, that I participated in.
The other book is excellent, too, and also ought to get plenty of publicity: Wounds That Will Not Heal: Affirmative Action and Our Continuing Racial Divide, by Russell K. Nieli. It likewise marshals a great deal of social science evidence that the results of racial preferences have been bad, not good.
I want to mention briefly just one of the studies discussed in Nieli’s book, by Duke University economists Peter Arcidiacono and Jacob Vigdor (the former participated in the Brookings conference, by the way). Recall that the only justification that universities can rely on for their use of racial preferences today is the purported “educational benefits” of “diversity.” It’s clear that those benefits are nonexistent for the mismatched African Americans and Latinos, but how about for the white and Asian students (the more plausible candidates anyhow, since there are more of them at the selective schools and presumably there is little need for, say, African Americans to be get wider exposure to white perspectives)? Well, here’s what Arcidiacono and Vigdor found in their 2008 study:
Our empirical results cover a broad range of outcomes, including earnings, educational attainment, and satisfaction with both one’s life and one’s job. Across these varying specifications, we fail to find any significant evidence that white or Asian students who attend more diverse colleges do better in life. . . . In general, we find that the type of diversity increase brought about by affirmative action policies — which brings lower-scoring minority students into potential contact with higher-scoring majority-race students — is if anything detrimental to majority-race students.
Sander and Taylor, by the way, filed an importantamicus brief with the Court in Fisher, and Nieli’s work is likewise in an amicus brief (joined as well by CEO board member Abigail Thernstrom and CEO research fellow Althea Nagai).
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And I have three other items related to Fisher v. University of Texas.
First, here’s somemore research that undercuts the social-science evidence relied on by those claiming “educational benefits” from “diversity”; you can take a look at this, too.
This leads us to the second remaining item, namely the Los Angeles Times editorial this week that concludes triumphantly that the Supreme Court should uphold the University of Texas’s racial discrimination because it must not “upend settled law on the naive assumption that racism and racial discrimination are ancient history.” But, again, the University of Texas does not try to justify its racial discrimination in admissions by pointing to continuing racism and racial discrimination, and for good reason: The Supreme Court has repeatedly rejected this broad remedial argument. So as a legal matter, the editorial is a nonstarter. The justification that the University of Texas gives is, again, the supposed “educational benefits” from “diversity” — that random interracial conversations justify systematic racial discrimination. As a logical and empirical matter, this is a nonstarter, too.
The third item also involves mainstream-media coverage of the case. The Washington Post on Friday had a story that discussed at some length the various (and predictable) amicus briefs filed on the university’s side, but says nothing about the amicus briefs on the opposing side. So here’s my summary of the latter that I wrote posted on National Review Online right after those briefs were filed:
Links to the merits brief for Abigail Fisher in her lawsuit challenging racially preferential admissions at the University of Texas, and to the supporting briefs filed this week by a wide variety of amici curiae, are posted here. There’s real diversity (pardon the expression) in these briefs, folks: conservatives, libertarians, and liberals; social scientists, economists, statisticians, and journalists; Asians, Jews, Indians, and African Americans; present and former civil-rights officials, including four of the eight current members of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights; lots of conservative lawyers and legal organizations; and U.S. Representative/Lieutenant Colonel (ret.) Allen West, to name just some.
I won’t try to summarize the briefs here, but will note a few themes: It is bizarre for the law not only to allow racial and ethnic discrimination but to defer to a university’s judgment on whether and how to discriminate; this discrimination is offensive and harmful not only to whites and not only to the other groups discriminated against but also to the groups who are supposed to be the “beneficiaries” of this discrimination; the discrimination is widespread and schools face not only internal but external pressure to engage in it; the discrimination cannot be supported by social science and, indeed, there is more and more empirical evidence that the costs of racial preferences overwhelm the increasingly shaky claims of its benefits; and the whole business is now just silly (I’m not sure that Elizabeth Warren is mentioned in any of the briefs, but she could have been).
