“Science and engineering should look like the rest of the population,” said Daryl Chubin of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). And if the racial bean-counting doesn’t yield the desired results, “somebody needs to pull the plug and say this has not been an open and fair search.”
The Center for Equal Opportunity‘s Roger Clegg, advocate for race-neutral hiring practices, writes about the AAAS’s diversity rationales on Minding the Campus. Clegg takes the AAAS to task for seeking to adopt racial quotas.
“[I]t’s clear that nondiscrimination is exactly what AAAS does not have in mind. The National Journal article says that it wants to ‘allocate additional slots to U.S. racial and ethnic minorities’ and to protect universities from ‘likely lawsuits by groups seeking color-blind admissions policies.’ As the quotes above suggest, it is demanding that schools get their numbers right. It wants quotas, it wants race and ethnicity to be weighed when hiring decisions are made.
“[I]f race or ethnicity is weighed, then racial and ethnic discrimination is taking place,” he writes. “Let’s have no nonsense about this not being so, since skin color or national origin is ‘only one factor.’ Either that factor makes a difference sometimes in who gets picked or it doesn’t. If it never makes a difference, then there’s no point in considering it. If it does make a difference on occasion, then on those occasions someone is getting or not getting the job because of skin color or national origin. That’s discrimination. Since we are dealing with scientists and not English majors, this kind of logic ought to be understandable.”
The Supreme Court in Grutter v. Bollinger contended that as long as race was one of the factors, and not THE factor, in admissions, it’s was okay. But as Clegg notes, it doesn’t make sense. Selecting students for admission based on race, whether it’s one of several factors or THE factor, is still racial discrimination.
One of the arguments the AAAS and others make to justify racial discrimination is the “role model” rationale. Racial minorities can’t succeed unless they’re taught by people who look like them.
In Black Rednecks and White Liberals, Thomas Sowell said that history has proven this idea wrong. For example, feudal Japan emerged from isolation and became an industrial nation by learning from Americans and Europeans. The country sent its students to America and Europe, and brought Americans and Europeans to Japan to teach necessary skills. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Jews in New York City were taught mostly by Irish Catholics, and a generation of black children in Harlem in the 1930s and 1940s were taught more often by Jewish teachers than black teachers. Yet, the Japanese, Jews, and blacks excelled despite looking into the faces of people who didn’t share their culture, religion, or skin color.
The Supreme Court has already rejected the role model argument over two decades ago in Wygant v. Jackson Board of Education. “A decade before that, in Hazelwood School District v. United States,” Clegg writes, “the Court had similarly noted that a school district could not point to the racial makeup of its student body as a justification for the racial makeup of its faculty. And rightly so. As Justice Powell wrote in Wygant, ‘Carried to its logical extreme, the idea that black students are better off with black teachers could lead to the very system the Court rejected in Brown v. Board of Education.’”
Think about it. In their misguided zeal to close the achievement gap between the races, social engineers want to regress to the days of government-mandated racial segregation. As long as it’s for a “good” cause, it’s okay?
(Photo credit: Shutterstock)
Comments on this entry are closed.