A Strong Argument against Racial Preferences — from a Liberal

By George Leef

Friday, October 28, 2022

 

Almost everyone on the left supports racial preferences in higher education, apparently thinking that we need them to bring about social justice or some other fuzzy objective. There are, however, a few who dare to think otherwise.

 

One of them is UCLA law professor Richard Sander, who has long maintained that racial preferences are not a benefit to their supposed beneficiaries, but instead a harm. In today’s Martin Center article, he presents his case.

 

After observing that nearly everyone on the right opposes preferences while nearly everyone on the left loves them, Sander writes, “The ideological divide on this issue has always mystified me because, as a lifelong liberal who tries to do objective empirical research on social issues, current admissions practices at colleges and universities strike me as both inconsistent with liberal values and ineffective in achieving liberal goals.”

 

Why? For one thing, they treat people not as individuals but as group members and then try to adjust groups in student bodies to get a “correct” balance. For a long time, Harvard and other top universities did that with Jewish students. Sander comments, “Almost every liberal who knows about Harvard’s ‘Jewish quota’ from the 1920s and 1930s finds it repellent. Yet it bears a striking similarity to the university’s current anti-Asian policies. Harvard had pioneered the use of an admissions test in the early 20th century, and by the 1920s it found that Jewish Americans, who constituted about 3 percent of the general population, made up 25 percent of those passing the test.”

 

Moreover, the effort at helping students from certain minority groups often backfires. Students who aren’t academically competitive are thrown in with classmates who are better prepared to handle the material.

 

The Supreme Court hears oral arguments this coming Monday on two cases involving racial preferences. Sander thinks that many liberals would actually be glad if the Court declared preferences to be contrary to the law: “If the Supreme Court, with its solid conservative majority, delivers the expected coup de grace to racial preferences in admissions, many liberal leaders will secretly breathe a sigh of relief; they privately acknowledge what they cannot publicly admit: Preference policies are unprincipled and usually counterproductive.”

 

Just so.