The Curse of Affirmative Action

Of all the names I’ve been called in life, including the usual anti-Semitic slurs, none has more sting than “affirmative action hire.”

I got that a lot on social media after I joined The Times. The meaning was clear: I was a quota-filler who had taken the place of somebody more deserving. Whatever I had accomplished, through talent or hard work, wasn’t enough. I was just fulfilling a misbegotten mandate for ideological diversity — and doing even that poorly, since, like every other columnist at The Times, I’m also a Trump opponent.

The accusation always came from the left, and it contained an implicit admission. The very people who ordinarily championed affirmative action as a cornerstone of a decent society — for giving a needed leg up to the systemically disadvantaged — had no trouble understanding the other dimension of the policy — an unfair preference for the unqualified. They knew that “affirmative action,” whatever its benefits as a form of social engineering, was a synonym for mediocrity.

Evidence: An internal Harvard document from 2013 found that, based on admissions criteria that considered academic performance only, Asian-Americans would account for 43 percent of the admitted class. But their actual admission rate was 19 percent then and has risen to only 23 percent since.

Evidence: An analysis commissioned by the plaintiffs of student records found that the Harvard Admissions Office consistently rated Asian-Americans lower on personality traits such as “likability” and “kindness,” even when they hadn’t met with them in person. By contrast, alumni interviewers, who did meet the applicants, often rated them highly on personality.

Evidence: annual meetings of the Association of Black Admissions and Financial Aid Officers of the Ivy League and Sister Schools, or Abafaoilss, in which conferees share information about the race of their admitted and matriculated students. The Supreme Court has allowed race to be a consideration in admissions while forbidding the kind of explicit racial balancing that seemed to be the purpose of the meetings.

All this confirms what most thoughtful people should know already about affirmative action: that what is supposed to be a powerful method for inclusion is an equally powerful method of exclusion. If you’re going to say yes to Jack, you’ll have to say no to Jill. The world of college admissions is a fixed pie.

What distinguishes the Harvard lawsuit from past legal challenges to affirmative action is that it shows that the people the policyharms aren’t privileged and unsympathetic white kids. The injured are other minorities.

Nor is this a matter of second-tier white students duking it out for the last available slots against standout minorities. The Asian-Americans being rejected by Harvard are outstanding candidates being penalized by hoary stereotypes about having ferocious work ethics but not much else. Internal Harvard documents refer to them as “busy and bright” and “standard strong” — reminiscent of the way those of a previous generation of Jewish students were dismissed as “average geniuses” who were not “clubbable.”

No wonder Harvard fought tooth-and-nail to keep those documents secret. The goal of achieving a desired racial composition on campus depends on Wizard of Oz-like schemes of dissembling and double-think. The core problem with every noble lie is that it can only be concealed by an additional lie, then another. Whatever else it is, it’s the opposite of Veritas.

Still, I can’t help but think that critics of the plaintiffs are right in at least one respect: Those “busy and bright” kids who aren’t going to Harvard will be fine. Most will still get into great schools and have good careers. They might rage against an institution that turned them away unfairly. Yet deep down they’ll have the satisfaction of knowing their own worth.

Will that be equally true of those who, thanks to affirmative action, did get in? I wonder. Perhaps the deepest damage affirmative action does is to those it embraces, not those it rejects. It isn’t a pleasant thing to live with the sense that your achievements aren’t quite real — and that everyone secretly knows it. It’s corrosive to live in the clutch of someone else’s lie.

“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” John Roberts once wrote. Should this case reach the Supreme Court, let’s hope he still means it.