Lay Off the Attacks On Black College Kids
OVER at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, Prof. Amy Wax has a talent for getting into trouble. She began last summer with an op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer that bemoaned the decline of oldfashioned values. The ones like: Get married and stay married for the kids. Work hard, take care of your neighbors, stay off drugs. Pretty hard to disagree with that, but then she followed this up with an interview in the college newspaper in which she said that “everyone wants to go to countries ruled by white Europeans” and didn’t dissent from the proposition that Anglo-Protestant cultural norms are superior.
That led to an open letter signed by half the Penn law faculty that accused her of racial bias and invited students to rat her out. According to Wax, Penn law dean Theodore Ruger suggested that she take a leave of absence and stop teaching a mandatory first-year law course. The dean denied this, but he did remove her from first-year teaching after learning that she told an interviewer she had “rarely, rarely” seen a black student graduate in the top half of his class.
Dean Ruger said that Wax was factually wrong about black-student performance. She had also violated the law-school policy that student grades are confidential. She was free to advocate her ideas, “no matter how dramatically those views diverge from our institutional ethos,” but first-year students had to be protected from her.
What resulted from all of this is one of those sterile debates between the competing claims of civility versus free speech. If you’re a conservative, you’re supposed to see this as an attack on Wax’s right to express her opinions. You might also want to suggest that Dean Ru- ger produce the evidence to show that Wax was factually in error. If you’re a liberal, you’re apt to label Wax a bigot for questioning the value of affirmative-action admission policies. You might also argue that Wax bears the onus of proof and that it’s for her to back up her claims. Arguing over the onus of proof is always a good way to sidestep murky factual issues.
If that’s what the debate is all about, count me out. I don’t want to take sides. I don’t think that disinviting white nationalists such as Richard Spencer from a college campus amounts to a new Spanish Inquisition. I don’t think that the test of a university’s academic integrity is whether it takes Milo Yiannopoulos seriously. At the same time, I wouldn’t give the liberal academy a pass when true conservative scholars are so rarely to be found on college campuses.
Go back 50 years, and liberals outnumbered conservatives in universities by three to one. Now it’s 12 to one. In some departments, such as history, it’s 30 to one. Nor is there any sign that the academy sees this as a problem. The ratio of liberals to conservatives may be 12 to one, but for newer academics the ratio is 20 to one. The conservatives who remain in higher ed are often over 65, and they’re aging out. In other words, it’s going to get worse.
Does that make me want to support Prof. Wax? No. I look at it from the perspective of the minority students I’ve taught. They’re all smart, able people, and I’d strongly advise you to hire them. That’s what I know, and even if I thought otherwise, like Prof. Wax, I’d be loyal enough to them to keep my mouth shut.
But suppose I’m wrong. Suppose that, forgetting duties of loyalty to our minority students and the affec- tion one ought to feel for them, we should have a public debate over affirmative action. Wonderful stuff, but can we then begin with a discussion of legacy admissions, the priority given to children of alumni who’ve made major donations to the college? At elite institutions, legacy children enjoy a tremendous edge over less wealthy children. And there are a lot of them.
There really isn’t anything much like this in other countries. Conservatives bemoan the affirmativeaction admission standards that advantage minority students but turn a blind eye to the most unfair affirmative-action standards of all.
Whatever one might say about giving a preference to minority students, at least it doesn’t perpetuate our class structure the way legacy admissions do.
One last thing. Didn’t conservatives learn from Hillary Clinton’s gaffe about deplorables that the last thing they should do is demean a class of fellow Americans?
True conservative scholars are so rarely ’ to be found on college campuses.