Affirmative overreaction
Stanford doesn’t ‘reflect America’
THE demographic profile of Stanford University’s class of 2026 is out, with 1,736 matriculated students in the freshman class of one of the world’s most prestigious universities. But as some perceptive critics were quick to notice, one key demographic is disproportionately underrepresented: While whites make up more than 50% of the nation’s adolescent population, per 2019 Office of Population Affairs numbers, they were only 22% of Stanford’s class of 2026.
A Twitter user by the name of Fischer King was one of the first to flag the disparity, adding: “Now I’m speculating, but admitted white men are likely connected — legacies, or just bought way in. The rural math genius like John Nash — he has no chance.”
Progressive journalist Elizabeth Spiers, on the other hand, suggests this is simply meritocracy at work: “The refusal to even consider the possibility that women and minorities are outperforming white male applicants here is unsurprising,” she tweeted.
Altered admissions
Of course, if Spiers and her counterparts believe that the underrepresentation of whites is simply the result of merit, they would ostensibly be fine with ending affirmative action — after all, the stated purpose of affirmative action was “to further a compelling interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body,” as Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote in the majority opinion for the Supreme Court’s 2003 ruling on the matter, Grutter v. Bollinger.
Now that said “diversity” is apparently attainable without the artificial engineering of race-conscious admissions, we can return to colorblind candidate selection. Right?
Spiers, for her part, goes on to attribute the fact that there are more women than men in Stanford’s class of 2026 — 54% to 46% — to the fact “that girls outperform boys in school,” maintaining: “Given that we know that empirically, anyone who is confused about why there might be slightly more women than men is just asserting their own biases.”
Excellent: We’ve relegated Ibram X. Kendi’s “all disparities are proof of discrimination” — “when I see racial disparities, I see racism” — to the dust bin of history where it belongs. Overrepresentation of one group, and underrepresentation of another, in a particular institution is no longer proof, in and of itself, of systemic bias. I look forward to Spiers extending that logic to the nation’s prison system, policing, crime, income inequality, marriage rates, Fortune 500 C-suites, the so-called “wage gap” and heavily male-dominated careers in STEM.
Of course, she won’t, because that’s never really what this was about anyway.
‘Unfair advantages’
We’ve been told for decades that affirmative action is simply an effort to make colleges more proportionally representative of the nation’s demographics writ large: “The diversity justification allows admissions departments to put a thumb on the scale to increase the representation of some minority students whose academic credentials would otherwise be insufficient. That means campuses look more like America,” a New York Times interchange beamed in 2015. But when Stanford’s share of the white population is decisively out of step with national demographics, suddenly it’s simply a question of merit. What should be clear, by now, is that affirmative action’s apologists were never going to take their ball and go home when they got a student body that matched the US census numbers. “White men have always had unfair advantages and allocations,” Spiers argued last year. “If you take your finger off the scale, the outcome might not be the one you wanted when you put it there.”
Great. So let’s take our fingers off the scale, and see what happens. Maybe then the results will actually look more like America.