The Harvard Political Review has joined with other college political publications to form the Alliance of Collegiate Editors (ACE), hoping to generate cross-campus dialogue on political issues. The first topic we will discuss is class-based affirmative action.
Class-based affirmative action is an issue on which unorthodox liberals and unorthodox conservatives seem to have found common ground. (For summaries of what’s been said in the blogosphere in recent weeks, see here and here.)
But, much as I love cross-ideological harmony, I share Matt Yglesias’s suspicion that debating the issue of class-based affirmative action is akin to “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.” That is, if we focus (as we almost always seem to do) on the admissions criteria of super-selective private colleges, we’re never going to have any impact on structural inequalities, either racial ones or class-based ones.
Peter Beinart, echoing Ross Douthat, thinks that “More white working-class kids at Harvard would mean an American educational elite less easily caricatured by Fox News, and more able to speak across the red-blue divide.” While that might do wonders for the media discourse, it won’t do much to produce real educational and economic opportunity for the vast majority of Americans.
Nevertheless, I think that class-based affirmative action is worth discussing, because this issue highlights the different sets of assumptions on which liberals and conservatives base their policy preferences.
It’s simple enough to see how this is true with liberals. They can get behind class-based affirmative action because they assume that the following things are true:
1. We are very far from achieving anything like true equality of opportunity,
2. It would be a good thing if we came closer to achieving equality of opportunity, and
3. We can do so by giving a leg up in admissions to students from low-income families.
Various liberals might not want to make the concession that they were wrong to favor race-based preferences (if they would even have to), but my point is that, as a matter of principle, liberals can readily endorse class-based affirmative action.
Given the support of people like Ross Douthat, Stuart Taylor, and James Joyner, you might think the same was true about conservatives. I’m not so sure. I don’t see how conservatives can consistently support class-based affirmative action and oppose regular old affirmative action. Their reasons for opposing the latter, in my view, preclude them from supporting the former.
Consider the three arguments put forward by philosopher Louis Pojman in his well-known article, “The Case Against Affirmative Action.”
First, you have the argument that affirmative action “requires discrimination against another group.” Argues Pojman:
Respect for persons entails that we treat each person as an end in him or herself, not simply as a means to be used for social purposes. … [Affirmative action] fails to treat White males with dignity as individuals, judging them by both their race and gender, instead of their merit.
This is a pretty familiar argument against race-based preferences. One hears echoes of Chief Justice John Roberts’s statement that “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
The question is, don’t class-based preferences run into the same objection? Don’t they fail to treat people as individuals? Class-based affirmative action would require the government to make judgments regarding individuals based on assumptions about their group. Low-income people, as a class, would be assumed to have had overcome more hardship and thereby demonstrated more “merit” than middle and high-income people.
Second, Pojman argues that affirmative action encourages “mediocrity and incompetence.” He says, “Government programs of enforced preferential treatment tend to appeal to the lowest possible common denominator.” Assuming this is true about race-based preferences, why wouldn’t it also be true about class-based preferences?
Third, Pojman says that merit “should enjoy a weighty presumption in our social practices.” The first “pillar for meritocracy” is the deontological argument, seen above, that we should not treat people as “means to be used for social purposes.” The second pillar is the utilitarian argument that “we will be better off by honoring excellence.” It benefits everyone to have the best doctors, the best professors, the best students, etc.
Of course, supporters of race-based preferences have long argued that affirmative action, in fact, enhances rather than subverts meritocracy. They say that the “best” doctor is one who can gain the trust of his community, the “best” professor is one who can bring a diversity of life experiences to the classroom, and so on. They also point out that traditional barometers of merit are often less than trustworthy. (See my June post on the SAT.)
But conservatives have always rejected such arguments. They have assumed, like Pojman, that certain tests and measures really are reliable indicators of merit. But class-based affirmative action, like race-based preferences, would require de-emphasizing these indicators to some extent, in favor of mushier estimations of merit, like the amount of hardship one has overcome.
One way I can imagine conservatives like Douthat distinguishing between racial and class-based preferences is by saying that low income, as a general matter, imposes greater obstacles than does minority racial status. That is one reason a liberal might support class-based affirmative action as a substitute for the traditional kind. But can conservatives, who have argued that affirmative action doesn’t treat people as individuals and disregards the concept of merit, really get behind a proposal that seems just as guilty of making broad and crude assumptions about people, and of rewarding something other than merit strictly defined?
For these reasons, I’m very skeptical of the possibility of cross-ideological agreement on class-based affirmative action. As a practical matter, maybe I shouldn’t care so much. If conservatives really do embrace it, then who am I to fault them? But given the arguments and assumptions underlying conservative opposition to race-based preferences, I don’t foresee that embrace coming any time soon.
I’d love to hear from conservatives who either support or oppose class-based affirmative action. Or maybe some liberals think that I shortchange its potential to have an effect on structural inequality?
Photo credit: Flickr stream of pobrecito33