In their exchanges, both Pete and Sam seem to accept the rather odd idea that affirmative action exists primarily to benefit the poor. For example, Sam writes that:
Peter’s most compelling argument is that affirmative action “typically benefits only middle- and upper-class minority students”—that is, students who probably aren’t nearly as vulnerable to segregation, foreclosure, unemployment, educational inequality, and other social disadvantages. If that’s true, I am completely open to revising my view on race-based affirmative action, so long as it is replaced by class-based affirmative action.
Yet in a world where less than 30% of Americans go to college, and only a fractional percentage of those students end up at elite universities where selection criteria even matters, affirmative action will always be a relatively “middle- and upper-class” problem. Whether a minority student gets helped into Harvard (or has to settle for Tufts or NYU instead) has almost no impact on the structure of inequality in America.
Which is not to say that affirmative action isn’t important, only that its importance as policy lies elsewhere.
In my view, the case for race-based affirmative action rests on the case for racial diversity as an institutional good — a good on par with, say, having football players in the classroom, or foreign exchange math students and prep school grads eating lunch together. Harvard is a big place with huge number of needs; we “need” to fill up football stadiums, and build out our math department, and keep our feeder schools happy. We admit students in what is ultimately an opaque and non-standardizable process for one reason alone: to fulfill those perceived institutional needs. That’s our prerogative as a university; we build each class from the top going down.
It seems incredibly reasonable, then, that one admission factor — among many — should be racial diversity. For all sorts of reasons, Harvard wants to help minorities get through the gates: to hedge into the best talent pools; to create a dynamic campus culture; to extend the reach of the Harvard brand.
From the university-eye view, then, it’s educational diversity, not social justice, that makes up the case for race-based affirmative action. And there’s law behind this. In the landmark affirmative action case, Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the Court said that affirmative action could not be justified on the grounds of reparations or poverty relief; it could be justified, however, as a feature of universities’ ongoing commitment to intellectual diversity. “The atmosphere of ‘speculation, experiment and creation’ — so essential to the quality of higher education — is widely believed to be promoted by a diverse student body,” Justice Powell wrote.
Thus the social benefits of affirmative action are either very local (for the families involved) or very elite (for the institutions that benefit). At its best, race-based affirmative action helps universities like our own — and organizations all around the country — maintain their competitive edge.
And that’s a good thing.