Who is assessing the assessors? And how?
Who is assessing the assessors? And how?
The Supreme Court gets ready to end Affirmative Action. The merit-haters are planning a preemptive attack. But they may be shooting themselves in the foot.
The game
The “poke the woke” game is getting duller. Our opponents have learnt our arguments by heart and know how to reply to whatever we say. Ditto on our side. Let’s try something new!
Let’s pretend we’ve converted. The West is indeed irredeemable and needs to be dismantled. Enlightenment is to be canceled. The US and racism are synonyms, both to be erased. All dead white men with or without beards are bigots. The Oppressed must oppress the oppressors, becoming oppressors themselves. The old world is scheduled for a demolition. A whole new world is to be built.
The NUMBER
As the country is bracing itself for the abolishing of the affirmative action in the 2022-23 SCOTUS term12, our universities don't sleep: they are hastily making sure they can continue business as usual, but this time around undetected. In short, they are getting rid of the NUMBER.
Here is the Massachusetts Department’ of Higher Education Strategic Plan for Racial Equity:
Explore or expand holistic admissions practices and policies that broaden the focus beyond GPA and standardized test scores (e.g., essays).
And here is Nicholas Lemann, in the New Yorker, vehemently rejecting the very idea of healing the patient instead of breaking the thermometer (after all, it has NUMBERs on it)… immediately:
Through all the decades of controversy about affirmative action, its opponents have often argued that we should fix the entire American educational system so that affirmative action would be unnecessary. That argument assumes that racial integration as an explicit aim is somehow inherently offensive, and it also proposes an almost unimaginably vast project. It would still be a large undertaking, but less so, for universities to reconsider their tendency to quantify every aspect of admissions in ways that, after the Supreme Court decision, will wind up being in conflict with keeping integration at even just its current, hard-won level. Now isn’t too soon to begin doing that work.
However, emotions aside, the 225-page-strong expert report on the effects of abolishing the SATs by the University of California system…
…did not find evidence that UC’s use of test scores played a major role in worsening the effects of disparities already present among applicants. The obvious challenges faced by low-income Black and Latino students were poverty and poor K–12 education.
The SCOTUS
Abolishing the SATs and GPAs will nevertheless achieve the principal goal of the anti-merit movement: getting rid of the undesirables who had the audacity to study for 26 hours a day, 8 days a week, from the day of conception:
Aligning enrollment with state demographics would require cutting the share of the Asian or Pacific Islander students by almost two-thirds. It would mean getting right with contemporary concepts of anti-racism by reviving one of California’s most shameful traditions: clearing Asians out of desirable spaces3.
Francis Fukuyama continues:
The dismantling of merit-based public education in the name of racial justice is a sure formula for mobilizing opposition to the Democratic Party among critical constituencies like Asian-Americans.
And mobilized they are, and hence the SCOTUS.
The bridges
So far so good. Don’t forget that within the confines of this piece, we are pretending we are on board with abolishing merit. But will the “world to come” be better without it? Let’s examine.
Imagine we successfully weeded out all the undeserving. But can we be sure we didn’t purge the talent among the deserving? The California SAT report has the answer:
African-American and Native American students would4 be especially hurt by dropping the SAT: among the students guaranteed admission to UC, 40% of African-Americans and 47% of Native Americans won their guarantee because of their SAT scores.
To reiterate, about 40% of the talented minority applicants are now sent home… in addition to the 60% of the talented inconvenient-minority ones, covered above.
But wait, how did we even know about these losses? Oh, yes, because of the SAT scores! But now, with the SATs being gone, how will the admission eligibility assessors know who is fit to become an engineer and who isn’t? By reading applicants’ essays? And who is assessing whether the assessors are doing a good job in selecting capable participants of tomorrow’s economy? But an even more interesting question is “how?” Remember, the NUMBER is gone.
To cut to the chase, will the bridges still stay? … They won’t. And we know what our meritophobic friends will say when the next bridge snaps in two:
We wanted the best, but it turned out like always5.
… to start next week …
“Stop Making Asian Americans Pay the Price for Campus Diversity”, by John McWhorter, New York Times, September 23, 2022.
“The University of California Is Lying to Us”, by Caitlin Flanagan, The Atlantic, July 22, 2022.
At the time of the report submission, on January 27, 2020, SAT was not been abolished yet.
Viktor Chernomyrdin, Russian prime minister, on a botched monetary reform, August 6, 1992 [Obituary, Guardian, November 3, 2010].