The Chronicle of Higher Education
From the issue dated September 26, 2008
By ALAN CONTRERAS
The enemies of diversity are hoisting a glass every night these days. All over the country, they have succeeded — or are making a serious run at success — in undoing efforts to increase diversity in academe and other sectors of society. That is because they are getting those of us who support diversity to fight the wrong battle, under the wrong conditions, on a field chosen by our foes.
We who think that colleges and universities in a healthy society will reflect that society's population have been guilt-whipped into defending a process at the expense of a goal. We have grown up with the phrases "affirmative action" and "equal opportunity" chained together as though their meaning were the same, which it is not. The enemy has hornswoggled us into thinking that in order to improve diversity on campuses and in public employment, we have to defend affirmative action as though it were Little Round Top at Gettysburg.
Affirmative action is a process, a means to an end. It is a relatively recent governmental invention intended to accomplish a particular task, which is primarily to ensure that employers recruit people from ethnic and racial groups not historically represented in socially acceptable numbers in the ranks of the employed. The societal goal, however, is equal opportunity: ensuring that people don't get screened out of opportunities based on factors unrelated to job performance. Those two concepts exist independently.
There came a point a few years ago when we should have said to the opponents of equal opportunity: "All right, if you don't think affirmative action is the best way to increase the presence of people with dark skin in our universities and public agencies, fine. Tell us what your plan is."
We should have called their monumental bluff. They have no plan. They don't care what happens to dark-skinned, low-income children; they neither have nor know any.
But the important fact is that we don't need affirmative action anyway. Affirmative action — and its sorry linguistic hangers-on, like quotas, opportunity adjustments, and geographic balancers — simply doesn't add much to what any sensible employer today would do anyway, and antidiscrimination laws can handle the rest.
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