Letters
…getting pleasure from reading
the obituaries…
RACE REASONING
Congratulations on President
Randel’s superb essay, “Greater Than Zero
Is What Justice Demands” (“From
the President,” February/03). In one concisely
written and tightly analyzed page, he lays out the parameters
of the whole race problem in America without avoiding
his own judgment as to ultimately virtuous arrangements.
He does not, of course, nor need he
in this essay, recite the encyclopedia of facts collected
by other scholars concerning the myriad ways in which
America has tried (and often succeeded, despite some conspicuous
failures) to cope with ethnic, religious, color, and/or
racial differences among our millions of citizens over
several centuries. Every reader should be aware of (and,
one hopes, familiar with) Gunnar Myrdal’s An
American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy
(New York, 1944).
One impetus
for this Carnegie-sponsored major study was a brilliant
gentleman (Negro) who earned his Ph.D. at Chicago in the
1930s: E. Franklin Frazier. His dissertation, “The
Negro Family in Chicago,” led to his classic book,
The Negro Family in the United States (University
of Chicago Press, 1939). In an editor’s preface
Ernest W. Burgess, PhB’13, praises the work as “the
most valuable contribution to the literature on the family
since the publication, 20 years ago, of The Polish
Peasant in Europe and America by Thomas & Znaniecki.”
In his author’s preface Frazier makes a point with
which any Chicago alumnus can agree: that sound social
analysis probes into the fundamentals of human relationships
that extend beyond the limits of race, gender, social
class, religion, ethnicity, and other individual characteristics.
I had the good fortune to take a beginning
course in race relations from Mr. Frazier in 1944, when
I was stationed across the river from Washington and he
was a professor of sociology at Howard University. Along
with a profound understanding of white-black relationships
in America, I learned also a few personal facts about
Mr. Frazier. Upon earning his Ph.D. he was invited to
join the Chicago faculty but chose instead to take a much
less prestigious appointment at Fisk University; subsequently,
his outstanding intellectual qualities led to his appointment
at Howard, then America’s outstanding “black”
university. (A bitter joke: Howard University’s
medical school, like those at most other American institutions,
“discriminated”; each freshman class offered
two positions to white students, who typically turned
out to be Jews from New York.)
While his intellectual prowess found
ample expression from Howard, one must wonder whether
he would have been more influential had he accepted the
Chicago invitation at the start of his career. One must
also wonder if Chicago—a pioneer in the study of
race relationships—might not have retained that
eminence had Frazier been able to lay its foundation more
than 50 years ago. We have seen in recent years how some
East Coast universities have “bought” black
scholars of “black studies” only to fall into
the trap of emphasizing “blackness” over the
rigor of scholarly analysis reflected in Frazier’s
work.
Leonard S. Stein, AM’49, PhD’62
Evanston, Illinois
How sad it was as an alumnus of a university
known for its intellectual disciplines to read a column
by the president of that university that was so devoid
of the discipline of logic. Where to begin, where to begin?
The purpose of a great university is
to provide a high quality of education to those who can
benefit from it and, as a related activity, to do research.
To attend such a university as a student is not a civil
right to which all have equal access, like voting, for
instance. We go to a university to train our minds, and
to some degree to acquire a certification that our minds
have been trained. Not everyone brings equal intellectual
aptitude to this opportunity.
President Randel touches on the subject
of discrimination, a red-flag word but a laudable intellectual
activity. Wise and intelligent people are responsible
to discriminate as part of their decision-making process
between one thing and another. Not to do so is irresponsible.
Economic discrimination (presumably expressed as, “You
can’t come here if you can’t afford it”)
is readily and generously responded to by various forms
of financial aid. The more complex manifestation (“You
can’t come here because your economic background
has left you unable to do the intellectual work”)
is more challenging but more effectively dealt with by
steps taken before college age than by the quota step
of admitting the intellectually underqualified, for reasons
I will address later.
Randel says that selection based on
qualifications is insufficient because such qualifications
are highly correlated with family wealth. This is irrelevant
as guidance to admissions policies (I speak as a student
from an economically unprivileged background). The question
for admissions policy is: are these test scores and grades
reliable predictors of success in the proposed academic
environment? The correlation to family wealth may be useful
in directing other social policy, such as funding models
for lower education. But it is not useful in determining
admissions policy.
A quota system that achieves diversity
by seeking to establish a cultural distribution from among
intellectually qualified candidates is not in question
here. There is some value in having a great university
populated by intellectually qualified students from a
variety of cultures, ethic groups, and foreign countries.
What is pernicious to all concerned
is the deliberate admission of students who are underqualified
in order to reach such a profile. We have the tools to
reliably predict academic success. Having administered
them, such a quota system provides a bonus, the effect
of which is to admit less intellectually qualified students
over more qualified (that is, less likely to successfully
benefit from the experience over more likely to benefit
from the experience). This process harms the very people
it sets out to help.
What happens to students admitted to
an academic environment for which they are intellectually
unprepared or unqualified? They fail in higher numbers
than they would in other institutions, or they artificially
succeed by being given a certificate of achievement that
they have not truly earned.
This failure is not good for the students
who fail. Failure breeds failure. Students who successfully
complete a less prestigious course of study are more likely
to succeed in the rest of life than those who fail in
an environment for which they are not prepared.
More insidious, the genuine success
of those of the same boosted ethic groups who genuinely
achieve is brought into question by the existence of the
quota system. Would a black patient go to a black physician
if it were widely known that some such physicians did
not earn their degrees in the same rigorous way as other
physicians? This is not speculation. There is evidence
that black physicians (and other professionals) are experiencing
this form of prejudice, and the University’s own
experience (which I witnessed in the 1970s) is that such
artificial admissions policies produce a higher rate of
failures among these students and extra burdens on minority
faculty, who are called upon to carry the struggling students.
The baseball analogy is totally inappropriate.
The pitcher is on the team because he can pitch really
well. That is his legitimate defensive contribution, even
if his offensive contribution is weak. The more appropriate
comparison to this quota debate would be to insist that
a certain number of players be near-sighted or slow of
foot, and therefore not well qualified to play the game
at all.
What would Martin Luther King Jr. think?
We don’t have to speculate; he told us. “I
have a dream, that one day my children will be judged
not by the color of their skin but by the content of their
character.”
Lew Flagg, MBA’71
Milford, Massachusetts
Regarding President Randel’s
comment on President Bush’s affirmative-action policy,
what’s most consistent with Martin Luther King’s
philosophy is that no minority should be underrepresented
at any college or university. When that happens, students
and faculty should be recruited to correct the deficiency,
without excluding anyone for that purpose.
It follows as a corollary that the
government should give financial grants to educational
institutions for solving any problems that this might
cause. Economists might complain that this could cause
inflation, but that’s the lesser evil compared to
discrimination. The only way to resolve the dilemma is
to take the bull by the horns, again consistent with King’s
philosophy.
Thus the girl who filed a lawsuit with
the Supreme Court against the University of Michigan should
be admitted to the university with a financial grant to
solve whatever problems that might cause.
If such a policy is implemented generally,
then, instead of minority underrepresentation being a
perennial problem, overcrowding might be a perennial problem,
but again that is the lesser evil, and is therefore the
way to go.
Kenneth J. Epstein, SM’52
Chicago
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