One Trouble with "The Trouble with Diversity"

It is somewhat odd. You would think that I would be an aggressive cheerleader for Walter Benn Michaels's The Trouble with Diversity. After all, if you proposed to take six ladder-faculty slots from Berkeley's Ethnic Studies Department and move two of them to Economics, two of them to Sociology, and two of them to the business school to hire people to really study the workings of the labor market, the intergenerational transmission of inequality, and compensation patterns within organizations--I would say that that would be a wonderful idea, and that it would make Berkeley a better university and the world a better world.

If you were to ask me who did more for the American minorites who are underrepresented at elite universities, and gave me a choice between (a) all the diversity deans in America and their staffs or (b) the neoliberals on the Clinton economic policy team who pushed through the 1993 expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit that boosts the collective incomes of poor Americans by what is now some $30 billion a year, I would have no hesitation in coming down on the side of Bill Clinton and his team--including, in a minor spear-carrying role, me--who changed in our own minor way not social consciousness but social being back in 1993.

I ought to be part of this book's core constituency.

But, instead, The Trouble with Diversity raises my hackles.

Let's dip into it. I flip it open, and land on page 85:

p. 85 ff: But the greatest value of diversity is not primarily in the contribution it makes to students' self-esteem. Its real value, as the widespread acceptance of affirmative action shows, is in the contribution it makes to the collective fantasy that institutions like Harvard and UIC are... meritocracies. For if the students at Harvard are appropriately diverse, we know that no student is being kept from Harvard because of his or her race or culture.... How, then, do some students end up at Harvard and some at UIC? Since the differences between them that produce this divergence are not (indeed cannot be) cultural (remember, cultures are equal), they are attributed instead to the merit of the individual....

This helps explain the popularity on campus... of affirmative action: it is a powerful tool for legitimizing their sense of their individual merit.... Affirmative action guarantees that... the white students on campus can understand themselves to be there on merit because they didn't get there at the expense of any black people. The problem with affirmative action is..,,, that it produces the illusion that we actually have a meritocracy.... [I]magine what that Harvard classroom would look like if we... [made] the [parental] income distribution at Harvard... look like the income distribution of the United States, over half the [current students]... would be gone.... Its no wonder that rich white kids and their parents aren't complaining about diversity. Race-based affirmative action... is a kind of collective bribe rich people pay themselves for ignoring economic inequality. The fact (and it is a fact) that it doesn't help to be white to get into Harvard replaces the much more fundamental fact that it does help to be rich....

Hence the irrelevance of Harvard's 2004 announcement that it wouldn't ask parents who earn less than [$60,000] a year to [contribute anything to tuition].... While this is no doubt great news to those financially pressed students who have gone to top high schools, taken college-prep courses, and scored well on their SATs, it is bound to seem a little beside the point to the great majority of the poor, since what's keeping them out of elite universities is not their inability to pay the bill but their inability to qualify for admission in the first place....

[...]

We like diversity and we like programs such as affirmative action because they tell us that racism is the problem... that solving it requires us just to give up our prejudices. (Solving the problem of economic inequality might require something more; it might require us to give up our money.)...

[...]

So on the one hand, we get affirmative action in universities, which solves a problem that no longer exists. It's their lack of family wealth, not the color of their skin, that disproportionately keeps blacks out of elite colleges.... The injury done to the poor... has taken place long before anybody gets to Harvard. But this doesn't mean that these solutions to fake problems serve no purpose. The purpose they serve is to disguise the real problem. We need, as I've already suggested, to believe that poor people aren't kept out of our elite universities in order to also believe that the economic advantages conferred by going to them are earned and so are justified. If going to Harvard is more a reflection of your family's wealth than it is of your merit... then, of course, the legitimating effect disappears. So the real point... the function of the (very few) poor people at Harvard is to reassure the (very many) rich people at Harvard that you can't just buy your way into Harvard...

I find that I cannot help but be annoyed by this.

I am annoyed by the shoddy sloppy neo-functionalist false-consciousness sociology. Perverse functionalist consequences that are asserted without supporting evidence are the "real" "purpose" of affirmative action programs. That's simply wrong in fact, and illegitimate in argument. It's taking 1970s-style cultural Marxism and eliminating the rational kernel while retaining only the mystical shell. Get rid of affirmative action in America tomorrow, and I guarantee that there will not be a great movement to tackle and repair the educational and other inequities and barriers that are driven by our Second Gilded Age distribution of income and wealth.

The primary purpose of affirmative action at elite universities is to partially--partially--counteract the steep differences in wealth distributions across races and ethnicities that our ancestors passed down to us, and give us as a society a chance to make full use of the talents and capabilities of the most fortunate and lucky slice of the rising generation of African-Americans, Hispanics, et cetera--not just of whites and Asians. The primary purpose is not to make the current cohort of students sleep more soundly.

The argument that Michaels is making is, I think, a version of what Albert Hirschman calls "the argument of the perverse effect" in his little book on The Rhetoric of Reaction: the claim that one's intellectual adversaries, are not just directing their efforts at low-value targets, but are doing positive harm. I see this argument every year when I teach Malthus. In Malthus's formulation, the argument is:

You Enlightenment liberals think your attacks on Throne and Altar are liberating humanity from the chains of superstition and ignorance. Fools! Break those chains and you will find humanity enslaved to its sexual appetites, population will rise until checked by famine and epidemic, and life will become even nastier, more brutish, and shorter than before.

Michaels's argument seems to me to have the same structure:

You twenty-first century diversity liberals think that you are reducing inequality. Fools! The more you reduce race, ethnic, and cultural inequality the more you legitimate and reduce pressure on the big enchilada, economic inequality.

I do think there is a difference between Malthus and Michaels. Malthus makes arguments and presents evidence. To counter Malthus's arguments--and I think that for the post-1500 period they can be countered--you have to engage him on the substance. Michaels, by contrast, makes assertions--where is the evidence? How can you respond? By saying, "Your father was a hamster and your mother smells of elderberries. Now go away, before I taunt you again"?

And Harvard's "irrelevant" policy of not asking for money for parents making under $60,000 a year? I think that there are 1,000 families today for whom that policy is not "irrelevant." It's $2 million a year.

Comments

[John Emerson]

In my experience since 1975, class-based issues have been neglected, while identity-based issues (including gender-identity issues, and adding environmental issues) have flourished.

This has been true for one major (often dominant) faction of the Democratic party, and it has also been true of most academic and free-lance leftism. In many left venues, indifference to or hostility to unions and the white working class is unchallenged, and many multiculturalists are moderate Republicans, apolitical, or anti-labor neo-liberal Democrats.

I have seen many cases when some version of identity politics gave an advantage to someone who was already middle class (and in many cases already separated from their supposed identity group), and also when such advantages served to raise select minority individuals up from the middle class (while separating them from their supposed identity group). Anecdotal, sure, but lots of anecdotes.

No matter how many individuals are brought up into the middle class, there's always going to be a class below, and as Michaels points out, this class is still almost half white. Class politics would involve attention to these people.

Education (rather than income) has even been used to define class:

http://www.emergingdemocraticmajorityweblog.com/donkeyrising/archives/001317.php

See also here: http://crookedtimber.org/2005/12/12/not-in-kansas-anymore/

The sub-middle-class, according to this definition, is just those who are less-educated or uneducated. Thus the schools are thus constituting a middle class which is mostly white, and making the middle class less white would be of minor significance for those in the class below.

[david]

It's cute when economists say "really study."

[Colin Danby]

I've tried to look at that discussion on The Valve a couple times but been driven back by waves of ennui; part of the trouble is too many things are being talked about at once with, indeed, a certain absence of rigor. Additionally "diversity" as the term is used by many higher-ed administrators is not entirely intellectually coherent however well-intentioned it may be, but that makes it *too* easy a target.

I have to stick up for ethnic studies, though, which is the favorite whipping-boy of way too many people. Everyone I know in ethnic studies is "really studying" something interesting and important and in cross-disciplinary ways that tend to be discouraged in economics departments. Not that it mightn't also be a better world if the Brad-designated departments also did more hiring in the directions he suggests.

[RedCharlie]

$2million/year?

That is much greater than tuition per student, but for 1000 students, that works out to be only $2000/student, which is much less than yearly tuition at an Ivy League.

Did you mean $20million/year, in toto? or just the cost to Harvard for this policy (assuming that <$60K were only paying about $2K/year to begin with)?

[otto]

There's nothing wrong with no fees for the $60,000 and less family. Indeed Harvard should go further by 1. elminating any fee for applying (not charging $65 but with a waiver) and 2. cutting down on the weight given to being the president of the chamber orchestra and famous novelist etc aspect of these applications and 3. removing the need for bullshit letters of recommendation. The number of applicants should be much higher - it should be possible to *casually* apply to Harvard and all the other great US university. Every step away from the casual application is a step towards entrenching the rich.

[RedCharlie]

I have to stick up for ethnic studies as well. And it's not just in reaction to the Harvey Mansfield-ish curmudgeons of the academic world.

My wife is considering doing a masters' thesis on the several thousand Marshallese who have settled in northwest Arkansas. Of course, this is in pursuit of her degree in Genetic Counseling, so it might not be so lacking in the rigor and hard numbers that Colin (and I suspect Brad also) finds lacking in the modern conception of ethnic studies aka "basket weaving" of the cultural sort.

[Colin Danby]

We agree Red C, but just to be clear, rigor is not the same as numbers -- good ethnography is rigorous. We need ways to talk about rigor, clarity, evidence without being heard as making a claim for one methodology over another.

To make clear the full outrageousness of the initial Brad suggestion, here's Berkeley's ethnic studies faculty

http://ethnicstudies.berkeley.edu/faculty/#Es

(a pretty impressive list, incidentally). I haven't counted how many are ladder-faculty, but taking away six lines would cut their strength by about a third. Then go over to econ with what, 70-odd people. And we're asked to believe that shifting lines from ethnic studies to economics would make a better university or world? Right. This is sheer greed.

[John Emerson]

"Too many things are being talked about at once"

Multiculturalism covers a lot of different things. Political tendencies, political strategies, college admissions policies, class offerings in HS and college, scholarship trends, pop culture, college and HS counseling practices.

The Valve people had one problem in that some hadn't received the Michaels book by deadline time.

[P6]

The problem with the analysis at The Valve is they were critcizing the literary quality of the arguments and presentation rather than whether or not they had any grounding in reality whatsoever.

[shah8]

I just want to make this comment.

Most white people that talk about class in this context, that I've ever heard, are mostly talking about how one agenda they percieve, multiculturalism, conflicts with another agenda they percieve, classes, and more importantly, me-ism. If you believe for one second that any general focus on class-based remedial action is going to include black people or women, you've got another think coming.

If you need more evidence, just check out what happened during the New Deal and with the veterans based assistance after WWII. Why doesn't anyone think about how short the Harlem Renaissance was (besides saying the Depression smushed it)? Black/East Asian peoples lost huge gobs of their middle class during the period 1926-mid60s, and a major reason for this was class based assistance that allowed white people of varying levels of merit to economically squeeze out other ethnicities (as the aid wasn't available for them). And many of the people who argue on the basis of class have the subtext of increased aid to lower class white people or is ignorant of this history...

[andres]

"Michaels, by contrast, makes assertions--where is the evidence? How can you respond?By saying, "Your father was a hamster and your mother smells of elderberries. Now go away, before I taunt you again"?"

It's a darned pity, but I no longer think that all of the readers on this blog know where this sentence is from--Monty Python has become classical and anything classical is ignored by the young generation. Oh well.

[Slocum]

"The primary purpose of affirmative action at elite universities is to partially--partially--counteract the steep differences in wealth distributions across races."

Not true. If the only problem with minority admissions was family economic disadvantage, this would be a trivially easy problem to solve -- simply replace all race-based affirmative action programs with status-based programs. The latter are not even controversial. But the problem is that for purposes of achieving racial balance, THEY DON'T WORK.

Consider, for example, the undergraduate affirmative action policy at Michigan that the Supreme Court threw out. That policy included a 20-point bonus (a very large bonus when 100 points were needed for admission) to economically disadvantaged students. And it also offered an alternate 20 point bonus to underrepresented minorities, which is to say, the only minority students receiving the race-based bonus were those who did not qualify as disadvantaged.

The bottom line is that African American and Hispanic students underperform significantly even when you control for family status (income, wealth, parental education, etc). This is the real tragedy, and to some extent, affirmative action programs, by making elite campuses look diverse, tend to camouflage rather than actually solve the problem.

[stewart]

There's a decent article in the most recent American Psychologist, by Blaine Fowers and Barbara Davidov, titled 'The Virtue of Multiculturalism', arguing that there are important benefits to all from attending to multicultural/diversity issues. Slocum's point about underperforming is also crucial - the situation is more fraught then he reports, because underperformance is also noted on the basis of cognitive and achievement test scores for some groups, while others (including some asians) overperform. This pattern is not general - different countries may have different groups who underperform, and others who overperform (compare native-born, caribbean, and african immigrants in the US or Britain, for example). Culture and expectations are hugely important, it's not just an economic class issue.

[Maynard Handley]

I'd say the larger point here is being missed, and, amazingly enough, the one person I've ever seen raise the issue is David Brooks. That issue is: what do you think society is going to look like when the color-blind meritocracy is reached?

The point is, OK, so we get rid of color discrimination, we even do the best possible to educate poor kids as well as rich. The fact remains that in such a society you're going to get even more like-mating-with-like than we have now. Those who are smart and possess a personal culture better adapted for the 21st century will mate and live with like, and those who are not will be left with even fewer role model. We're on our way to an even more aggressive eloi-morlock separation than now.

I don't know what to do about this. I fear, however, that the people who should be worrying about it refuse to do so because they pathologically insist that all children come into the world blank slates, that parental biological influences have negligible effect on children, and, when pushed, try to claim (I'm not sure if they actually believe this), that not even parental cultural influences have an effect, as opposed to big bad "social and class" influences. Since these people refuse to believe that this sort of positive assortative mating has any effect on the kids, they're unwilling to see the consequences of a truly meritocratic society.

(For what it's worth, I suspect that over the sorts of durations of interest to us, three generations or so, the selection effects of positive assortative mating would be pretty minimal. However I am much less sanguine about the cultural issue. In theory, of course, the cultural issues can be fixed with an aggressive enough state, but there is no way people like Walter Benn Michaels would accept that, no freaking way.)

[jim]

I think there's a split in the American left, perhaps in the Western left. On the one hand you have those who are motivated by a utopian vision, on the other those who are motivated by considerations of fairness and justice. The one group believes we should make what progress we can towards the vision and since the vision is of a community of free and equal persons, we should fight against all manifestations of inequality. The other recognizes that some forms of inequality are the result of injustice, discrimination against particular identities, for example. But it is the injustices which give rise to the inequality which are therefore to be resisted, not inequality per se.

I think, Brad, you are in the second group.

[Jon Fernquest]

"I do think there is a difference between Malthus and Michaels. Malthus makes arguments and presents evidence...Michaels, by contrast, makes assertions--where is the evidence? How can you respond?"

Polemics versus contributions to knowledge.

(Polemics have a long history, but they are usually part of an ephemeral intellectual history not much read after publication.)

That's why education in America has to be made into a feast not a famine, to quickly replace polemics with contributions to knowledge. That's productivity, like what you do on your blog.

[bill]

RedCharlie wrote "$2million/year?

"That is much greater than tuition per student, but for 1000 students, that works out to be only $2000/student, which is much less than yearly tuition at an Ivy League.

"Did you mean $20million/year, in toto? or just the cost to Harvard for this policy (assuming that <$60K were only paying about $2K/year to begin with)?"

I believe he meant $2K/year is probably what families <60K were paying before the policy. IIRC, in the 80s, Harvard required even the impoverished to come up with $2K/year for their education. One winter break, my working-class, blackjack-playing roommate had only $500 for the Winter semester, went to Atlantic City, and quit after he had the $1000 he needed.