Affirmative Action Hoax: Diversity, the Importance of Character, and Other Lies by Steven Farron

Author:Steven Farron [Farron, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New Century Books
Published: 2014-06-16T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 14

Admissions III: The Shape of the River: The Lie Exposed

The first thing that a man will do for his ideals is lie.

(Joseph Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954): 43)

Hypocrisy is a tribute that vice pays to virtue.

(La Rochefoucauld (1665))146

Among the Harvard officials who lied about Professor Davis’ disclosures about Harvard Medical School was its president, Derek Bok, who made the following public statement (Davis 1986: 181): “I find no basis for any implication that minority students are less than fully qualified for the M.D. degree in accordance with the normal standards of the Harvard Medical School.”

In 1998, Bok co-authored with William Bowen, former president of Princeton, The Shape of the River, a book that has rightly been hailed as a landmark in the saga of American affirmative action. As Bok and Bowen observed (pages xxiv-xxv), it is the first systematic, empirical defense of academic affirmative action ever written. I will outline the information they provide on admissions and then discuss again universities’ admissions policies in the light that it sheds on them.

On pages 26 and 27, Bowen and Bok reported the probability of admission in 1989 to five highly selective colleges in their database of blacks and whites with Verbal+Math SAT scores at each 50-point interval. (Until 2005, the only SAT tests were Verbal and Math.) A black applicant with a Verbal+Math SAT score between 1250 and 1299 had a 75 percent chance of admission, while a white with a combined score over 1500 had only a 65 percent chance. A black with a Verbal+Math SAT score between 1100 and 1149 had nearly a 50 percent chance of admission; it was not until the 1450-1499 range that a white had a 50 percent chance of admission.147

In Section G of Appendix III, I quote an attack on the SAT by Eugene Garcia, Dean of Berkeley’s School of Education. I point out that it is full of blatant lies. Among them is that SAT scores replicate parental income. Garcia’s hypothetical example is the daughter of a migrant worker with an SAT score 100 points lower than that of the graduate of a private school who attended an expensive SAT preparation course. Even Garcia could not attribute more than 100 SAT points to the most extreme difference in social background.

Bowen and Bok continued (page 27, footnote): “Nor are any of the conclusions stated here altered if we add high school grades as a second numerical criterion.” But that is not true. Colleges give greater preference to blacks in high school grades than in SAT scores. Nearly all the colleges in Bowen and Bok’s database had average Verbal+Math SAT scores above 1100 (page 40). Nationwide, at colleges whose students have an average Verbal+Math SAT score of at least 1100, the difference in high school grade-point-average (GPA) between blacks and whites is the equivalent of 400 Verbal+Math SAT points; and that does not take into consideration the fact that whites take much more difficult and advanced courses in high school than blacks.

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