I know it's foolish of me to comment on such a hotly debated issue,
but I think I will anyway just to see what happens. I have not read
the Curtin article, and so confine my comments to what Harold Marcus
has said. Sorry if I misunderstand or misrepresent him.
1. Affirmative action does advocate the hiring of less competent
Blacks over more competent Whites. It explicitly aims to correct
post facto hiring patterns in which Whites are consistently favored
over Blacks of equal qualification. If in fact less qualified Blacks
have been hired, then that's not a criticism of affirmative action,
but of people who misuse it or misunderstand it. It is wrong to use
select examples of miscarried justice to destroy a system of justice.
Criticism of affirmative action must carefully distinguish between
its principle and its practice.
2. I trust we can all agree that the measurement of academic performance
potential is at best an inexact science. For example, whether people
continue to publish after being hired or tenured seems anyone's guess.
We only have a rough idea of relative merit, which means that there is
more often than not room for discretion. Affirmative action only says
that we can't excercise that discretion in a way to create a pattern
that manifests a favor for white males over equally qualified females
and people of color. It seems that attacks on affirmative action often
presume the preexistence of a hierarchical ranking in which choosing
candidate 27 over candidate 26 is a major miscarriage of justice.
3. Statistical evidence for gross social injustices is undeniable.
Affirmative action has had little effect on many instances of injus-
tice, and in those cases there can be little reason for crying foul.
Where affirmative action seems to have had relative more success is
in the discrimination against women. That Blacks rather than Women
are attacked smakes of demogogic racism. I hope this is not true.
But Whites continue to be favored over Blacks and males over females.
In that context, it makes little sense to cry out that white males
are being discriminated against (reverse discrimination).
4. One does not have to be a post-modernist to recognize that all
truth has a subjective component. This is a commonplace of modern
scientific philosophy. Consequently, the social, economic, and cultural
experience or make up of the researcher or the teacher finds its way
into the results, and all knowledge and teaching is ideological (in
the sociological sense of that word). A class perspective or a cultural
experience or a gender identity affects the questions we raise, what
answers are deemed acceptable or reasonable, and the social impact
of our research. Likewise for teaching. Therefore the social location
of the researcher or teacher is relevant. This does not by any means
imply that all Blacks are good at teaching Black history any more
than that Whites are incapable of doing so. All it means is that
statistically it is less likely for Whites to have the sensitivity,
the experience, and the social relation to their students necessary
for success. Having said that, I suspect that a school that advertised
that "Whites need not apply" is on shakey legal ground. Are you saying
that is what Duke advertised? In any case, that has nothing to do with
the issue of affirmative action.
5. That administrators mindlessly buckle under pressure from students
or state legislators is perhaps true enough, but irrelevant. The real
issue is what our moral responsibility is in the face of de facto
social injustice. Perhaps some faculty will circle the wagons around
their petty autonomies and insist they have no social reponsibility,
and perhaps others will do what they can within the law to recticy
social injustice. But what administrators say or do is the problem
of administers. We are morally responsible for our choices; adminis-
trators don't make those choices for us.