By CHRIS POWELL
In recent years American higher education has made a fetish of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” which has succeeded “affirmative action” as the euphemism for racial preferences in hiring and the award of other benefits. Since higher education is the fortress of what styles itself as liberalism — that is, political correctness — the Trump administration delights in attacking it, and now is proposing to revoke tax-exempt status for colleges whose policies benefit students according to their race. Many colleges have such policies to help Black, Hispanic, and other minority students specifically.
Exposing the poverty business; and will property taxes shift?
Student scores rise marginally but remain the usual disaster
Most in poll disapprove Lamont; could election be competitive?
In the strict legal and moral senses the administration is right. Government should be color-blind in dealing with individuals. That’s equality under the law.
But of course the country continues to suffer vast economic and social inequality, especially regarding race and class, which should be just as intolerable as racial preferences. Social harmony and justice won’t be achieved until opportunity is more equal.
Racial preferences sabotage their purported objective, for they instill suspicion and resentment, impugn the qualifications of their beneficiaries, and confer a false sense of achievement.
But getting rid of racial preferences and curbing the arrogance of higher education, nice as that would be, will do little to democratize opportunity.
Fortunately democratizing opportunity doesn’t require treating people according to race or ethnicity, since economic and social inequality are matters of poverty more than race and ethnicity. Higher education implicitly acknowledges this with scholarships and tuition discounts for students who are from poor families or who face other disadvantages. Favoring applicants from minority groups when all other aspects of applicants are equal is fair and won’t cause trouble or resentment.
Otherwise racial preferences are clumsy and unintelligent substitutes for fairness and the country doesn’t need them to elevate the poor and disadvantaged.
College scholarship programs like those run by the school systems in Hartford, New Haven, and Waterbury, cities with much poverty, elevate students without regard to race even as most of their beneficiaries come from minority groups. Under those programs students who attend school consistently, behave well, and get high grades are guaranteed substantial financial aid for higher education. The money comes from private donors, charitable foundations, colleges, and government. The program in New Haven is largely funded by Yale University, which additionally covers tuition for its own students of limited means.
Colleges today crave outstanding minority students, as they should, since the country needs them badly.
But higher education is only a secondary mechanism of elevating the poor. Indeed, much of higher education is fluff of little value.
The primary mechanisms of elevating the poor are lower education and parenting, areas in which Connecticut, while a rich state, fails terribly.
Most poor children in Connecticut are poor because they have only one parent and because the state’s welfare system rewards and incentivizes childbearing outside marriage and thus impairs family formation.
Many of these children never advance far educationally because the state’s schools operate by social promotion. Connecticut’s schools have no requirement for students to earn advancement from grade to grade and graduation from high school by learning. As a practical matter there is no requirement for students even to attend elementary and high school, since the requirement is not enforced seriously.
So it’s no wonder that chronic absenteeism is so high among students in Connecticut’s poor cities — 33% in Hartford, 30% in Bridgeport and New Britain, 28% in New Haven, 25% in Norwich and New London, and 22% in Waterbury. Children who can’t reliably get to elementary and high school are not likely to get to college or even learn enough to qualify for more than menial jobs.
The indifference of elected and school officials to the pernicious results of welfare and educational policies underlies Connecticut’s longstanding and disgraceful educational performance gap between white and minority students and the state’s continuing failure to elevate the poor.
The country needs diversity, equity, and inclusion. But rewarding people for their race is mere discrimination, political patronage, and evasion, not education and achievement.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
Chris Powell column 