1. Popular Affirmative Action Joke Declared Dead
Over the years, there have been some creative twists on an old joke related to affirmative action. George W. Bush was admitted for reasons other than merit to both Yale undergrad and Harvard Business School, and he never reported feeling inadequate or that he didn’t belong. Yet he liked the joke well enough, claiming that affirmative action hurts those it is supposed to help. Proving that ideology trumps evidence—even when that evidence is your own experience.
Justice Clarence Thomas has raged about affirmative action for decades. He has said that he was accepted into law school when Yale launched an “effort…to reach out and open its doors to minorities whom it felt were qualified.” What bothered him at Yale was not any feelings of inadequacy: he knew very well he was the equal of any other student. But those other students resented him and doubted his worthiness. And law firm interviewers didn’t take him seriously. It seems to me that affirmative action helped him, but racists hurt him. I don’t see how any program to ameliorate racism can avoid pissing off a few racists. Yet he still argues that affirmative action stigmatizes its beneficiaries.
In any case, I’m happy to pronounce the old joke officially dead!
The cause of death: irony.
It’s common knowledge that high school girls are outperforming boys, and that college enrollment is now close to 60 percent female. It is now easier for boys to get into most colleges than girls, as admissions offices strive to avoid hitting this 60 percent, what some call the “tipping point.” The debate over this ironic form of affirmative action has been curiously soft-spoken, but it has had one wonderful side-effect: it has exposed as a sham a traditional argument against affirmative action—that a person who is admitted due to their minority status will feel that they don’t belong, that they were given an undeserved pass.
No one has used this argument to oppose this new, almost-universal bias against women. Colleges quietly tilt the playing field and never, ever, ever worry that men will suffer from feelings of inadequacy.
Because the same people who relied on the argument have now forsaken it, we can see it as the shabby circular reasoning it always was. Their argument might be paraphrased: just as these males shouldn’t feel inferior because they are not inferior, those minorities should feel inferior because they are inferior. It’s merely the members of a privileged group projecting their feelings of superiority onto perceived interlopers.
2. Blindingly Obvious
With college men now in the minority, there’s a lot of worry in admissions departments, and a great deal of public debate about causes and what should be done. But there’s one important item that is conspicuously absent from the entire discussion: the most obvious explanation.
This explanation is not notable for its accuracy—it may or may not be the true root cause. But, because it is so blindingly obvious, it should be the first hypothesis that we consider.
To use the level playing field analogy, let’s imagine a controlled experiment. In the past, the field was tilted: men were playing downhill, women uphill. Men were winning. Now the field is level. Women are winning. If nothing else has changed, it’s a matter of basic deduction: women are the superior players.
Pundits have bent over backwards to find that something else that has changed. Maybe it’s boomer parents. Or it might be environmental factors: video games, popular music, atrocious diets, ADHD epidemics, etc.
But it’s usually easiest to attack education, which, we are told, favors girls because they’re better at sitting and thinking. And don’t forget: most teachers are women. Conveniently, this plays into the talking points of those who have led the vilification of teachers in recent years, and also those political demagogues and business interests intent on dismantling public education. Yet this argument overlooks the fact that boys were doing fine in the same educational system in the past. That boys still rule in the sciences. And that recent years have brought more “boy-friendly” strategies and more male teachers.
Why do we shy away from the most obvious explanation of the data? As a man, I see no cause to take offense at such a suggestion. I’m smarter than many millions of men and women, and many millions of men and women are smarter than me. What does it matter that there may be a few million more women in the latter category? Or that, statistically, women may be one or two or three percent more intelligent? In a world of seven billion people, such percentages are meaningless.
I’m not proposing that innate superiority is the answer. In fact, I’m far from convinced that it is a significant cause. What is significant is our willful ignorance of the most likely explanation. If we allow our fear to blind us to the obvious, then how can we possibly look at the problem honestly? And how can we ever hope to make things better?
