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PARTISAN I"tEVLEW
schools, and community colleges - is to serve a democratic society, it
must by its very nature be elitist. Good universities are elitist in the same
sense that good professional football teams are elitist. They try to get the
best coaches and players and make them do the best they can. We try to
get the most brilliant faculty and the most able students and make them
all work as hard as they can. Higher education is elitist because its essence
is the relentless quest for intellectual quality. Without a commitment to
quality, we merely become trade schools or social welfare agencies. Our
efforts are based on assumptions such as that some books are better than
others; some people are more intelligent than others; some theories are
true and others false; some ideas are original and others derivative.
Furthermore, we are convinced that with some effort and training, we
and our students can be taught
to
ascertain the presence of these features.
Because its mission is the relentless search for quality, such otherwise
socially desirable traits as representativeness are really of secondary impor–
tance to universities.
It
would not, for example, be a valid criticism of
the world 's best math department that its faculty is not representative of
the population as a whole. The best argument for faculty diversity is as
follows: Assume that academic talent is randomly distributed across the
gene pool. Then, if you are recruiting talent from only a subsection of
that pool, you are losing access to a large number of talented people. By
expanding your talent search , you increase the probability of a higher
quality faculty. The argument for diversity is that simple. But notice that
implicit in the argument is the claim that achieving diversity just for the
sake of achieving diversity is not an objective of a university , any more
than it is of a football club or a team of brain surgeons.
If
our objective
is
to
improve the intellectual quality of the university, we will make our
talent searches as broad as possible, but hiring people because of their
race or ethnicity is just as irrelevant as hiring people because they are left–
handed or suffer from premature baldness. Worse yet, there is no way
to
discriminate in favor of the members of some groups without discrimi–
nating against others. And as I noted earlier, American universities in
general are now practicing racial and sexual discrimination against white
males.
The definition of "affirmative action" has been gradually changed
over the years, as far as universities are concerned. Originally, affirmative
action was a way of implementing the principle of equal opportunity,
and the "affirmative actions" we were supposed to take were a matter of
affirmatively encouraging ITlembers of groups who had previously not
competed for university positions to begin to do so. But as interpreted
in recent years, "affirmative action" is no longer consistent with equal
opportunity, since the operational meaning of affirmative action is that
in a competition between a white male and a member of a targeted mi-
