498
PARTISAN REVIEW
Delta Blues
T HE S HAPE OF THE RIVER: L ONG-TERM C ONSEQUENCES OF
C ONSIDERING RACE IN C OLLEGE AND U NIVERSITY ADMISSIONS.
By
William G. Bowen and Derek Curtis Bok.
Princeton University Press.
$24.95.
The dust jacket of
The Shape
if
the River
reproduces a map of the U-shaped
Morgan's Bend in the Mississippi River. The allusion is to the famous pas–
sage in Mark Twain's
Life on the Mississippi,
which serves as the epigraph to
Bowen's and Bok's ambitious statistical defense of affirmative action in
college admissions-the passage in which the pilot, Mr. Bixby, tells young
Mr. Clemens that, to succeed at navigating these waters, "you've got to
know the shape of the river perfectly." Bowen and Bok elaborate: the Oow
of talent from high school to college and into the larger society is not a
"pipeline" but "a process akin to moving down a winding river, with rock–
strewn rapids and slow channels, muddy at times and clear at others." In
their view, college admissions is a particularly complex passage, defYing
those armchair cartographers who think it should all be reduced to
straightforward judgments of merit.
That U-shaped image of Morgan's Bend, like the title itself, offers a
strange echo of another recent book on race in America: Richard
J.
Herrnstein and Charles Murray's TI1e
Bell Curve.
The two books create an
intriguing antithesis. Had Twain not come to hand,
The Shape
if
the River
might have been as aptly titled
The Bar Graph.
Most of the book consists
of a gentle massaging of data from a Mel lon Foundation study, conducted
from 1994 through 1997, which produced the "College and Beyond
Database."
The Shape of the River
is determined by what happened down–
stream to some "eighty thousand undergraduate students who matri–
culated at twenty-eight academically selective colleges and universi ties in
the fall of 1951, the fall of 1976, and the fall of 1989." The twenty-eight
colleges and universities include Princeton, where Bowen served as presi–
dent from 1972-1987, but not Harvard, where Bok served as president
from 1971 to 1990.
The titl e invi tes another mischievous image: the residents of
Alexandria, Missouri desperately sandbagging the riverbanks as the Oood
waters rose in 1993. For surely TIle
Shape
if
the River
is an effort by two
prominent members of the Eastern cultural elite attempting to raise a levee
against the rising populist rejection of a policy they spent much of their
careers furthering. And in this sense, their argument fails. Their book serves
