Years ago, when I was running a research project in Washington,
a memorandum came down from on high, telling us that there was money available to hire “minority”
professionals for the summer, without having to take it out of the regular project budget.
“Wonderful!” I said. “There’s a Jewish lady up at Princeton who wants to come down here
and help me out, but I don’t have any money to pay her.” This idea was shot down immediately.
“Jews are not a minority,” I was told. “And Jews from Princeton are definitely not a minority.”
It did no good to point out that Jews are only 3 percent of the population, and so must be a
minority. Nor did it do any good to say that Jews were defined as an ethnic minority in
the research project itself. The powers that be turned a deaf ear to all such arguments.
In a sense, they were right. The word “minority” had already become one of many
politically corrupted words. It no longer meant a statistically smaller part of the population.
It meant people you feel sorry for. After all their achievements, nobody felt sorry for Jews
any more. Therefore they were not a “minority.” Nobody feels sorry for Asian Americans any more,
after so many success stories. Therefore, they are increasingly excluded from “minority” status
in programs and policies at some colleges and universities. A few years ago, a memorandum from
the U. S. Air Force Academy gave lower cut-off scores for “minority” applicants being recruited
but Asian Americans had to meet the same standards as whites. Few institutions are
so impolitic as to put such policies in writing or so unfortunate as to have them leak out.
But there is growing evidence that this practice extends well beyond the Air Force Academy.
When Berkeley used verbal test score cut-offs to eliminate applicants in 1984 and 1986,
“minority” students were exempted—but Asian American students were not. Many Asians were
wiped out by the verbal cut-off scores because their strong suit tends to be math. At Harvard,
the test scores of Asian American applicants were virtually the same as those of white applicants,
but the Asian Americans actually admitted had test scores substantially higher than those of whites
who were admitted. In terms of test scores, Asians had to be better to get in. It is not
just Asians and Jews who lose their “minority” status because of outstanding performance. Some
financial aid programs have also passed over those blacks who score above a certain level, in favor
of those blacks who did poorly, who “really need” help. They want people they can feel sorry for.
Academic smoothies are never at a loss to explain away whatever they do. At M.I.T., for example, the
director of admissions has responded to criticisms of large test score disparities among people
admitted from different racial and sex backgrounds by downgrading the importance of test scores.
Differences in test scores have only a modest correlation with later academic performance,
he said. This familiar argument is clever but phony. The average M.I.T. student scores in
the top one percent in math. Just where in that top one percent probably doesn’t matter a lot,
as the director of admissions says. But it does matter that he is in the top one percent.
By the same token, the difference of a few million dollars between one Rockefeller and another
probably doesn’t matter that much. But that doesn’t mean that it makes no difference how much
money you have. It makes a very real difference that 90 percent of the white M.I.T. students
score higher in math than the average black M.I.T. student. A substantially higher percentage of the
black students fail to finish M.I.T., and those who do graduate have substantially
lower grade-point averages. The tragedy is that this waste—more than one-fourth of the black
students don’t graduate at M.I.T.—is completely unnecessary. The average black student at M.I.T.
is well above the national average on math tests. He is just not in the stratospheric level of other
M.I.T. students. At most colleges, universities, or technical institutes, these same black
students would be on the dean’s list. In short, black students with every prospect of success
are artificially turned into failures by being mismatched with their college. This is not
peculiar to M.I.T. It is a nationwide phenomenon among elite schools, who are more interested in
having a good-looking body count from every group than they are in the price that has to be paid.
Everyone pays a very high price for this academic fad. Disadvantaged minority students pay the
highest price of all. Asians may be lucky that they are not considered a “minority.”