William H. Simon
AFFIRMATIVE ACTION critics say that it is unfair to consider race and gender in hiring and school admissions. To them, fairness means choosing people on the basis of ``the merits'' or ``qualifications.''
In fact, however, there is nothing particularly fair about even well- designed standards of merit or qualification. Employers and universities choose workers and students not on the basis of whether applicants deserve to be chosen but on the basis of whether they have qualities that are useful to the employer or society.
From the point of view of the applicants, selection standards -- whether or not they consider race or gender -- are arbitrary in myriad ways.
Consider my case. I owe my position in the upper middle class to the fact that in 1970 the Educational Testing Service eliminated math from the Law School Admissions Test and replaced it with verbal logic problems. If the test had included the kind of math problems used in past years, I would have done poorly, but I'm fairly good at logic problems, and I got a good enough overall score to get into Harvard Law School.
You might say that the system created a ``preference'' for people like me. The effect of the preference was to put people who performed relatively better on the math problems used previously at a disadvantage. Math whizzes were the victims of affirmative action for logic choppers.
Why was the test changed? Apparently, someone decided that people good at logic problems are more likely to be productive as lawyers than people good at math. One thing we can be sure of is that the change was not made because it would make the process more fair.
Judgments about which applicants are likely to be more productive have little to do with fairness. In the first place, such judgments are largely speculative. There's no way to substantiate them objectively.
Moreover, even where the judgments are accurate, the qualities they single out are often qualities that haven't been earned through effort or work. They're just qualities that people are lucky enough to have. I never tried to become good at logic problems. My ability is just as much an accident of birth as skin color (mine, by the way, happens to be white). Affirmative-action critics talk about the job and school selection process as if it were a game. But it's really like the process of choosing up sides before a game starts. The person doing the choosing uses subjective judgments, not about which members of the pool deserve to be on the team, but about who would be most useful to the team.
Right now being a woman or a minority makes a person of color especially useful to teams that would otherwise be all or mostly white and male. Such a person might be likely to bring new perspectives and community ties to the team. He or she could help the team develop its ability to communicate and collaborate across race and gender lines.
Of course, just because arbitrariness is inevitably a large part in any selection process doesn't mean that egregious forms of unfairness should be tolerated. We rightly prohibit discrimination against women and minority groups because such discrimination carries a vicious stigma of inferiority and reinforces gender and racial segregation in society.
But a preference in favor of minorities or women confers no stigma on white men and is likely to mitigate, rather than reinforce, segregation.
Being disadvantaged because you're a white male is like being disadvantaged because you're not good at logic problems. It may be arbitrary, but it's not unjust.
DAY: FRIDAY
DATE: 6/16/95
PAGE: A29
© 6/16/95 , San Francisco Chronicle, All Rights Reserved, All Unauthorized Duplication Prohibited
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