Victor Davis Hanson
Finally, I would discuss options for the various excellent students, most of them either Hispanic, Asian, black, or poor white. Some wished to teach, and we sought to enhance their careers by placing them in charter, prep, and parochial schools for the most part. For those who wished to be lawyers or doctors we discussed the various professional schools. I would write additional letters besides those in the official application packets. Sometimes I would call a graduate study program to discuss the unique talent of a student or students, many of them the first in their families to graduate from college. We developed a reputation for turning out exceptionally well-trained classical language graduates, qualified for almost any professional school.
But after about 4-5 years, a dismal pattern emerged. Any student, regardless of income, who was categorized as Hispanic, black or Hmong, and to a lesser extent female, was usually admitted with full scholarships. Indeed, we sent such students to Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford. But any student deemed white male, no matter how poor, or how disadvantaged, required extra effort to be admitted and often was not.
But my point is not the old one about the bias of affirmative action, but rather the effect of this systemic racism and sexism upon the students themselves.
The poorer white males—and they certainly were not part of the bicoastal elite, but mostly the children of the Oklahoma diaspora that had centered on the Fresno to Bakersfield corridor in the 1930s and 1940s—seemed dejected, often embittered.
Some would say, “Can I get in anywhere as a white male,” and the more curious would ask, “Aren’t the places I am applying to run by some white males?”
(I had noted that those most fervently for diversity quotas were often middle-aged white males. Did these older white-male functionaries think the more they posed as discriminatory DEI advocates, so all the less would younger DEI cohorts attack their own white male “privilege” and thus the less chance they would be dethroned?)
There was a sense that white male applicants had to have straight A averages, perfect SAT and GRE scores, and more languages to have a shot at a top-notch graduate school. And this reality, in fact, was a boon to them. (A great philosopher once said to me that until 1975 he preferred black doctors since they were usually better trained and harder working than their white counterparts given the systemic blockages and adversities they faced. But after that date, he increasingly learned the hard way to prefer white and Asian male doctors on the reverse logic that they now had to be especially well trained and disciplined, given the difficulty they faced getting into medical schools. His point was not race, but simply that challenges and struggle hone our skills, while laxity and indulgence dull them.
So, for many of the minority students there grew an expectation that their applications would be accepted. Once I notified a prestigious school that one of our accepted classics applicants had confessed to me that he was an illegal alien (an especially hard-working and bright prospect) and I wanted to ensure the graduate school there was no intent on our part to mislead them, given he had incorrectly filled out his application as a U.S. citizen. The professor I called immediately perked up and told me “That’s all for the better! No problem.”
The more I tried to ensure that our minority students were better than the norm—more Greek and Latin composition, reading knowledge of French and German, 10-15 courses in Greek and Latin upper-division literature—the more it seemed they slowly got the message that their status, not their accomplishment mattered more for their futures.
I noticed another slow trend. The more our once conservative minority students progressed through our programs, were accepted at graduate schools, were degreed, and entered the workforce as professors, teachers, lawyers, and bureaucrats, the more liberal and “diversity” obsessed they proved.
I taught on a minority-majority campus in which most of the administrators by 2000 were Hispanic. Affirmative action by 2000 guided all our searches, despite state law to the contrary. There was no systemic racism, no favoritism. Over some 20 years I gave over 150 independent tutorials in addition to my 8-10 course yearly teaching load, the vast majority to minority students.
And yet among those former students who occasionally contacted me requesting additional recommendations, or visited, or called, all of whom were successful and enjoying enviable jobs, there was too often little reflection on their past meritocratic education.
Instead, they inevitably referenced the bias and unfairness they were currently battling. It finally got to the point that when a former student, in whom I had years earlier invested hours of counseling and tutorials, began complaining about systemic racism, or intuitional bias, I would just sigh and say, “You’re not the same person I taught, and so please do not bother me again—given that the past indulgences of the university toward you, your scholarships, and the ample attention provided by your professors do not sustain your sense of grievance and concocted prejudices.”
But the truth was worse. They felt offended, victimized, and aggrieved because they had learned to do so was a win/win proposition. Anything successful they would do in the future would be enhanced by their acclaimed DEI status; any failure would be contextualized by DEI.
Ideology, then, is the great evil of history. It permeates an entire society if left unchecked. It is the harbor of the mediocre. Think of all the great evil the incompetent nomenklatura who loudly joined the party in the Soviet Union did to Russia, on the assumption their communist fides precluded any disinterested appraisal of their paltry records.
If DEI is ended, admissions made racially blind, legal-only immigration, most of it meritocratic, racially segregated graduations, dorms, and safe spaces stopped, within a single generation, the U.S. would become a much happier, less neurotic, and more cohesive society.
But that is a thought that terrifies the DEI incompetent—while it encourages everyone else of any background who sees his superficial appearance as incidental not vital to his persona.
The post <span class="ultra-flag 4"><i class="fas fa-lock"></i>VDH Ultra</span>The Real Dangers of DEI. Part Two appeared first on VDH’s Blade of Perseus.