The Institutional Contradictions of Affirmative Action
with Amy Wax
Amy Wax is a controversial figure. There’s no denying that. But she is also a noteworthy legal scholar and an award-winning teacher whose accomplishments have been recognized by her peers and her institution, the University of Pennsylvania Law School. As a tenured professor, she is guaranteed academic freedom, the very purpose of which is to ensure that researchers are able to pursue knowledge and truth wherever it may lead and to teach their students without the interference of political and institutional power.
Whatever Amy’s views on race and nationalism—I ask her about them in detail in the full version of this week’s episode—they are well within the purview of academic freedom. So too her critiques of race-based affirmative action, many of which I share. It seems to me that part of the reason Amy is being persecuted by her university’s administration is her refusal to parrot the nonsensical company line on affirmative action and her pointing out of its contradictions and their deleterious consequences for the institution and its students.
In the following excerpt from this week’s episode, Amy and I discuss those contradictions and what her university’s investigation of her means for the broader debate about affirmative action. The irony, of course, is that both Amy and I are champions of the American university system. We don’t want to see it come down, we want to see it flourish. But the only way to do that is to look its problems square in the face and call them by their name.
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AMY WAX: Here's the attitude of the students, the attitude of university: We love affirmative action. It's absolutely essential. We can't do without it. If we don't have it, the number of black students will be a fraction of what it is. You can go to the Harvard case before the Supreme Court. The briefs say all of this stuff.
GLENN LOURY: Yep.
But on the other hand, nobody wants to admit that they're a beneficiary of affirmative action. They view it as an insult. So how do you reconcile, Glenn, these two statements? Well, they're completely contradictory. But you see, they don't care, because contradiction, being consistent, being rigorous, being logical, that's whiteness, Glenn. That's whiteness. That's the stuff they wanna get rid of. That is the actual priority here, unspoken.
All of these standards, all of these requirements: intellectual integrity, consistency analysis, rigor, logic, evidence. Get rid of it. If we want this person out, we can accuse her of anything. We can contradict ourselves all over the place. Have you heard the concept, Michael Anton's concept of "parallax celebration"? Do you know what that is?
I have not. Spell it out for us. And by the way, let me just say this before you go on. I just wanna say this. I agree a hundred percent with the concerns that you've just been expressing about the subtle underhandedness and corruption of affirmative action. It leads us to telling lies. And the paradox that you just called attention to—can't take away affirmative action, otherwise no blacks would be here, but there's no black person whom you can point to who is actually there because of affirmative action—is just the tip of the iceberg.
It seems to me here, with respect to how it is that using different standards for selecting people into highly competitive and elite venues, corrupts the process of evaluating individual performance. I'll repeat myself. If you use a lower threshold on average, it's a statistical necessity that you're gonna get lower performance if the criteria are correlated with the post-admissions performance. So now you've got what you could not help but get, given how you're behaving, and then you're telling me don't believe my lying eyes and shut up about it.
That is, it seems to me, the corner that they've got you painted into. You refuse to go along with the lie that there's nothing to see here. There are no issues here. Don't worry about it. And as a result, you have to be hung out the dry. That's what I see.
Well, I mean, the lie is even bigger than that. Let me just quote Richard Hanania who tweeted something very wise. He said the problem with affirmative action is not that you let in some people who might be over-placed or aren't quite up to snuff. No, it's the effect it has on institutions and the distortions that it introduces in what people are allowed to say, the lies that they are forced to tell, the contradictions that they are forced to embrace.
I mean, it's bigger than that, Glenn, in the following sense. You said, well, if you lower the criteria for admission that is going to affect performance. Well, that's precisely what they're at pains to deny. The criteria mean nothing. They're an illusion. They're a tool for oppression. Performance, that's just this notion that white people come up with to oppress minorities. It's meaningless, it's empty. It's just a ruse. The whole meritocracy is a joke. It needs to be abolished and demolished. That is the broader agenda. So all of these categories, all of these predictions, all these correlations, they can't be spoken of because they're just part of this whiteness conspiracy that we have to get rid of.
I mean, this is a very, very broad and deep project, Glenn, that is growing. We are far along in advancing this project. And of course there's huge duplicity and deceit here, because on the one hand we have all of this palaver about excellence and achievement and all of that. But on the other hand, in the very same institutions, we have this sneering at and this denigration—[phone rings] I'm sorry, that's my phone. Ignore it. These things are happening simultaneously, Glenn, and people like us are caught in this bind. We are the sacrificial lambs here. That's that's what's going on.
Okay, I can anticipate objections to making ourselves—I'll include myself in that—into victims when we are, in fact, very privileged and powerful people. We're tenured professors at Ivy League institutions. We live in big houses and we have a nice retirement account to fall back on. And the storm troopers are not exactly at our door, so [laughs]. But I hear you.
They're at my door.
Okay. But Amy ...
My kids have been trolled, my husband ... No, they're at our door.
Okay. I want you to address this.
I mean, I haven't been fired yet.
No, you haven't. And I doubt that you will. I doubt that you will. And if you do get fired—God help that that doesn't happen. I don't want that to happen at all. But should it happen, it'll be a signature case in the history of academic freedom in this country. It would be an outrage beyond belief that you would be relieved of your teaching responsibilities and the sinecure that you've earned because of your opinions, because you don't believe, you haven't drunk the Kool-Aid, you don't believe the hype, because you have views. I mean, my view is, if she's wrong, refute her. That’s what you do. You don't tell her to shut up. You don't call her a name. You argue.
Okay, Glenn, let me say one thing about that. Of course, I a hundred percent agree with you. But here's the thing. If I'm stripped of tenure, whatever, and I'm not saying that's going to happen. But if it did, here's the question. And this goes to Penn's calculation, which is what can we get away with? Will anybody care? This is a really important question I am asking you. Because right now, even though this is happening to me, people are still giving money to Penn. Students are applying in record numbers.
I think that these universities have become emboldened and their attitude right now is, how many divisions does the Academic Freedom Alliance have? How much power does FIRE have? It's sort of like Disney and Governor DeSantis. “Well, our stock is going up, so why should we stand down in the culture war?” I really think we're at the point where these universities are so woke and so arrogant and so bold that their view is, let's see what we can get away with. Will the alumni rebel? Will the students rebel? Will the donors rebel? I mean, I think the government could rebel if the Republicans get control, but I'm not even sure they'll do that.
There are lots of things they could do, and we could discuss some of those things. But it requires political will. It requires leadership. It requires recognizing that this is a problem, a major problem. The far-far-left control of the universities really is a crisis for our nation because it is resulting in the indoctrination and miseducation of our most influential young people. And I consider that catastrophic. I don't know about you.
You might want to read this critical assessment of Dean Ruger's bill of indictment against Amy Wax:
https://alexanderriley.substack.com/p/latest-on-upenn-laws-effort-to-purge
Some conclusions:
Most woke policies are being carried out by upper middle class whites “for” blacks.
Woke whites and fellow travelers are impervious to complaints from whites, or Asians for that matter, about the elevation of blacks using a lower standard than is applied to whites or Asians and the intellectual corruption necessary to do so while denying the negative effects of the practice.
Woke whites are impervious to complaints from whites that identity based politics and social practices are a historical dead end for inter-racial social cohesion the United States, and by extension, for humanity.
Woke whites are impervious to complaints that identity based politics and social practices are a detriment to the working class of all backgrounds because the working class does not have the means to escape the immediate consequences as do the upper classes.
Woke whites are impervious to complaints that woke policies are stoking the culture of black grievance with negative results in various areas such as violent crime, black performance, and general race relations.
There is enough support in the black community, from the very poor to the upper middle class, for woke policies. The concept of “being owed” for slavery and discrimination has broader and deeper support in the black community than is generally discussed or acknowledged.
In the black community, those expressing the sense of being owed drown out those who express ideals of hard work, accomplishment, and moving beyond the psychology of grievance much in the way woke attitudes now drown out opposition in the white community.
Thinkers like Loury, McWhorter, Sowell are talking to the wrong people about the wrong things. White, Asian, and black intellectuals are not able to counter woke policies as intellectuals concerned about the ideals of the enlightenment like the rule of law, free speech, due process, etc. nor actual detriments suffered largely by elite white professionals.
Woke policies are not going to be changed until blacks end them.
Blacks will not actively oppose woke policies until and unless they organize around how these policies are detrimental to them in both immediately tangible and more abstractly historical terms.
Leading blacks to counter woke ideology is a political task, requiring black leadership.
The prospects of black leadership emerging from the Democratic Party to tackle woke policies is slim to non-existent.
Therefore, the task ahead is . . .