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July 2001 Issue

Is Affirmative Action Good for the Jews?

By Daniel Treiman

Affirmative action has long been a controversial issue in the Jewish community. While there's evidence that Jews are more supportive of affirmative action than other whites, many of affirmative action1s most prominent critics are Jews. And since Jews have traditionally emphasized the importance of higher education, the application of racial preferences to college admissions has been a particular source of unease.

Why does affirmative action make Jews uncomfortable? Obviously most Jews, since they're classified as white, aren't beneficiaries of race-based affirmative action. And affirmative action policies can give minority applicants an edge over white applicants in the competition for a finite number of admission slots at elite schools.

That said, the actual adverse impact of racial preferences in college admissions on Jews isn't great. Nor does it explain the depth of Jewish discomfort with affirmative action. Rather, it's the reasoning underlying affirmative action that Jews find disturbing.

In its 1978 decision in The Regents of the University of California v. Allan Bakke, the U.S. Supreme Court, by a 5-4 vote, deemed illegal the University of California at Davis medical school's practice of essentially reserving slots for minority applicants. Justice Lewis Powell, one of the five justices in the majority, however, defended the use of race in college admissions, only within much narrower parameters.

Powell argued firmly that it was illegal for a public university to use racial preferences to remedy "societal discrimination" or "to assure within its student body some specified percentage of a particular group merely because of its race or ethnic origin." But he alone argued that, although race must not be a decisive factor, it could still be taken into account as one factor among many in the interest of promoting a diverse student body.

Powell's diversity rationale would henceforth serve as the legal basis for affirmative action in admissions at public universities and a common justification for affirmative action efforts elsewhere. Of course, there are many different ways of interpreting what would qualify as a racially diverse student body. College affirmative action efforts, however, generally aim for a particular type of diversity--a diversity that mirrors the racial makeup of their state or the nation as a whole.

Colleges, such as the University of Michigan, whose admissions policies were recently challenged in a pair of lawsuits, generally grant preferences to members of "underrepresented racial or ethnic minority" groups. By granting preferences on the basis of a group's "underrepresentation," colleges clearly are saying that proportional representation of minority racial groups is the ideal "diversity" toward which they strive. While Bakke doesn1t allow them to explicitly employ goals, quotas, or set-asides, colleges are nevertheless using Powell's diversity rationale to pursue the sort of proportional racial representation he deplored.

Why has this occurred? Before Bakke, colleges implemented affirmative action policies primarily to remedy what they perceived to be the legacy of racial injustice. While Bakke forced colleges to speak in terms of diversity, affirmative action policies are still largely driven by the same impetus as they had been before.

And colleges use underrepresentation as a yardstick by which to measure disadvantage stemming from racism. They assume that, in the absence of racism, minority groups would be represented more or less in proportion to their numbers in the general population. Underrepresentation is thus an injustice that should be remedied.

In a 1998 column entitled "The Dispossession of Christian Americans," the none-too-philo-Semitic Patrick Buchanan takes this sort of reasoning to its logical conclusion. Buchanan points out that Jews and Asians, groups that he notes collectively represent only around 5 percent of the U.S. population, make up around half of undergraduates at Harvard University (perhaps a somewhat high estimate, but not out of the ballpark).

He then calculates (plausibly) that given the numbers of Jews, Asians, racial minorities, and foreign students, that "non-Jewish whites--75 percent of the U.S. population--get just 25 percent of the slots. Talk about underrepresentation! Now we know who really gets the shaft at Harvard--white Christians."

Having noted Harvard's use of affirmative action to increase the representation of blacks and Hispanics in the student body, Buchanan concludes, "If proportional representation is the name of the game, Christian and European-Americans should get into the game, and demand their fair share of every pie: 75 percent, and no less."

Of course, Buchanan's whining on behalf of "dispossessed" white Christian "victims" is nothing short of silly. Asian and Jewish overrepresentation at Harvard certainly cannot be attributed to discrimination against non-Asian gentiles. Rather, Asian and Jewish overrepresentation is mainly attributable to cultural and socio-economic factors.

If white Christians can be underrepresented and Jews and Asians overrepresented at Harvard for reasons having nothing to do with discrimination, however, it logically follows that underrepresentation of non-white racial groups isn't necessarily the result of racism either. Indeed, the overrepresentation of certain groups guarantees that other groups will necessarily be underrepresented. After all, there are only 100 percentiles in 100 percent.

Contemporary affirmative action policies are about increasing the enrollments of underrepresented groups, not limiting the numbers of students from overrepresented groups. But proponents of affirmative action refuse to take their reasoning to its logical conclusion: If underrepresentation of certain groups is unjust then so too must be overrepresentation of other groups, because the latter leads to the former.

There was a time, however, when Harvard did regard Jewish overrepresentation as a problem. For much of this century, Ivy League schools actively tried to limit the number of Jewish students they would admit. While anti-Semitism did play a role in prompting these efforts, their main aim was to prevent Jews from becoming wildly overrepresented (perhaps even a majority on some campuses), as they would have been in the absence of such discrimination.

Today, most of us would nevertheless recognize the injustice of such efforts. Jews didn't apply to elite colleges to represent their ethnic group. They applied because they wanted an education. Rejected Jewish applicants probably took little solace in the fact that their ethnic group was still overrepresented in a given student body.

As America diversifies, Hispanics and Asians are numerically eclipsing blacks and Native-Americans--the two racial groups whose underrepresentation really is due largely to racism's legacy. A growing Asian population that is dramatically overrepresented in elite schools and a burgeoning Hispanic population will only make clearer the link between some groups' overrepresentation and others' underrepresentation. Efforts to promote proportional representation of underrepresented minority groups through racial preferences will become increasingly untenable, divisive, and unjustifiable--and more burdensome for members of overrepresented groups.

No, affirmative action is not good for the Jews. And, for the same reason, it is not good for our increasingly diverse America.

Daniel Treiman, the editor of New Voices, the national Jewish student magazine, graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1999.

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