Steven Farron's The Affirmative Action Hoax is, to my knowledge,the most thorough and uncompromising exposé of affirmative action in higher education. As many other writers have done, he provides copious evidence that universities discriminate against whites on a massive scale. However, unlike most critics of racial preferences, Farron examines his subject from a race realist perspective that acknowledges the reality of biological differences in intelligence among the races. 72;This perspective enables him to see clearly how flimsy all the 72;arguments commonly made in favor of affirmative action are. Farron 72;also recognizes that the dogma of racial equality that underlies 72;affirmative action inevitably leads to the corruption of academic 72;standards. Farron proves through countless examples that affirmative action 72;university admittees have been far below the white standard for 72;decades:
* In 1989, black applicants who were admitted to selective colleges scored 350 points lower on the SATs than white admittees did.1
* In 1996, the University of California at Berkeley Law School 72; accepted every black applicant with an undergraduate GPA of 3.25 and a Law School Admission Test (LSAT) score in the 70th percentile but rejected all white and Asian applicants with the same scores.2
* In 2001, the average SAT score of Hispanics who were admitted to UCLA was lower than the average score of whites who were rejected.3
* Similarly, for decades the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) scores of minorities who are admitted to American medical schools have been lower than those of whites who were rejected.4
* Blacks and Hispanics receive 80 percent of merit scholarships-that is, scholarships supposedly awarded on the basis of talent rather than need-at the University of Michigan, despite the fact that they have much lower test scores and grades than whites and Asians.5
Farron directs devastating criticism against the claim that 72;affirmative action is necessary to compensate for the disadvantages suffered by American minorities, such as poverty and past discrimination. First of all, the beneficiaries of racial preferences are not poor or disadvantaged in any other respect. All studies of the subject have shown that the large majority of affirmative action admittees to universities come from middle and upper-class households.6
Furthermore, minority students do not underperform in school and on tests because of poverty, but because blacks are on average much less intelligent than whites. In fact, the average IQ of whites in the bottom half of the American income range is about eight points higher than the IQ of blacks in the top half.7
Poor whites score better on standardized tests than wealthy blacks. In 2002, the average math SAT score of whites whose parents earned less than $10,000 was 497, but the average score of blacks whose parents earned $100,000 or more was 490. LSAT scores show the same pattern.8
Some defenders of affirmative action argue that blacks underperform in high school due to low self-esteem. However, the clear conclusion of studies on this subject is that black teenagers have significantly higher self-esteem than whites. The Washington, DC school population is more heavily black than that of any state, and it also scores worse on standardized tests. Yet the students there are more likely to answer yes to the statement "I am good at mathematics" than students in any state.9
Universities are under pressure not only to admit, but also to graduate, large numbers of minorities. Indeed, in some cases, universities that do not graduate specified quotas of minorities are denied federal funding or accreditation.10
The compulsion to graduate unqualified applicants inevitably lowers academic standards. Dr. Bernard Davis, a faculty member at Harvard Medical School, exposed this travesty in 1975. Affirmative action resulted in the admission of black medical students who were far below the usual standard for Harvard, which is, of course, one of the most selective schools in America. The average MCAT score of black admittees was in the mid-400s, which was lower than the average score of white applicants who were rejected by all medical schools in the country.
Naturally, these students fared poorly, but the school hid the 72;disparities by lowering its standards. Harvard replaced the usual 72;letter grades with a pass/fail system to obscure differences in 72;student performance. Also, the medical school began offering repeat examinations for students who failed courses and lowered exam standards. Even worse, Harvard devalued its medical degree. Whereas previously Harvard had required that degree recipients do much better than the minimum national standard on standardized tests for medical students, the school began granting its degrees to all students who performed at the minimum level or above.
However, even this was not enough to guarantee passage of black 72;students. In 1975, the dean of the medical school granted a degree to a black student who had failed to meet the minimum national 72;requirement on standardized tests after having taken them five times. The indignant Davis made the whole mess public. In recompense for his bravery, students picketed his office, and he was denied promotion.11
The lowering of standards is responsible for the colossal grade 72;inflation that has taken place at American universities in the past 40 years. In 2003 about half of students at the nation's top colleges received A's. As Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield explains: in the late 60's and early 70's, white professors, imbibing the spirit of affirmative action, stopped giving low or average grades to black students and, to justify or conceal it, stopped giving those grades to white students as well.
The affirmative action travesty persists because of the willingness of university administrators and the media to deceive the public. One tactic is to simply to deny that racial preferences exist. Up until 1996, the University of Michigan administration would tell anyone who asked that they simply did not take race into account in admissions. Then a professor forced the university to disclose its admissions records through a Freedom of Information Act request, and it turned out that standards for black admittees were far below those for whites and Asians.12
A more common lie is that race gives applicants only a slight edge. The dean of Berkeley's law school told a reporter in 1995 that race only comes into play when admissions committees must choose between two applicants with the same qualifications. When the law school was forced to disclose its admissions records, the enormous disparities quoted at the beginning of the article were revealed.13 Farron shows through many examples that the news media can be counted on to parrot the lies of university administrators, repeating discredited denials of racial preferences without looking into the facts.14
The Affirmative Action Hoax takes on many other myths concocted by the academic elites and their media minions to defend racial preferences. If you're mad at what Farron labels "the vicious anti-white discrimination that has pervaded American society since the 1960s,"15 then this book is for you.
Steven Farron has put up a website to supplement his book here. 72;www.affirmativeactionhoax.com/