Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/1998/10/07/bowen_and_boks_new_book_benjamin_wallacewells_reviews_the_shape_of_the_river.php
Wednesday, October 7, 1998
Derek Bok and William Bowen have just published a book, The Shape of the River , which argues for the use of racial affirmative action in college and university admissions. Bok is the former President of Harvard and Bowen is the former President of Princeton, so their book has gotten a lot of notice.
I have read their book. It is a very good book. It is literate, critical, and logical. It has a load of arguments and a load of statistics, and the statistics seem to support the arguments.
All of which makes supporters of affirmative action very happy. Ward Connerly and other anti-Affirmative Action conservatives have done such a good job at promoting their case in the names of Merit and Fairness that the New Left's ancient warriors have been left to grumble in their gruel about Our Responsibility and Social Necessity and likely Utopia too. These, of course, have nothing on Merit and Fairness, and liberals know it.
So along come Bowen and Bok with a bevy of statistics. While the liberal case for affirmative action has long been high on sympathy and anecdotal appeals it has also been notoriously low on statistics. This hasn't helped the cause; conservatives have bonked liberals over the head with numerals and decimal points and there hasn't been any proper response.
Bok and Bowen, both social scientists, use phrases like 'database' and 'allowing for error' and 'appendix 5.4' a lot — their argument is intended to give the case for affirmative action scientific validity.
Not so fast, Mr. Bok.
Bowen and Bok's book is based on a single study, the College and Beyond study, conducted by the Andrew Mellon Foundation. The Mellon Foundation interviewed hundreds of students who graduated from 'elite' colleges in the last twenty years. The study looked at both what sort of candidates these students were (based on things like SAT score) and what sort of lives they went on to live (based on things like graduate degrees and current income).
They also gathered anecdotal evidence on things like job satisfaction and the feelings of these students, in many cases out of college for decades, about the effect of affirmative action policies on campus climate. Each statistic was then broken down among lines of race, gender, and class, with all their mutual entanglements.
The conclusion that Bok and Bowen reach comes as no surprise: Blacks have benefited from affirmative action. Many of those students studied have received graduate degrees. Their median income is high ($71,000). They say they are satisfied with their lives.
Of course they are successful. They are graduates of elite schools. But their success is evidence for their personal intelligence, the success of mutually reinforcing affirmative action, and the more general ability of elite schools to insure the success of their graduates. (It also may be evidence of affirmative action's universality — it's a train you could ride forever). It is not a validation of race-conscious admission.
As Bowen and Bok themselves admit: 'Still, on the basis of the evidence in this study, the excluded white male students might have done at least as well as their retrospectively rejected black classmates [this, in the book's jargon, means those blacks who were admitted because of affirmative-action but would likely not have been in affirmative action had not existed], and probably even better in terms of earnings.'
In other words, those whites who were excluded because of affirmative action policies would have done at least as well as those blacks who were admitted.
Bowen and Bok, then, make a fairly narrow claim: affirmative action in college admissions has benefited blacks. Nowhere do they argue that an affirmative action system is more fair than a race-blind system.
In their final chapter, which explicitly makes their case, Bowen and Bok write like this:
'Virtually all colleges and universities seek to educate students who seem likely to become leaders and contributing members of society. Identifying such students is another essential aspect of admitting 'on the merit,' and here again race is clearly relevant.'
And like this:
'Would society have been better off if additional numbers of whites and Asian Americans had been substituted for minority students in this fashion? That is the central question...'
And, in the preface, like this:
'This book is an attempt to chart what race-sensitive admissions policies have meant over a long stretch of the river — both to the individuals who were admitted and to the society that has invested in their education and that counts so heavily on their future leadership.'
Bowen and Bok's arguments are not centered on what is best for the college or what is best for the student but on some vague and ill-defined notions of what is best for society.
They do not claim that affirmative action is a good way of making sure that each college has the best students possible. (Instead, they take pains to distance themselves from those who think affirmative action is a good way to make up for past injustices).
They argue instead for social expedience: colleges should admit blacks who are technically less qualified than whites because educating blacks is a good goal in and of itself and far fewer blacks would be admitted in the absence of race-conscious programs.
Bowen and Bok assume a reference point. They assume you agree that promoting a racially diverse society should matter more to colleges than getting the most prepared student body — that colleges should be social 'levelers' and not strictly educational institutions.
The Shape of the River is important because it is the best statistical and rhetorical defense of affirmative action that has been produced. It is intended, though, as a psuedo-statistical validation of support for affirmative action. Bowen and Bok are not out to change the mind of anyone who opposes affirmative action, and so are not likely to do so.