The Asian American Challenge to Affirmative Action—and to American Jews
Mosaic Magazine| Ruth Wisse
Ruth Wisse, Harvard professor emerita, asks why more American Jews haven’t protested affirmative action, a policy reminiscent of the 1920s. Wisse examines the corrosive ideology and intentions undergirding the practice and “house of lies” promulgation by elite schools. If overturned, Wisse expects that “places like Harvard will almost certainly resist” but that some universities may “come to grips with the harm they have done or tolerated.”
Wisse begins by asking “How can two Jewish organizations [Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and the Anti-Defamation League], both committed to protecting American justice and American Jewry, be supporting opposite sides?” Later, she asks, “How did liberal American Jews not realize that they and their children…would be defamed and ostracized by this movement… That so many Jews have been among the ideological proponents of this policy makes their participation all the more grotesque.”
Describing affirmative action as “radically sacrificing democratic means to progressive egalitarian ends,” Wisse describes policies “propelled by ideology rather than by evidence… What she [Justice O’Connor] fatally misunderstood was that the policy would never be subjected to any such test of its ‘progress,’ and no more than the Soviet Union’s misguided agricultural experiments, also known as ‘five-year plans,’ would it ever be strictly time-bound to prove its worth…”
“I keep citing totalitarian models,” she explains, because “political correctness overtook the universities, institutions whose mission was to guard against just such straitjacketing of the free mind.”
Wisse also cites her time at Harvard, and questions the morality of the elite schools—
“I argued before the faculty that enforcing racial diversity was bound to decrease both intellectual diversity and political diversity… My proposal that Harvard conduct its own study on the correlation between the introduction of color diversity and the decline of intellectual diversity was quashed like a flea and denounced by a colleague as too extreme to be taken seriously…”
Referencing the views of Thomas Sowell and Jason Riley, she questions the intentions of the virtuous ideologues: “Had the elite schools truly intended to educate the disadvantaged, they would have tested effective ways to teach and advance students as and where they really were situated, pausing at every checkpoint to assess results…. What we have instead is a house of lies, with deans of diversity applying ruinous categories to cover up the policy’s damage. The lying is especially corrosive in an institution dedicated to the pursuit of truth…”
Wisse concludes by asking what will happen if SCOTUS rules against affirmative action: “Places like Harvard will almost certainly resist adjusting…[but] the Supreme Court would at least force some universities to come to grips with the harm they have done or tolerated.”
