Bill Gates, Minority Leader

Gates insists there was “no politics” involved in his decision. If so, one wonders what Gates thinks politics is, because the scholarships were announced against the backdrop of threats to affirmative action programs. California and Washington (where Microsoft is headquartered) have banned racial preferences through initiatives at the state level, Michigan and Florida are likely to do so at upcoming referenda, and Texas’s race-based college admission policies have been overturned in the courts.

At the University of Washington, Seattle, an end to quotas is expected to leave the institution with 40 percent fewer blacks, 30 percent fewer Hispanics, and 20 percent fewer Indians. Microsoft took a stand against Washington’s anti-preference Initiative 200. Gates’s father, an old-line Seattle civic leader, has consulted with UW about how to get around the rules and keep minority enrollment high. Says Washington’s liberal governor Gary Locke, who was present at the scholarship announcement: “The advocates of Initiative 200 said government can’t do it; they never said that the private sector can’t do it.” It is clearly Gates’s hope to do with private funding what it is rapidly becoming illegal to do with public.

The Gates scholarships are open to blacks, Hispanics, Indians, and Asians (for whom underrepresentation in higher education is hardly a problem), but not to whites. The United Negro College Fund — whose president, the ex-congressman Bill Gray, is a friend of Gates — will take a lead role, with the National Hispanic Scholarship Fund and the American Indian College Fund acting as junior partners. The exact interplay of these groups is to be determined by a minority advisory board that begins meeting in October. But conversations with officials at all three groups indicate that they will act as bureaucratic Bantustans, with each minority group picking an allotted number of Millennium Scholars from its own “race.” No one yet knows how to handle “Asians,” since no foundation exists to agitate for scholarships for them.

The most illogical aspect of the grant is that education is listed as one of the graduate disciplines eligible for funding. Bill Clinton, in his very brief statement on Gates’s gift, addressed “the need to encourage young people to become teachers.” But clearly, no such encouragement is needed; 80 percent of doctorates awarded to blacks are in education. One suspects either that powerful education lobbies have had a hand in shaping this program (Gray was a member of the board of the Gates Learning Foundation until it was merged into a larger Gates endowment); or that the scholarship’s designers have doubts that minority communities are capable of absorbing a billion dollars in hard-science scholarship money.

That renders dubious the grant-makers’ assumption that funding is the primary — even the only — obstacle to higher minority representation in high-tech. There is no evidence beyond the anecdotal to back up this proposition. And to the extent that the gift merely replaces other sources of financing, much of this money will be going to top-notch students who would have been paid for at Ivy League-caliber universities in any case. As such, the gift would ultimately go not to needy kids but to Harvard, Stanford, Yale, MIT, and the other elite universities that are the bulwark of America’s rapidly hardening class system.

And yet, Bill Gray hopes for a “20 percent add-on to where our normal growth would take us.” This means something different. It means a privately funded expansion of colleges’ already huge commitment to minority enrollments. Administered that way, the Gates program is an affirmative-action program pure and simple, a billion-dollar subsidy for the race-based swapping of prospective (white) science candidates for (non-white) students a couple hundred SAT points lower. And the scholarships’ potential to erode academic standards does not stop there. The program’s insistence that Millennium Scholars maintain at least a 3.0 grade point average to retain eligibility is superficially attractive. But it is hard to see how this could fail to result in near-irresistible pressure on teachers to race-norm their grades.

Can we call Gates’s gift a generous one? No one can deny that Gates has long held a serious interest in minority issues. (Even if it has been at times bizarre: As a Harvard undergrad, he requested minority roommates from the university housing office.) Nor should one gainsay that Gates is throwing a lot of money around. But a billion dollars may be very little to pay for the opportunity to deflect skepticism from the high-tech industry’s own anemic rates of minority (except for Asian) hiring. Gates, whatever his intentions, is shunting responsibility for black and Hispanic non-participation in the high-tech economy away from (his own) business sector and onto (someone else’s) education sector.

Now for the gift itself. The “generosity” consisted in making the original investment in the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which a booming stock market has fattened to $ 17 billion. The actual payouts are now compulsory. Under the terms of the 1969 Tax Reform Act, set up to keep rich people from parking funds in tax-free charities, all foundations must spend at least 5 percent of their assets annually. If Gates doesn’t pay out at least $ 850 million, it gets seized from him. So get used to these grants: Gates is required by law to give roughly a billion dollars away to something every year.

Gates is clearly entering a phase of his life in which he seeks to drive public policy from a position of personal privilege. “It’s fine for people to talk about what public policy should be, but this is private philanthropy,” he says. The question is whether he should do this by means of racially exclusive policies that Americans are repudiating by overwhelming plebiscitary majorities.

The representatives of the various college funds were wholly untroubled by the scholarship’s racial basis, but only Suzette Brewer, spokesperson for the American Indian College Fund, was willing to say so for the record. Asked if she thought the criticism of the scholarships’ exclusion of whites was justified, she replied, “To be measured in my response, I would have to say, generally and historically speaking, no. To be perfectly honest. Historically, they run the system.”

This seemed to be an almost universal misperception among the various racial representatives. Amidst the cavalcade of malarkey that followed the September announcement, Bill Gray’s allegation that whites controlled vast tranches of scholarship money stood out as particularly delusional: “There are scholarships by the Daughters of Norway, Sons of the Confederacy,” Gray said, “and I don’t think that an Asian American could claim that his great-grandfather was from Norway or fought for the Confederacy and get one of those. So by definition, who are those scholarships for?”

What world is Gray living in? Not that scholarships weren’t set up that way at one time, but if anyone today tried to administer them that way, he’d be thrown in jail faster than you can say Bob Jones.

In fact, Gates dropped a hint last week that he might get around to subsidizing whites too. When asked about the exclusion of whites from the Millennium Scholars, he replied, “We’ll be supporting other scholarship programs as well.” It sounds like we’re on our way to having two funds — one for minorities and one for whites. The New York Times may be right to say that Gates is “adhering to the finest traditions of philanthropy.” One of these, unfortunately, is the tradition that used to be called “separate but equal.”

Christopher Caldwell is senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.