AFFIRMATIVE ACTION seems to be entering a new phase: As the public turns against it, universities are growing increasingly desperate in their support. I teach at Yale, where the administration has made it clear that (in particular) it wants more female professors in technology and the hard sciences. Other universities have the same goal; they have longed for women scientists for years, but their longing seems to have entered a new phase of grim determination. Yale College happens to be heavily armored in foot-thick academic independence, and we have survived a long series of ideological barrages in better shape than we are usually given credit for. But whatever the outcome at this university, the Yale administration is doing the academic world no favor by joining the crowd that has gathered to poke and prod this particular hornets’ nest. The approaching hornet swarm is bad news for universities and society in general.
Whether or not you approve of affirmative action, it’s clear that certain of its goals can be achieved and others can’t. If you are determined, say, to increase the proportion of Hispanics in your undergraduate population, you can probably do it; Hispanic applicants are available. If your goal is a large increase in female science and engineering professors, you can’t do it, because the candidates are not available. Wounded ideologues (whose programs have been tried and failed) are the most dangerous kind. We ought to prepare and plan ahead.
To do that, we need to understand why this issue has come up in the first place. It’s true that women are scarce in hard sciences and engineering. Why? If anti-woman bigotry were the explanation, we could increase our female-professor count by cutting down on the bigotry. But everyone knows that anti-woman bigotry is not the explanation. The very notion is an Orwellian freedom-is-slavery inversion; pro-woman bias has been the rule in academia for a generation. (Of course affirmative action proponents could define opposition to affirmative action as evidence of anti-woman bias in itself — but in doing so, they would merely be declaring themselves right by definition.)
The real explanation is obvious: Women are less drawn to science and engineering than men are. (They’re also less prone to the intense, cutthroat aggressiveness that usually marks the successful research scientist or engineer.) If you visit the comfortable, typical Connecticut suburb where I live, you can see the big picture in microcosm. The public schools run a summer program for children. Our older boy has spent a couple of weeks during each of the past several summers in a Lego-and-computers course. At the end of each session, students show off their accomplishments; I’ve never encountered one girl at any of these performances. Scientists and engineers are mainly grown-up versions of Lego-and-computers children. If you believe the Bigotry Theory, you must also believe that bigotry explains the scarcity of girls in our local Lego-and-computers group. If you believe that — that our tony, Democratic suburb is biased against little girls — then you’ll believe anything.
In recent years, affirmative action pushers have been less inclined to accuse people of bigotry — perhaps because they know the accusation is insulting and false. Nowadays affirmative action is mainly justified by the need for “diversity”; we can’t be a society where nearly all the engineering and hard science professors are male, because — we just can’t. It’s true that all professional football players are male, but that’s different. Football is important; we can’t force weak players on the NFL merely for ideological reasons. The public wouldn’t stand for it. But in low-profile, unimportant areas such as physics, the public doesn’t care much about the players, and ideologues have a free hand.
Honorable people have put forward the “diversity” argument, but consider what this argument implies. If women aren’t being kept out of science by force, they must be choosing not to enter, presumably because they don’t want to; presumably because (by and large) they don’t like these fields or (on average) don’t tend to excel in them, which is nearly the same thing. Yet diversity promoters have decreed that, nonetheless, more women shall enter engineering and science. Their attitude is either patronizing or bullying.
Affirmative action pushers have obviously decided that some fields (namely, the ones males disproportionately prefer) are just better than others (namely, the ones women choose). Otherwise, why monkey with female predilections? The result is a diversity crusade that insults women scientists and non-scientists. It degrades scientists by suggesting that they can’t make it without a little help from Big Brother; and degrades non-scientists by suggesting that they’d be in a different field altogether if they only had the guts. Of course, modern culture amounts to one long harangue against female tastes; it’s hardly surprising that the same message should underlie the latest trends in affirmative action.
To what purpose are universities willing to inflict this damage? So what if we don’t have a lot of female engineering and science professors? Some people claim that if we don’t have more women science professors, we have no hope of luring more girls into science. A circular argument: We’ve got to get more women into science, because otherwise we won’t be able to get more women into science. And consider the implications of the underlying claim, that girls must have some sort of specially close relationship to female scientists. If that’s so, then boys must be specially close to male scientists. History’s greatest engineers, scientists, and mathematicians have nearly all been male. Are we quite sure we want to make this crazy claim? In any case, I can picture my own reaction if someone had told me that, say, I could only learn physics properly from a Jew. That I could only be well and truly inspired by a Jewish professor. That Christian students had an automatic “special relationship” to all the Christian professors. I would have told such a person to drop dead. Yes I am closer to Jews than Christians in certain ways — and to parrot-lovers than cat-fanciers in certain other ways. But none of these facts needed to be or ought to have been reflected in the demographics of the Yale faculty.
We opponents of affirmative action don’t claim that we are defending a system of pure merit against a barbarian onslaught. Everyone who holds a good academic position owes it in some degree to luck. There is no such thing as a university powered by pure intellectual merit. Even if there were, we wouldn’t like it, because other kinds of merit (for example spiritual) count too. We aren’t defending a perfect system against an idea that would destroy it. We are defending a fairly good system (and America’s hard science and technology is fairly good) against an idea that is bound to fail and, along the way, to insult the people it’s supposed to help.
And after it does fail? After it becomes clear that no large increase in numbers of female engineers and hard scientists is going to materialize? The next step is frighteningly clear. The administrators who are hot for affirmative action today will be hot for restricted admissions tomorrow. Next step: male quotas on course enrollments and majors. Sound impossible? Can’t believe that any college would dare tell your son, “forget that computer science course; male enrollment is maxed out. Can we show you something in Film Studies?”
It’s a nightmare, but we’d be foolish not to take it seriously. This is exactly what colleges across the country are doing today to their aspiring male athletes. The affirmative action pushers wanted more college women to play sports. Women didn’t feel like it. You can’t force women to play if they don’t want to. So if a spurious “equality” is your goal, your only choice in the long run is to jettison men’s sports, as universities across the country now routinely do. If universities are willing to jettison aspiring male athletes in the name of equality, why not aspiring male physicists? Because physics is more important than sports? Many people, academics and otherwise, don’t believe that. In any case, the ditching of men’s athletics proves that ideologues can undertake a policy that any normal person would regard as malicious and stupid and get away with it. The public has been conditioned to take anything the bureaucrats dish out and like it. The future is grim unless we start worrying about it right now.
David Gelernter is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
