Justice_ What's the Right Thing to Do_ - Michael Sandel [81]
Promoting Diversity
The diversity argument for affirmative action does not depend on controversial notions of collective responsibility. Nor does it depend on showing that the minority student given preference in admission has personally suffered discrimination or disadvantage. It treats admission less as a reward to the recipient than as a means of advancing a socially worthy aim.
The diversity rationale is an argument in the name of the common good—the common good of the school itself and also of the wider society. First, it holds that a racially mixed student body is desirable because it enables students to learn more from one another than they would if all of them came from similar backgrounds. Just as a student body drawn from one part of the country would limit the range of intellectual and cultural perspectives, so would one that reflected homogeneity of race, ethnicity, and class. Second, the diversity argument maintains that equipping disadvantaged minorities to assume positions of leadership in key public and professional roles advances the university’s civic purpose and contributes to the common good.
The diversity argument is the one most frequently advanced by colleges and universities. When faced with Hopwood’s challenge, the dean of the University of Texas Law School cited the civic purpose served by his school’s affirmative action policy. Part of the law school’s mission was to help increase the diversity of the Texas legal profession and to enable African Americans and Hispanics to assume leadership roles in government and law. By this measure, he said, the law school’s affirmative action program was a success: “We see minority graduates of ours as elected officials, working in prominent law firms, as members of the Texas legislature and the federal bench. To the extent that there are minorities in important offices in Texas, they are often our graduates.”7
When the U.S. Supreme Court heard the Bakke case, Harvard College submitted a friend-of-the-court brief defending affirmative action on educational grounds.8 It stated that grades and test scores had never been the only standard of admission. “If scholarly excellence were the sole or even predominant criterion, Harvard College would lose a great deal of its vitality and intellectual excellence… [T]he quality of the educational experience offered to all students would suffer.” In the past, diversity had meant “students from California, New York, and Massachusetts; city dwellers and farm boys; violinists, painters and football players; biologists, historians and classicists; potential stockbrokers, academics and politicians.” Now, the college also cared about racial and ethnic diversity.
A farm boy from Idaho can bring something to Harvard College that a Bostonian cannot offer. Similarly, a black student can usually bring something that a white student cannot offer. The quality of the educational experience of all the students in Harvard College depends in part on these differences in the background and outlook that students bring with them.9
Critics of the diversity argument offer two kinds of objection—one practical, the other principled. The practical objection questions the effectiveness of affirmative action policies. It argues that the use of racial preferences will not bring about a more pluralistic society or reduce prejudice and inequalities but will damage the self-esteem of minority students, increase racial consciousness on all sides, heighten racial tensions, and provoke resentment among white ethnic groups who feel they, too, should get a break. The practical objection does not claim that affirmative action is unjust,