Unless Public Officials are Willing to Go Earp, Affirmative Action is Permanent

By Nicholas Stix

Political scientist Bob Weissberg has wrestled for years with affirmative action, and his brilliant new VDARE article, “Is the Affirmative Action Frankenstein on Its Last Legs?,” shows his characteristic intelligence. And yet by my reading, most of the facts he cites—the 1,001 euphemisms officials use to hide affirmative action, and the terrible price that AA’s supporters exact on those who publicly criticize AA (the latter of which both Weissberg and yours truly are intimately familiar with)—fail to support his conclusion that AA is on the way out.

Since the mid-1990s, California, Washington, and Michigan have passed referenda outlawing AA, which have accomplished … nothing. California’s state university system has simply ignored the law, or conspired to thwart it.

Last I noticed, conspiracy—whether to violate Prop. 209, or to defraud the taxpayers—was a crime everywhere, even in Detroit. However, while spending the majority of the 1990s teaching college, I noticed that my full-time colleagues and the administrators where I taught more often than not held the taxpayer, the law, and education in contempt. These people believe they operate in a law-free zone. They would likely claim that the “autonomy” of higher ed requires things to be this way.

Nonsense. Higher ed is a trillion-dollar graft machine dominated by hustlers and nihilists. Sure, they can come up with sophistry rationalizing their crimes. That’s not hard. But one orthodox pc tenure holder once had a lapse into honesty. In spring 1994, the philosophy department at the New Jersey state college where I taught was sitting outside for a faculty colloquium (I taught philosophy that semester). This man, who had not one, but two Ph.D.s—in math and philosophy—sadly confessed that the only value philosophy had for him, was in paying to send his son to accounting school.

Owing to the pleasant weather, a few students were present, and I tried to explain to the man that the value of philosophy is not utilitarian, but in the ability to give young people spiritual orientation that will transcend the shifting economic winds.

Since I was just an adjunct lecturer, he ignored me.

Affirmative action has ruined morale in higher ed, but more importantly, it is an instance of crime and corruption. We have to look at many college “educators”—presidents, remedial skills program heads, admissions officers, etc.—as the criminals that they are. At present, they see no cost to their lawlessness, and huge benefits. Thus, they have no incentive to cease their criminal activities. Only when a prosecutor goes Earp and sends police into a college, arrests “educators,” perp walks them before the TV cameras, and prosecutes them, will these outlaws see that the ill they wreak has consequences. In many cases they may ultimately go straight, switching to a more honest trade, such as mortgage refinancing for dead-beat homeowners.