Should We Lower Standards to Prevent People From Being “Excluded”?

Performance Standards are often depicted as mere subjective barriers reflecting the biases of those who create them.  Thus Professor Stanley Fish of Duke University charges “insincerity” to opponents of affirmative action who want everyone to compete by the same rules by saying that “the playing field is already tilted” in favor of the majority because “the skills that make for success are nurtured by institutions and cultural practices from which the disadvantaged minority has been systematically excluded.”  With the word “excluded” being used in very elastic senses today, it is hard to know how this statement differs from saying that people from different cultural backgrounds have the prerequisites for various activities to varying extents.  In a similar vein, former Harvard president Derek Bok said that to apply the same admissions standards to minority students as to everyone else would be to “exclude them from the university.”  Among other things, this ignores the fact that blacks were receiving both college and postgraduate degrees from Harvard in the nineteenth century, when it was very unlikely that they were being admitted under lower standards.  The more fundamental fallacy, however, is in using ex ante words like “exclude” to describe ex post results.

Thomas Sowell, "The Vision of the Anointed," pg.199