It is interesting to come back to the United States after 18 years of living abroad to discover that affirmative action is still such a hot issue. I remembered having written a piece on the argument for a college paper and actually managed to find it again in an old suitcase that had been used as a file for my university projects and which was kept in a closet at my parents’ home while I began a new life in the Old World.
Although it was comforting to be able to read something I had written 20 years ago without embarrassment, it was rather disheartening to realize how up-to-date the issues I then wrote about still are. The lessons that were obvious to a 20-year old college student have yet to be learned and are still being heavily debated 20 years later.
Most of the emphasis of the debate going on then and now seems to be the question of quotas. When many American companies began downsizing several years ago, white men became angry when they were unable to be reabsorbed into the job market, especially when it was evident that they were victims of reverse discrimination because of affirmative action hiring policies.
Although the reverse discrimination quota question is a very important aspect of the issue, I believe there is something more important to America than measuring who is getting the bigger portion of the pie. European nepotism and American affirmative action hiring quotas share the same basic fault: the best person for the job is not the one getting hired. And the best students are not getting into the best schools.
This is unfair not only to the potential candidates who did not get hired or accepted but who were perhaps better qualified, not only to fellow colleagues who have to take on the burden of working side by side with others who are sometimes deficient, not only to the general public who is being submitted to these substandards, it is unfair to the very future of America itself.
One of the many examples I used many years ago to defend my premise was that of the guidance counselor who had administered some of the entrance examinations necessary to apply for admission into the institution I attended. I recalled being astounded by his abundant use of double negatives, misplaced verb conjugations, as well as a certain oblivion to past participles, and wondering why he was giving me the examination. He was a member of a minority group and when I made an inquiry about the conditions under which he had been hired, I discovered that it was a direct result of affirmative action quota requirements. The fact that this man was white or black or Hispanic to me was irrelevant; I didn’t feel that it was appropriate for someone with his lack of language skills to be in the position he was in, testing students for entry into an institution of higher learning. We have filled our learning institutions with staff and faculty members using a criteria of quotas rather than quality and we are now reaping the fruits of exposing our scholars to such substandard educators.
When I left this county 18 years ago, I was alarmed at the number of college graduates who were coming out of degree programs with somewhat less than a perfect grasp of their own language. I may be accused of having a penchant for language since I speak several, but be assured that it is shocking to come back to this country to find people waving master’s and doctorate degrees around who can’t even use the third conditional, and who make the kind of grammatical errors that even my foreign students didn’t make when I was teaching ten years ago.
Getting back to the subject of affirmative action, it is evident that much of the blame for our waning educational standards goes to the law’s excessive implementation. Instead of giving everyone, whether white or members of ethnic or racial minorities, the tools to meet the standards toward higher achievement, we have simply lowered those standards. I don’t really think we are doing anyone any real favors here. It is certainly no benefit to the future of this country. America has too important a role in world leadership to not only be settling for, but actually promoting such mediocrity. We’re not helping minorities reach for the stars, we’re lowering the sky.
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