| Viewing Single Post From: Musings of a Superfluous Man | |
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| Duke parent 2004 | Aug 21 2008, 12:17 AM |
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THE BEST OF THE BEST Roger Kimball, co-editor of The New Criterion and indefatigable scourge of the politically correct academy, has begun an amusing contest on his blog. Here’s the announcement he made on August 18 (at http://pajamasmedia.com/rogerkimball/2008/08/18/exit-pursued-by-a-bear-or-fukuyama-as-antigonus/): The Challenge: Name the silliest argument to be offered by a serious academic in the last 25 years and to be taken up and be gravely masticated by the larger world of intellectual debate. To get things going, Kimball offers “global warming” as a worthy contender, and then his own favorite, Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis, which dates from an essay Fukuyama published in 1989 in The National Interest. Kimball has yet to say whether he’ll award a prize other than fifteen seconds of fame at his blog. Nor has he given his prize a name. Were George Orwell’s name not already attached to an award for distinguished political writing, I’d vote for “Ignis Fatuus Prix d’Orwell”--not only because Orwell railed against using foreign words in English prose but also because he was fond of saying that some ideas were so outrageous that only inmates of universities could have generated them. Also a shame is Kimball’s restricting his time period to just the past twenty-five years. For while watching the Olympic Games this week, I concluded that had Kimball given me another ten years with which to work, I’d immediately submit as my own entry in his contest that humdinger of professorial deep thinking—namely, affirmative action. So what do the Games have to do with affirmative action and silly academics, you ask? In December of 1980, I wrote a newspaper op-ed in response to a wire-service story that featured a Dr. Waldrip, the administrator of desegregation for the Cleveland public schools. Herr Waldrip had just immortalized himself by ordering both his high-school principals and his basketball coaches to “recruit white students to play basketball. At least 20 percent of each basketball team should be white.” Waldrip contrived quotas for other sports as well; for example, half the baseball players were to be black. One of Waldrip’s colleagues, the director of athletics at Cleveland’s John F. Kennedy High School, spoke up for all those poor slobs, the unlettered masses, when he tilted at the new dispensation: “It is ridiculous when you don’t choose players on a team by ability.” I, of course, sided with the athletic director, even though he worked at a school named for a rake who had won a Pulitzer Prize for a book written by someone else. Affirmative action was very much at full throttle twenty-eight years ago. Just two years earlier, the U. S. Supreme Court had in its ruling in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke failed to shut the door on affirmative-action ideologues determined to allocate precious spaces in professional schools (in this instance a place in the entering class of a medical school) to persons who, were it not for their race, would not have been admitted. So despite the absurdity of Dr. Waldrip’s directives, I thought it still necessary to draw on the reservoir of good sense in everyone who loved sports: A few years ago . . . the philosopher Sidney Hook asked the proponents of goals and quotas whether they could seriously envisage applying their formulas to sports. At the time, neither Hook nor his interlocutors were in doubt about the answer. Indeed, Hook used sports to show how deeply and rightly imbedded in the American way is the notion that ability and merit ought to prevail. Of course, everyone should get a chance to show his stuff. But only the best should make the varsity, even if nature “unfairly” gave some persons advantages—for example, tallness. The duffers and the also-rans could always romp in intramurals or pick-up games or try out for coxswain. Over the past thirty years, the affirmative-action steamroller has encountered increasingly stiff resistance. Thanks to the efforts of warriors such as Ward Connerly, Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams and John McWhorter (all of them black men, by the way); thanks to organizations such as the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and the National Association of Scholars; thanks to judges who still take seriously the U. S. Constitution and the explicit language of statutes (e.g., the 1964 Civil Rights Act); and thanks to the explosion onto the scene of the Internet, which, paraphrasing Carl Becker, has made of “everyman his own broadcasting station,” proponents of affirmative action have needed to add "bob and weave" and even “retreat” to their lexicon of war. But to my mind the biggest thanks of all should go to the world of sports. Although I’ve not seen any study that shows a positive correlation between professors at universities who wish to reduce the role of athletics on campus and those who push for ever more affirmative action, I’d not be surprised if there were such a correlation. Although I myself think that athletics gets too much money and attention at many universities, I’ll not say it too loudly lest I inadvertently boost the ranks and clout of the affirmative-action bigots on campus, especially those who despise their own middle-class students and particularly the athletes among them. I know that an unfailing “stake through the heart” that I’ve used in debates with quota-meisters over the years has been a simple question: Why aren’t you campaigning for more white guys in the NBA? I know that every four years millions, if not billions, of people around the globe look forward to two weeks of watching the world’s greatest athletes compete without wondering whether those athletes resulted from a rigged selection like that endorsed by a full professor of history at Johns Hopkins University: “I’m not saying they [faculty members] should be actively discriminating in their favor, but I do feel . . . that to enforce affirmative action properly, there are cases in which we should go for the next-best candidate who is a woman or black, provided they are still more than competent to do the job, that the edge between the candidate and the top choice is only slight.” So to sprinter Usain Bolt, a black man from Jamaica who these past few days set world records in the 100-meter and 200-meter dashes, and to swimmer Michael Phelps, a white man from the United States who in winning an unprecedented eight gold medals also broke seven world records, I say without reservation, “You are, indeed, the best of the best—and even better than you know.”  Edited by Duke parent 2004, Aug 21 2008, 04:01 PM.
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| Musings of a Superfluous Man · DUKE LACROSSE - Liestoppers | |
9:21 AM Nov 28
