In 2004, Sowell predicted the Left would turn to virtue signaling to protect affirmative action.
General consensus would claim Affirmative Action is intended to aid the black community. However, study after study concludes quite the opposite: Affirmative Action hurts the black community.
Sowell recounts when he was a professor at Cornell, the average white student scored in the 99th percentile on their SATs. Therefore, the professors taught to that level. Since black students were on average the 75th percentile, they lacked the proficient skill set to keep up. Sadly, this led to academic probation for 50% of Cornell’s black students. On standardized tests, Blacks admitted into MIT scored in the top 10% of math nationwide, but once at MIT they predominantly scored in the bottom 10%.
This has been found to be consistent across higher education. According to Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor Jr., students that were mismatched with their schools because of affirmative action were left in the “bottom 20% of their classes (and the bottom 10% in law school).”
Plenty of these minority students are capable of thriving at crawling vine institutions like UCLA or Vanderbilt, just not the more elite ivy league school that admitted them for the sake of diversity.
Campus administrators and professors like Sowell understand this. In fact, when anonymity protects academia from public scrutiny, a majority of professors oppose affirmative action in hiring and admissions according to a 1996 Rapper Poll.
Why does the Left continue to turn a blind eye to empirical evidence?
Thomas Sowell argues the reason is that the left would lose their moral pedestal. “Perhaps that is because, whatever its economic and social benefits, it offers few rewards to politicians, activists, and intellectuals or to those who wish to seem morally superior by denouncing society,” he says. “Only if the goal is the advancement of the less fortunate, rather than the aggrandizement of those who would be their guardians or spokesmen or elected officials.”