224 CHAPTER 8 | FRom ETHos To Logos: APPEALing To YouR REAdERs■^2 No issue has been more saturated with dishonesty than the issue
of racial quotas and preferences, which is now being examined
by the Supreme Court of the United States. Many defenders of
affirmative action are not even honest enough to admit that they
are talking about quotas and preferences, even though everyone
knows that that is what affirmative action amounts to in practice.
Despite all the gushing about the mystical benefits of “diversity”
in higher education, a recent study by respected academic schol-
ars found that “college diversity programs fail to raise standards”
and that “a majority of faculty members and administrators recog-
nize this when speaking anonymously.”
This study by Stanley Rothman, Seymour Martin Lipset, and
Neil Nevitte found that “of those who think that preferences have
some impact on academic standards those believing it negative
exceed those believing it positive by 15 to 1.”
Poll after poll over the years has shown that most faculty mem-
bers and most students are opposed to double standards in col-
lege admissions. Yet professors who will come out publicly and
say what they say privately in these polls are as rare as hens’ teeth.
Such two-faced talk is pervasive in academia and elsewhere. A
few years ago, in Berkeley, there was a big fight over whether a
faculty vote on affirmative action would be by secret ballot or open
vote. Both sides knew that the result of a secret ballot would be the
direct opposite of the result in a public vote at a faculty meeting.
— ThOmas sOwell, “The Grand Fraud:
Affirmative Action for Blacks”
■^3 When the judgment day comes for every high school student^ —^
that day when a final transcript is issued and sent to the finest
institutions, with every sin of class selection written as with
a burning chisel on stone — on that day a great cry will go up
throughout the land, and there will be weeping, wailing, gnash-
ing of teeth, and considerable grumbling against guidance coun-
selors, and the cry of a certain senior might be, “WHY did no one
tell me that Introduction to Social Poker wasn’t a solid academic
class?” At another, perhaps less wealthy school, a frustrated and
under-nurtured sculptress will wonder, “ Why can’t I read, and
why don’t I care?” The reason for both of these oversights, as they
may eventually discover, is that the idea of the elective course
has been seriously mauled, mistreated, and abused under the
current middle-class high school system. A significant amount
of the blame for producing students who are stunted, both cog-
nitively and morally, can be traced back to this pervasive fact.
Elective courses, as shoddily planned and poorly funded as they
may be, constitute the only formation that many students get in
their own special types of intelligences. Following the model of08_GRE_5344_Ch8_211_256.indd 224 11/19/14 11:04 AM