GETTING IN: A while back, the Goblin Queen posted, amid a longer rambly post (not that there’s anything wrong with that!) this take on affirmative action in college admissions: “I was thinking that maybe one way for colleges might foster diversity without a strict numerical preference (and which would allow for them to solicit applicants that offered non-racial diversity) would be to have a series of essay questions: ‘What challenges have you faced in your educational career? Feel free to discuss social or economic challenges.’ (I think UC did use some version of this in the post Regents ban, pre Proposition 209 days.) ‘How has some aspect of your identity shaped the way you see the world and your future work [if it were medical school, the practice of medicine]? Feel free to discuss your racial, sexual or socioeconomic identity.’ ‘How do you think you will contribute to the diversity of identities and views on this campus?’ I think this would have several advantages: it would avoid the numerical preference that makes people like me queasy; it would be non-superficial, that is, it would not just use race as a heuristic for identifying people of varying experience, but it would actually seek out those people who could intelligently express their experience; it would allow the colleges all the latitude they wanted in interpretation of the essays and in the kind of diversity they sought; and it would take a lot of the rhetorical ammunition away from AA’s detractors—Bush couldn’t argue that a race isn’t an experience because it would be the experience that was being sought, not the race.”

While I shudder to think of the poor admissions officer who has to read high school seniors’ meditations on their “sexual identities” (sigh…), I think that’s on the right track. It avoids most of the problems with affirmative action that I outlined here. (Except one, of which more in a moment.) Interestingly, Body and Soul and The Agitator (scroll down to point #6) converge on this point as well–both posts are much worth reading, and I think they end up agreeing with one another. Yay! I am irenic!

So let me lay out my areas of agreement and disagreement with the Goblin Queen Plan.

Agreement: As the Agitator says, it really does take character to overcome adversity. Smart college admissions people should recognize that fact and take adversity into account–without assuming too much. A C student at a bad high school might be a Jeanne D’Arc in the making… or she might be just a slacker. But admissions departments should make the extra effort to look for signs of character traits, like persistence, imagination, and training in the school of hard knocks, that might be hidden in the numbers.

And diversity of experience is often beneficial, as this post from IsThatLegal? obliquely points out. I do think that I learned a degree of humility, flexibility, and imaginativeness (is that a word?) from getting to know people from very different backgrounds. (I’ll note, though, that by “different backgrounds” I mean not just race, ethnicity, and income level but stuff like whether they were raised by conservative parents, whether they were raised outside the East Coast, and so on. And there’s a very specific kind of humility you learn by getting to know people whose backgrounds are somewhat similar to your own–I had to give up some assumptions, for example, about people raised secular-Jewish, stop thinking that I knew that whole story because that was how I had been raised.)

But I’m not convinced that diversity of background in any specific area is something that every college should strive for. Easy, easy examples: Spelman? Howard? I don’t know that they suffer from a terrible deficit of diversity of experience because they’re mostly black.

No one can get to know people from every background–that would mean, of course, getting to know everybody. So we generally rely on our ability to transfer habits of mind and lessons learned through one kind of encounter to another kind. For example, as I said in one of those vast race posts, “I would guess that it’s not at all hard to intuit good responses to (say) your town’s only Hispanic family from [kids’ books like] Dogsbody or Witch Week.” And without some basic degree of imagination and charity, diversity of background will work against learning rather than in its favor: When IsThatLegal’s point is taken in the wrong direction, the black students in “a class on the Court’s affirmative action cases” are left feeling like they have to Speak For The Race. People are being used as sociopolitical counters in a game designed to be won by the privileged (who are thereby able to attain the privilege of meeting people from Different Perspectives and Disadvantaged Backgrounds). So diversity is neither necessary nor sufficient for cultivating a habit of mind that seeks challenge and refuses to stick with the safely known.

Other disagreements: First, one might ask also about what an applicant gained from her background.

Second, the GQ’s questions seem to me to fall into one of the biggest affirmative-action traps: encouraging people to view themselves as the sum total of the oppressions that have been visited upon them (or, at best, the socially-designated identity labels with which they’ve been tagged). This relates to my problem with “The Pianist”; I think it’s something that a literarily-minded person would be more likely to notice, since I’m used to focusing on the ways in which people defy the impressions you’d get from knowing their demographic statistics. Back in college, I wrote, “The great writer is great as an individual, whose merit lies precisely in his break with the collective voice of tradition and his transcendence of that tradition; or he is great because his voice is thoroughly universal; but he cannot be a thoroughly tribal voice and still gain entry into the ranks of the masters. He can speak as Everyman, or he can speak as Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (and he is almost invariably speaking as both), but he cannot speak as The Danes. Thus any attempt to value some collective over the individual will militate against the canonical authors. Within this individual and universal voice, the issue of a man’s relation to his tribe may be addressed….” The “I am my oppressions” view is damaging in a lot of ways, which I tried to discuss in that previous aff. action post; when linked to the “you must speak for your people” view, it’s really deadening to individuality and one’s ability to “become what one is.”

I think this problem with the GQ Plan can be at least in part avoided, though, by tailoring the questions more carefully to match the particular schools. This would also allow schools to give applicants–and thereby themselves–a better sense of a unique mission and focus. This is a really good article decrying Yale’s decision to go on the Common Application, and calling for much more diversity (hey, there’s that word again!) in schools’ sense of their own missions. Here are some of the questions that Lukas suggests Yale might ask:

•Write about a Yale alumnus and explain how this person stands for or against your idea of an educated person.

•Explain what you hope to gain from attending college.

•Write about a book that made you do something, rather than simply think something.

•Name and describe five classes that you would like to see offered at Yale.

So questions like, “When have you overcome an obstacle to achieve [insert school’s focus here–academic excellence, leadership, etc.]?” or, “What do you bring to [school] that’s unusual? What distinguishes you that we wouldn’t know from your transcript?” or, “Tell us about a teacher who inspired you. What made this person different from your other teachers? How has this person’s example shaped your goals?” or, “How did you learn the value of an education? What does it mean to be educated? How do you plan to use your education to serve or enrich those around you?” could be used, perhaps (depending on the school’s level of difficulty, etc.) in conjunction with some of the really fun, hardcore questions listed in this OpinionJournal column. (I bet Jeanne would have aced those!)

Schools could use the application process to build a stronger sense of their own focus; they should also, meanwhile, explain what they are doing, letting applicants know that they are looking for people who have demonstrated strength of character, not just people who have been trained to recite What I Learned From My Victimization narratives. In that context, I have no problem with the Goblin Queen’s suggestion that schools remind applicants, “Feel free to discuss social or economic challenges,” since after all those are likely to be relevant and some applicants (probably the better ones…) may feel reticent about bringing them up.

This approach gets away from the false anti-aff. action notion that grades and SAT scores form the sum of “merit.” It rightly treats people as individuals-with-histories, neither social statistics nor atomistic individuals. I don’t know that every school should adopt some variant of this, but I think it’s a much better approach to the real problem of discerning merit in a world of widely varied opportunities than points-system or race-based affirmative action is.