Controversial Essays

by Thomas Sowell

  There have been many good changes but, on net balance, it is doubtful whether kids growing up in our old neighborhood today have as much chance of rising out of poverty as we did.

  That is not because poverty is worse today. It is not. My friend remembers times when his father would see that the children were fed but would go to bed without eating dinner himself. There were other times when his father would walk to work in downtown Manhattan—several miles away—rather than spend the nickel it took to ride the subway in those days.

  Things were not quite that grim for me, but my family was by no means middle class. None of the adults had gotten as far as the seventh grade. Down South, before we moved to New York, most of the places where we lived did not come with frills like electricity or hot running water.

  Some people have said that my rising from such a background was unique. But it was not. Many people from that same neighborhood went on to have professional careers and I am by no means either the best known or the most financially successful of them.

  Harry Belafonte came out of the same building where my old school-mate lived. One of the guys from the neighborhood was listed in one of the business magazines as having a net worth of more than $200 million today.

  If anyone had told me then that one of the guys on our block was going to grow up to be a multi-millionaire, I would have wondered what he was drinking.

  Not everybody made it. One of my old buddies was found shot dead some years ago, in what looked like a drug deal gone bad. But many people from that neighborhood went on to become doctors, lawyers, and academics—at least one of whom became a dean and another a college president.

  My old school-mate retired as a psychiatrist and was living overseas, with servants, until recently deciding to return home. But home now is not Harlem. He lives out in the California wine country.

  Why are the kids in that neighborhood today not as likely to have such careers—especially after all the civil rights “victories” and all the billions of dollars worth of programs to get people out of poverty?

  What government programs gave was transient and superficial. What they destroyed was more fundamental.

  My old school-mate recalls a teacher seeing him eating his brown bag lunch in our school lunchroom. A forerunner of a later generation of busybodies, she rushed him over to the line where people were buying their lunches and gave some sign to the cashier so that he would not have to pay.

  Bewildered at the swift chain of events, he sat down to eat and then realized what had happened. He had been given charity! He gagged on the food and then went to the toilet to spit it out. He went hungry that day because his brown bag lunch had been thrown out. He had his pride—and that pride would do more for him in the long run than any lunches.

  His father also had his pride. He tore to shreds a questionnaire that the school had sent home to find out about their students' living conditions. Today, even middle-class parents with Ph.D.s tamely go along with this kind of meddling. Moreover, people like his father have been made superfluous by the welfare state—and made to look like chumps if they pass it up.

  What the school we went to gave us was more precious than gold. It was an education. That was what schools did in those days.

  We didn't get mystical talk about the rain forests and nobody gave us condoms or chirped about “diversity.” And nobody would tolerate our speaking anything in school but the king's English.

  After finishing junior high school, my friend was able to pass the test to get into the Bronx High School of Science, where the average IQ was 135, and yours truly passed the same test to get into Stuyvesant High School, another selective public school that today's community “leaders” denounce as “elitist.”

  The rest is history. But it is a history that today's young blacks are unlikely to hear—and are less likely to repeat.

  WASTING MINDS

  Menlo-Atherton High School in an affluent California community is considered to be very good academically, at least by current standards, in an era of dumbed-down education. Yet its problems are all too typical of what is wrong with American education today.

  A gushing account of the free breakfast program and other giveaways to lower-income students who attend this high school recently appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, while the Wall Street Journal presented a sympathetic account of the school's attempt to teach science to students of very disparate abilities in the same classroom.

  Even more revealing, the villains in this story—as seen by both the educators and by the reporter for the Wall Street Journal—are those parents who want their children to get the best education they can, instead of being used as guinea pigs for social and educational experiments.

  Creating a science class that included students of very different levels of ability and motivation was one of these experiments. These disparities were especially great in this particular school, since its students come from both highly-educated, high-income families in Silicon Valley and low-income Hispanic and other minority families from the wrong side of the local freeway. Moreover, they were fed into the high school from their respective neighborhood schools with very different standards.

  The science class turned out to be a disaster. While the principal admired the good intentions behind it, he also admitted “it was almost impossible to pull off in real life. The disparity was too great.” Yet the science teacher blamed the ending of this experiment on affluent parents who “really didn't give it a chance” and the principal spoke of the “heat” he got from such parents, who “thought their kids were being held back by the other kids, that their children's chances for MIT or Stanford were being hampered.”

  This was seen as a public relations problem, rather than as a perfectly legitimate complaint from parents who took their responsibilities for their children's education seriously—more seriously than the “educators” who tried to be social workers or world savers.

  In a school where 40 percent of the children are Hispanic and 38 percent are white, sharp income and cultural divisions translate into racial or ethnic divisions plainly visible to the naked eye. This also arouses the ideological juices and emotional expressions of resentment, both inside and outside the school.

  Stanford University's school of education is reluctant to send its graduates to teach at Menlo-Atherton High School because the latter doesn't make enough effort to overcome “inequalities” and uses politically incorrect “tracking” by ability “to keep affluent kids protected from the other kids.”

  In other words, a school that takes in fifteen-year-olds from radically different backgrounds is supposed to come up with some miracle that can make them all equal in ability, despite fifteen years of prior inequality in education and upbringing. Somehow, there are always magic solutions out there, just waiting to be found, like eggs at an Easter egg hunt.

  Make-believe equality at the high school level fools nobody, least of all the kids. White kids at Menlo-Atherton refer to the non-honors courses as “ghetto courses,” while a black kid who enrolled in honors courses had his friends demand to know why he was taking “that white-boy course.”

  If you are serious about education, then you need to start a lot earlier than fifteen years old to give each child a decent shot at life in the real world, as distinguished from make-believe equality while in school. Ability grouping or “tracking”—so hated by the ideological egalitarians—is one of the best ways of doing that.

  If you were a black kid in a Harlem school back in the 1940s, and you had both the desire and the ability to get a first-rate education, it was there for you in the top-ability class. The kids who were not interested in education, or who preferred to spend their time fighting or clowning around, were in other classes and did not hold back the ones who were ready to learn.

  Our egalitarian dogmas prevent that today, destroying low-income and minority youngsters' opportunities for real equality. A mind is indeed a terrible thing to waste, especially when it is the only avenue to a
better life.

  THE “NON-PROFIT” HALO

  You may never have heard of the University of Phoenix, but it has more students than Harvard, Yale and Notre Dame—combined.

  There is a reason you probably have not heard of the University of Phoenix. It represents a new development in higher education and one that the establishment does not welcome.

  The vast majority of colleges and universities are non-profit organizations, but the University of Phoenix is not. To some people, non-profit organizations have a sort of halo around them. It is another example of the power of mere words that the fact that one organization's income is called “profit” and another's income is not makes such a huge difference to so many people, including the government, which treats non-profit organizations differently.

  Officials of non-profit organizations are not volunteers donating their time. The average university president has a six-figure salary and many also get free use of a big, expensive house. There are three university presidents whose annual salaries and benefits exceed half a million dollars a year each. In addition, it is not uncommon for top professors in medical schools to earn even more than their university presidents, while college athletic coaches often have the highest incomes of all.

  Nevertheless, it is considered shocking in genteel academia that the University of Phoenix is legally set up as an organization that is out to make a buck, even though most of us get our food, our shelter and our medical care from such organizations. Indeed, those of us who were not born rich and who don't want to live on welfare are out there every working day trying to make a buck.

  Ironically, the real reason for the opposition to the University of Phoenix is precisely because it would threaten the money coming in to conventional, non-profit colleges and universities. As a new institution, Phoenix does not have to do all the costly things that conventional academic institutions have been doing for many generations, so it can charge lower tuition.

  For example, it does not have the expenses of a huge campus, a football stadium and dormitories. Its students are largely adults scattered all around the country, who communicate with the university on the Internet. The University of Phoenix also does not have to have the huge and costly libraries that most universities have because it provides electronic access to more than 3,000 journals, while the need for books is not nearly as great, because this university specializes primarily in business courses, and so does not need to cover everything from astronomy to zoology.

  What an economist might call greater efficiency is depicted by conventional colleges and universities as “unfair competition.” Unfortunately, the various licensing and accrediting agencies have requirements which reflect the situation of liberal arts colleges and universities catering to a younger clientele, studying a wider variety of subjects.

  Worse yet, political pressures from the existing educational establishment add to the hurdles facing any fundamentally new academic institutions that do not take on the costly ways of operating that the old ones use, including tenure for professors and adolescent activities and lifestyles for the students.

  I have no idea what the quality of education is at the University of Phoenix—and it is none of my business. It is the business of the university's 53,000 students and whatever new students it may get wherever it is allowed to compete with conventional non-profit colleges and universities. It is the business of employers who are thinking of hiring University of Phoenix graduates and it is the business of postgraduate institutions who need to judge their qualifications for admissions.

  Much of the enormous costliness and irresponsible self-indulgence of the academic world comes from the fact that it has neither accountability nor competition. It has little or no incentive to do things efficiently and every incentive to appease every campus constituency by giving them their own turf, at the expense of the taxpayers, donors and tuition-paying parents.

  Accountability is so remote in academia that conventional colleges and universities need all the competition they can get. The academic establishment's fear and resentment of the University of Phoenix is a sign of how much some real competition is needed. But such competition may be stifled by arcane laws that serve to protect the academic dinosaurs.

  DO FACTS MATTER?

  Recently a young black man sent a thoughtful e-mail to me. Among his kind comments was an expression of sympathy for the racism that he thought blacks of my generation must have experienced in going through college.

  In reality, it is his generation of blacks who have encountered more racial hostility on campus than mine. But his was an understandable mistake, given how little attention is paid to accuracy in history and how often history is used as just a propaganda tool in current controversies.

  My college and early postgraduate education took place during the 1950s—that decade before the political left brought its light into the supposed darkness of the world. During the decade of the 1950s I attended four academic institutions—a year and a half at a black institution, Howard University, three years at Harvard, where I graduated, nine months at Columbia, where I received a master's degree, and a summer at New York University.

  I cannot recall a single racist word or deed at any of these institutions. The closest thing to a racist remark was made about a student from England who was referred to as “nasty, British and short.” It was I who made that remark.

  My first encounter with racism on campus came toward the end of my four years of teaching at Cornell in the 1960s—and it erupted after black students were admitted under lower standards than white students and were permitted to engage in disruptions that would have gotten anyone else suspended or expelled. I was not the target of any of these racist incidents, which were directed against black students. I received a standing ovation in the last class I taught at Cornell.

  One of the black students at Cornell moved in with my wife and me for a while, because she was afraid of both the black militants and those whites who were increasingly bitter about both the trouble that the militants were causing and the way the administration was catering to them. This backlash was not peculiar to Cornell, but developed on many campuses and became so widely known over the years that it acquired a name—“the new racism.”

  In the late 1980s, for example, a dean at Middlebury College reported that—for the first time in her 19 years at that institution—she was getting requests from white students not to be housed with black room mates. People who had taught at Berkeley for similar periods of time likewise reported that they were seeing racist graffiti and hate mail for the first time. More than two-thirds of graduating seniors at Stanford said that racial tensions had increased during their years on campus.

  All this is the direct opposite of what you might be led to believe by the politically correct history or theory of race in America. The endlessly repeated mantra of “diversity” implies that such things as group quotas and group identity programs improve race relations. Quotas are often thought to be necessary, in order to create a “critical mass” of black students on campus, so that they can feel sufficiently comfortable socially to do their best academic work.

  That there are various opinions on such things is not surprising. What ought to be surprising—indeed, shocking—is that these social dogmas have been repeated for decades, with no serious effort to test whether or not they are true.

  When elite liberal institutions like Stanford, Berkeley and the Ivy League colleges have been scenes of racial apartheid and racial tensions on campus, have more conservative institutions that have resisted quotas and preferences been better or worse in these respects? My impression has been that they have been better. But the real problem is that we must rely on impressions because all the vast research money and time that have gone into racial issues have still not even addressed this key question that goes to the heart of the dogmas pervading academia today.

  Over a period of more than three decades, during the first half of the 20th century, 34 black students from Dunbar H
igh School in Washington were admitted to Amherst College. Of these, about three-fourths graduated and more than one-fourth of these graduates were Phi Beta Kappa. But there were never more than a handful of black students at Amherst during that era—nothing like a “critical mass.”

  Is this evidence conclusive? No. But it is evidence—and the political left avoids evidence like the plague.

  DO FACTS MATTER? PART II

  The history of the education of blacks in America has become politicized to the point where it is barely recognizable as history, rather than as an arsenal of horror stories to be used in the political wars of today. Many of these horror stories are true, even if increasingly dated, but there is an almost complete disregard of other important aspects of the history of black education that are also true.

  Yes, Governor Wallace stood in front of the entrance to a building on the campus of the University of Alabama, in order to try to prevent black students from being enrolled. Yes, white mobs jeered and attacked the first black college students to enroll in previously segregated Southern colleges and universities. Worse, such mobs tried to impede the enrolment of black youngsters in public schools in various Northern cities, as well as in the South.

  But the real story is that all these efforts failed. And they failed because the American government, with the support of the American people, would not stand for letting them succeed. More important, these episodes were just episodes in a much larger epic.

  During the era of slavery, it was illegal to teach slaves to read and write, throughout the Western Hemisphere. In parts of the antebellum South, it was also illegal for free blacks to be educated and there was no provision for them to be educated in much of the North. Yet the census of 1850 showed that more than half of the 500,000 free blacks were able to read and write.