“It especially annoys me when racists are accused of ‘discrimination.’ The ability to discriminate is a precious facility; by judging all members of one ‘race’ to be the same, the racist precisely shows himself incapable of discrimination.”
Attributed to Christopher Hitchens
“Discrimination” is condemned widely nowadays, but usually not understood. Without committing the etymological fallacy, the word “discrimination” comes from the Latin “discriminare”, meaning “to divide”, which comes from “discernere”, to discern. Someone who can discriminate is someone who can tell the difference between things or people, and treat different things or people differently. We discriminate all the time: it’s part of ordinary life. Clearly, some (most) discrimination is good.
In the case of universities, an admissions tutor who admits the most intelligent or promising students is discriminating between candidates: namely, the good-enough candidates and the not-good-enough candidates. This discrimination is good because it is relevant. If we failed in our duty to discriminate between candidates, given the limited supply of places at Cambridge University, we would end up admitting worse candidates at the expense of better ones.
If, on the other hand, admissions tutors were to be influenced by irrelevant factors, such as race or background, and discriminate on those grounds, we would also end up admitting sub-par candidates.
Too often, people criticise “discrimination” when they really should be criticising “irrelevant discrimination”. Discriminating on irrelevant grounds creates sub-optimal outcomes, but failing to discriminate on relevant grounds also creates sub-optimal outcomes. We have a duty not to discriminate on irrelevant grounds, but we also have a duty to discriminate on relevant grounds. Sloppiness with language prevents useful debate on this issue from taking place.
I was pleased, therefore, to read that Vice-Chancellor Alison Richard has condemned attempts by the government to encourage universities to recruit more pupils from state schools.
Obviously admissions tutors should only take into account a candidate’s ability. There is no such thing as “positive [irrelevant] discrimination”: any irrelevant discrimination is bad.
As Thomas Sowell has pointed out, “You are not doing anybody a favor by sending them where they are more likely to fail, rather than where they are more likely to succeed.”
In the case of “affirmative action” in the US, “where the racial preferences in admissions are not as great, the differences in graduation rates are not as great. The critics of affirmative action were right: Racial preferences reduce the prospects of black students graduating.”
Discriminating on the grounds of race is irrelevant discrimination and reduces efficiency and overall welfare. Discriminating on the grounds of what school someone went to is also irrelevant discrimination and will have the same effect, ultimately hurting those it is intended to help.
41% of the students at Cambridge went to private school, but private schools educate only 7% of the pupils in the country. Why do so many more (proportionally) private school pupils get into Cambridge?
One explanation would be discrimination in their favour. However, there is no evidence for this1. Laudably, the copies of our UCAS forms that are given to admissions tutors do not mention which schools we went to. There is no reason to believe that Cambridge admissions tutors do not simply admit whichever candidates seem the best.
This leads us to the conclusion that private schooled pupils are better, on average. This may be because the pupils were better in the first place, because private schools are selective. Or it may be because private schools make their pupils better, through better teaching. It is probably a bit of both.
We can fix both problems by closing state-run schools, and making paying for education through a voucher system the state’s only involvement. That way, the market can improve the schools, something the government cannot do, but everyone would still be able to go to school regardless of their income.
The government are putting pressure on universities because they do not want to admit the real cause of state-schooled-pupil under-achievement: government involvement in education.
“A spokesman for the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills insisted that any measures to encourage widening participation at universities were voluntary. ‘We value the independence of universities, but we also want to get the best students into the best courses,’ he said.”
Note the implication that universities are using their “independence” to discriminate against the “best students”, without any evidence to back it up. On the contrary, universities are using their independence to admit the best students, and it is the government that wants them to apply other criteria. And voluntary measures are merely a prelude to non-voluntary ones, of course. There is a chilling effect here, because universities are likely to do what they know the government wants, even without it asking, in an attempt to forestall more government meddling, since the government provides the money. As another vice-chancellor said: “The Government gives me a cheque every year. I have a public duty to do what the Government says.”
I applaud Cambridge University’s long-term project to become financially independent of the government, so that it can pay for the education of the best pupils, regardless of their financial background, without being subject to government meddling.
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1. There is a tendency to assume that disparity in figures automatically implies bad discrimination. Both of the poisonous candidates for the CUSU Women’s Sabbatical Officer mentioned that more men than women studied maths at Cambridge, and of those, proportionally more achieved firsts. They ignorantly assumed this was caused by irrelevant discrimination. Of course, it is actually due to the fact that maths geniuses are more likely to be men. While men and women have the same average ability at maths, variance is higher in men, so there are more male maths geniuses and male maths morons. This is explained by Charles Murray in “The Inequality Taboo”. The following diagram (not to scale) shows this intuitively:
See also http://clubtroppo.com.au/2008/04/06/inequality-how-much-is-too-much/
Tags: discrimination, education, equality
Very accurately and precisely explained, Hugo. I particularly like the dig at CUSU Women’s Officers.
By the way, without wanting to sound like a bigot, why on earth are there Women’s reps, “LBGT”* reps and all the other minority reps in the first place, but no men’s reps, “straight” reps, white reps etc? I happen to think that the idea of having “straight” and white reps is appalling and repulsive, as is the idea of having reps for minorities. Their very existence presumes that there is institutionalised [irrelevant] discrimination against the group they represent, which is, in my experience, never the case within this University. It also presumes that special treatment is necessary and desirable (another offence against equality and dignity. If I belonged to some sort of minority group I would be grossly offended by the suggestion that I need special treatment in order to get by).
* I use asterisks when referring to sexual orientation since I reject the whole notion of labelling people’s sexual preferences and grouping them accordingly. In my view sexuality is an issue within the domain of aesthetics and nothing to do with the fictional notion of rigid “minority” group boundaries. In short, I don’t believe that “heterosexuality” or “homosexuality” exist at all.
Imagine the uproar if Radio 4 started “Man’s Hour” to complement “Woman’s Hour”.
The main problem with women’s reps is that not only are men not allowed to vote for them, we are not even allowed to question them, as I found at CUSU hustings. So I couldn’t point out their error. So they remained ignorant. Shame.
Of course, once such a position exists, whoever holds it has an incentive to seek out bad discrimination even if there is none. For an example, see the CUSU-LBGT webpage on “biphobia”: “biphobia exists in many forms, namely: pretending bisexuality doesn’t exist; assuming two men holding hands are gay, two women are lesbians and one of each are straight; people trying to check history to class people as straight or gay; … ; fear of dating bi people (because they’re bound to leave you for the other sex)”.
My brother once worked for the “Learning and Skills Council”. His job was to give money to “community projects” such as funding local football teams. Obviously this has nothing to do with the LSC’s remit to “make England better skilled and more competitive”, but anyway. He received an application for funding for a football team of Tamils. He pointed out that white people were not allowed to join this team, and a “whites-only” team would not receive funding. He therefore proposed to deny funding to the Tamil team. He was over-ruled.
Of course, football teams shouldn’t receive funding at all…
Chris Dillow:
“Universities minister John Denham wants universities to do more to recruit talented students from poorer backgrounds. Which only raises the question: why aren’t state schools doing more to bring out the talents of the poor?
…
There’s a common theme here. There’s a refusal to acknowledge that the state has failed. Denham refuses to face up to the failure of state education, preferring to hector universities into compensating for these failures
…
We should ask: how might schools improve the education and life chances of the poor? This requires thinking of ways of stopping the rich from grabbing the best state school places. One possibility here might for the state to issue school vouchers, with vastly more given to the poor.
…
In other words, it’s possible that leftist goals can be better achieved with a smaller state. I say ‘possible’ because this thesis has not yet been tested. But the contrary thesis – that the state is an appropriate tool for the left – has been tested, with poor results.
Why do so many on the left fail to see this? Why are they making a fetish of the state, when so much evidence speaks against such a belief?”
I did read that in the Telegraph, it gets on my nerves.
The biggest joke of all is that it isn’t only women who can vote for Women’s Officers, but anyone who “self-defines” as a woman. My friends and I had a plan to “self-define” as women for election day, turn out en masse to vote for one of us as Women’s Officer, then self-define back to being men the day afterwards. Then we realised that one of us would be stuck pretending to be a women for a year, so we gave it up. Good idea, though.
Furthermore, much as I sympathise with the CUSU LBGT group’s opposition to back-labelling historical people as “straight” or “gay”, merely adding the extra option of “bi” to this categorisation process would not solve anything. The real mistake is reading modern attitudes to sexuality back into very different historical cultures AT ALL. Take, for example the fact the homosexual activity was commonplace among the Greeks alongside heterosexual activity with their wives; do we conclude that all Ancient Greeks were “gay” or “bi”? It’s time for Marxist, feminist and other “interest group” historians to stop this utter nonsense.
I’m afraid I get lost when you start talking about sexuality. As far as I’m concerned, someone who sleeps with the opposite sex is straight, someone who sleeps with their own sex is gay, and someone who sleeps with both is bi. Simple.
Read some aesthetics and some history of sexuality, then we can talk :p
To comment slightly further (and less dismissively), does that mean that monks, nuns, Catholic priests and other celibates aren’t anything, because they don’t sleep with anyone? (Apart from the bad ones of course). Or indeed that anyone who chooses to obstain from sex is neither straight nor gay nor bisexual? Clearly this is nonsense. Sexual activity isn’t necessary in order to have sexual preferences. Sinilarly, there is no barrier preventing straight people from sleeping with members of the same sex and vice versa. Therefore, any discussion of this issue must refer to desires rather than activities.
Once we have established that sexuality or rather talk of sexual orientation has to do with desires, life becomes a lot more complicated. To categorise aesthetic desire in such a formulaic manner is simplistic and and unintelligent. For Plato, true aesthetic desire in the form of “eros” (read Phaedrus for context) can only exist between men. Sexual desire was considered a combined desire for body and soul, not just one or the other. In other words, people fall in love with what is beautiful, and for the Greeks the “body beautiful” was inevitably associated with men. However, none of the red-blooded Greek warriors who took male lovers would consider themselves “gay”, not would their society have had any conception of such a thing. They all had wives with whom they had children. Does that mean that they were all what you call “bisexual”? No, of course not: they would not have recognised such a term, or such an idea. Back then, people didn’t “fancy” one sex or the other, the idea is totally modern and in my view erroneous.
You see? Sexuality isn’t simple at all.
I know all that; I was being deliberately dismissive. Yes, I should have mentioned asexuality, and celibacy, but substitute “desires” for “sleeps with” and I am correct. Just because the concepts didn’t exist once upon a time, and the people themselves wouldn’t have recognised them, that doesn’t mean they are wrong.
“Does that mean that they were all what you call ‘bisexual’? No, of course not: they would not have recognised such a term, or such an idea.” Actually the answer is yes. That they wouldn’t have recognised the term or idea is irrelevant.
I should also say that even if this historical argument was sound and meant that these concepts are not useful when talking about history, it still wouldn’t mean the concepts are not useful when talking about now.
The terms are useful (I’ve even had to employ them myself), but they needn’t be set in stone. The historical context, and the complexity of aesthetics, are useful for demonstrating to today’s (mostly ignorant) populace that terminology such as “straight”, “gay”, “bi” or whatever are not set in stone. When someone tells me categorically that they are straight or gay, I tend to be highly sceptical.
Anyway, we’re way off topic, and I’ve lapsed into pedantry!
Your article on discrimination was very good, especially the graph!
One last thing: from your perspective bisexuality is a “thing” that “exists”, and Ancient Greek men were bisexual without knowing it. I would say that bisexuality is not a “thing” that exists per se, but rather modern society feels a need to put this sort of behaviour, or rather the closest modern equivalent, into a category. Also, modern notions of what bisexuality entails (i.e. being attracted to men and women in the same way and on the same terms) are very different from how the Greek men interpreted their sexual behaviour, which involved both sex with women and sex with men, but their understanding of sexuality between different sexes and of sexuality between people of the same sex were very different.
I hate over-simplifications!
Great article! Thanks for explaining this so clearly.
[...] of qualifications is to be able to discriminate between people on grounds of ability. This is “good discrimination”. If it is really true that people are working harder and teachers are teaching better, then we need [...]