 All right, hello, welcome. Great to have you all here. Good evening, it's such a pleasure to welcome the students, alumni, faculty here, and of course, our guest speaker, Professor Larry. Before we start, before I start the introductions, I would want to thank our institutions, Gustavus, for making this event possible, but in particular, the Lindow family for supporting the conservative folk residency here at Gustavus and for making it possible for us to have difficult conversations from diverse perspectives. That's something very important. Should be a part of the college education. So I hope you came here to be challenged. You came here to be exposed to views you might not agree with, and that you will be enriched by this experience, right? The point of these conversations not to agree with each other is to learn from each other. So today, we welcome Professor Glenn Larry to Gustavus. He's a renowned economist, social critic, public intellectual, and an economist, right? His career started with a PhD from MIT and with great expertise in econometrics, industrial organization, and just labor market analysis. Over the term of his career, he worked at Harvard, Boston University, and he's now at Brown University. He's the Merton Stoltz Professor of Social Science at Brown and the Palson Fellow at Manhattan Institute. He's published numerous academic articles, multiple books, and now he has a book, a memoir in the works that will be published next year. There are many reasons to engage with Professor Larry with his arguments. Some of you came here because of the following that he has on social media because of his YouTube channel. So you know that he's engaging and he has something interesting to say. And I think that following comes from the courage that he displays when he makes his arguments. So we all remember the pandemic when it started, but we also remember the death of George Floyd and what happened after that in Minneapolis. And at the time, when CEOs and university presidents and many other people in positions of power were making arguments from the place of emotion, he was making arguments from the place of reason. When you don't have information, maybe it's OK to say I don't know as opposed to following your heart. So that bravery, that courage led him to say, I object. And that's the perfect use of tenure, to be that exemplar of disagreeing. And to disagree doesn't mean you have to be perfectly convinced you're right. It just takes the possibility that the bravery that I disagree, I might be wrong, but I'm brave enough to engage and to challenge what's widely accepted. So I hope some of that courage spills into our hearts and into the hearts of the students in the room. Please join me in welcoming Professor Larry to Gustavus. Thank you. Thank you very much, Marta. It's good to see such a nice turnout here at Gustavus Adolphus College. I was told you can say Gustavus even though I thought you were supposed to say Gustavus. But it's good to be here. Now, mind you, agreeable, disagreeable, that's a good thing. Constructive conversations that are difficult, that's a good thing. It's OK to agree. I just want to say that. It is a difficult subject though. I have a prepared text. I'm going to share it with you and then be open for questions. So bear with me. The lecture proceeds in two parts. First, I'm going to critique the conventional wisdom that's widely embraced in today's elite academy about the sources of persisting racial inequality in America. Then I'm going to give voice to my concerns about how these institutions pursue racial diversity and inclusion in their own ranks. Both parts of this talk will take the position that thinking about these matters in elite higher education circles in America today is badly off key and in need of comprehensive revision. So part one. Why, I ask, the success of the civil rights movement, notwithstanding has the unequal economic status of black Americans persisted into the 21st century. Clear thinking about this difficult problem requires that we distinguish between the role played by anti-black discrimination, past and present, and the role of behavioral patterns to be found among some blacks. Now, this is, I admit, putting a very sensitive issue starkly. I willingly acknowledge that anti-black biases exist. And I insist that they be remedied. But I also think it is imperative to identify and address ourselves to the behavioral patterns that prevent some black people from seizing the newly opened opportunities. In recent writing, I have recast these two positions as causal narratives. What I call the bias narrative argues that the root cause of persisting disparity is found in anti-black racism. This is the view most often encountered on campuses nowadays. Discrimination causes racial inequality, so we must reform society to achieve a level playing field. The focus here is on the demand side of the labor market. Such reforms are necessary but not sufficient in my view. By contrast, the view which I would emphasize today, what I call the development narrative, is concerned with how people acquire the skills, traits, habits, and orientations that foster their successful participation in society. Its focus is on the supply side of the labor market. Its premise is that those who lack the experiences are not exposed to the influences and do not have access to the resources that foster and facilitate their human development. Those people will in general fail to achieve their full potential. Now, and of course, these two narratives, bias versus development, need not be mutually exclusive. What is clear, however, is that they point in very different directions in terms of intervention and remedy. This tension between a focus on demand side versus supply side factors to a conferational disparities is a very old theme for me. It's what led me to coin the term social capital. In my doctoral dissertation at MIT, in doing so, I was contrasting that concept, social capital, with the more familiar notion of human capital. As you may know, human capital theory studies inequality via a conceptual framework that was initially developed to explain investment decisions by firms and that focused on formal economic transactions. I thought this framework was not adequate when applied to explaining persistent racial disparities. I believe my concerns then remain relevant. I'll use my time here to explore these ideas more fully. My basic point in that thesis was that associating business with human investments is merely an analogy, not an identity, particularly when thinking about persistent racial disparities. Business investments are transactional. Human investments are essentially relational. So important things were overlooked in the human capital approach, things having to do with informal social relations. Conventional theory was incomplete when accounting for racial disparities, I thought, and there were two central aspects of this incompleteness. This led me to make two observations. One about the dynamics of human development and the other about the nature of racial identity. I wish to reiterate these observations because they remain relevant today. My first observation. My first observation was that all human development is socially situated and mediated. The development of human beings occurs inside social institutions. It is dialogic. It takes place as between people by way of human interactions. The family, the community, the school, the peer group. It is inside of these cultural institutions of human association where development is achieved. Resources essential to human development, the attention that a parent gives to her child, for instance, are not alienable. Developmental resources for the most part are not commodities. The development of human beings is not up for sale. Rather, networks of connections between people create the context within which developmental resources come to be allocated to individual persons. Opportunity travels along the synapses of these social networks. People are not machines. Their productivity, which is to say, the behavioral and cognitive capacities that bear on their social and economic functioning are not merely the result of some mechanical infusion of material resources. Rather, these capacities are the byproducts of social interactions mediated by human affiliation and connectivity. This was important, fundamentally important, I thought, and still think, for understanding persistent racial disparities in America. That's the first point I was making all those years ago about the incompleteness of human capital theory. My second observation was that what we are calling race in America is mainly a social and only indirectly a biological phenomenon. The persistence of cross generations of racial differentiation between large groups of people in an open society where people live in close proximity to one another, provides irrefutable indirect evidence of a profound separation between the racially defined networks of social affiliation in that society. But simply, there would be no races in the steady state of any dynamic social system unless on a daily basis, and in regard to their most intimate affairs, people paid assiduous attention to the boundaries separating themselves from racially distinct others. This is so because over time, race would cease to exist unless people were acting so as biologically to reproduce the variety of phenotypic expression that constitutes the substance of racial distinction. I cannot overemphasize this second sociological point. We speak so casually about racial equality and racial justice, and yet, race is not something given in nature. Rather, it is socially produced. It's something we are making and remaking. That there exists distinct races is an equilibrium phenomenon. It's endogenous. It follows that if the goal is to understand the roots of durable racial inequalities in any society, we must examine in some detail the processes causing race to persist as a fact in that society. Almost certainly, such processes will not be unrelated to the allocation among individuals of human developmental resources. Here, then, is my second observation in a nutshell. We economists need to recognize the limits of our tools to account for durable economic disparities by race. The creation and reproduction of such inequality ultimately rests on cultural conceptions people hold about their identities, about the desirability and legitimacy of conducting intimate relations with racially distinct others, and here I do not only mean sexual relations, although I do mean that, too. Racial inequality is not just the disparity of material resources. Most fundamentally, it is rooted in the decisions all of us are making about with whom to associate and with whom to identify. Such, anyway, was the gist of my argument. The contrast I drew in my doctoral dissertation all those many years ago at MIT between human and social capital was grounded in my conviction that such decisions determine the access people enjoy to the informal resources they require to develop their human potential. What I called social capital when I coined that term in 1976 is, on this view, an essential prerequisite for creating what economists routinely refer to as human capital. As economists, we know that human capital, that is, a person's skills, education, work experience, and social aptitudes is a key determinant of a person's earnings power and of his or her capacity to generate and to accumulate wealth. So social capital is an extension of human capital theory. The resources people need for their development are not all commodities acquired in markets as the result of transactions. Some of these resources are embedded in a person's social situation, e.g., the resources of a mother's attention to her health when a child is in her womb, the resource of peers with whom one associates and the things they valorize, which then become important things shaping the choices one makes about the acquisition of skills, the resource of information about what is possible to achieve that results from one's connection to others who have explored those possibilities. These are also factors or inputs into skills production, but these things are not commodities. So a financial deficit does not fully capture a deficit of these things. This was the idea I wanted to employ to give an account of durable racial inequality even after eliminating most discrimination. I wrote that dissertation in the mid-1970s just a decade beyond the big civil rights laws and quite early in this era of relatively fair market opportunities for people irrespective of race. The post-civil rights era is now more than a half century old. I'm not saying that things are perfect in terms of racial equality of treatment. Of course they are not. Obviously, things are not perfect, but it is a relatively level playing field now in terms of the valuation of skills. So the question before us is whether the disparities that history has produced for black people will necessarily wither away under this new dispensation. And my answer is no, they needn't because formal transactions in labor, credit, housing, and other markets are not the whole show. Also important are the informal interactions with one's peers, in neighborhoods and communities, given the structure of families, the nature of prevailing values, norms, and notions of identity, those to whom one is connected. Who one can call upon, who influences one, who informs one. These things matter, books in the home matter, whether the children are read to, whether parents turn off the television set, and so on. My social capital concept is a tool for thinking about inequality and its remedies. It disciplines us to appreciate the limits of anti-racism regulations in a world where developmental outcomes depend on non-market processes. It shifts the conversation away from a purely redistributive focus to a relational focus. I am not saying that people without money have no need of it. Rather, what I'm saying is that money is not the only thing they need. Talking in this way, I insist, is not blaming the victim. Oppressed groups, time and again, evolve notions of identity that cut against the mainstream. A culture can develop among them, inhibiting youngsters from taking those actions needed to develop their talent. Now I ask, do kids in a segregated dysfunctional peer group simply have the wrong utility functions? That's economic speak. Do they simply have the wrong preferences? I hold that it's a mistake to attribute dysfunctional behavior in an historically oppressed group of people to they're simply having the wrong preferences when their preferences have emerged from a set of historical experiences that reflect the larger society's social structures and activities. And yet, and by the same token, it is a grievous error to ignore the consequences of such behavior or to pretend it doesn't exist as many anti-racism advocates are now doing. Behavioral issues affecting black communities are real and must be faced squarely if one is to grasp why racial disparities persist. Self-evidently, the young men who are killing each other on the mean streets of St. Louis and Baltimore and Chicago are behaving abominably. Those bearing the cost of such behavior are mainly black people. An ideology that ascribes that behavior to racism is a bluff. It can't be taken seriously by serious people. Nobody really believes it, not really. Consider educational test score data. Anti-racism advocates are in effect daring you to say that some groups are represented at elite universities in outsized numbers compared to other groups because their academic preparation is magnitudes higher and better and finer. Such excellence is an achievement. People are not born knowing these things. One acquires such knowledge and mastery through effort. Why some youngsters have acquired these skills while others have not is a deep and interesting question, one which I'm quite prepared to entertain at length but the simple retort racism is laughable. As if such disparities have nothing to do with behavior, with cultural patterns, with what communities and peer groups value, with how people spend their time, with what people identify as being critical to their own sense of self-respect. And so Asians are said sardonically to be a model minority. Well, as a matter of fact, a pretty compelling case can be made that culture is critical to their success. Don't just take my word for it. Read the sociologist Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou's book, The Asian American Achievement Paradox. They interviewed families in Southern California trying to find out how these Asian kids get into Dartmouth and Columbia and Brown and Cornell and MIT and Caltech, et cetera at such high rates. What they find and report in that book is that these families do in fact exhibit cultural patterns, embrace values, adopt practices, engage in behavior, and follow disciplines that orient them so as to facilitate the achievements of their children. It defies common sense as well as the evidence to assert that they do not or conversely, and here's the point, to assert that the paucity of African Americans performing at the very top of the intellectual spectrum. I'm talking here about excellence and about the relative low numbers of blacks who exhibit it has nothing to do with the behavior of black people, that this outcome is due entirely to institutional forces. That's an absurdity. I maintain nobody really believes it. Neither does anyone believe that 70% of African American babies being born to a woman without a husband is one, a good thing. Nobody really thinks it's okay, or two is due to anti-black racism. They say it, but they don't really believe it. They're bluffing. They're daring you to observe that the 21st century failures of many African Americans to take full advantage of the opportunities created by the 20th century's revolution of civil rights are palpable and damning. And yet these failures are being denied at every turn. This I maintain is not a tenable position. The end of Jim Crow's segregation and the advent of equal rights for blacks now a half century on, was a game changer. And that now a half century on, we still face these disparities is shameful. The plain fact of the matter is that much of the responsibility for this sorry state of affairs lies with the behaviors of black people ourselves, a fact that the anti-racism crusaders in today's elite academy refused to acknowledge. What is more, there is a deep irony in first declaring white America to be systemically and essentially racist, and then mounting a campaign to demand that those very same whites recognize their own racism and deliver black people from its consequences. I wanna say to these advocates, if indeed you are right that your oppressors are racist, why would you expect them to respond to a moral appeal? You are in effect putting yourself at the mercy of the court, while simultaneously decrying that the court is biased. This idea is disempowering in the extreme. I'm gonna shift now to part two of my lecture, explaining what's wrong with racial affirmative action in higher education. There will be an opportunity for you to respond, so keep your powder dry. I begin the second part of my lecture with a provocation, affirmative action in American higher education is not about equality, it's about covering ass. In saying this, I wish to draw your attention to the difference between a university's interest to admit a diverse student body and the long-term interest rightly understood of a population that may be beneficiaries of such a largesse. My point is that genuine equality is distinct from titular equality. Substantive equality is not the same thing as optics equality, equality of respect, honor, dignity and standing, equality of achievement and mastery. These are not the same things as statistical parity among demographic groups. True equality of respect, the only equality worthy of the name is distinct from today's popular sloganeering that celebrates diversity, equity and inclusion. For what are euphemistically referred to as historically underrepresented groups. And by the way and transparently, that phrase is only another way to avoid saying for non-white identity groups that do not perform well on standardized tests. An affirmative action policy that entails the permanent lowering of standards and academic qualifications for admitting black applicants into competitive academic venues is on this argument not really an egalitarian policy at all. To the contrary, it can be a patronizing and dishonest end run around the very difficult task of developing the full human potential of all of our people. Affirmative distraction, not affirmative action. As we stand here a half century past the advent of racial preferences and higher education admissions, I'm urging that we think carefully about institutionalizing selection methods that rely on racially differential academic standards. I urge us to consider that while such a system can indeed equalize representation, it is simply inconsistent over the longer term with achieving genuine equality of respect. I set this argument within an historical context. A half century ago, black Americans emerging from Jim Crow segregation and widespread discrimination had actually been impeded in terms of developing our competitive and productive capacities. Education was not equal in 1930 nor in 1950 nor in 1970, nor indeed is it equal today. There were negative consequences of discrimination in employment and of segregated residential neighborhoods and of differences in the quality of schools that young people attended. These disparities impeded development within the black American population of our innate potential for academic performance. These effects are visible in American society even to this day, I grant you that. Given such a history, one cannot expect that at day one there would have been equality of test scores or other measures of achievement since background conditions did not afford blacks an equal chance to achieve our full human potential. That was the status quo ante from which affirmative action emerged. A half century ago, the baseline from which we endeavored to move forward towards something more equal, such were the conditions in which the routine employment of racial preferences and higher education admissions at the elite schools emerged. That was a difficult historical challenge and we are now here, the first quarter of the 21st century already nearly gone at a crossroads. We need, I am arguing, to step back and reevaluate. I'm not here objecting to affirmative action in principle by declaring that it's unjust racial discrimination and reversed. That it is intrinsically unfair to its non-beneficiaries. That's not my argument. As in historical matter, in my opinion, in the transition from the status quo ante of exclusion, it was both necessary and proper to rely upon preferential methods as a stop-gap mechanism. But that was treating the symptoms of black underdevelopment, not curing the disease. At the end of the day, we must address the fundamental developmental deficits that impede the ability of African Americans to compete. Rather than doing this, we are settling into a second best remedy, using lower standards for judging the fitness of black applicants. That's a mistake. It's a profound error. I'm arguing that it's a mistake to use preferences to cover for the consequences of our racially unjust history. It's cheap grace for elite higher education and it ultimately black people will be the ones left at the short end of this deal. The permanent reliance on racial preference to select elites invites patronization, condescension, contempt, dishonesty, shame, and the erosion of standards in those selective venues where the competition for status is most keen. I'm not here concerned with any particular mechanism of selection, you may not like the SAT scores. You may prefer to use letters of recommendation or high school GPAs when deciding on college admissions, but whatever the mechanism of selection I hold, it should eventually come to be applied in the same way for selecting black Americans as anyone else. Otherwise, the end result will fall short of genuine equality. This is a statistical argument, not an ethical argument. Here's my point. My point is that there will surely be post-selection differences in the performance of students by race on average. If one uses different pre-selection criteria when choosing them, so long as the pre-selection criteria being used actually correlate with post-selection performance. If these selection criteria like standardized test scores or earlier grades or advanced placement enrollment or the quality of writing or whatever other indicia one may want to use, if these things are not correlated with performance, then they should not be used at all to select admittees of any race, and particularly so when they have a disparate impact on a historically disadvantaged group. But such criteria have been used precisely because as we all know, they are in fact correlated with post-admissions performance to some degree. The context matters here, of course. For graduate education in the STEM fields, we might be talking about the GREQ. For undergraduate education in the liberal arts, we might be talking about the SAT verbal. But in either case, the relevant assessment criteria, the test scores correlate in a large population with post-selection performance. Now, if we're gonna be using different cutoffs by race, and we are with a vengeance, just look at the data produced by discovery in the Harvard case, that's before the Supreme Court right now, for instance, there are huge disparities in the indicia of academic preparation characteristic of applicant populations by race to Harvard. And that's but one example, and we only know about its details because there's a lawsuit in the discovery process has brought those data to public view. Transparency in such matters is pretty hard to come by. I argue that where we have different criteria of selection by race, there will be different post-selection performance by race if the criteria in question correlate with performance. That's not my opinion. That's the law of large numbers. These are large samples. This is a statistical necessity on average. What's the consequence of that? We're in the right tail now, we're selecting elites. The consequence of using racial preferences to promote representation of the disadvantaged in venues of high selectivity is either that we acknowledge post-admissions performance disparities by race, which is humiliating, or we cover them up by flattening our post-selection performance assessment criteria. That is to say, we either humiliate those being preferred or we pretend these predictable racial performance disparities don't exist, which is a lie. The dishonesty can be stifling. My claim is that right tail selection plus racially preferential selection is ultimately inconsistent with true racial equality. It will get you representation, but it will not get you true equality. That is, not an equality of dignity, of standing, and of respect. This latter I hold ultimately depends on something approximating equality of performance. It should be clear that different average performance by race in a highly competitive elite setting is to be avoided. We can pretend it doesn't exist. We can look the other way. We can grade inflate. We can formulate various institutional responses to the fact of racially differential average performance in our competitive venues. That is, we can live with the result, especially since the beneficiaries of affirmative action are a relatively small part of an institution's overall student body. But in doing so, have we really moved closer to creating a just society? What I'm trying to get at here is that we should be concerned about the quality of racial equality, about the distinction between counting people by race while saying we are diverse and inclusive. On the one hand, and on the other hand, developing the capacities for performance of our young people who belong to historically disadvantaged and underrepresented groups. Now people here are gonna accuse me of stigmatizing students of color who benefit from affirmative action because I point to post-admission's performance differences by race's grounds for concern. That's a red herring. Recall, I'm talking about selection of elites when I distinguish between what I called ass-covering representation and substantive equality. I'm not talking about selection in the fat part of the population distribution. Those selected are taken to be exceptional performers. The honor conveyed to them comes from the distinction of being identified as one of those young people in society who truly excel, who are capable of extraordinary achievement, who are in the top five or 10% and so on. At Brown University, where I teach, we admit 1,800 students or so each year out of over 30,000 applicants. Something similar is true at Harvard. The fact of having been selected is meant to convey that you have been vetted compared to others and found to be an outstanding prospect amongst your peers. That is an honor, a certification of merit. Note, affirmative action in higher education is mainly practiced only at the top tier institutions. Such selection mechanisms stamp people and certify them as being extraordinary among their peers. Now we're now, in effect, making such certifications separately by racial identity group. This is an unavoidable implication of using race as a criterion of admission at elite schools alongside standardized achievement criteria. Peter R. C. Diakono, an economist who was expert witness for plaintiffs in the Harvard Affirmative Action case that is now at the Supreme Court, has studied students at his home institution, Duke, who elect upon entry to pursue science, engineering, and mathematics type curricula in the STEM fields. He wants to know how likely it is that students abandon their intent to study the technical curriculum and switch over to less quantitative lines of study as a function of students' race and pre-admission characteristics like their test scores and prior grades. Using data on Duke undergraduates, he found that more than half of the black students in his sample who began intending to pursue STEM area studies ended up switching out before graduation compared to under 10% of white students in the same situation. But he also found that if he were to control for the test scores and grades of the students upon entering Duke, then conditional on test scores and grades, there was no racial disparity in the probability of leaving STEM. What this data from Duke indicates is that the black students interested in STEM but with lower technical qualifications and their pre-admissions profiles were simply unable to persist in their study of the technical curriculum. I ask you, is such a result consistent with genuine racial equality of respect and standing? Let me give another example. I've actually been told on more than one occasion, Soto Voce, by law firm partners in New York and Chicago that for optics sake, they hire associates of color who they don't believe are all that good. But they know that again, for optics sake, they're gonna have to make some of them partners because the firm can't stand the reputational hit of having a class of partners with an inadequate number of non-whites in it. And without wanting to be quoted by name, they say, I shudder at this prospect. And yet the logic of affirmative action compels this very outcome. And now we're confronted at the firm with an ex post facto situation in which everybody knows that there are these disparities by race and performance, but nobody is willing to say so since it is politically incorrect and professionally dangerous to do so. I call to your attention the case of Sandra Sellers, a lecturer at the Georgetown Law Center. You can look her up who a couple of years ago was caught on a hot mic reporting that in her class on negotiations, the students clustering at the bottom in terms of poor academic performance were disproportionately black. She abhorred that that was the case, lamented that that was the case, but reported that it was nonetheless the case. She was caught on a hot mic saying that she didn't know that she was being recorded. When that was made public, there was a firestorm of protest and lamentation at Georgetown Law decrying the racism of the institution, how dare a professor merely report the fact of racial differential performance in her classroom. That's where we are with affirmative action. I'm just saying it ain't equality. Affirmative action in 1980 was one thing. Taking that as a year marking the transition from the era of discrimination to an era of aggressive efforts to achieve diversity and inclusion. However, affirmative action as the institutionalized and ongoing practice of using differential standards by race when selecting among applicants who compete for highly valued positions, that's another thing altogether. If equality of respect is what we seek, then the latter is extremely problematic. So my concerns about affirmative action don't go all the way down. I understand the historical contingencies that I've given rise to it. I identify with the well-meaning sentiments of those who advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion, but I cannot get past this point that I'm trying to make to you here. Which is that if you're assessing students, they're competing with one another to get into a venue of academic performance whereby definition that everybody can do it well, that's the whole point. It's elite. If you have different standards by race and you judge blacks by a less exacting standard, you're gonna get on average less impressive performance from the people who are selected. Again, that's not my opinion. That is not equality. Now we have to make a choice here about what we're doing. Are we playing shell games with each other? So that photo ops, past muster, or are we actually gonna get busy dealing with the consequences of our history, reflected in the differential performance of our racially defined kids in these very competitive venues. I understand that a single institution cannot solve that problem on its own. I understand fully well the path of least resistance is tempting to take. If you're a single institution, you don't control primary and secondary education. You don't control federal policy about how do you deal with indigent families. You don't control the matrix of values and cultural influences that are affecting the way that kids develop their human potential. And so the path of least resistance, the path to covering your derriere is to simply say, okay, the black kids don't have to be at the 95th percentile of the LSAT test takers to get into my law school. They can be at the 70th percentile and still get into my law school. That's not bad for a black kid. That's basically the unspoken context. Not bad for a black kid. I understand that that's the path of least resistance. But it offends me. It offends my sense of dignity. There's an alternative. I would argue and we should be pursuing it. Direct societal attention at the underlying structures generating these differences in performance and prepare ourselves for the possibility that not every group does everything equally well all the time. There will maybe more Asians than in the population presenting themselves in the engineering school and there won't be more Jews than in the population mastering the heights of finance. That might happen. It's not the end of the world. We can live with it. What we can't live with is the institutionalized patronization of black people. That is no place to go. If we want there to be more black physicists or more black literary critics or more black economists then we should do something about the educational dynamic that produces such huge disparities in the pre-selection performance by race on those criteria used to select students to study those subjects at elite institutions. The stakes here are quite high. Racially preferential treatment in elite higher education normalizes a way of thinking about race, equality, and equity that has far-reaching implications. There are some kind of goods which simply cannot be redistributed because the very act of redistribution undermines the quality of the good in question. Human distinction is one such good. There's no shortcut to it. You have to actually do the work as they say. I'm issuing a cry from the heart here. Please don't patronize my people. Don't judge us by a different standard. Don't incomparable with the soft bigotry of low expectations. Don't underestimate us. Keep the bar high. We'll get there or we won't. I can live with that. What I can't live with is being patronized. This is a plea to elite gatekeepers to pull back from the brink. I don't know that it's even an argument at this point as much as it is an expression of sentiment on my part, though there is logic behind it as I've tried to demonstrate. The consequences of American history have left us facing a huge project of developing the human potential of African American people in this society. The legacy of our ignoble history is partly reflected in deficiencies and inadequacies of performance so that the relative number of African Americans excelling at certain kinds of rarefied intellectual pursuits is low. Excuse me. Taking the long view of history, the only viable solution to that inheritance is a focus on enhancing the capacities of African American people to perform. That is a huge, multi-dimensional, decades-long project. Institutional dependence on racial preferences merely diverts us from that necessary task. Now, as I've said, I understand that running an elite institution, for example, those people who do so don't have control over all the venues of human interaction in which development should take place. They don't govern much of that process, of that pipeline at all. They govern only a very small sliver at the back end of a long process. They don't control primary and secondary education. They don't control preschool education. They don't influence family life and peer group culture and the extent of economic disadvantage that may impede young people from achieving greater academic success. They don't control the federal budget for supporting low-income families and so forth and so on. So there's only so much that those decision makers running elite institutions can do, but from a societal point of view, the challenge before us is to bring this segment of our population to a point where it's able to fully realize its potential, which has to some degree been stifled by history. And I want this to be done in a way that does not patronize that population and that doesn't abandon our standards of excellence. We're now in the year 2023. We're more than a half century past the advent of affirmative action. We need to take stock. We need to be serious about assessing the consequences of what we do. And when I venture down that road, I have my doubts. Again, let me not mince words. The goal should be racial equality. The long-term goal of what we do in the aftermath of our ignoble history should be creating a circumstance of equal dignity, respect, standing and status across racial group lines. We are a long way from doing that, institutionalizing the practice of preferential affirmative action when assessing African-Americans for selection into highly competitive arenas that is using different standards when judging the fitness of African-American aspirants who compete with others for access to these selective and elite venues. That is, making that an ongoing way of doing business is inconsistent with the goal of racial equality. It invites us to become liars. It invites us to pretend that things that are true are not true. It invites us to look the other way. I repeat myself, it's undignified. It's patronizing. Let me say it again. Knowing that I'm being judged by standards that are different and less rigorous in virtue of the fact that my ancestors suffered some indignity is itself undignified. It's patronizing. It's not equality. It's the opposite of equality. Fair treatment for all, regardless of their identities, is what we should strive for, not parity of group representation. This general point applies well beyond the historical context of race in the United States. Indeed, and I will conclude. There's a fatal contradiction at the heart of the argument for group equality of social outcomes. In my considered opinion, we are not to expect group equality of social outcomes, and we are not ought to make achieving it our goal. Equality of opportunity, not equality of results is the only defensible public policy goal in my view. The dogged pursuit of equality of results between racial groups across all venues of human endeavor is a formula for tyranny and yet more racism. Here's why. Identity-based arguments for group equality posit that we have different groups. We have Jews, we have South Asians, East Asians, we have blacks, we have Latinos, et cetera. And that these groups have identities deserving to be acknowledged and respected. When someone tells me I identify as a member of group X, I'm given to understand that this is a part of their personhood, which wants to be respected and given credence. So groups are fundamental building blocks of society in this identity-focused view of the world. They are not a matter of indifference. We are in these various boxes. Groups matter, a group's culture and heritage matters to its members. The music they listen to, the food they eat, the literature they read, the stories they tell their children, all of these things for the identitarians are important and they vary across groups. On the other hand, these very same group identitarians want to be group egalitarians. And they presuppose that absent injustice, there would be equality of groups across every human enterprise, but how can that be? Because if indeed groups matter, some people are going to bounce a basketball 100,000 times a month and other people are gonna bounce the basketball 10,000 times a month. Some people are gonna be drawn to books as a way of experiencing human culture and other people are gonna be, I don't know, more verbal or more spontaneous or whatever it might be. There are differences between groups and culture. Groups matter after all. They're not all the same. They don't do the same things. They don't believe the same things. They don't think the same things. They don't spend their time in the same way. So now, I have a population with groups and the groups have their own integrity, expressing themselves in how they live their lives, how they raise their children, how they spend their time. This will inevitably result in different representation of the groups' members across various human activities. The various groups' members will not all be involved in academic pursuits in the business world, in the professions, in sports and entertainment to the same degree. They will not all have the same occupational or professional profiles. If groupness actually matters for the identitarians, then this groupness must be reflected to some degree in how people choose to live their lives. How then can egalitarians insist that society is unfair unless it yields an equal proportionate representation of these diverse groups in every human enterprise? That's simply a logical contradiction. Acting in a determined way on that contradiction can only lead to tyranny, to disappointment, to conflict, and to more racism. Four, if we try to erase those cultural and behavioral distinctions that constitute the substance of groupness, putting everybody in one social milieu, overriding the autonomy of parents, socializing child rearing, and so on, we might then be able to flatten the social terrain enough to achieve group equality, but to do this would be tyrannical. It would extinguish our freedom as individual persons to associate with each other, to believe and to live as we please. And should such a draconian policy fail to produce group equality as seems more than likely, we'd end up with the question, how come so many Jews or Asians or whites or whatever are in medical school with PhDs in electrical engineering at the top of the income distribution? That's where identity-based group egalitarianism ultimately leads. There's no end to the quest for group equality if indeed group identities are meaningful and persistent. The presumption of group equality in the face of group distinctions of social organization, culture, and values leads either to the tyrannical imposition of uniform standards in a vain attempt to tamp down the authentic expression of groupness or to endless finger-pointing and suspicion whenever some group of people moves ahead of or falls behind the pack in this or that arena of achievement. Remember, there can be no underrepresentation without overrepresentation. The fractions have to add up to one. So if one group has got more than their share in the population, somebody else has got less than their share. So the complaint that we have underrepresentation is an effect, an indictment of those who are quote-unquote overrepresented. It presupposes that their success is not the product of their effort, not the result of their behavior, not the consequence of their mastery over craft and technique, but is instead somehow an expression of social unfairness. That is a formula for perpetual conflict, not for social justice. It's a temptation that we should resist. Thank you. Okay, oh, there we go. Hi, I'm Barbara Larson Taylor. I work in the marketing office and I help with logistics at different events. Thank you, Dr. Lowry, for those really interesting remarks. We really appreciate you being here. Thank you. While you're thinking of your question, two announcements I want to make. One is that because of COVID, we are blessed to have two Lyndell residents in current conservative thought this spring. So April 19th and 20th, we'll be having Russell Moore. He is editor-in-chief of Christianity Today. He'll be on our campus. Two opportunities that are more open to the public. One is on the Wednesday night, is a dessert in discussion for students. And on the Thursday, April 20th, in Christchapel, he'll be there for Daily Sabbath with a reception following. So keep your eye out for that. And also just another thank you to the Lyndell family. And if Karen Lyndell-Piker could just stand, she is the daughter of the Lyndell family here today. And just let's say thank you to the Lyndell's right here. Thank you, Karen, and to your parents for their vision for this. So now, some questions. You know, I will start on wherever I see some hands. And I have one mic, so I will go, you know, maybe one side and the other. And we have one right here, right in the middle. That's easy to start. Sir, a colleague, John McWhorter, gave some policies and recommendations about what raises some mechanisms that would presumably help black people and help produce a disparity. What ideas, if any, do you have? I'm sorry, what was the question again? Okay, so John McWhorter has one. Yeah, yeah, I heard that part. Yeah, I was wondering what some ideas you have on that matter. Allow for more open competition for the provision of educational services to disadvantaged families by breaking up the monopoly that public school teachers and unions have over the provision of those services. More charter schools. Let my people go. Service providers work for the citizens, not the other way around. They're not entitled to the patronage of their charges. They have to earn it. So let's open up educational service provision to the best and most effective providers of it, regardless of whether or not they are a part of the care of establishment. That's controversial. I was about to ask, if you were in charge of the Chicago Public Schools, what would you do? But I won't ask that now, since I kind of have an answer, but I'm curious about, it is such a hard position, I think, to be in charge of an institution, the school, whether it's an individual school, it could be a charter school. But you can't control the family, right, on the kitchen table. I just wonder what you think, like how much can a K-12 setting really do, apart from the social capital formation that I imagine you may say happens more at home? I'm just curious about what can schools do at the K-12 level, 12 level? Well, they can teach the rewriting and arithmetic and stay out of the business of trying to foist on our children, whatever the latter day, liberationist, post-modern ideology might be, of course. That's also a controversial statement. You know, I'm not a public school educator, I'm not a K-12 educator, so anything I say here is gonna be a little bit off the top of my head. And I do think that the complementarity between what goes on in the home and what goes on in the school is very important. I'm a fan of early childhood education, of early innovation, of getting into the thing as early as possible. I have a classmate of mine, his name is Ronald Ferguson, he teaches at the Kennedy School at Harvard, who's launched a movement. You can look it up, the basics, the basics movement, Ron Ferguson, if you go to Google, you'll find information on him and what they're trying to do, they're in a dozen countries and they're in 30 states around the United States, whatnot, is educate parents from the very beginning about the importance of stimulating the early cognitive development of children from infancy before they ever get to the school. So that kind of thing, which is just one person's effort, the network has been developed, they are, I think, doing good work, but they are a relatively drop in the bucket compared to the magnitude of the problem. That kind of thing, and again, forgive me for not having an education policy agenda on the tip of my tongue. All right, other questions? Okay, can we get the mic over? Thank you, Dr. Lowry. In addition to all your academic work, I want to thank you for the Glenccio, which I think is an invaluable forum for heterodox ideas about not just about race, but about many different topics. I've been a loyal listener for years and I really appreciate it. Thank you. So my question is about the idea of colorblindness and how it's gone from being the ideal toward which, as a society, we're striving to now being an indicator of racism when you say that you're colorblind, and what do you think that says about how the discussion of race, how it's shifted in our society, and do you see any signs that the pendulum is sort of swinging away from Ebermeck's candy and his ilk, and that maybe we're sort of, I detected some bit of optimism in your discussion with Dr. McWhorter on your show, so did you feel like that we're kind of moving in the right direction, or are you still pretty pessimistic about the dialogue on race in the US? Okay, that's a lot, colorblindness. This is a straightforward thing. People are against colorblindness because it constrains them from doing the kinds of policy interventions that are racially preferential to the groups that they wanna favor. So whereas the moral argument against Jim Crowe that Martin Luther King gave voice to in that famous address he gave at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, this I Have a Dream and so forth, that moral imperative that we are Americans here, first and foremost, that our racial identity is a relatively insignificant factor that should in no way infringe upon our citizenship. He wants his children in 1963 to be judged by the content of their character, not by the color of their skin. That happens to be the morally correct position, in my opinion. We're not our race. This is relatively superficial. We don't wanna build a society in which we essentialize these essential, these inessential features of our humanity. Now that's easier said than done, especially when you're dealing with the consequences of racialized history so that you've got urban districts in which you have concentration of minority residents who are relatively low income who are disadvantaged and so forth, and that's a product of our history. Blindness to that consequence of our history is inane. It's an attempt to define away a problem. But in terms of structuring our institutions in an ongoing way, our courts, for example, wildly disparate outcomes. Half of the people in their lock and key in this country are people of color. The idea that you would so design courts that they would not be colorblind, which is to say that the processes of justice would not attend to the racial identity of the defendant. Oh, we gotta have a different standard of assessing this case because the defendant is blacks and blacks are disadvantaged, is obviously wrong to us. I think that that same insight applies in many other areas. So I'm for colorblindness. I'm for the principle of we care about people because of their humanity, not because of their racial identity. So that's what I think is going on. I think people have rejected the obvious implication of the historically significant moral insight that the civil rights movement brought to the fore of these are our citizens. These are our people. They stand on equal footing regardless of the racial identity and that's a move of convenience. It's a move that allows us to avoid having to do what it is I've advocated to be done here in this lecture, which has addressed the consequences of history in terms of people's actual development to perform. What was the rest of your question? Are you off to this question? I think things are in flux. I get this question asked a lot. Are we past peak woke? Have we reached peak woke? And there's a lot of pushback against woke. I mean, there's the argument about critical race theory and K through 12, for example, there's the effort that some people are making a pushback against the woke DAs and prosecutors around the country who are dealing with high criminal victimization in their constituencies and so on. And you know where I stand, I say some of these arguments are absurd. They're absurd on their face, I think. And I don't think that they can hold in the long run. I think people are cowed. People are self-sensoring. People are not saying what they really think. What kind of things might they really think? So you get an incident, George Floyd in Minneapolis, Michael Brown in Ferguson, Tyree Nichols in Memphis, Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Eric Gardner in New York. You get an incident. People interacting with the police. Was this guy in Milwaukee? I can't remember his name now. But there are a lot of them. So you see the video. So the cops are doing stuff and there's question about whether or not the cops have acted out or would not like that. But the person on the other side of that interaction is also doing stuff. They're running away from the cop. They're engaged in activities that are, frankly, the kind that attract the attention of police in the first place, like trying to pass counterfeit currency and they're resisting arrest there, et cetera. What are we supposed to say? What we're supposed to say is it's open season on black people. Cops are off the hook. They're all a bunch of racists, et cetera, et cetera. What are people actually thinking? I think a lot of people are actually thinking. All they had to do was comply with the police officers directive and whatnot. And when you get the riot from the people waving the banner saying justice, or when you get the Reverend Al Sharpton holding forth at the funeral ceremony of somebody as if he were representing the height of nobility and ethical purity, a lot of people are saying that's an ambulance chasing huckster who's pulling the wool over your eyes. And when you get a political party, I'm talking about the Democrats. Building electoral coalitions around foisting false narratives on the American people about these difficult and ambiguous incidents. You get a lot of people saying, I'm gonna vote for Donald Trump, damn it. And you're gonna call me a racist, that's fine with me. So, you know, you ask me if I'm optimistic. I don't know whether or not that outcome that I just got through describing is anything good. It's not good for wokeness, but I don't know if it's good for the country. We have time for maybe one or two more questions, yeah. Well, thank you for being here. I assume you're very familiar with the ethical cause that first generation in black students. I'm sorry, very familiar with what? The ethical cause that first generation African American students bear for the sake of upward mobility. My question for you is what advice do you have for these first generation black students who wanna prioritize academic achievement while balancing the relationships with their friends and family and communities? Let me see if I understand the question. So it's a tough role to hold being a black student trying to get a hit, especially first generation. Some of these students, I'm now rephrasing your question to make sure I understand that some of these students just wanna put their head down and get their work done, but they might find themselves on the outs socially because other students of color will look a scans at them for their focus on academic achievement. Did I understand your question correctly? Sorry. Well, I don't hear that well, so I might not have heard everything you said, but please tell me what your question is so I can respond to it. I'm referring to the ethical costs, like giving up the relationship. Ethical? Ethical costs, yes. That African American students and first generation college students bear in order, I'm sorry, for the sake of upward mobility like coming to college, and those ethical costs being, having to choose between prioritizing academic achievement or having to go home and help the family and stuff like that. Oh, okay. There are economic pressures and there's a sense of you're leaving people behind if you just take care of your own business and go on. Yes, sir. Okay, and that's tough. It was mentioned, Amarita mentioned that I'm just finishing my memoir and it's gonna be published next year. And in it, I tell a story about, I'm from Chicago, I'm from the South side of Chicago from a working class black family in Chicago. And he's gone now, my uncle Alfred, but he was the patriarch, the longest living of the group of people that included my mother and her brothers and sisters. And he was the last survivor into his 80s. And I was already a professor at Harvard when I go back to Chicago to visit the family and he took me inside one day and he said, son, we can only send one off to Harvard and MIT and all of that. And he said, you, we don't see us in anything that you do. He said to me, and it broke my heart because I thought I was carrying the ball forward. I thought I was the next stage in the evolution of our families in effect, assimilation into the structures of American society. But he was basically saying you're inauthentic, you're not black enough. And that hurt me. But I, on reflection, thought, my God, he's trying to put me in a box. He's trying to make me live his life, not my life. I wish that he had had more opportunity and a wider menu of options and a greater exposure to all that the world has to offer. When he was a kid, he did. And he came up into 30s and 40s and it was American 30s and 40s for black people. He didn't, but I did. And I can't let my embrace of that be stifled by his resentment. He can't live my life. I can't live his life. I'm carrying the ball forward. I did not abandon my roots. I may well have transcended some of the limitations that had been imposed upon us, but I gotta do me. You gotta do you. And by the way, by the way, black people will be proud of you if you do you, start a business, get a degree, enter a profession, achieve mastery over a craft, make something. That's the only ticket to equality in my opinion. One last question. Thank you, and thank you for Professor Lowry. The reason I'm here is that in your most recent conversation with John, you mentioned that you were going to a school in Minnesota next week. It's up to you or a little college somewhere in Minnesota that you have to take two planes and then ride for an hour in a car to get to, and I'm here. Exactly. Yeah, my rowboat is pulled up outside. I made it, though. The question that I'd like to ask you, well, is the same one that I asked Wilfred Riley recently when he came to town. I may be something of an odd duck. I'm one of your left-wing fans, and I became a fan largely through your conversations with John McWhorter, which I believe, I hope I won't embarrass you by saying this, are the only prominent public conversation between a left and right intellectual that is undergirded, not just by respect for the craft of debate and rhetoric, but by actual love, and it comes across. And I see that as necessary for the soul of this country. So the question I would like to ask you, as somebody who feels as though his own team is somehow off course, okay? When I was the age of the average person in this room, I was a member of the young socialists, the country's largest communist youth organization. So the me who was 21, if he knew that I was coming to the conservative lecture series in middle age, I think sellout would be the nicest word he would say. What I would like to ask you is, what is the telos of the left? What are we here for? Why do we exist? Is it not true that something important would be lost if we all vanished tomorrow? And everyone left on the planet was a conservative. Is it not true that that would be a problem? What are we here for? What does a healthy left look like? Well, not being a man of the left, I'm perhaps not the person to ask that question of, but I'll try. Oh, and I wanna mention, you know, Cornell West and Robbie George have been having an ongoing dialogue of their own for years now, and Cornell's a man of the left, and Robbie's a conservative the last time I checked. Loved your conversation with him with Tedros Curos. And there's a lot of mutual respect and even love between those two guys. They do really have a good relationship. So we're not alone in John and I in doing that. Robbie may be to my right, I'm the right partner of the John and Glenn show, and Cornell is almost certainly to John's left. So there's even more of a schism that's being bridged with those two than in our case. The left does have something to say, I think. I have said on my show, you may have heard me say it, that I'm married to a Bernie Sanders loving, socialist loving woman. I debated Richard Wolfe, the Marxist economist, and my wife, LaWan, moderated the debate, and I was annoyed with her because she seemed to be giving him more play. And her questions seem to be tilted in favor of the left-wing position. So we have an ongoing, loving, set of exchanges, and I think I've learned from her. She says that wealth is too unequally distributed and that the rich and powerful have too much influence over American public life. There's probably something to that. I say capitalism with a good welfare state, okay? Not socialism where the government is making decisions about resource allocation. Capitalism, but where people don't go without food if they're hungry, where they don't go without housing if they're ill-housed and stuff like that. A decent safety net. And then there's a question about what that safety net is gonna consist in, and there are countries in the general sphere of private property and capitalism differ a lot with respect to how it is that they respond to these social welfare needs and so forth. And the left has something to say about that. But I'm glad that Bernie is not president of the United States and that the House of Representatives is not dominated by socialists. I think that's the road to serfdom. I mean, it's literally the road to impoverishing ourselves and reminding our freedom. On the other hand, I think when I hear Cornell West invade against militarism, against the US having to put a navy in every ocean having to make the settling of disputes all across the globe, the business of our taxpayers and of our military, I think when he raises questions about whether or not our national security state endangers our personal liberties, that these are things that a person has to take really very, very seriously. I don't agree with him about an open border. I think you don't have a country if you don't have a border. On the other hand, I think the debate about what in the modern 21st century globalized society, I'm talking about the global society, what the role of the hegemon United States should be, our legitimate questions on which the left has something to contribute. I think the impulse to hold on to our cultural understandings that we've inherited from our forebears around how it is that we deal with sexuality and things of this kind under pressure because things are changing as we go on. And the left and the conservatives have a different position in that. At my show, had a couple of occasions to interview my son, Glenn II, who's an openly gay man with a partner that he's been with for a decade. And when he came out, I had some problems with that. I'll be honest with you, I really did. I had to really struggle not only to accept him, but to not feel regret at my son's sexuality. And I don't feel that way anymore. And I'm really, really glad that I don't feel that way. And I didn't learn that from the conservatives, not to feel that way. So, something like that. Well, thank you. And what we had Dr. Robert George here is one of our Lindo residents in conservative thought, which was just a thrill. So please join me in thanking Dr. Lowry for being here. Thank you. Thank you very much.