The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions
William G. Bowen *58 and Derek Bok
Princeton University Press, $24.95
Affirmative
action in higher educa
tion is a contentious subject -- and
at the moment its supporters are on the defensive. Federal Courts
in Texas and Michigan have prohibited public institutions from considering
race in admissions processes; the Supreme Court will decide this year
whether these rulings should be extended or modified. Voters in California
have rejected affirmative action. The result (at least in Texas and in
California) has been a sharp decrease in black and Hispanic students at the best
state schools.
While voters have rejected affirmative action as unfair, and courts have declared it unconstitutional, scholars and intellectuals such as Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom have argued that affirmative action simply does not work. It harms its intended beneficiaries by forcing them to compete in races they can only lose, and it makes suspect the legitimate achievements of all minorities.
Notably absent from this debate have been facts. We know very little about how affirmative action works. How heavy is the thumb on the scale? How do students admitted because of race preference fare? What happens to the students denied admission at the colleges of their choice because of affirmative action? William G. Bowen *58 and Derek Bok -- former presidents of Princeton and Harvard, respectively -- have written a passionate and precise book, The Shape of the River, which fills this void. It marshals new and convincing evidence for the case that affirmative action at America's elite colleges and universities has been a success. The evidence is the admissions records, college performance, life histories, and attitudes of more than 60,000 students who attended 28 elite colleges and universities -- including Princeton -- in 1976 and 1989. (See box.)
Bowen and Bok reject the metaphor of the educational process as a pipeline. It is, they argue, "more helpful to think of the nurturing of talent as a process akin to moving down a winding river, with rock-strewn rapids and slow channels, muddy at times and clear at others."
The two main conclusions of The Shape of the River are simple, but the careful qualifications that go with them are not. The first conclusion is that many blacks (sample limitations preclude much discussion of other racial and ethnic groups) who entered elite colleges and universities would not have been admitted had these institutions not followed a conscious policy of seeking a racially diverse student body. However, while racial preference helped them, the blacks admitted to our best colleges and universities are well qualified academically. The mean SAT score for blacks who entered four elite schools in 1989 was marginally higher than the mean SAT score of the (overwhelmingly white) students who entered these same four schools in 1951.
Bowen and Bok's second conclusion is that affirmative action works. Blacks attending elite colleges and universities do much better than similarly qualified blacks who attend less selective schools. They are more likely to graduate from college and to attend and graduate from professional schools. In professional life they make more money and tend to be more satisfied with their jobs and more likely to participate -- and assume leadership roles -- in civic activities. In general, the more selective the school, the greater the effect.
IS THERE A COST TO WHITES?
The boost that blacks get from attending elite colleges is a benefit of affirmative action. But what about the cost to whites denied places at colleges so that blacks could attend? The evidence in The Shape of the River is that whites lost less (in terms of graduation rates, economic success, and other measures) than blacks gained. It is a debater's point (and one that Bowen and Bok do not make) that simple utilitarianism -- "The greatest good for the greatest number" -- supports affirmative action, at least as practiced by our elite colleges and universities.
The Shape of the River is both simple and complex. It is simple because, as we have seen, the main conclusions can be stated easily. It is complex because the authors carefully qualify their conclusions and state precisely their bases. The authors also make statements that raise questions. They state, for example, that beneficiaries of affirmative action "generally had successful careers, in college and after." What does "success" refer to -- grades, graduation rates, continuing graduate and professional education, economic achievement, or other, more intangible things such as satisfaction with life and civic engagement? The word "generally" indicates that experiences varied. What factors correlate most closely with success -- academic ability, race, social background, or college selectivity?
The authors of The Shape of the River are educators. They describe their findings in all their intricacy before offering summary statements or judgments. Bowen and Bok want readers to confront the data in all their complexity as much as they want them to share their conclusions. The Shape of the River is testimony to its authors' belief that educated men and women will reexamine their deepest convictions when presented with new and compelling evidence.
Despite their willingness to let readers draw their own conclusions, Bowen and Bok do argue strongly against some hypotheses. They believe their evidence demolishes what they call the "fit" hypothesis, the view -- associated with such writers as Shelby Steele and the Thernstroms -- that affirmative action harms by forcing its beneficiaries to face stiffer competition. Also, according to this view, racial preference encourages self-doubt because blacks can never tell whether their achievements are real or simply a concession to race. But Bowen and Bok's analysis suggests the "fit" hypothesis is completely wrong. They argue that graduates of elite colleges are proud of their achievements. These graduates know that one cannot graduate from Yale, Columbia, or Princeton without working hard and doing well. They may suspect that racial preference got them into college, but they know that only their own ability and effort allowed them to graduate. This success creates self-confidence and optimism that leads to further achievements.
Affirmative action has other benefits. A race-conscious admission policy produces graduates who both value and practice racial inclusiveness. Whites and blacks who went to college with race-conscious admissions policies are comfortable in multiracial settings, and they report that college greatly contributed to their ability to get along with people of different races and cultures. (Both blacks and whites say this is very important -- although blacks think it more important than whites.)
Bowen and Bok report one finding that worries them and other supporters of affirmative action. This is the long-established observation, which their data confirm, that relative to whites, blacks with the same SAT scores get lower grades and rank lower in class. This result holds when attempts are made to control for income, choice of major, and other variables that might affect academic performance. Bowen and Bok present possible explanations. They note that black students at some schools -- notably the University of Michigan and Carnegie Mellon -- do better academically than at others. They admonish the administrators of elite colleges and universities to make good on their obligation to see that all their students take more advantage of academic opportunities. And they assert that admissions policy must be based on more than grades. Success in life is a better criterion, and by this broader measure race-conscious admissions is a success.
The Shape of the River invites its readers to think hard about what principles should guide admissions at America's best colleges and universities. A core finding is that students who enter these institutions benefit greatly. It is arguable that blacks benefit more than whites; certainly they do in terms of how much money they make in later life. In my view, the country as a whole has also benefited from race-conscious admissions policies. As long as race remains significant -- and it surely will for a long time -- then our society will function better if its elite is diverse and representative. Race-conscious admissions policies at elite schools have done a great deal to diversify our elite. It is a virtue of The Shape of the River that it makes us think hard about these questions and realize how complex they really are.
-- Michael Rothschild
Michael Rothschild is dean of the Woodrow Wilson School.
The College and Beyond Database
The primary source for The Shape of the River is the
College and Beyond (C&B) database, created by the
Mellon Foundation (of which William Bowen *58 is the very
active CEO). The database has two parts: a survey administered
to students who first entered college in 1951, 1976, and
1989, and transcript and admissions records of these same
students. The files for 1976 and 1989 used in The Shape of the
River contain information on students who attended 28
selective colleges and universities. The institutions are: Miami of
Ohio, Michigan (Ann Arbor), North Carolina (Chapel Hill),
Pennsylvania State, Columbia, Duke, Emory, Northwestern, University of
Pennsylvania, Princeton, Rice, Stanford, Tufts, Tulane, Vanderbilt,
Washington (St. Louis), Yale, Dennison, Hamilton, Kenyon,
Swarthmore, Wesleyan, Williams, Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Smith, and Wellesley.
The overall response rate was high (80 percent), I suspect because the questionnaire was so well designed. My stepson and his wife entered Williams in 1989 and were thus part of the C&B sample. They found the survey intelligent and willingly responded to it. When I told them it had been used to study affirmative action, they were surprised to learn that race was its major thrust.
The College and Beyond database is unique. Until its creation detailed data linking social and economic status, SAT scores, high school grades, performance in college, and later experience simply did not exist.
Researchers are already busy analyzing these data, and much of what we will come to believe about the effect of college on economic and social success will come from such studies. The creation of the College and Beyond database is as important a contribution to our understanding of higher education as is The Shape of the River.
-- Michael Rothschild
A dog and a boy at play at the pond
In the new children's book The Sunset Pond,
written by Laura Appleton Smith and illustrated by
Jonathan Bumas '78 (Flyleaf Publishing, $14.95), a
young boy named Matt takes his dog, Bud, down to a
nearby pond. It's sunset, and the two do things typical
of kids and dogs -- run, play fetch, and just sit. This
is Bumas's first book for children, and in the illustration shown at
left, Bud pursues a frog on a log, who's obviously
not interested in playing.
Bumas makes his living as an illustrator
(primarily in pastels). At Princeton he won the S.M.
Shellabarger Memorial Creative Thesis Prize for his
novella Toward the Gardens. Bumas lives in Forest
Hills, New York, and is working on a picture book
for children about frogs.
White man's blues
A memoir of race and music
Mister Satan's Apprentice: A Blues Memoir
Adam Gussow '79
Pantheon, $25
Students of contemporary music have long sought the answer to a conundrum: Why have the blues, the music that African Americans shaped from their unique brand of pain and longing, lost currency within the black community yet grown so popular among whites? Mister Satan's Apprentice: A Blues Memoir doesn't answer that question definitively, but it does shed welcome light on both the dynamics of the modern blues scene and on the possibilities of black-white friendships in a racially divisive era. In the mid-1980s, Adam Gussow '79, a half-Jewish, suburban New Yorker, found himself adrift. Drawn to the harmonica since childhood, Gussow apprenticed himself first to Nat Riddles, a youngish black street musician, and then to the enigmatic Mister Satan, a weathered, Mississippi-born street guitarist in Harlem. Against the odds, Gussow not only befriended both men but became an integral part of their musical lives. Over several years, Gussow and his mentors together earned small but consistent sums playing streetcorner gigs in Harlem and lower Manhattan. To great effect, Gussow relates his journey through the Harlem blues scene while interweaving the story of his childhood, his Princeton undergraduate days, and his aimless early 20s in New York City. Gussow's elaborate literary structure establishes a compelling velocity, and his prose is exquisitely styled and often memorable. (Readers, however, should be prepared to grant Gussow substantial poetic license: His descriptions, settings, and abundant dialogue are rendered in suspiciously lavish detail many years after the fact).
Though it probably took Mister Satan and Gussow longer to climb the music-industry ladder than it should have, they do eventually hit it big; by now, they've released several albums and played concerts everywhere from Canada to Finland. But Gussow's tale is not about music alone. He lovingly details his close relationship with Mister Satan without shrinking from their periods of turbulence. And Gussow recounts his sex life and his drug and alcohol benders at length, though his detail is often so gratuitously explicit that one wonders how much of it is just the author trying to overcompensate for his current persona as a Princeton Ph.D. candidate by emphasizing his gritty days on the street.
GETTING ALONG
Even if one senses a bit too much self-absorption in Gussow's book, his nuanced and thoughtful treatment of race more than counterbalances it. Gussow's self-evident love of the music persuasively demonstrates that he is much more than a dillentantish seeker of the exotic. Indeed, against a backdrop of worsening racial tensions in late-1980s New York, black radicals force Mister Satan and his acolytes to defend Gussow's right, as a white man, to play the blues in Harlem. Although they do so without hesitation, the upshot of the confrontation is complicated.
On the other hand, the partnership between Mister Satan and Gussow is a black nationalist's nightmare -- living proof that "if we could get it together, different as we were, then America might be able to do the same, given time." Yet a few pages later, following another brutal, racially motivated murder in New York's outer boroughs, Gussow is forced to admit that "there was only so much two street musicians could do." Gussow is not the only white blues pilgrim to thrive within today's biracial blues scene, but he has written an uncommonly good memoir about it. If music doesn't conquer all, Gussow's experiences suggest, it does at least come tantalizingly close.
-- Louis Jacobson '92
Louis Jacobson has written about the blues for The Economist and Washington CityPaper. Gussow and Mr. Satan were profiled in the November 9, 1994 PAW.
Living on the River
Satan and Adam
RaveOn, $15.97
As long as men have been playing the blues, there's been a debate about the place of white musicians in that most quintessentially black of American musical forms. Can white men play the blues? Is it effrontery for them even to try?
Adam Gussow '79, who is writing a doctoral thesis on early blues lyrics for Princeton's English department, has been on the front line of the debate for years as a theorist in the columns he writes for Blues Access magazine but mainly as practitioner. It's been a dozen years since Gussow stumbled upon the oneman blues whirlwind who calls himself Satan (real name Sterling Magee) on a Harlem street corner -- "Robert Johnson reborn as Parliament Funkadelic, a Mississippi flood rolling down Broadway," is Gussow's memorable description of the sound. In those 12 years the unlikely team of grizzled Mississippiborn blues belter and Ivyeducated harmonica player has worked concert halls and street corners all over the world, warming up for the likes of Bo Diddley and Buddy Guy and appearing in the U2 movie Rattle and Hum. The first song they recorded, "I Want You," was picked for Rhino Records' Modern Blues of the 1990s.
Living on the River is Satan and Adam's third album and the first to use multitrack recording, which has broadened their repertoire. Along with takes on Chicago blues (a slow, impossibly funky version of Willie Dixon's "Little Red Rooster") and R 'n' B (Ray Charles's "I Got A Woman" as a wild stomp driven by Gussow's squalling harmonica), the pair offers up surprising covers of "I'm A Girl Watcher" and a wonderful "Ode to Billie Joe" which eschews the campy melodrama of Bobby Gentry's original and reinvents the song with gorgeous acoustic guitar, an African drum called a djimbe, and Gussow's sweet, high harmonica lines. On every cut, Magee's raspy tenor conveys years of pain and defiance, while his guitar work is full of driving, jazzy funk. (Satan and Adam's Website is at www.island.net/~blues/s&a.htm.)
-- Merrell Noden
TELEVISION: Ad man
Mark Feuerstein '93 in new show
How many alums show up at their fifth reunion knowing they'll be the lead character in their own TV sitcom? Mark Feuerstein '93 certainly did. As the star of NBC's Conrad Bloom, new this fall on Monday nights at 8:30 p.m., Feuerstein plays an advertising copywriter.
"There was no moment where I said, 'I'm now an actor,'" says Feuerstein over lunch in Beverly Hills. "I thought I'd go to the Woodrow Wilson School then become a lawyer, like my father and uncle." He even took biology sophomore year just in case he wanted to be a doctor. "My idea of acting," he admitted, "was doing imitations of comedians like Eddie Murphy and Andrew Dice Clay." With the Diceman as his muse, Feuerstein's first audition, for a production of Theatre In-time's Burn This, was less than inspired. He laughs about it now. "It was the worst. An embarrassment. I did not get the part."
But he did land a part in the next Intime play, Orphans, and got hooked on acting. "Slowly I became interested in Ibsen and Chekhov and started taking those classes and loving the teachers and the material." Feuerstein devoted his two junior papers to Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, first by writing about it in the fall and then directing it in the spring.
By the time he graduated, after portraying Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire for his senior thesis, Feuerstein had been in more than a dozen plays. But the experiences didn't help him get into the drama schools at NYU or Yale. On a lark, he applied for a Fulbright and won full tuition at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts. "It was awesome," he says. "A free year to do Shakespeare and restoration comedy."
Feuerstein found, though, that the best class in England was not at the academy. "The best thing I did was study clowning for a month with this fat French guy named Phillipe Gaulier -- he had a fat mustache and clown glasses," he recalls. "It was the best. Every day he would annihilate you, and pretty soon you didn't care. And suddenly you're funny because you're so reckless and so free -- you become a real clown. He was a great teacher."
Feuerstein returned to New York unemployed and without an agent, and immediately telephoned the closest contact he had in show business: his father's allergist's niece, a casting director. "I still thank her whenever anything good happens, because she was the first to make a phone call." Her gamble on his talents paid off in voice-over work on a beer commercial, an appearance in a local TV dating service, and eventually two year's worth of off-Broadway stage work.
In 1996, while appearing in Dark Rapture at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, Feuerstein would drive to Los Angeles every Monday, taking any meetings his agent could arrange. One was with the vice-president of Paramount, who introduced him to the television producers of Fired Up; they eventually hired him. He also met James Burrows, the TV titan behind shows like Cheers and director of the pilot episodes of Frasier, Friends, and Caroline in the City. When a part opened up on Caroline for a love interest, Burrows flew Feuerstein in from New York to audition. He appeared on that show for eight episodes before Fired Up debuted in early 1997. The show lasted a year, at which point its creator, Marco Pennette, had him pegged for Conrad Bloom.
FROM TV TO FILM
Now Feuerstein is being tapped for the silver screen. After playing the lead in Casanova Falling, an independent film shot last year, he's nabbed small parts in big studio movies like this fall's Practical Magic, playing Sandra Bullock's first husband ("we smooched a little bit -- I won't lie!"); and he just finished shooting a role in Albert Brooks's new film, The Muse ("Two and a half days of heaven," says Feuerstein of the scenes he did with Brooks and stars like Jennifer Tilly). But the one thing he'll always remember is that his entire career started in college. "If I hadn't gone to Princeton," he says, "I never would have become an actor." He smiles. "It's true!" Then he laughs. "I'm a cheeseball, I'm not going to deny it."
-- Stephen Garrett
Visitation Unimplor'd: Milton and the Authorship of De Doctrina Christiana, by William B. Hunter '37 (Duquesne University, $48) -- A challenge to the prevailing view among scholars that De Doctrina Christiana, discovered in 1823, was written by Milton.
Apologia Pro Vita Mea, by Willam B. Hunter '37 (Self-published; $18, 1000 Ridgecrest Dr., Greensboro, NC 27410) -- An intellectual biography by a Milton scholar, including a chapter about his undergraduate experience at Princeton with Willard Thorp and other professors.
Utilitarianism, Institutions, and Justice, by James Wood Bailey *94 (Oxford, $49.95) -- Using the insights of game theory, the author argues that the utility principle, rather than recommending cruel acts, allows society to identify morally desirable institutions. Bailey is a lecturer in politics.
Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris, by Vanessa R. Schwartz '86 (University of California, $35) -- Examines the exploding popularity of the leisure industry in turn-of-the-century Paris. Schwartz is an assistant professor of history at American University.