Fox Business Guest Blames Academic Achievement Gap in Colleges on ‘Black Culture’
During a discussion of higher education on Lou Dobbs Tonight, conservative commentator Heather Mac Donald blamed “black culture” for the academic achievement gap and blasted diversity goals in college admissions, saying “Asian students are getting screwed the most.”
Mac Donald is a longtime critic of affirmative action and skeptic of claims of systemic racism. She has authored numerous books including Are Cops Racist? and was a fervent supporter of the New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk policy. She warned in 2012 that dropping the policy, which overwhelmingly targeted black and Hispanic men, would lead to resurgence in violent crime and murder. In fact, violent crime and murder in New York City continued to drop to record lows after the city abandoned the policy.
Dobbs turned to her for comment after the College Board’s recent announcement that it was backing away from adding a “adversity score” to its SATs to account for the different socioeconomic backgrounds of students.
“Frankly, what this is all about is an effort to repackage racial preferences in a more palatable form,” Mac Donald responded. “All of this tinkering with meritocratic admissions in colleges and throughout the economy, frankly, is all driven by one fact, which is the persistent academic achievement gap. If black culture or the rest of culture could close that gap, we would be back to colorblind system. But the College Board is trying to give colleges an excuse to continue to give preferences to underprepared black students to catapult them into academic environments for which they are not prepared.”
Mac Donald went on to characterize diversity goals in college admissions, whether race or gender-based, as misguided. “This is done in the name of helping the students,” she said. “In fact, there is nothing more cruel than awarding a student a racial preference and putting them into an environment in which he is not academically prepared for. He is going to struggle. He will inevitably blame his problems on phantom, circumambient racism rather than acknowledging the difficult truth that he would’ve been better in an environment where he is matched with his peers. This is not a race problem, that would occur with gender preferences as well. That is the underlying problem that America doesn’t want to address head on.”
When Dobbs called out colleges for not giving sufficient weight to things like grades and achievement in the admissions process, Mac Donald agreed.
“Now it’s driven by racial preference and it’s Asian students who are getting screwed the most, I would love to abolish college admissions offices,” she added. “Right now, we’re fiddling with meritocracy and putting our competitive edge at risk because we insist on engineering a student body based on racial quotas on who is most capable of succeeding in any given academic environment.”
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