Lou Dobbs guest blames “Black culture” for academic achievement gap
Heather Mac Donald claims colleges are giving preferential treatment to “under-prepared Black students”
Published
Citation
From the August 27 edition of Fox Business' Lou Dobbs Tonight:
LOU DOBBS (HOST): And The College Board dropping -- dropping adversity -- an adversity score, as if that was somehow going to somehow revolutionize college admissions and quantify for the terribly lacking admissions offices of universities and college, so that they wouldn't have to actually read something, or try to understand someone.
HEATHER MAC DONALD: Well, this is a cosmetic change. They've replaced the single score with six different scores. But frankly, Lou, what this is all about is an effort of re-package racial preferences in a more palatable form.
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 a colorblind meritocratic system, but The College Board is trying to give colleges an excuse to continue to give preferences to under-prepared Black students, to catapult them into academic environments for which they are not prepared. This is done in the name of helping the students.
In fact, there is nothing more cruel than awarding a student a racial preference, and putting him into an environment for which he is not academically prepared.
He's going to struggle, he's going to 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 actually matched with his peers. This is not simply a race problem, it would occur with gender preferences as well, but that is the underlying problem that America simply doesn't want to address head on.
...
Right now, we're fiddling with meritocracy. We're putting our competitive edge at risk because we insist on engineering a student body based on racial quotas, rather than who is most capable of succeeding in any given academic environment.