Campus racism.

Affirmative action is presented as a heroic attempt to atone for past racial sins.

Like most such heroism, it has its victims:

white and Asian students,- independent-minded scholars;

and the minority students who are its supposed beneficiaries.

THE DECADE of the 1980s has seen a rise in racial incidents on America's campuses. At Smith College, "NIGGERS, SPICS, AND CHINKS QUIT COMPLAINING OR GET OUT" was painted on a campus building. In a UC Berkeley building, "NIPS GO HOME" was scrawled on the wall. The University of Michigan's Ann Arbor campus radio station featured ethnic jokes aimed at blacks. The Danmouth Review, an independent conservative student newspaper, published an article satirizing black language titled, "Dis Sho' Ain't No Jive, Bro." A leaflet opposing Holocaust studies and a swastika painted on a wall were found at Stanford University. At Philadelphia's Temple University, a White Student's Union was formed. Since 1986, the National Institute against Prejudice and Violence has documented racial incidents on 160 college campuses, including some of the nation's most prestigious. In addition, more and more colleges are becoming the focal point of membership recruitment by the White Aryan Resistance, Skinheads, and the Ku Klux Klan.

Racial incidents have not been a one-sided coin. A black full professor at Dartmouth College frequently uses the term "honky" in his classroom in reference to whites. A black student at Vassar College hurled anti-Semitic insults at a Jewish student which included "dirty Jew," "stupid Jews," and "f------ Jew." At the University of Pennsylvania campus, three black non-students crushed the skull of an Oriental student. On the campuses of Drexel University and the University of Pennsylvania, black nonstudents have been alleged to systematically seek out white students to extort and rob.

Civil-rights advocates, affirmative-action officials, and politicians see the increase in campus racial incidents as the result of an "atmosphere" created by the Reagan Administration. Their reasoning is that by its attacks on affirmative action, the Administration created a perception of a tolerance for racism. To counteract this "atmosphere," there have been calls for more affirmative-action recruitment programs, mandated Black Studies classes as part of the college curriculum, more "cultural diversity," and more resources devoted to race relations.

Here we might explore the opposite line of causation and ask instead, what role has current campus racial policy played in the build-up of resentment and bitterness, and the consequent rise in campus racial incidents?

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION in recruitment makes the assumption, implicit or explicit, that a pool of black academic talent exists and that the paucity of blacks enrolled in the nation's colleges, medical schools, and law schools is a result of racial discrimination in admissions. Whether colleges currently engage in discriminatory policies against blacks is a matter for speculation; however, the question of just how large is the pool of black academic talent that meets standard college admissions criteria is not.

Black students score well below the national average on every measure of academic achievement. In 1983, fewer than 4,200 black college-bound high-school graduates, out of 75,400, had grade-point averages of 3.75 (B+) or better, compared to 7,858 out of 36,048 Asians, and 115,722 out of 701,345 whites. That means that 5.5 per cent of black college-bound seniors earned B+ averages, compared to nearly 22 per cent for Asians and 16.5 per cent for whites.

Standard Achievement Test (SAT) scores tell an even more dismal story about college preparation. In 1983, across the nation, 66 out of 71,137 black college-bound seniors (less than a tenth of 1 per cent) achieved 699, out of a possible 800, on the verbal portion of the SAT, and fewer than a thousand achieved scores of 600 or higher. On the mathematics portion of the SAT, 205 blacks had scores over 699 and fewer than 1,700 achieved scores of 600 or higher.

Of the roughly 35,200 Asians taking the test, 496 scored over 699 on the verbal portion (1.4 per cent) and 3,015 on the mathematics. Of the roughly 963,000 whites taking the test, 9,028 scored over 699 on the verbal (just under I per cent) and 31,704 scored over 699 on tbe mathematics.

An important debate wages over just what SAT scores measure and predict, and how reliably they do so. Regardless of the outcome of the debate, the tests do say something about academic achievement in the tested material. Black performance on them has important implications concerning the availability of academically qualified black students for college recruitment.

At some of the nation's most prestigious schools, the SAT scores of the student body are as follows: at Amherst, 66 per cent of the students score above 600 on the verbal and 83 per cent above 600 on the mathematics; at Bryn Mawr, 70per cent above 600 on the verbal and 70 per cent over 600 on the mathematics; at Haverford, 67 and 86 per cent; at MIT, 72 and 97 per cent. The median student SAT scores for the verbal and mathematics portions are 600 at Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Georgetown, Harvard, Oberlin, Princeton, Williams, Yale, and other colleges ranked as most competitive. Student SAT scores at schools ranked very competitive, such as Franklin and Marshall, Lafayette, Brandeis, and Lehigh, range in the high 500s and low 600s.

The black scores on the SAT, compared with the SAT performance of the general student body at the most prestigious schools, suggests that even if these schools made every heroic recruitment effort, it would be impossible to find much more than a tiny handful of blacks who would match the academic characteristics of these schools' average student. In 1983, there were 570 blacks who had combined SAT verbal and mathematics scores above 1,200, compared to 60,400 whites who did. That means, given the paucity of well-qualified blacks, that less-elite schools, among the nation's more than three thousand institutions of higher learning, are quickly left drawing from the lower end of the pool of college-bound black students.

At the graduate-school level, the academic tale is even more gruesome. The Graduate Record Examination (GRE) is used as a part of the admissions process by most graduate schools. It has three parts: verbal, quantitative, and analytical. In 1983, the mean national GRE scores were 499 on the verbal, 516 on the quantitative, and 522 on the analytical. Black mean scores were well below the national means: 370 on the verbal, 363 on the quantitative, and 363 on the analytical, which translates into a 129point deficit on the verbal, 153 on the quantitative, and 159 on the analytical. Black performance on the GRE is lower than that of any other ethnic group reported taking the test (American Indians, Mexican-Americans, Asians, Puerto Ricans, Latin Americans, and Whites).

Poor black performance on standardized tests is frequently dismissed as owing to cultural bias of the test. If the charge of cultural bias has merit in the first place, in the sense that a culture-free test could be devised, one would expect cultural bias to be exhibited most strongly on the verbal portion of the test, where there are questions of reading comprehension, language, and literature. A much better performance relative to the national mean would be expected on those parts of the test where cultural bias is minimized-i.e., mathematics and analytic reasoning. As it turns out, blacks are closer to the national norm on the verbal portion of the GRE and furthest behind on the quantitative and analytical portions.

The Asian population is more culturally distinct than other reported groups taking the GRE. However, the mean Asian score on the verbal portion of the GRE is 479, just 20 points below the national mean and 109 points higher than blacks. On the quantitative portion of the GRE, Asians' mean score is 575, outscoring the nation by 59 points. On the analytical portion, the Asian mean score is 522, identical with the national mean. Therefore, we might ask: If the examination is culturally biased, how is it that people of a culture far more alien to the American culture score close to the national mean?

Black performance on the GRE also allows us a preliminary assessment of what goes on while blacks are undergraduates. When blacks enter college as freshmen, their SAT scores as a percentage of the national norm are about 80 per cent. After four years of college, those who take the GRE achieve scores that are only 71 per cent of the national norm. Whatever the caveats regarding what tests measure, an unambiguous conclusion is that the achievement deficit of blacks does not diminish during four years of undergraduate training.

The fact that the black achievement deficit does not diminish demands more investigation into the possible reasons. Maybe there is nothing that can be done in the space of four or five years of college to significantly repair pre-college damage. Maybe the pattern of courses chosen by black students are not the most effective in terms of remediation. In any case, much more needs to be done to search for answers to these important questions.

COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES, under many sources of pressure, have sought to incrcase their enrollment of black students. If colleges adhered to rigid academic guidelines for admission, most would be frustrated in these efforts. Therefore, academic standards must be compromised. That is, colleges and universities must have one standard for admittance for whites and a lower one for blacks.

Whatever justification may be given for such a practice, it cannot help but build resentment, bitterness, and a sense of unfair play among whites, as it has already in matters of hiring, promotions, and layoffs. Official policy calling for unequal treatment by race is morally offensive whether it is applied to favor blacks or applied to favor whites.

Recently, charges have surfaced about discrimination against Asian-Americans at some of the nation's most prestigious colleges like UCLA, Harvard, Berkeley, and Brown. In 1982, Asians admitted to Harvard had a combined SAT score of 1,467, compared to a combined SAT score of 1,355 for whites. On the average, an Asian had to score over 100 points higher to be admitted than a white. At Brown, between 1983 and 1987, the Asian admittance rate declined, while Asian academic performance (SAT scores and grade-point averages) increased.

Jack Bunzel reports in The Public Interest (Fall 1988) that "virtually all American-Indians, Hispanics, and blacks who apply to Berkeley, and meet the minimum UC requirements, are admitted [though it is possible to meet those requirements with a GPA of 2.78]. . . . white or Asian students are rarely accepted by Berkeley without a GPA of at least 3.7 or 3.8." According to Bunzel, for an Asian to have a 50 per cent chance of admission to Berkeley, he needs to have an Academic Index score of 7,000, while a score of 4,800 is enough for a black.

The other side of the admittance issue is the graduation issue. According to Bunzel, UC Berkeley figures show that 66 per cent of white students and 61 per cent of Asian students graduate within five years. Only 41 per cent of Hispanics and 27 per cent of blacks graduate in five years. These facts show that affirmative-action programs in college recruitment do not come close to being even a zerosum game where blacks benefit at the expense of Asians. It is more like a negative-sum game, where everybody is worse off. In other words, Berkeley's affirmative-action program leads to the rejection of Asian and white students with a higher probability of graduation in favor of black and Hispanic students with a significantly lower probability of graduation. Thus, white and Asian students are being sacrificed to the benefit of no one.

This kind of affirmative action is not only inept social policy, it produces personal tragedy. Bunzel relates a story told by Donald H. Werner, headmaster of Westminster School: UC Berkeley made decisions on two of its students this past year, both Californians. Student A was ranked in the top third of his class, student B in the bottom third. Student A had College Board scores totaling 1,290; student B's scores totaled 890. Student A had a good record of citizenship; student B was expelled last winter for breaking a series of major school rules. Student A was white; student B was black. Berkeley refused student A and accepted student B.

The use of dual standards by college administrators, in an effort to produce "diversity" in the student body, is widespread. Whatever noble goals foster dual standards, one of their side-effects is that of producing racial animosity and resentment. It is easy to understand, though not to justify, how individuals who may never have harbored feelings of racial resentment can come to resent blacks, Hispanics, and other "protected" groups.

BLACKS HAVE difficult experiences on campus: high chances of being on academic probation and feelings of alienation from the larger community, which may be manifested in self-segregation, and dropping out of college. Today, there is little evidence of acts of official college racial discrimination against blacks. The bulk of black problems stem from poor academic preparation for college. Continually focusing on affirmative-action programs at the college level, while ignoring the massive educational fraud taking place at the primary and secondary schools blacks attend, means that campus problems will exist in perpetuity. It means most blacks will always need special admission privileges.

Today, many major cities have black mayors, large black representation on the city councils, and many black teachers and principals; in some large cities the superintendent of schools is black. That means blacks have many more policy choices than they had in the past. In the name of future generations of blacks, it is high time that responsible black people stop worrying about what whites are doing to blacks and begin to focus on what blacks are doing to blacks.