Bakke and His Competitor for Medical School
AFFIRMATIVE ACTION obviously got Jayson Blair his job at the New York Times despite his dishonesty and incompetence. But that is to be expected, even by supporters of affirmative action. The whole idea is that the employer chooses workers who are more likely to be dishonest or incompetent, because he is trading off that extra probability against the benefit of having a person of the race he prefers. If he isn’t doing that, it’s not affirmative action– it’s just hiring the most honest and competent person. So affirmative action proponents should be pleased if they see evidence of black and hispanic incompetence— it’s a sign, and an inevitable one, that affirmative action is being widely practiced.
Jonah Goldberg brought up an example of this today– students in the Bakke case:
Or recall the profile of Patrick Chavis, a black doctor who had been admitted to the UC Davis Medical School under the race-quota scheme that rejected Allan Bakke. Bakke, of course, sued and the result was the Bakke decision now under review by the Supreme Court. In a 1995 article, “What Happened to the Case for Affirmative Action,” Nicholas Lemann, a writer as talented as he is liberal, contrasted the two doctors. Chavis was a heroic obstetrician working in Compton. Bakke was a mediocrity toiling in obscurity in Minnesota. Giving Chavis an opportunity — according to Lemann and the activists and politicians who rallied to the article — was a boon not only to Chavis but to the community, the nation, humanity, indeed all carbon-based life forms. Alas, two years after the article appeared, the Medical Board of California suspended his medical license, partly on account of Chavis’s “inability to perform some of the most basic duties required of a physician.” Chavis was found to have been guilty of gross negligence and incompetence in three cases; the judge overseeing his case ruled that letting Chavis “continue in the practice of organized medicine will endanger the public health, safety and welfare.”
Goldberg got the story from William McGowan’s Coloring the News: How Crusading for Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism.