June 29, 2023 • 12 mins
Dr. Wilfred Reilly, an Assistant Professor of Political Sciences at Kentucky State University, talks about the Supreme Court's ruling that brings an end to affirmative action, the logic behind the ruling, and where college admissions goes from here...
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
All right, want to welcome backa guest we had on. I just
met him a few weeks ago.Doctor Wilfred Riley is a social commentator,
college professor, and many other things. He's at Kentucky State University and Frankfort.
Welcome back, Wilford. Good tohave you on. Good to be
back on the show. Yeah,indeed, I appreciate you're gonna have to
come in and guest host for me. Sometimes. You got a lot of
(00:20):
positive response last time you were onwith me. Good good, Yeah,
I'd I'd be more than glad todo that. All right, You're a
black college professor. We're hearing frommany black and white voices today regarding the
Supreme Courts ruling on affirmative action.So I just wanted to get your take
on it through your perspective today.Was it time for this thing to be
(00:43):
pushed aside? Probably? I understandwhy a lot of black what you call
ados American descendants of slaves Americans areirritated. But I mean the reality is
that modern affirmative action policy didn't makea ton of sense. What made these
two cases against Harvard North Carolina sopoignant was that they weren't brought by white
(01:04):
kids, not that there's anything wrongwith our white countrymen, but they were
brought by Asian and South Asian Americanswho argued that they were disadvantaged in collegiate
applications. And it turns out that'strue. I mean, Harvard apparently had
what was akin to a system ofold school racism in place, where Asian
(01:26):
American applicants in particular were evaluated usingall of these bizarre techniques like what's your
quote unquote personality score, where therewere several hundred points of weight, whether
this was done officially or not givento the sat in gre scores for black
and Hispanic applicants. So the disadvantageif you were an Asian guy applying into
(01:47):
the Ivy League would be about twohundred points as versus a Black and African
American guy. And I mean thisstretched beyond just those two groups. I
mean, so, for example,Hispanics, most of whom are Caucasian in
the same sense Italian Americans are areconsidered to be members of a minority group
in the USA, while Arab Americans, for example or not, and Hispanics
(02:09):
that's seventeen percent of the population arenow substantially larger group than African Americans.
So anyway, blah blah blah.The basic reality. The court in this
modern era, when we're more thanjust a black and white country, said
that it makes absolutely no sense todiscriminate against the son of an Asian immigrant
in preference for the son of ablack dentist. And I think a lot
(02:30):
of people would say that sounds intuitivelylogical and ethical to me, and I
guess I would be on that team. In the modern moment, AA doesn't
seem to make a ton of sense. There are so many people who are
so emotional about it as though it'snineteen fifty four, and as you've stated
(02:51):
before, we're in a different universethan we were in nineteen fifty four.
Well, yeah, I think innineteen fifty four, whether or not you
would like it as a poor Irishkid, affirmative action was very easy to
logically and morally justify. There wereessentially two large ethnic groups in the country
unless you're talking about some Western stateswith a good chunk of Native American Indians,
(03:12):
and group A had oppressed, GroupB had engaged in ethnic conflict with
a group B. In one therewas slavery, There was Jim Crowe.
So it made a lot of senseto say. And let's remember this has
been in place for sixty years now, it made a lot of sense to
say for a generation, even fortwo generations, let's give Group B a
leg up. But the problem nowis not just that we're at the end
(03:34):
of the two generations. It's alsothat we have groups you know, C,
D, E, F, soon in the country. So I
mean, this actually gets pretty complicated. I mean, I'm a tenured professor
and in the past and executive ata fairly solid state college, and I
mean when you look at black applicantsto larger schools than mine, if you're
talking about the ivys or the bigten institutions, a lot of the black
(03:58):
people that are applying arts the USA, I mean, the best black students
in the USA right now are fromNigeria, Ghana, Jamaica, you know,
other successful countries. So you're takingyou're in this weird situation where you're
privileging a well off Jamaican guy overa well off Bosnian guy. For that
matter, maybe a struggling Bosnian guy, and both of them have at least
(04:18):
a little bit of an advantage overanyone from that giant continent we call Asian.
And yeah, the justices took alook at this. I mean,
this wasn't an especially close decision,and they said no. So I mean
affirmative action at least in the sensethat we saw at Harvard, at least
at the sense that we saw atUNC, which is which is not Harvard
is a very typical big state institutionthat seems to be gone. Now.
(04:42):
The question is will the colleges justcheat, like will there be something like
we can't judge based on race anymore. However we can wait how tough your
life has been, and the numberone factor we're going to look at when
we evaluate that is racism. SoI mean, there's still probably least some
ways for them to manipulate their studentbody. But this is at very least
(05:03):
a statement publicly, this doesn't makesense anymore. The University of Louisville did
issue a statement today and got thatreaction that you just noted. Here's a
part of their statement, as themost diverse non HBCU among Kentucky's public colleges
and universities, You of L,he laughed at that. You of L
(05:24):
will continue to be committed to diversityamong our students, faculty, and staff.
So are they saying they insinuating thatthey're going to go around anyway and
ignore what was ruled today. Well, I would never comment on what my
esteemed colleagues at the University of Louisvillemight or might not be doing. I
mean, I will say this kindof this kind of gamesmanship where one side
(05:45):
has their lawyers and the other sidehas their lawyers. I mean, ken
border on the absurd, right,I mean, so even the language used
in that statement, like they're themost the most diverse non HBCU. So
for example, we at KS youare the most diverse overall institution among public
colleges, so you exclude all theministerial colleges, they're fifty fifty and song.
I mean, this same kind ofwit with words is definitely going to
(06:09):
be brought into the arena of admissionspolicy. So like if I were a
tricky college executive, which I haven'tbeen for about two years, what would
I do? One thing you'd considerwould just be dropping tests. So I
mean, like in Kentucky, blackwhite Native American students actually have fairly similar
grades. You could then just honestlysay, if you admitted a fully proportional
class. While this looks like thestate of Kentucky because we don't use exams
(06:30):
at all. You could simply findout which extracurricular activity was the most popular
with Blacker, in particular Hispanic kids, perhaps in varsity soccer, and you
could wait that very heavily at admissions. And I mean this might sound like
kind of a joke, but there'sno particular reason that colleges wouldn't do it.
If you just want to admit basedon merit, I'll tell you it's
the easiest thing in the world.You take test scores and wait those fifty
(06:57):
You take grades and you wait thosefifty percent, and that's all you count.
You maybe give fifty points to varsityathletes and performing musicians. That's all
you'd have to do to admit astudent body that was composed of, you
know, the best kids to applyto your school. The whole idea that
you need an admissions office with ahundred people in it is an offshoot of
affirmative action. It's an offshoot oflegacy programs or and that's something we should
(07:19):
get too as well. But whereyou're reaching out to find out whose granddaddy
gave the most money to the school. It's an offshoot of athletics. It
comes from a whole bunch of thingsthat don't really have a lot to do
with who the best students would actuallybe. Professor Riley, I do want
to say that I've seen a lotof people write online and they're they're they're
considered the white savior, they havethe white savior mentality because a lot of
(07:43):
people say, this is not yourdeal. Backouts, you know, quiet
your voice. But a lot ofpeople responding to like this, for instance,
this person who worked for Joe Biden'selection and also for Obama, that
this is a travesty and black personwill be able to succeed in a merit
based system, which is exactly whyaffirmative action based programs are needed. And
(08:05):
a lot of people were answering thisway. So you're claiming black people are
inferior and incapable of succeeding in amerit based system. A lot of them
were pushing back with that, whatdo you think, Well, I think
that person Erica marsh someone who I'vebantered with online who initially thought was a
satire account, I think that they'rekind of saying the quiet part out loud.
(08:26):
I mean, that is the justificationfor affirmative action, the justification for
what you call large boost where yougive a black kid one hundred and fifty
point and that's as much as wereally go in Kentucky, but one hundred
fifty point or a two hundred pointadvantage over a poor white kid. The
justification for that is, well,the black kid couldn't compete in a totally
fair system. And they're two things. They're first of all, at some
(08:50):
baseline genetic level that that's clearly nottrue. I mean, you know,
there are groups that have done verywell academically for a long period of time,
Jewish Americans saw, but in termsof like the middle of the pack
run of human beings, most peoplecan be trained to study and do well
in college and so on down theline. But the flip here is that
right now, it actually is truethat there are really big academic differences between
(09:16):
groups and students. And this issomething that's so unpc it's awkward to talk
about. But if you just gointo the SAT data year by year,
I mean, in a typical year, the SAT average for black, Hispanic
and Native students is going to beabout nine to fifty. It was at
nine twenty six for Native Americans lastyear. I believe nine forty one for
blacks. It's going to be aboutten fifty to eleven hundred for whites,
(09:39):
Hights have been closer to eleven hundredin the reason past, and then it's
gonna be about twelve fifty for Asians. So you really have three different groups
of people at three different levels ofpreparedness that are applying to most good colleges.
And I mean it actually is truethat if you go to all Narriti
admissions for the first couple of yearsthat a lot of schools, you're not
going to see a lot of whatwe've been trained to think of as minorities
(10:03):
American black folks, Hispanic so on. You're gonna see a lot of Asians.
You're gonna see a lot of Indians, a lot of Nigerians. But
for some reason, people that areon the other side of this debate tend
to think of those almost as inbrown skinned white people. At any rate,
though, I mean hopefully, andI think this will happen, having
the motivation to study and work harderto get into college, we'll probably make
(10:26):
minority scores better rather than worse.I mean, that's that's the goal,
and I think that's pretty likely tobe true. Meritocracy is still the word
in play here. That's how weget there, right, yes, I
mean again, so okay, nowthis is this is kind of a slow
one across the plate in terms ofsome of this stuff. I think that
getting rid of affirmative action morally issomething that's kind of hard to object to,
(10:50):
especially in a state like Kentucky,where coming from Chicago, I don't
see a ton of privilege when Idrive outside of Louisville or Frankfurt. So
that's one thing. But the otherthing that has to be accepted is that
most of the students at a typicaltop one hundred college don't just get in
quote unquote. I mean, soyou have legacy programs. We already mentioned
those, but you know, wasyour father, grandfather, grandmother an alumnus
(11:15):
of the school, you have aboost that's equivalent to the boost for Hispanic,
if not black kids. If youare the son or daughter or something
that works for the school, whichisn't just a professor, I mean that
would include all of the coaches,that would include all of the support staff.
You know, deans of di andthings like that. You know,
about ten percent of most major schoolsis made up of varsity athletes. And
(11:39):
that's not just you know, footballand men's and women's basketball. That includes
crewe and lacrosse and all that kindof thing. So I think that most
people that want true merit would say, okay, well, this is one
step, but let's get rid ofall of that. Let's let people apply
to the school, make the feesa little bit lower, and pick the
best students. And I think inthat since meritocracy is the best path for
(12:01):
higher education, you know, Ithank we think there's still some people that
have a bit of a case whenthey say, okay, you've gotten rid
of affirmative action, but why isall that other stuff still in place?
Why is it just the black andLatino kids that are now going to be
on a lot of campuses and reducenumbers. And I think the answer to
that is, okay, well,get rid of all of it, bring
(12:22):
another case in front of the court. Good points. I appreciate all that,
and look forward to speaking with youagain down the road. I'm still
calling you, professor, even ifyou're not at the moment. Well,
I'm still I'm not teaching during thesummer, but I mean I still have
to have the title, hopefully.All Right, we'll all come back in
the fall, and then we'll talkagain sometime soon. Wilfred, I'm appreciate
(12:43):
it, thanks so much. Allright. All right, that's doctor Wilfred
Riley from Kentucky State University. We'reback in a few on news radio AD
forty WHA s
All right, want to welcome backa guest we had on. I just
met him a few weeks ago.Doctor Wilfred Riley is a social commentator,
college professor, and many other things. He's at Kentucky State University and Frankfort.
Welcome back, Wilford. Good tohave you on. Good to be
back on the show. Yeah,indeed, I appreciate you're gonna have to
come in and guest host for me. Sometimes. You got a lot of
(00:20):
positive response last time you were onwith me. Good good, Yeah,
I'd I'd be more than glad todo that. All right, You're a
black college professor. We're hearing frommany black and white voices today regarding the
Supreme Courts ruling on affirmative action.So I just wanted to get your take
on it through your perspective today.Was it time for this thing to be
(00:43):
pushed aside? Probably? I understandwhy a lot of black what you call
ados American descendants of slaves Americans areirritated. But I mean the reality is
that modern affirmative action policy didn't makea ton of sense. What made these
two cases against Harvard North Carolina sopoignant was that they weren't brought by white
(01:04):
kids, not that there's anything wrongwith our white countrymen, but they were
brought by Asian and South Asian Americanswho argued that they were disadvantaged in collegiate
applications. And it turns out that'strue. I mean, Harvard apparently had
what was akin to a system ofold school racism in place, where Asian
(01:26):
American applicants in particular were evaluated usingall of these bizarre techniques like what's your
quote unquote personality score, where therewere several hundred points of weight, whether
this was done officially or not givento the sat in gre scores for black
and Hispanic applicants. So the disadvantageif you were an Asian guy applying into
(01:47):
the Ivy League would be about twohundred points as versus a Black and African
American guy. And I mean thisstretched beyond just those two groups. I
mean, so, for example,Hispanics, most of whom are Caucasian in
the same sense Italian Americans are areconsidered to be members of a minority group
in the USA, while Arab Americans, for example or not, and Hispanics
(02:09):
that's seventeen percent of the population arenow substantially larger group than African Americans.
So anyway, blah blah blah.The basic reality. The court in this
modern era, when we're more thanjust a black and white country, said
that it makes absolutely no sense todiscriminate against the son of an Asian immigrant
in preference for the son of ablack dentist. And I think a lot
(02:30):
of people would say that sounds intuitivelylogical and ethical to me, and I
guess I would be on that team. In the modern moment, AA doesn't
seem to make a ton of sense. There are so many people who are
so emotional about it as though it'snineteen fifty four, and as you've stated
(02:51):
before, we're in a different universethan we were in nineteen fifty four.
Well, yeah, I think innineteen fifty four, whether or not you
would like it as a poor Irishkid, affirmative action was very easy to
logically and morally justify. There wereessentially two large ethnic groups in the country
unless you're talking about some Western stateswith a good chunk of Native American Indians,
(03:12):
and group A had oppressed, GroupB had engaged in ethnic conflict with
a group B. In one therewas slavery, There was Jim Crowe.
So it made a lot of senseto say. And let's remember this has
been in place for sixty years now, it made a lot of sense to
say for a generation, even fortwo generations, let's give Group B a
leg up. But the problem nowis not just that we're at the end
(03:34):
of the two generations. It's alsothat we have groups you know, C,
D, E, F, soon in the country. So I
mean, this actually gets pretty complicated. I mean, I'm a tenured professor
and in the past and executive ata fairly solid state college, and I
mean when you look at black applicantsto larger schools than mine, if you're
talking about the ivys or the bigten institutions, a lot of the black
(03:58):
people that are applying arts the USA, I mean, the best black students
in the USA right now are fromNigeria, Ghana, Jamaica, you know,
other successful countries. So you're takingyou're in this weird situation where you're
privileging a well off Jamaican guy overa well off Bosnian guy. For that
matter, maybe a struggling Bosnian guy, and both of them have at least
(04:18):
a little bit of an advantage overanyone from that giant continent we call Asian.
And yeah, the justices took alook at this. I mean,
this wasn't an especially close decision,and they said no. So I mean
affirmative action at least in the sensethat we saw at Harvard, at least
at the sense that we saw atUNC, which is which is not Harvard
is a very typical big state institutionthat seems to be gone. Now.
(04:42):
The question is will the colleges justcheat, like will there be something like
we can't judge based on race anymore. However we can wait how tough your
life has been, and the numberone factor we're going to look at when
we evaluate that is racism. SoI mean, there's still probably least some
ways for them to manipulate their studentbody. But this is at very least
(05:03):
a statement publicly, this doesn't makesense anymore. The University of Louisville did
issue a statement today and got thatreaction that you just noted. Here's a
part of their statement, as themost diverse non HBCU among Kentucky's public colleges
and universities, You of L,he laughed at that. You of L
(05:24):
will continue to be committed to diversityamong our students, faculty, and staff.
So are they saying they insinuating thatthey're going to go around anyway and
ignore what was ruled today. Well, I would never comment on what my
esteemed colleagues at the University of Louisvillemight or might not be doing. I
mean, I will say this kindof this kind of gamesmanship where one side
(05:45):
has their lawyers and the other sidehas their lawyers. I mean, ken
border on the absurd, right,I mean, so even the language used
in that statement, like they're themost the most diverse non HBCU. So
for example, we at KS youare the most diverse overall institution among public
colleges, so you exclude all theministerial colleges, they're fifty fifty and song.
I mean, this same kind ofwit with words is definitely going to
(06:09):
be brought into the arena of admissionspolicy. So like if I were a
tricky college executive, which I haven'tbeen for about two years, what would
I do? One thing you'd considerwould just be dropping tests. So I
mean, like in Kentucky, blackwhite Native American students actually have fairly similar
grades. You could then just honestlysay, if you admitted a fully proportional
class. While this looks like thestate of Kentucky because we don't use exams
(06:30):
at all. You could simply findout which extracurricular activity was the most popular
with Blacker, in particular Hispanic kids, perhaps in varsity soccer, and you
could wait that very heavily at admissions. And I mean this might sound like
kind of a joke, but there'sno particular reason that colleges wouldn't do it.
If you just want to admit basedon merit, I'll tell you it's
the easiest thing in the world.You take test scores and wait those fifty
(06:57):
You take grades and you wait thosefifty percent, and that's all you count.
You maybe give fifty points to varsityathletes and performing musicians. That's all
you'd have to do to admit astudent body that was composed of, you
know, the best kids to applyto your school. The whole idea that
you need an admissions office with ahundred people in it is an offshoot of
affirmative action. It's an offshoot oflegacy programs or and that's something we should
(07:19):
get too as well. But whereyou're reaching out to find out whose granddaddy
gave the most money to the school. It's an offshoot of athletics. It
comes from a whole bunch of thingsthat don't really have a lot to do
with who the best students would actuallybe. Professor Riley, I do want
to say that I've seen a lotof people write online and they're they're they're
considered the white savior, they havethe white savior mentality because a lot of
(07:43):
people say, this is not yourdeal. Backouts, you know, quiet
your voice. But a lot ofpeople responding to like this, for instance,
this person who worked for Joe Biden'selection and also for Obama, that
this is a travesty and black personwill be able to succeed in a merit
based system, which is exactly whyaffirmative action based programs are needed. And
(08:05):
a lot of people were answering thisway. So you're claiming black people are
inferior and incapable of succeeding in amerit based system. A lot of them
were pushing back with that, whatdo you think, Well, I think
that person Erica marsh someone who I'vebantered with online who initially thought was a
satire account, I think that they'rekind of saying the quiet part out loud.
(08:26):
I mean, that is the justificationfor affirmative action, the justification for
what you call large boost where yougive a black kid one hundred and fifty
point and that's as much as wereally go in Kentucky, but one hundred
fifty point or a two hundred pointadvantage over a poor white kid. The
justification for that is, well,the black kid couldn't compete in a totally
fair system. And they're two things. They're first of all, at some
(08:50):
baseline genetic level that that's clearly nottrue. I mean, you know,
there are groups that have done verywell academically for a long period of time,
Jewish Americans saw, but in termsof like the middle of the pack
run of human beings, most peoplecan be trained to study and do well
in college and so on down theline. But the flip here is that
right now, it actually is truethat there are really big academic differences between
(09:16):
groups and students. And this issomething that's so unpc it's awkward to talk
about. But if you just gointo the SAT data year by year,
I mean, in a typical year, the SAT average for black, Hispanic
and Native students is going to beabout nine to fifty. It was at
nine twenty six for Native Americans lastyear. I believe nine forty one for
blacks. It's going to be aboutten fifty to eleven hundred for whites,
(09:39):
Hights have been closer to eleven hundredin the reason past, and then it's
gonna be about twelve fifty for Asians. So you really have three different groups
of people at three different levels ofpreparedness that are applying to most good colleges.
And I mean it actually is truethat if you go to all Narriti
admissions for the first couple of yearsthat a lot of schools, you're not
going to see a lot of whatwe've been trained to think of as minorities
(10:03):
American black folks, Hispanic so on. You're gonna see a lot of Asians.
You're gonna see a lot of Indians, a lot of Nigerians. But
for some reason, people that areon the other side of this debate tend
to think of those almost as inbrown skinned white people. At any rate,
though, I mean hopefully, andI think this will happen, having
the motivation to study and work harderto get into college, we'll probably make
(10:26):
minority scores better rather than worse.I mean, that's that's the goal,
and I think that's pretty likely tobe true. Meritocracy is still the word
in play here. That's how weget there, right, yes, I
mean again, so okay, nowthis is this is kind of a slow
one across the plate in terms ofsome of this stuff. I think that
getting rid of affirmative action morally issomething that's kind of hard to object to,
(10:50):
especially in a state like Kentucky,where coming from Chicago, I don't
see a ton of privilege when Idrive outside of Louisville or Frankfurt. So
that's one thing. But the otherthing that has to be accepted is that
most of the students at a typicaltop one hundred college don't just get in
quote unquote. I mean, soyou have legacy programs. We already mentioned
those, but you know, wasyour father, grandfather, grandmother an alumnus
(11:15):
of the school, you have aboost that's equivalent to the boost for Hispanic,
if not black kids. If youare the son or daughter or something
that works for the school, whichisn't just a professor, I mean that
would include all of the coaches,that would include all of the support staff.
You know, deans of di andthings like that. You know,
about ten percent of most major schoolsis made up of varsity athletes. And
(11:39):
that's not just you know, footballand men's and women's basketball. That includes
crewe and lacrosse and all that kindof thing. So I think that most
people that want true merit would say, okay, well, this is one
step, but let's get rid ofall of that. Let's let people apply
to the school, make the feesa little bit lower, and pick the
best students. And I think inthat since meritocracy is the best path for
(12:01):
higher education, you know, Ithank we think there's still some people that
have a bit of a case whenthey say, okay, you've gotten rid
of affirmative action, but why isall that other stuff still in place?
Why is it just the black andLatino kids that are now going to be
on a lot of campuses and reducenumbers. And I think the answer to
that is, okay, well,get rid of all of it, bring
(12:22):
another case in front of the court. Good points. I appreciate all that,
and look forward to speaking with youagain down the road. I'm still
calling you, professor, even ifyou're not at the moment. Well,
I'm still I'm not teaching during thesummer, but I mean I still have
to have the title, hopefully.All Right, we'll all come back in
the fall, and then we'll talkagain sometime soon. Wilfred, I'm appreciate
(12:43):
it, thanks so much. Allright. All right, that's doctor Wilfred
Riley from Kentucky State University. We'reback in a few on news radio AD
forty WHA s
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