The Gods of Equity & Equality
The Gods of Equity & Equality
Stumbling towards our future of Idiocracy.
HARRISON BERGERON
by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
“THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General….”
That beginning of the fictional short story by Kurt Vonnegut, written over six decades ago (1961), sounds far-fetched to say the least. A society devoted to the Cult of Equality & Equity taking severe measures to ensure an equilibrium across the general public? That is just crazy. The story goes on to describe the various “handicaps” that are deployed on the populous; heavy weights to hinder the strong, ear pieces that emit high-pitched sounds on a timed interval to distract those with high intelligence, even masks required to be worn if someone is too handsome or pretty.
One analytical take into the writer’s motivation for creating the story would have to look at the historical timeframe in which it was written. In 1961, America was ruminating on the questions of equality and the state of society in regards to racial relations. Throughout the 1960s, Civil Right legislation became the law of the land to establish guidelines to try and create an equal playing field for the areas of employment and education. This timeline of events is masterfully laid out in the book “Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties” by Christopher Caldwell.
This article from the L.A. Times follows a pattern of modern journalism that advocates a form of “handicapping” when the ethnic percentages within a certain profession do not conform to their belief in the almighty Gods of Equality & Equity. This article focuses on law school applications, and the use of the Law School Admission Test (LSAT) to determine admission.
The legal profession lacks diversity, and the LSAT makes matters worse
“Law schools are the gateways to a legal profession that lacks diversity by race, ethnicity, gender, disability and more. An important step to creating a more diverse legal profession is to change law schools’ admission policies.”
“Compounding these inequities, the number of white applicants to law schools were double the combined total applicants of those three minority groups. Our country may be rapidly diversifying, but not law schools, with the LSAT inhibiting diversity and helping to maintain the status quo.” “In the 2016-17 admission cycle, it took about 1,960 Black applicants to yield 1,000 offers of admission, compared to only 1,204 among White applicants and 1,333 overall.”
“…A tiny number of students of color with high LSAT scores and lower college GPAs may benefit from having the LSAT. However, at least an order of magnitude more students of color are hurt by the LSAT. The outliers should not be used as a rationale to continue an inequitable factor in the admissions process. It should be up to individual law schools to decide whether their educational missions are best served by being test optional or even test free, as are all of the University of California and California State University campuses for undergraduate admissions.”
This push to simplify and water down standards to achieve desired numbers of proportionality is not only naïve, but extremely counterproductive to having a successful, high-functioning civilization. We should want the best students, without regard for race or gender, to be accepted into selective educational institutions. Not only for law schools, but medical, engineering, and science-related professions.
Equality of opportunity should be the goal, not ethnic proportionality across the board, in line with population percentages. That is neither logical, nor rational to believe that to achieve diversity goals, one must “handicap” those who excel.
The fact is the Law School Admission Test (LSAT) is extremely difficult. It's designed to predict how well the brightest students across the world will fare in law school. In other words, just because you have a 4.0 grade point average from a top tier university doesn't mean you're a lock to score high on the test.