Former Reagan administration official and author Dinesh D'Souza '83 and Roger Masters, professor emeritus of government at Dartmouth, presented views D'Souza described as "unorthodox" during a debate yesterday titled "Affirmative Action and the Crisis of Academic Standards."
While D'Souza believes that some minorities do not perform well academically because their cultures and values do not promote such accomplishment, Masters sees these differences as caused by differences in the susceptibility of members of different races to environmental toxins that harm the brain.
The debate drew an audience large enough to easily fill 3 Rockefeller's capacity of approximately 70 people, but the crowd was forced to evacuate the room and stand outside the Rockefeller Center when a fire alarm went off.
After several minutes had elapsed, a Hanover fire crew confirmed that there was no fire and that it was safe to reenter the building. They were unsure as to why the false alarm went off.
D'Souza began the debate by explaining that, as he does not believe that institutionalized racism is a problem in today's society, affirmative action should not be necessary.
D'Souza -- a native of India -- drew a distinction between the kind of institutionalized racism that prevents all members of a particular group from obtaining jobs, a university education and other such privileges, and the types of biases that individuals hold against particular groups. While the latter cannot ever be fully eradicated, according to D'Souza, the former can be and has.
While some proponents of affirmative action argue that it is necessary because certain tests, notably the SAT, are biased against minority students, D'Souza argued that he does not know of any standardized test on which blacks and Hispanics do not, on average, receive lower scores than Caucasians and Asians.
He said that, while it is possible that a single test might be biased against a particular race, it is extremely unlikely that all standardized tests are biased against minorities.
Rather, D'Souza attributed these differences to differences in cultures among races.
He cited a study which showed that poor Asians performed better on standardized tests than wealthier students of other races.
According to D'Souza, Asian students do better, not because their genes predispose them to score well on such tests, but because Asian communities encourage children to work hard.
He concluded with a quote from Martin Luther King, "Every man must write with his own hand the charter of his own Emancipation Proclamation."
Masters then explained his own theory as to why some races score better than others on standardized tests.
Masters said that there has been a staggering increase in learning disorders in the U.S. in recent years; an increase which may be caused by increasingly high levels of certain environmental toxins which affect the brain.
For example, he said he recently received diagnostic results of a sample of water from the College's own Gerry Hall from Northeastern Environmental Labs.
The results show that iron is at the EPA maximum contaminant level, and manganese is at twice the EPA maximum contaminant level.
According to Masters, such incidences of contamination of water are not uncommon; according to one estimate, 140 million Americans are drinking contaminated water.
As there are studies which show that blacks are more prone to lactose intolerance than are members of other races, Masters wonders if blacks are more vulnerable to the effects of toxins found in drinking water, or lead in crumbling paint, than are people of other ethnicities.
Masters also questioned the value of standardized tests which purport to measure merit, as most are timed tests which don't accurately measure the capabilities of talented students who suffer from certain learning disabilities that may be caused by exposure to chemicals.
Until we know more about why people are the way they are, and how chemicals can affect human behavior, we can't really know how to fix education, he said.
D'Souza said during his rebuttal that, while Masters' research into the effects of chemicals on human behavior may prove valuable, his argument does encourage members of minorities to renounce intellectual and moral responsibility for their actions.
"It amounts to, 'The water made me do it,'" he said.
Ultimately, affirmative action encourages minorities to take the easy way out; instead, we should focus on improving education for poor and minority students, D'Souza said.
In his rebuttal, while Masters agreed with D'Souza that society needs to do all it can to see that minority students receive an excellent education, he emphasized that we cannot really know how to do so until we better understand the workings of the brain.
He also expressed concerns about the ways that the admissions process at elite institutions like Dartmouth have become increasingly bureaucratic in recent years.
Since Dartmouth doubled in size to accommodate women, admissions officers must rely more on bureaucratic, impersonal measures of achievement like standardized testing, rather than on measures of the unique talents of each applicant, Masters said.
For instance, it is no longer possible to interview each applicant, the way admissions officers once did, he said.
According to Masters, this increasing impersonality and bureaucratization of education, not affirmative action, accounts for the decline in academic standards in recent years.
