by Shelby Steele

About the author: Shelby Steele is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank.

The affirmative action debate comes to us every season in a different guise. Recently—as if to illustrate the degree to which race has corrupted the practice of social science in America—Derek Bok and William Bowen used their Ivy League imprimatur (they are, respectively, the former presidents of Harvard and Princeton) to assert that "the data" showed preferential treatment for blacks and Hispanics in college admissions to be a great success. So "the data" became accepted as fact until people like Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom showed that "the data" in this case constituted a mask. When, for example, a survey that found that black students were happy with their college experience was used to dismiss the complex matter of...