That forced inclusion by any means had an impact on meritocracy and, consequently, on the ability of the institutions to which it is applied to remain high-performing has always been a fear of conservatives. We know something of this in Italy where on the ballot for the renewal of the European Parliament we were forced to express more than one preference to include at least one candidate of a different gender, when even, perhaps, we would have considered one of the same gender better.
A Star-Spangled Trend
The “quota” system, it must be said, is by no means a made-in-Italy innovation, and like so many questionable gimmicks of the supposedly inclusive new morality it comes from overseas. In the United States, as anyone with the most rudimentary grounding in the politics and daily life of that country knows, the “quota” system has been tried and tested for decades, and not only with regard to gender but also with regard to disability, sexual orientation and the many ethnic “minorities,” particularly African Americans, who populate the States. The system, also referred to as affirmative action (or positive discrimination, a more common label for the United Kingdom), although contested, has now become customary, coming to be further strengthened by the new intersectional perspective.
A crusade against exclusion
Since the road to hell is always paved with good intentions, the motivations behind the birth of affirmative action are also, at least in words, noble, and there are mainly two of them: the first of a political order, that is, to bring allegedly discriminated categories out of social marginalization, and the second of a moral order, that is, trying to compensate not only symbolically the victims of discrimination suffered in the past. Leaving aside the question of how it is possible, in 2024, to compensate victims of slavery (in the U.S. abolished in 1863), one wonders what the real impact of these measures is. In a nutshell, have affirmative action policies succeeded over the decades in moving away from the merely symbolic and ideological result of giving apologies to groups discriminated against in the past? Has discrimination actually ceased? And again, what impact have these policies had in terms of economic productivity, school yield, and the smooth functioning of the political-administrative system?
A lot of smoke and no fire
Off the top of my head, the results do not look exciting: never before has the U.S. media been talking (rightly? Wrongly?) about a continuing resurgence of racism, sexism and bigotry, i.e., precisely those scourges against which affirmative action was conceived, while the political system seems increasingly to be suffering, as indeed any other evolved and “complex” Western-style society, from increasing cumbersomeness, bureaucratic proliferation and invasiveness in private life. And in education?
The designated victim: merit
As is obvious, the partial retirement of meritocracy in education, in which the Anglo-Saxon ethos has always rightly placed a strong point and a source of pride, cannot fail to have heavy repercussions also in the world of work and, more generally, in the entire economic system of the community. The fact takes on particularly serious connotations when such fallout occurs in areas considered sensitive, such as national security or health care. Despite the fact that the latter is, in a country like the United States, almost entirely private, the supposedly economistic background of the nation that is the symbol of economic liberalism does not seem to have offered adequate shelter against the disasters of such an exquisitely ideological measure as affirmative action. background economicistico della nazione simbolo del liberismo economico non sembra aver offerto adeguato riparo contro i disastri di un provvedimento di matrice squisitamente ideologica come l’affirmative action.
The case of UCLA
It was not so long ago, in fact, that news reported, data in hand, a significant drop in performance among those seeking admission to one of the most prestigious medical schools on the planet, California's David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of Los Angeles (UCLA). The forced inclusion of members of ethnic minorities, particularly that of African Americans, even when not possessing the knowledge normally required of other students, within the schools, in fact, tends to considerably lower performance in studies as a whole. UCLA, which receives more than fourteen thousand applications each year, was only able to admit 173 applicants in 2023 due to lack of basic requirements.
An unwritten law
Applicants' performance on admission tests, of course, is evaluated individually, and this can easily lead to disputes. What to do in the case of candidates who express poor performance but, at the same time, are beneficiaries of affirmative action? Such cases have occurred recently at UCLA of all places, leading to clashes within the faculty between a “meritocratic” faction and one, including dean of the evaluating committee Jennifer Lucero, in favor of inclusion at all costs. If all this may appear, to the continental European reader, as puzzling, even more surreal it appears in light of the fact that, in the state of California, affirmative action was, after a fair amount of enforcement, declared illegal in 1996. Instead, the affair, in good substance, seems to demonstrate how it has been so culturally introjected, in academic authorities but probably also in the people of California, that it has become a kind of unwritten law, enforced in defiance of existing regulations.
Quality in free fall
It was precisely this unwritten law that would cause, as time went on, a significant decline in the quality of professionals who graduated from UCLA and entered the wards of hospitals across the country. Professionals who, during their studies, often have to waste a lot of time relearning (mastering?) even basic notions, as an anonymous source at the school confessed to the Washington Free Beacon.. The impact has been notable: the school, since Lucero joined the board, has lost twelve positions in the medical research rankings compiled by the U.S. News & World Report, but the number of students who have been rejected on more than three exams (23.8 percent) and those who have dropped out has also increased, thus taking places away from those who, perhaps, found themselves excluded in the name of inclusion. The UCLA case is a small drop in the ocean of the U.S. health care system and, more generally, in the Western education sector, which, let us remember, will increasingly take on priority geostrategic value in the context of renewed competition between powers, Russia and China in primis, countries in which affirmative action does not exist and the parameters of evaluation are ironclad, net of corruption. In the proportions and fallout that the United States is experiencing, it must be said, affirmative action has never made it to the countries of the European Union, but for once it would be nice, as well as a duty, for the legislature to prevent rather than cure.
Research fellow at the Machiavelli Center. A philosophy scholar, he has been working for years on the topic of the revaluation of nihilism and the great German Romantic philosophy.
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