Selling Merit Down the River

Abstract

The River Pilots are at it again. And they are as confused as ever. Their latest endeavor, Taming the River (River III, 2009), offers a detailed analysis of the results of two sets of questionnaires given to a representative sample of college students at twenty-eight selective colleges and universities who matriculated as freshmen in the fall of 1999. Like their earlier work, The Source of the River (River II, 2003), which examined the achievement of these same students to the midpoint of their freshman year, this newest installment looks at a blinding complexity of student characteristics and attitudes and their relationship to various outcome variables including school retention and student grades traced further on into the students’ college life. This ongoing longitudinal study was inspired by The Shape of the River (River I, 1998), written by former Princeton president William Bowen and former Harvard president Derek Bok, which used a different database—the College and Beyond Survey—to analyze the progress of students who had attended more than two dozen selective American colleges and universities. All three River books, although they have multiple authors and despite the fact that River I specifically claims not to have any policy agenda but to be merely gathering facts relevant to a more informed public debate, are written from the standpoint of those who passionately, even desperately, want to retain current racial preference policies in American universities and to minimize or refute the claims of the policies’ many critics. This attempt at refutation is particularly aimed at people like Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele, Acad. Quest. (2009) 22:521–529 DOI 10.1007/s12129-009-9140-8