Mark Sawyer
        Political Science

            Professor Mark Sawyer is part of a sexy new breed of academics pursued lustfully by private and public schools alike.  Hired by UCLA in 1999, Sawyer was by 2002 ardently courted by Yale University and lauded as an strong candidate by Professor William Foltz of the university’s African-American Studies department.  Despite recent wild battles to secure the services of so-called “superstar” African-American academics, Sawyer adopted a guileless glad-to-be-here tone in his comments in the February 22, 2002 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education.  “I’m just happy to have my name mentioned in the same article as Cornel West and Henry Louis Gates,” Sawyer insisted.  “That’s probably not going to happen ever again.”

             Whether his modesty was false or genuine, Sawyer’s rising star continues to climb, fueled by race, race and more race.  As his curriculum vitae notes, Sawyer’s research interests include:

            Comparative study of racial attitudes

            Race and state development

            Black ideologies

            Issues for minorities and women in public contracting

            Globalization and urban communities

            Immigration race and citizenship

             More of the same is found on his personal webpage, which describes Sawyer as

             “a comparativist who has serious interests in Black Political Thought, Critical Race theory, Post-Colonial theory, and theories of the state.  His dissertation research centers on the power of  the assumption of racial homogeneity in Marxist ideology and its impact on Cuban racial politics.  Further, Sawyer is interest in issues of transnational identity and teaches a graduate seminar in “The Politics of the African Diaspora” that considers the salience of transnational identity in the black experience and its impact on Black ideological formation.”

            Given Sawyer’s preoccupation with African-American issues, it’s not surprising to confirm that Sawyer is himself African-American.  Indeed, it may be impossible in this day and age to specialize in academic study on a particular minority group without being of that minority group.  Sadly for all involved, it looks as though the era of white-guilt academics (as epitomized by radicals like white UCLA African-American specialist Paul Von Blum) has passed for good.

             In public forums, Sawyer has been surprisingly quiet about racial issues, though he has popped up in a few interesting ways.  In 2001, Sawyer was on the planning committee of a conference titled, “The Struggle for Social Justice: A Symposium on Recognition, Reparations and Redress.”  The conference was part of a colloquium mandated by the passage of California Senate Bill 1737.  The bill, written by none other than radical State Senator Tom Hayden, whose involvement with UC and UCLA issues runs deep, directed the University of California Regents to

            “assemble a colloquium of scholars to draft a research proposal to analyze the                             economic benefits of slavery that accrued to owners and the businesses, including                         insurance companies and their subsidiaries, that received those benefits.”  

            In short, Hayden’s bill tasked California’s taxpayer-funded higher education system with conducting what was essentially plaintiff’s research that fed in perfectly to the burgeoning slavery reparations movement.  If the agenda wasn’t clear enough, the bill also ordered the State Library to “examine the economic legacy of slavery in California, including forced slavery, chattel slavery, and indentured servitude.”

             Oddly enough, the UCLA conference, while a part of this slavery-specific colloquium, took a more general form by also touching on the Holocaust, the “exploitation of indigenous peoples,” and even the Armenian Genocide.  In light of this, Sawyer claimed the meeting was “not simply a black and white conference; it’s an international conference.”  “International” or not, Sawyer’s own contribution on the conference’s second day, a speech titled “Political Economy of Slavery,” was very much in the spirit of Hayden’s radical agenda.

            With rare exceptions like the reparations conference, Sawyer’s work leaves the impression that he prefers cheering from the sidelines rather than actively taking part in the game.  Sawyer has found it easy to sign petitions.  Sawyer did so most notably with his support for the “Professors of Conscience” statement in which anti-Israel American academics joined anti-Israel Israeli academics in issuing a dark warning about Israel’s alleged plans to expel all Palestinians during the confusion of the Iraq war.  Sawyer also signed a petition declaring unequivocally that the nearly airtight conviction of Philadelphia cop-killer Mumia Abu Jamal (nee Wesley Cook) was merely another example of “criminal injustice,” which the petitioning African scholars view as part of a pattern of abuse that stretches “over 400 years.”

            Continuing down the predictable liberal path, we find that Sawyer is a pro-union activist, having won a $20,000 educational grant from the UCLA Labor Center in June 2005.  Like most laboristas, Sawyer disdains Wal-Mart, and has produced the book length manuscript “Citizens, Workers and Consumers: Wal-Mart, Health and the Private Welfare State,” along with the article “Wal-Mart is Coming vs. Hold the Line on Health Care: Media Frames and the Southern California Grocery Strike.”

            In judging a radical’s heart and mind, it’s best to hear his own words.  While Sawyer has been no Robert Watson, he did make one notable contribution to the Daily Bruin on October 25, 2000.  As it happens, Sawyer was responding to one of my early Daily Bruin Viewpoint columns; this particular one enumerated my concern over UCLA’s endless preoccupation with race.
 
            Sawyer, to put it mildly, took umbrage.  To paraphrase Shakespeare, hell hath no fury like a racialist scorned.  While conveying a generally hurt tone over the attack on affirmative action, Sawyer was particularly offended at my use of a familiar excerpt from Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1963 speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial:

            “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
 
            Sawyer fussed and howled about my using the plain meaning of King’s words to suggest that King would not support the unequal treatment inherent in racial preferences.  King, Sawyer thundered, “was a staunch support of affirmative action” who “believed in an even stronger version than was ever practiced.”  Sawyer claimed that King supported quotas, and “had real antipathy and concern for the “good will of whites.””  Sawyer then quoted King’s views of whites at length, highlighting a different part of that 1963 speech in which King argued, “America has given the Negro people a bad check; a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’”  Sawyer then took the devious tack of quoting from a book written by King in 1967, four years after the Washington, D.C. speech under discussion.  The book contained, among other salient points, King’s view that “Whites, it must frankly be said, are not putting in a similar mass effort to reeducate themselves out of their racial ignorance.  It is an aspect of their sense of superiority that the white people of America believe they have so little to learn.”

            Any historian with a pulse is well aware, as Sawyer no doubt is, that King’s views underwent a significant transformation over those four crucial years.  King began expressing doubts about the Vietnam War in 1965, and by 1967, King had become a full-throat radical, stating that the U.S. was involved in Vietnam “to occupy it as an American colony” and denouncing American government as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”  King voiced increasing impatience in domestic matters as well.  While the vast majority of white America had risen up against the genuine abuses of Jim Crow and segregation, King wanted to level society, preferably by governmental fiat, ensuring not just equality of opportunity but equality of outcome.

            It is far from unfair to quote the King of 1963 against affirmative action; in many ways, that King is a completely different man from what he was by 1967.  In 1963, King’s complaints were genuine and utterly just; Jim Crow still ruled the South.  Just two years prior, Freedom Riders had been pulled from buses and beaten by white mobs, and Birmingham, Alabama sheriff Bull Connor was still using police dogs and fire hoses on civil rights marchers.  In 1963, many of the givens of modern American race relations, such as the Voting Rights Act, were still two years in the future.  In 1963, King rhetorically answered his own question, “When will [we] be satisfied?” by enumerating his conditions: the end of “police brutality,” the ability to “gain lodging in…motels [and] hotels,” and a real opportunity for a “Negro in Mississippi [to] vote.”  There is nary a word, despite Sawyer’s devious approach of plugging in King’s radicalized 1967 views, about ensuring an equality of outcome.

            Most importantly, the quote, which illustrates King’s hope for a race-blind America, was not pulled out of a vacuum.  The “I have a dream” motif is repeated eight times, and includes King’s wish that one day, “little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.”  Most tellingly, King dreams that “one day, this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.””

            Given such background, Sawyer’s shock and dismay over my use of King’s words is so much nonsense.  Almost as if he knew that trading King quotations wouldn’t be enough to complete a cogent argument for affirmative action, Sawyer took issue with my supposed use of “racial code words and signs that are explicit appeals to whites to assert their power.”  Explicit appeals to assert power?  Sawyer treats my humble Daily Bruin opinion column as if it were the equivalent of Rwandan hate radio urging Tutsis to “cut the tall trees” (i.e. the rival Hutus) during that country's 1994 massacres.

            Two apparent code words in particular seem to disturb Sawyer: “merit” and “qualified.”  How, Sawyer asks, could I treat these as settled terms when “tough admissions decisions are made amongst a huge pool of “qualified” students”?  Contrary to Sawyer’s contention of admissions office hair-splitting, a large number of applicants admitted to UCLA are indeed unqualified, demonstrated by the consistent gaps between the GPA and SAT scores of white and Asian-American freshman enrollees, and dramatically lower scores from African-American and Hispanic in the same class.  The factor of “life challenges” offers no hope for Sawyer’s argument either.  As copious anecdotes from a 2003 Wall Street Journal article showed, Asian-American and Hispanic applicants with nearly identical troubles received different treatment from the UC.  The hard-luck Asian-Americans with exceptional GPA and SAT were still rejected, while the Latinas with abysmal scores were quickly snapped up by UCLA and UC Berkeley. 

            Perhaps aware of the flimsy nature of his pro-racial preferences arguments, Sawyer throws handfuls of them against the wall, hoping one will stick.  He tries the Kaplan example, arguing that test preparation services give an unfair advantage to the students who can afford them (although Sawyer doesn’t explicitly say so, the implication is that these students are white).  The problem, of course, is that prep courses cannot make a genius of a dullard.  Having dispensed with that claim, we confront Sawyer’s other claim: what of the prototypical “Inglewood high school student [who]…goes to a school that does not offer AP courses that add extra points to the student’s GPA?”  A quick stroll down memory lane reminds us why Sawyer picked that school as his example.  Inglewood High School students, backed by American Civil Liberties Union lawyers, filed a class action law suit in 1999 challenging the disparity in Advanced Placement course offerings between high schools in poorer and wealthier areas.

            It is true enough that AP courses can boost an applicant’s GPA, given that they’re graded (and accepted by the UC) on a five-point scale.  Thus, a B grade in an AP class is the equivalent of an A grade in a regular four-point scaled class, while A grades in an AP class has resulted in the situation that the average UCLA freshman now enters the university with a GPA over 4.0.  The problem is that Sawyer mischaracterizes the situation.  Even back in those relatively dark ages, Inglewood High School was already offering three AP courses.  Was it an inadequate number?  Probably.  But also a far cry from Sawyer’s statement that none at all were offered.
 
            A quick jump forward to today shows that Inglewood High School (the real one, not the whipping boy of Sawyer’s radical imagination) offers Advanced Placement courses in no less than ten subjects: English Literature, English Language, Calculus, Biology, Chemistry, Physics, World History, US History, Government, and Spanish for Hispanics. 

            Presumably, the ACLU lawsuit was the impetus for the Advanced Placement Challenge Grant Program.  This initiative was established to meet the California governor’s goal of providing at least four AP courses in every California high school by the fall of 2001.  Suffice to say, if today an Inglewood High School student, or any other California high school student, wishes to challenge himself with AP classes, the opportunity is there.  And that fact, unfortunately for Sawyer, blasts a gaping hole another one of his vital arguments.
 
            While Sawyer misrepresented Inglewood High School’s AP course offerings, he actually offers an even weaker justification for racial preferences.  Affirmative action, Sawyer contends, ensures the presence of “multiple voices” at UCLA.  In his 2000 Daily Bruin op-ed, Sawyer complained, “in two classes I have lectured this fall, there have been no black males to discuss or comment about experiences with police and the criminal justice system.”  Sawyer assumes, of course, that every black college-aged youth has had run-ins with the police and/or criminal justice system.  What if Sawyer had five black students, none of which had ever been in any significant trouble?  Would he call for thug-based affirmative action and demand that UCLA admit applicants with more rough-and-tumble backgrounds?  The truth is that troublemakers, by and large, don’t come anywhere near qualifying for UCLA admission.  That Sawyer should assume black youths who are admitted would naturally bring an expert voice on police and criminal issues, is a nasty piece of stereotyping, yet illusive of the radical mindset.

            In pursuing his “multiple voices” argument, Sawyer makes only one relatively cogent point: that the “paucity of minorities…means that the full range of black opinions, from feminist to nationalist to conservative, are not represented.  Often a single black student is called upon to represent the race.”  Again, what would Sawyer have us do?  One method would be to open the floodgates on minority admissions, admitting so many that eventually you’d have to end up with some from rare groups like conservatives.  Or perhaps Sawyer would have us seek ultra-specific categories of racial and ideological applicants for preferential admissions treatment.  It’s just crazy enough to work: UCLA could run newspaper advertisements along the lines of “Wanted – 5 black conservatives, 4 Hispanic feminists, 6 Filipino radicals – call for more details: 310-UCLA-WIN.”

            Even with such a system in place, could we ensure that each classroom would have at least one black conservative, one black feminist, one black radical, and so on down the list?  For that matter, would we still not be capturing all relevant voices?  What about black fiscal conservatives who are socially liberal, or black social conservatives who are fiscally liberal?  Sawyer’s system, properly realized, might well require a Racial Representation Strike Team to ensure in each classroom a proper number of minorities from each part of the political spectrum.  The answer to the “multiple voices” dilemma is to accept neither of these options, but rather to reject Sawyer’s argument altogether.  What else can one do with an argument that assigns to classmate interaction a pedagogical importance that approaches that of the professor himself?  No lecture should falter simply because a black or brown face isn’t in the audience that day.  That it should, or that the professor should publicly confess to feeling that it did, is the sign of a poor educator.  While Sawyer complains, “Often a single black student is called upon to represent the race,” he fails to acknowledge that this is problem is self-created.
 
            After disgorging this complaint, Sawyer moves to his last and least quantifiable argument.  Cribbed from the affirmative action apologia “Shape of the River” by Derek Bok and William Bowen, Sawyer contends that affirmative action is needed because “students of color tend to return to their communities with a sense of obligation to help.”  It’s an interesting line of argument, provided you treat higher education as the incursion of a debt which can only be paid off by doing good works in poor communities.  The problem is that this kind of policy rewards racialized thinking.  Rather than encouraging students to apply their skills where they fit best, minority students hear the drumbeat of “return to your people,” “help communities of color,” and so on.  Tellingly, Sawyer (and the book from which he took his arguments) can only reference unnamed “Studies of law, medical and dental school graduates” which indicate that minority graduates tend to return to minority areas.
 
            But wait: isn’t the big debate mostly about undergraduate affirmative action?  Sawyer is wise to avoid this point, since it’s rather damaging to his argument.  After all, undergraduate degree holders just finished with four or more years in English literature studying the homoerotic imagery of Shakespeare, or in political science flogging the concepts of oikos and the Nietschzean “will to power,” aren’t particularly well-prepared for making direct, tangible contributions to “communities of color.”

            Just as damaging to the “Shape of the River” argument is its presupposition that minorities’ supposed tendency to “return to their communities of color” justifies admitting them into schools that otherwise would have been closed to them.  Not surprising for a pair of Ivy League swells (Bowen is the former president of Princeton University; Bok the former president of Harvard University), the authors have bought into the notion that the more “prestigious” a given school, the better its actual educational product.
 
            Nobody can deny the existence of an educational gap between a Harvard University and a San Diego State University, but if affirmative action is really only giving a small bump to an otherwise qualified candidate, then the typical effect is placing top minorities into, say, a school ranked #10 instead of #30.  In the end, both schools will give the minority student an excellent legal education.  And if minority students are actually returning to “communities of color” in droves to conduct quasi-missionary work, as Sawyer and his ilk claim, then this slight boost is rather pointless.  The clients in the prototypical community legal aid clinic don’t care, nor would they notice a difference in quality, from a lawyer trained at a #10 school versus a #30 school.

            Undoubtedly, a small number of minority students (or white and Asian-American students, for that matter) would have their whole lives changed for the better if they were accepted to a #10 school when their academics would only qualify them for a #150 school.  But this isn’t what happens: affirmative action proponents loudly insist that the system’s preferences are only slight nudges.  Looked at from another angle, if minority students are not joining the corporate law rat race, why does a normally uncompetitive black applicant need to take a seat that would otherwise belong to a white or Asian-American applicant?  Better to leave the white students to scratch and claw at each other over getting into Harvard vs. Yale vs. Princeton.
 
            Of course, Sawyer and his ilk will never accept this argument.  They’ll likely tell you that it’s an issue of fairness, or that somehow, there really is a difference in education between a #10 versus a #30 school.  But the fact is that students who benefit from affirmative action, despite what surveys say, want to do well for themselves.  Sawyer himself is a prime example.  He attended prestigious St. Ignatius College Prep in Chicago, Illinois, a school whose tuition today weighs in at $9,700.  Not only is the cost far over the average secondary private school tuition of $6,052 (as reported in a 2003 Cato Institute study),but it even exceeds the current tuition of UCLA itself.  While at St. Ignatius, Sawyer distinguished himself among tough competition as a smart, skilled student, earning semi-finalist status for the 1990 National Achievement Scholarship Program for Outstanding Negro Students.  In college, Sawyer continued to outperform, making a lightning progression through a four-year B.A., two-year master’s and three-year doctorate with the University of Chicago.

             In public comments, Sawyer has claimed that those who argue against affirmative action “want to shut the doors to hard working students who go to school to gain skills to do thankless work in poor communities.”  Has Sawyer lived up to his own challenge?  Far from doing “thankless work in poor communities,” Sawyer sits in a comfortable tenured position at one of the top public research universities in the country, wooed by Ivy League universities, one of which will (no doubt) one day win his services following a lucrative bidding war.  Do as I say, Sawyer clearly advises, not as I do.