I've been railing in print against race-based preferences in admissions for more than 25 years. However, I must now take a back seat to Bill (and not for the first time).
I agree with almost everything in his post. However, I believe there's more merit to diversity than Bill allows, though not nearly enough to justify racial discrimination.
Supporters of race-based preferences cite three diversity-based benefits -- to society, to the blacks and Hispanics who are preferred, and to white students who are said to benefit from being on campus with minority groups whose members they ordinarily wouldn't encounter much.
It's actually the benefit to whites that is pushed hardest as the diversity-based rationale for racial preferences. From a sales pitch point of view, you can understand why.
In my view, the benefit to white students from going to college with minority group members is not a crock. I always suspected there was some benefit in this, and talking to students who, in recent years, have attended colleges with racially diverse student bodies has persuaded me that this is so.
The notion that a diverse student body is desirable has been around for longer than race-based preferences have. For as long as I can remember, Ivy League colleges have sought to admit students from rural America and from sparsely populated upper Midwest and Western states. In doing so, they departed from strict merit, though probably not by very much.
I think that as a student I gained a benefit (albeit small) from my college's geographic diversity. The benefits of a racially diverse student body are at least equal to, and in my view clearly exceed, the benefits of a geographically diverse one.
But does this benefit rise to the level of compelling interest, as it must for the discrimination that produces the diversity to pass legal muster? I don't think so. Adding marginally to white students' college experiences is nice, but not compelling. It provides a woefully insufficient basis for the odious practice of race discrimination.
Furthermore, colleges aren't tailoring their race-based admissions policies to the creation of a diverse student body. You don't need a student body with 10 percent black representation or more to confer the benefit of a racially diverse student body on white students. If there's evidence that merit-based admissions entails the virtual absence of blacks at Harvard or UNC, I haven't seen it.
Thus, diversity, while not a crock, is an excuse. Defenders of racial preferences seized on it as a rationale only because Justice Powell endorsed it in the Bakke case.
The real reason why colleges discriminate on the basis of race is because doing so comports with their vision of social justice. And that vision is, I believe, a crock.
I've been railing in print against race-based preferences in admissions for more than 25 years. However, I must now take a back seat to Bill (and not for the first time).
I agree with almost everything in his post. However, I believe there's more merit to diversity than Bill allows, though not nearly enough to justify racial discrimination.
Supporters of race-based preferences cite three diversity-based benefits -- to society, to the blacks and Hispanics who are preferred, and to white students who are said to benefit from being on campus with minority groups whose members they ordinarily wouldn't encounter much.
It's actually the benefit to whites that is pushed hardest as the diversity-based rationale for racial preferences. From a sales pitch point of view, you can understand why.
In my view, the benefit to white students from going to college with minority group members is not a crock. I always suspected there was some benefit in this, and talking to students who, in recent years, have attended colleges with racially diverse student bodies has persuaded me that this is so.
The notion that a diverse student body is desirable has been around for longer than race-based preferences have. For as long as I can remember, Ivy League colleges have sought to admit students from rural America and from sparsely populated upper Midwest and Western states. In doing so, they departed from strict merit, though probably not by very much.
I think that as a student I gained a benefit (albeit small) from my college's geographic diversity. The benefits of a racially diverse student body are at least equal to, and in my view clearly exceed, the benefits of a geographically diverse one.
But does this benefit rise to the level of compelling interest, as it must for the discrimination that produces the diversity to pass legal muster? I don't think so. Adding marginally to white students' college experiences is nice, but not compelling. It provides a woefully insufficient basis for the odious practice of race discrimination.
Furthermore, colleges aren't tailoring their race-based admissions policies to the creation of a diverse student body. You don't need a student body with 10 percent black representation or more to confer the benefit of a racially diverse student body on white students. If there's evidence that merit-based admissions entails the virtual absence of blacks at Harvard or UNC, I haven't seen it.
Thus, diversity, while not a crock, is an excuse. Defenders of racial preferences seized on it as a rationale only because Justice Powell endorsed it in the Bakke case.
The real reason why colleges discriminate on the basis of race is because doing so comports with their vision of social justice. And that vision is, I believe, a crock.
Diversity is our strength! Oh wait! No! Diversification is our strength!