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The Supreme Court Should Reject Racial Preference in College Admissions
[American Thinker] The Supreme Court is going to hear two cases about racial preference in college admissions that allegedly discriminates against Asian students.In the 1978 Bakke decision, the Supreme Court said race could be a factor in admissions, but as anyone who is sat through an academic committee meeting knows, when race is a factor, it is the only factor. Even though the Supreme Court in Bakke said that a set-aside for admissions, or quota, was impermissible, colleges and universities routinely use racial quotas masquerading as goals. The consequence has been that highly qualified Asian students are rejected on trivial and subjective data, such as leadership skills and self-confidence, to increase the proportion of less qualified blacks and Latinos. How do Asian students achieve high academic status and participate in a range of extracurricular activities while lacking in leadership, self-confidence, and other personality traits? The answer is that when it comes to Asians, the subjective evaluation process is a farce designed to discriminate against them. Race-based admissions are not the exception but the rule. And no one but diversity, inclusion, and equity experts conducting so-called cultural audits has profited from this policy. Colleges and universities are run by a professional class of bureaucrats. And if anything, members of bureaucracy know that the very essence of their work is their own survival. To survive the political pressure of diversity, colleges and universities play a numbers game and reduce standards to produce a student population that will meet the espoused goals of cultural auditors and intrusive minority politicians. A great deal of social policy is counterintuitive. Among the casualties of the policy are the very minorities it is supposed to advantage. McWhorter: It's time to end affirmative action [Hot Air] Earlier this week the Supreme Court took up affirmative action by agreeing to hear challenges to the admissions process at two US universities. Today, NY Times’ columnist John McWhorter has a piece arguing that it’s time to end affirmative action, though he still favors programs that give preference to students based on income. When affirmative action was put into practice around a half-century ago, with legalized segregation so recent, it was reasonable to think of being Black as a shorthand for being disadvantaged, whatever a Black person’s socioeconomic status was. In 1960, around half of Black people were poor. It was unheard-of for big corporations to have Black C.E.O.s; major universities, by and large, didn’t think of Black Americans as professor material; and even though we were only seven years from Thurgood Marshall’s appointment to the Supreme Court, the idea of a Black president seemed like folly. McWhorter makes the column personal by talking about his own daughters. The oldest is still not in high school so they are years away from applying to college, but he says that when they do, he doesn’t want the admissions panel judging them based on their skin color: Posted by: Besoeker 2022-01-29 |
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