From Peter Wood's Racial Color-Blindness Won’t Defend Itself
The racial gerrymandering of college admissions is a world unto itself, one which proceeds by an Alice-in-Wonderland logic. Everywhere other than the courts, the use of racial preferences is frankly acknowledged as a means of increasing the percentage of black and Hispanic students as a goal in its own right. But because the U.S. Supreme Court decades ago declared this form of racial favoritism illegal, the courts operate on an entirely different rationale. Drawing on Justice Powell’s opinion in the 1978 Bakke case, which was eventually turned into law by Justice O’Connor’s majority opinion in the 2003 Grutter case, the courts engage in the elaborate judicial fiction that racial preferences are employed solely to achieve the “educational benefits” of “diversity.”
This puts an enormous burden on an extraordinarily flimsy idea. “Diversity” has no particular educational benefits that anyone has been able to substantiate. We may well, for non-educational reasons, prefer to live in a racially diverse society, but the notion that college administrators are the best situated people in American life to decide the maximum educational mix of “more of these” and “fewer of those” on the basis of race and ethnicity convinces very few. It is just the pretense that the courts have foisted on higher education as the price of maintaining the racial spoils system of college admissions.
