This "racial diversity" you like so much splits people up into ethnic tribes, who then compete with each other for preferences from the Government. It teaches students they should be valued for their skin color or surname, instead of for what they have accomplished.
I'm not particularly a fan of this. But we should note that it's not the universities that do this, the larger society does it, both in the ways in which we identify ourselves, but more important in the structures of discrimination--education, housing, jobs, etc. If you don't address that discrimination at some level, you then perpetuate present patterns of dominance/subordination. Even the Bush court brief acknowledged that the issue needs to be addressed. They just disagreed with this particular remedy.
Frankly, at the moment, I'm just a bit with Rice on this one. You need to use race in admissions processes; it's just not clear how much a proportion of the process it should be. Now that's an argument, as I said in my previous post, that one can have.
The Michigan case will be overturned, of course. I hope it is done on a broad basis so that we can put his issue behind us.
Well, to make that pronouncement you'll have to do a better job than you have, or I have, for that matter, of figuring out where Kennedy and O'Connor will come down. At the moment, I'm predicting another 5-4 vote; just can't predict which way. But I would guess the decision will be drawn on narrow lines, with the infamous three (Scalia, Rhenquist, and Thomas) drafting briefs that try to overrule Bakke; Kennedy and O'Connor somewhere in the middle, split or on the same side; and Ginsburg, Stevens, Breyer, and Souter, the reasonable moderates to uphold the Michigan procedures.
I, of course, would love to see a decision, which obviously won't come from this case, to say quotas are completely acceptable. |
