Excellent article that could use a little more historical context. The UC case (Bakke) was filed by white conservatives on behalf of white applicants who discovered that they were having trouble competing with Asian applicants. “Asian” applicants means for my purposes students from the “Confucian cultural sphere” - China, Korea and Japan. The conservative move was to attack black and Latino students so as to make more room for white students. Today Berkeley and UCLA are plurality Asian and have Black and Latino students as small minorities. I once heard a Japanese mother in Los Angeles describe UCLA as “our” university.
There is a grand irony in all of this, of course: The Supreme Court has established a bizarre inversion, allowing for negative discrimination, or discrimination *against* (against LGBTQI most obviously, but creeping toward a return to allowing white supremacy as legal doctrine as well) while erasing opportunities of "discrimination" *for* (banning Affirmative Action, debt relief for student borrowers) that isn't even really discrimination in any meaningful sense. In this inversion affirmative action is a sort of unacceptable racism and actual racism (or homophobia, or what have you) is somehow protected.
The only silver lining is that with university and college admissions, only a tiny slice of schools really are involved here -- the vast majority of places in the US are at best semi-selective, and almost definitionally, the kind that are truly selective have the kinds of resources to create clever workarounds.
The most frustrating thing to me is that the people who bring these cases always assume that they were just one or two admissions decisions away from being accepted at Harvard or UNC, when the reality is that in any of these selective application pools there were literally hundreds of better or equally qualified students from nearly every demographic pool who also did not get in. I guess I just cannot imagine being so delusional as to think I am entitled to go to Harvard AND to then believe that if I do not get in it's the fault of the 5% of the admitted class that is Black and not the 43% that is athletes, legacy, donor progeny, and the children of faculty and staff. Honestly that person should be rejected just for being a fucking dipshit.
This is one area where I'm inclined to just admit my overall ignorance and get on with life. I don't know what policies actually achieve good results, and I'm furthermore uncertain how to define "good" in this context.
For the record: I (probably) personally benefitted from elite universities having small d diversity goals - trying to have enough students other than white rich male Americans for those "future leaders of America" (sigh) to have had at least some contact with a few of their smarter, richer and/or more ambitious age-peers from elsewhere, both the other side of the tracks and outside of the "world's greatest country" (sic).
OTOH, I would only benefit from large-D "diversity" goals if I made a point of loudly proclaiming differences it would normally be better to keep private. I'm not black or hispanic, and being female and/or having Jewish ancestry no longer count. But I could legitimately claim disability (*eyeroll*) or a place in the QUILTBAG, to hopefully keep myself out of the category of "wanted only if rich and/or legacy" :-(
Excellent article that could use a little more historical context. The UC case (Bakke) was filed by white conservatives on behalf of white applicants who discovered that they were having trouble competing with Asian applicants. “Asian” applicants means for my purposes students from the “Confucian cultural sphere” - China, Korea and Japan. The conservative move was to attack black and Latino students so as to make more room for white students. Today Berkeley and UCLA are plurality Asian and have Black and Latino students as small minorities. I once heard a Japanese mother in Los Angeles describe UCLA as “our” university.
There is a grand irony in all of this, of course: The Supreme Court has established a bizarre inversion, allowing for negative discrimination, or discrimination *against* (against LGBTQI most obviously, but creeping toward a return to allowing white supremacy as legal doctrine as well) while erasing opportunities of "discrimination" *for* (banning Affirmative Action, debt relief for student borrowers) that isn't even really discrimination in any meaningful sense. In this inversion affirmative action is a sort of unacceptable racism and actual racism (or homophobia, or what have you) is somehow protected.
The only silver lining is that with university and college admissions, only a tiny slice of schools really are involved here -- the vast majority of places in the US are at best semi-selective, and almost definitionally, the kind that are truly selective have the kinds of resources to create clever workarounds.
The most frustrating thing to me is that the people who bring these cases always assume that they were just one or two admissions decisions away from being accepted at Harvard or UNC, when the reality is that in any of these selective application pools there were literally hundreds of better or equally qualified students from nearly every demographic pool who also did not get in. I guess I just cannot imagine being so delusional as to think I am entitled to go to Harvard AND to then believe that if I do not get in it's the fault of the 5% of the admitted class that is Black and not the 43% that is athletes, legacy, donor progeny, and the children of faculty and staff. Honestly that person should be rejected just for being a fucking dipshit.
Nice mix of thoughts.
This is one area where I'm inclined to just admit my overall ignorance and get on with life. I don't know what policies actually achieve good results, and I'm furthermore uncertain how to define "good" in this context.
For the record: I (probably) personally benefitted from elite universities having small d diversity goals - trying to have enough students other than white rich male Americans for those "future leaders of America" (sigh) to have had at least some contact with a few of their smarter, richer and/or more ambitious age-peers from elsewhere, both the other side of the tracks and outside of the "world's greatest country" (sic).
OTOH, I would only benefit from large-D "diversity" goals if I made a point of loudly proclaiming differences it would normally be better to keep private. I'm not black or hispanic, and being female and/or having Jewish ancestry no longer count. But I could legitimately claim disability (*eyeroll*) or a place in the QUILTBAG, to hopefully keep myself out of the category of "wanted only if rich and/or legacy" :-(