"Bans On Affirmative Action Help Asian Americans, Not Whites, Report Says" reads a Chronicle of Higher Education headline this week reporting on a new study of preference bans and attendance, offering little surprise to… any, it seems, aside from the study's authors. The study examined the results of preference bans at a number of colleges, and found that they yielded significant increases in Asian American applicants, significant declines in black attendance, and mixed portraits otherwise, with some declines in white attendance, which can partially be attributed to demographic change in the applicant pools. It's slightly odd to see race-blind admissions yielding a decline in white attendance, but, substantively speaking, it's been apparent for a significant amount of time (to anyone who's watched the UC schools, for one) that the end of preferences is principally a boon to Asian American attendance. And despite all this, opposition to preferences has continued to mount. How do the researchers explain this? Whites have been fooling themselves.

In a grim and considerably unfair portrait of the movement against affirmative action, the report suggests that their findings "can hardly be satisfying' to 'those who campaigned for the elimination of affirmative action in the belief that it would advantage the admission of white students." Yes, it would be dissatisfying to those persons, but what is that demographic? I seem to recall broad enthusiasm for restoring merit as the source of anti-preference arguments and success, not white American racial interest. The report continues in this vein, predicting that whites may begin opposing affirmative action bans if Asians continued to make gains, observing that "Whites are still too influential in politics and in the private sector to sit quietly while this trend continues." I was struck by the profound cynicism of this commentary, seemingly attributing the success of bans to narrow white misconceptions of their self-interest, until I saw the final line of the Chronicle report. One of the study authors, Charles E. Young, former chancellor of UCLA, stated, about the effects of preference bans in colleges, that "limits on affirmative action have 'clearly negatively affected their ability to provide diversity in education,' hurting the education of their students." Hurting the education, of course - now it's easy to discern a narrative. What's a new way to stem the tide against preferences and install diversity forever? Convince whites that they might want them!

The study commentary seems to advance a recent tradition of pro-preference argument, which seeks to bolster support for preference regimes by seeking to incorporate aggrieved parties into their preference schemes. Already, some have argued that preferences for vanishing males could convincingly be incorporated into existing diversity systems. Now we'll see preferences for whites? It's a novel universalist argument, but hey, any argument's worth a try if it might keep affirmative action alive, right? I look forward to reading the full study.

In our latest podcast, John Leo interviews Ward Connerly on his efforts to eliminate racial preferences in five states this November and the role of diversity in college admissions. Listen here.

Randy Cohen, the New York Times "Ethicist", offered a very slippery response to a reader last week, on the question of financial incentives for the hiring of minority professors. You'd best read the whole exchange first. My comments are beneath:

I teach at a state university that offers financial incentives to hire minority candidates. A department receives $1,000 for completing a tenure-track hire but $5,000 if it hires a minority candidate. I'm concerned that colleagues will make recommendations based on the financial reward rather than pursue the "best" candidate. Should the institution offer these bounties? - DR. MARK E. CHASE, SLIPPERY ROCK, PA.

There's nothing discreditable or even unusual about using financial incentives to prompt estimable conduct. Governments use tax codes to promote desired activities. Businesses offer bonuses to encourage certain kinds of job performance. (Full disclosure: I have a "financial incentive" to write this column. It's called a "paycheck.") Be wary of skewing your argument with a loaded word like "bounties."

It is admirable of your school to acknowledge that some minorities are underrepresented on campus, that this is unjust in itself and that it subverts the school's mission: it is important for students to encounter professors (and fellow students) of diverse backgrounds and viewpoints. In pursuit of this goal, the school may try various things. There might be better ways to genuinely expand faculty diversity, but until such methods are on the table, and unless the danger you worry about actually emerges, financial incentives are worth a try.

Be comforted that hiring a new faculty member involves so many layers of scrutiny, so many opportunities for colleagues to weigh in, that the hazard you invoke is minimal. Remember: this tactic is not meant to lower hiring standards but to broaden the pool of people considered for the job.

For so long there has been so much social (if not legal) pressure arrayed against hiring such folks - in effect, incentives to hire white men - that it seems hypocritical to object only when incentives benefit minority candidates.

First, yes, the incentive that Dr. Chase writes concerning is clearly a small one. It's unlikely that a department would contort its hiring decision much on the basis of a $4,000 "bounty" - after all, they'd have to work with the hire. Cohen's right to point out that the "hazard is minimal" - yet his answer concerning that minimal danger is far from forthright. Consider this, the slipperiest sentence from above:

Fear that Proposition 209 has whitewashed the University of California? A majority of students at seven of the nine undergraduate campuses at the University of California are now foreign-born or have one foreign-born parent, a new study by the Center for Studies in Higher Education at UC Berkeley reveals. Chinese, Latino, Korean, Vietnamese, Filipino, East Indian, Pakistani, Japanese, Pacific Islander, and white immigrants now constitute a majority at all UC schools save for UC Santa Cruz and UC Santa Barbara - where students who are immigrants or have one immigrant parent still make up almost 40% of each student body.

The report contained other striking revelations; socioeconomic diversity is on the rise as well; 24% of attendees reported annual parental income of under $35,000. Surprising? Well, it's not unrelated. The report additionally indicates that those students immigrant backgrounds are "much more likely" to come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds than their peers. 74% of those in the under-$35,000 bracket grew up speaking a principal language other than English, or English along with another language.

What does this all mean? Well, the report's explanation is simple, and convincing:

UC is becoming increasingly racially and ethnically diverse in complex ways that reflect major demographic changes in the state, with Chinese students largely from immigrant families now representing the second largest identifiable racial/ethnic group in the UC system, followed by Chicano/Latino and then Korean and Vietnamese students.

The representation of Asians in the UC system is a continued success story, but the encouragingly high Latino\Chicano rate of attendance, at 14% of the undergraduate body, is an encouraging rejoinder to objections that Proposition 209 decimated Latino attendance rates. Latinos constituted a bit over 13% of the UC population prior to Proposition 209, according to the California Research Bureau. They've clearly now achieved comparable results free of preferences.

What's more, the report posed a number of questions about students' priorities at college. The more affluent students were, the more likely they were to skip classes and to value "social involvement - time spent on fun" over "academic involvement - time spent on academics." The students from less affluent backgrounds, by contrast, were most likely to report never skipping classes, and valued academic involvement over social involvement by the greatest margin. The changes in the UC student body reflect a clear shift towards greater seriousness in student performance. Hopefully we'll see more of the same.

Since the Supreme Court last week decided against Seattle and Louisville, Kentucky’s policies of assuring a certain degree of racial diversity in public schools, we have heard much about the undoing of Brown v. Board.

However, I have a hard time mourning the decision, though the brute notion that we must ignore race to get beyond it is, surely, simplistic.

Preliminarily, I think of the plethora of schools nationwide where all the students are brown and yet excellence is a norm. I think of the fact that to the extent that black teens tar excelling in school as "acting white," it tends to be when they go to school with white people, as scholarly studies have shown.

Yet I openly admit that my discomfort with racial (as opposed to socioeconomic) preferences in education is also based in part on gut impressions - based on my own experiences in academia over, now, almost 20 years. Too often, commitment to "diversity" has nothing to do with recognizing the humanity and individuality of the persons in question, and much to do with reaffirming other people's sense of moral legitimacy.

As it happens, it was ten years ago this week that I had one such experience.
Every two summers, linguists have a kind of summer camp, the Linguistic Society of America Institute, where linguists from around the world give mini-courses for students on a college campus. I was invited to teach at the one in 1997.

Henry Lewis Gates, renowned Harvard professor of African-American Studies - which is to say, someone about as deep as can be gotten in the belly of the diversity-obsessed academic beast - said something quite remarkable the other day. Invited to address the graduates of Kentucky's Berea College, founded in 1855 as the first integrated college in the South, from the speakers platform Gates trod very familiar territory. He lauded the benefits of affirmative action, and instructed the grads that it isn't enough to "pay lip service" to diversity. But in an interview he gave an enterprising reporter for the Lexington Herald-Leader, things got interesting. Gates allowed that while he, the son of a janitor, had needed affirmative action to get ahead, his own privileged children did not; nor should they benefit from it. But poor white children should. "We need to get more black people into the middle class," he concluded. "We need to get more white people into the middle class."

One cannot help but wonder whether the learned professor realizes that such a position -support for economic affirmative action, but opposition to the kind based merely on skin color - is identical to that held by the nation's leading crusader against racial preferences (and a man much detested by campus liberals and leftists), Ward Connerly. Indeed, in his successful fights on behalf of state initiatives to end race-based college admissions and government hiring in California, Washington and Michigan, Connerly has been bitterly denounced as a race traitor and worse for saying the very same thing; demanding, for instance, how affirmative action supporters can fail to see the elemental unfairness of a college admissions officer giving preference to the child of a black surgeon over the child of a white coal miner who would be the first in his family to go to college.

The yield of the University of California's "holistic" admissions process is now becoming apparent with the release of enrollment figures. Admissions were conducted under a novel system for the current year, a "holistic process" which was promoted as a means to improve the relative chances of disadvantaged students who lacked AP courses and other academic opportunities that wealthier peers enjoy.

Now that the matriculating class of 2007 has been selected, University administrators are hailing the result as a great success. So it proved a boon for low-income students? Well, no, not at all actually. The number of students from families with incomes under 30,000 declined from 955 in 2006 to an estimated 689 for 2007. The number of first-generation students fell by about 400.

What do University administrators have to say about the results? Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs Janina Montero declared to the UCLA Daily Bruin "We are certainly out of crisis mode." Acting Chancellor Norman Abrams was "very pleased" with the result.

How is this? Well, black enrollment increased from 96 in 2006 to 203 for the present year. What would most rational persons call a policy that traded modest increases in black enrollment for much more severe declines in immigrant and other low-income enrollment? Flawed? Only a university administrator could look at such a result and declare themself pleased.

By K.C. Johnson

Apart from Barack Obama's call for students who perform national service to receive a college tuition credit, issues related to higher education received scant attention in the 2008 campaign. Yet for those interested in meaningful reform on the nation's college campuses, the election provides some intriguing possibilities---provided that Republicans move beyond the perspectives offered in the campaign and return to the higher education agenda articulated by conservatives and libertarians over the past 15 years.

On issues relevant to higher education policy, Obama was clearly the most centrist of the three major contenders for this year's Democratic nomination. John Edwards, who hitched himself to the far left of the party, surely would have been a paragon of political correctness. And before her reinvention as a tribune of the white working class, Hillary Clinton employed an often crude, gender-based identity politics.

A January New York Times op-ed typified how the Clinton campaign and its supporters reflected the excesses of 1970s feminism. Gloria Steinem (erroneously) rejoiced that "women over 50 and 60, who disproportionately supported Senator Clinton, proved once again that women are the one group that grows more radical with age."

By Robert Weissberg

"..the one aspect of American culture and society most in need of improvement and investment--education--has been greeted by deafening silence on the part of all candidates."

Leon Botstein, president of Bard College in his "charge" to the Class of 2008. Leon forgets to mention that all of today's presidential candidates, including also-rans, offer detailed prescriptions for fixing education and US spending on education has for decades out-paced inflation and even government health care spending. In other words, class of 2008, when it comes to saving the world, just make it up. Why bother with inconvenient truths.

Universities, it would seem, are committed to uncovering truth. Exceptions occasionally occur, and a small contingent insists that there is no such thing as objective truth, but for the most part, professors who make up data or plagiarize are usually caught and punished. Recall that Ward Churchill was fired for research misconduct and fraud, not his loathsome views, and even fellow travelers could not justify deception. Professors may exaggerate a bit, disregard awkward findings or even tilt research towards pre-conceived outcomes, but it would be professional suicide to insist that 2+2=5.

Unfortunately, a major exception exists, and this might be called the "Grand Noble Lie" whose purpose is not to deceive (the usual aim of a lie) but to reassure listeners so as to advance a career. Whereas conventional liars seek to cover their tracks (e.g., what is "is"), the effectiveness of the Grand Noble Lie depends on its blatant, plain-to-see falseness. It is insufficient to claim that 2+2=5 or for the timid 2=2=4.01; rather 2+2=100. This is an incredibly upside down world whereby those saying 2+2=100 may go on to glory while Professor Joe Average dreads being humiliated for citing a book he never read. That Grand Liars are more likely to be distinguished university presidents, or at least Deans, not under-the-gun junior faculty concocting data to get published, only makes the phenomena even more remarkable.

By Ward Connerly

If you like "whodunit" books and "perfect crime" plots, I heartily recommend the Tim Groseclose experience of trying to obtain the data to evaluate the "holistic" admissions process of the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). Groseclose is the political science professor who blew the whistle on what he considers to be UCLA's violation of the California Constitution with regard to the use of race preferences in admissions to his campus.

As a regent of the University of California (UC), I supported the use of what we called "comprehensive review" as an alternative to over-reliance on standardized test scores. Yet, at the time of approval, I and others expressed concern that allowing UC campuses the discretion to view applicants for admission "comprehensively" opened the door to the use of subjective factors that could not be detected or proven; however, it was my belief then that UC administrators would resist the temptation to cheat and violate the California Constitution and that they would administer this new process with integrity. In the case of UCLA, I am now strongly convinced that my faith in the institution's honor has been misplaced.

Why the perfect crime?

Originally, UCLA reviewed applications for admission by determining the academic competitiveness of those in the applicant pool solely on the basis of academic performance. Nonacademic factors were reviewed separately. This approach was a fail-safe method of ensuring that the constitutionally prohibited factors of race, color, ethnicity, sex and national origin would not be factors in admissions decisions.

By Gail Heriot

The ABA is very big on diversity. To satisfy its standards, nearly all law schools must seriously relax their admissions standards for minority students. But how many of so-called beneficiaries of affirmative action are graduating and passing the bar? And how many are winding up with nothing to show for their trouble but students loans? The evidence is not encouraging.

For years, the ABA has used its clout to demand that law schools toe the affirmative action line. In the 1990s, fully 31% of law schools admitted to political scientists Susan Welch and John Gruhl that they "felt pressure" "to take race into account in making admissions decisions" from "accreditation agencies."

Law schools must take pressure from the ABA seriously. As the U.S. Department of Education's designated law school accreditation agency, the ABA, through its Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, has the power to decide whether a law school will be eligible for federal funding. Unless the ABA approves, for example, a law school's students will be ineligible for student loans. And that is just the beginning. Most states do not allow the graduates of non-ABA-accredited law schools even to sit for the bar examination. A law school that is not in the good graces of the ABA is thus not a law school at all.

By Russell Nieli

Several years ago a Korean-American student in one of my politics classes at Princeton described the reaction of his Asian classmates in the California private school he attended when the college acceptance and rejection letters arrived in the mail the spring of their senior year. A female Black student, he explained, had applied to more than half a dozen of the most prestigious colleges and universities in the nation and got accepted to all of them, deciding eventually to enroll at Stanford. Many of his Asian friends, he said, along with many Whites, reacted bitterly to the Black student's success, some in open disbelief that this student could be so phenomenally successful in her college search. Why was there such bitterness among his classmates, I wanted to know. "Were there better qualified Asian and White students with higher SAT scores than the Black student?" I asked. "Better qualified?!" he said, "there were loads of Asian and White students who were much better qualified, with much higher SAT scores, much higher grade point averages, and who were much more active in student government and a host of other extra-curricular activities than this Black student." To add further fuel to his classmates' anger, he went on, this particular Black student had a cold, off-putting, self-centered personality which hardly endeared her to her classmates. "She didn't make it on charm" was the gist of his further remarks here.

This Korean student's story was in the back of my mind as I read the newspaper accounts about the racial discrimination complaint lodged not long ago with the Department of Education against Princeton University by Jian Li, the Chinese-American student at Yale who had a perfect 2400 (i.e. three 800s) on the newer version of the SAT. Li was a stellar student in high school, who in addition to his perfect SAT score achieved near-perfect scores on several of the College Board achievement tests (SAT IIs), took nine Advanced Placement courses, and had a near-perfect grade-point-average that placed him in the 99th percentile of his graduating class in a competitive suburban high school. In addition to his top-of-the line academic performance, Li was active in a number of extracurricular activities, and was a delegate to the prestigious Boys State. All of this would be an impressive achievement for anyone, but Li was the son of Chinese immigrants, his first language was Chinese, and English was not spoken in his home. Li's academic achievement was a truly remarkable and inspiring story of talent, persistence, and the immigrant work ethic in pursuit of the American Dream.

Li was happy at Yale and lodged his complaint not because of any animus against Princeton -- Princeton was only one of five elite universities that rejected his application (Harvard, MIT, Stanford, and Penn were the others) -- but because of a general sense that Asian applicants to elite colleges were being unjustly disfavored in comparison to the members of other minority groups, especially Blacks and Hispanics, and were not being evaluated fairly under the same set of academic standards as others. For anyone familiar with the admissions policies at the more selective colleges and universities over the past thirty years, Li's complaint not only rang true but has been well-documented again and again wherever the situation has been adequately studied. The simple fact is that a Black or Hispanic student with Li's credentials would almost certainly have gained admission to every elite institution he or she applied to. Indeed, an "underrepresented minority student" would have stood a decent chance of gaining admission to some of the schools Li was rejected at with test scores a hundred to two-hundred points below each of his scores on the three-part SAT exam.

By Robert Weissberg

In the spring of 2008 Baylor University denied tenure to a larger than usual number of Assistant Professors up for promotion, including two-thirds of the women, and while tenure denial is normal at Baylor, the carnage uptick - from 10% to 40% in a single year - drew national attention and outcries of unfairness. No doubt, outsiders may find that awarding life-time employment to 60% of those eligible is a fantastic deal in today's economy where corporations routinely shed entire divisions and even CEO's get the ax. Surely no rational firm could guarantee tenure to 90%, even 60s%, of those initially hired. That harsh economic fact understood, why the sudden indignation? Is something seriously rotten at Baylor? As a veteran spending four decades passing among the natives (I speak fluent numbo-jumbo, passable gibberish, I should add), let me try to explain why what is typical in the "real world" outrages so many academics.

The place to begin is to recognize that winning tenure is customary at American colleges save elite, research-oriented institutions. In fact in a few top departments almost no junior faculty wins tenure, so the review process resembles the annual clubbing of baby seals. Given that rejection runs counter to widespread expectations, it is naturally a bitter pill to swallow. It is not a matter of initial screening being so astute that no mid-course corrections are necessary. Rather, the pathways to tenure abound, standards are pliable, and the ever-present threat of litigation shields protected endangered species faculty, so in many instances a negative outcomes is genuinely surprising, if not shocking.

Truth be told, all the transparency and fairness talk is largely irrelevant administrative boilerplate. Subjectivity is everywhere; as in judging pornography, fuzziness is inherent, and this applies equally to Harvard or Okefenokee Tech. "Original research" or "excellent teaching" are rubber yardsticks far distant from cars sold per month. Apprehensive junior faculty speculate endlessly about thresholds - One or two books? Are five articles enough? How many research grants and of what size? Can mediocre teaching be overcome by outstanding outside letters? - but universities justifiably never operate on piece-work, and it is preposterous to insist that bean counting is even possible. On-the-bubble candidates scrutinized past decisions with Talmudic attentiveness, but the outcomes are always murky - Assistant Professor Alphonse is now an Associate despite his weak publication record while Professor Gaston who followed was booted notwithstanding an outstanding resume. Stories of unexpected failures are told and re-told, embellished and deconstructed, but these hardly calm jangled nerves. In the final analysis, tenure judgments resemble the College of Cardinals electing the Pope - there are usually solid reasons but they may be forever obscure and, critically, no senior faculty is obligated to explain his or her vote. It is a mystery wrapped in a sheepskin encased in a 9 x 12 manila envelop. Up or down reasons can be petty, wrong-headed, misinformed and otherwise flawed, but truth is unknowable. The most vicious personal blackball can be "explained" with "his Bush-as-Hitler research just did not meet the standards for the Benedict Arnold Program in American Studies." Nothing more had to be said. This uncertainty, the knowledge that one's life can be decided by whim, is truly frightening.

By Gail Heriot

(Ms. Heriot is a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. This piece is adapted from Ms. Heriot's Commissioner Statement for the Civil Rights Report on Affirmative Action at American Law Schools released last fall.)

I have no doubt that those who originally conceived of race-based admissions policies - nearly forty years ago - were acting in good faith. By lowering admissions standards for African-American and Hispanic students at selective law schools, they hoped to increase the number of minority students on campus and ultimately to promote minority integration into both the legal profession and mainstream society. Similarly, however, I have no doubt of the good faith of those who opposed the policies. Indeed, their warnings that academic double standards cannot solve the nation's problems and may well exacerbate them seem especially prescient in light of recent research.

The real conflict over race-based admissions policies has not been about good or bad faith or about whether we should aspire to be a society in which members of racial minorities are fully integrated into the mainstream. There is no question we should. The conflict is about whether racial discrimination - something that nearly all Americans abhor - is an appropriate tool to achieve that end. Put starkly: Should the principle of non-discrimination be temporarily sacrificed in the hope that such a sacrifice will, in the long run, help us become the society of equal opportunity that we all aspire to?

Justice Stanley Mosk warned of the risks associated with such temporary compromises with principle over thirty years ago, when, writing for the California Supreme Court in Bakke v. UC Regents (1976), he held racially discriminatory admissions policies to be unconstitutional:

To uphold the University would call for the sacrifice of principle for the sake of dubious expediency and would represent a retreat in the struggle to assure that each man and woman shall be judged on the basis of individual merit alone, a struggle which has only lately achieved success in removing legal barriers to racial equality.

By Michael Meyers

At a recent Manhattan Institute forum, Ward Connerly, the fierce opponent of race and sex preferences by government (who's leading a state-by-state referendum drive to abolish affirmative action) admitted how the Bush Administration has disgraced itself by endorsing racial and gender-conscious policies and practices. Connerly did not give examples, but one glaring illustration is President Bush's Education Department's failure to address racial and gender discrimination underway in public schools and higher education in the guise of helping black men through differential treatment and separate programming.

This latest rage in education takes the form of Black Male Initiatives, which usually include "special" classes, counseling, mentoring, tutoring, and, on some campuses, even separate residences for blacks and ethnic minorities. The U.S. Education Department simply won't comment. I know because I asked Secretary Margaret Spellings to do so ­in the context of the Administration's claims that it supports the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, which overturned the "separate but equal" doctrine in the field of public education. There are a plethora of laws that dictate that race may not be used as a proxy for educational disadvantage by public schools and universities, yet programs have been designed and implemented for black men only in public higher education systems and lower schools in Georgia, Kansas, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York. Many of these efforts proclaim their intent to "save" black boys and black men and also to "restore" them to their "rightful place" as credits to their race and as leaders "in their own communities" and, also, as heads of "the black family." All of that racial rhetoric is propagated by governmental and academic leaders at a time we are supposed to have entered a color-blind, 21st century, world where racial and gender stereotypes are not only old-hat but dysfunctional.

Spellings never answered but instead punted to the DOE's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) which can on its own, if it wanted, give recipients of federal funds guidance on the do's and don'ts - especially the don'ts - of separating and differentially treating children and adults in education solely on the basis of their skin color and/or gender. But notwithstanding this Administration's commitment to color-blindness and equal sex treatment, it, like the Clinton Administration, is frozen and mute when it comes to giving leadership and clarity on this momentous government-assisted, publicly-financed racial and gender divide of our times. So, I brought a complaint to OCR, so that they could no longer ignore the race fad that was sweeping the nation under the nomenclature of the "Black Male Initiative."

By Peter Wood

Defenders and advocates of group preferences generally make their stand on a moral claim: group preferences are needed to advance the common social good. To oppose group preferences is, in turn, to act immorally. The vehemence with which defenders of group preferences frequently speak and the extreme tactics of some pro-preference groups such as By Any Means Necessary stem from this rootedness in moral conviction and moral antipathy.

Critics of group preferences also often make their stand on a moral basis. Many believe that group preferences perpetuate the sort of inequalities in our society that undermine the common good. Other critics tap directly into an almost visceral sense among Americans that group preferences are unfair. The critics of group preferences likewise imply some moral deficiency on the part of their opponents, who they see as not just advocates of unwise policy but also as architects of an unjust social order.

The moral claims of both supporters and critics run deep, but they of course do not exhaust the terms of the debate. We also make legal arguments, pragmatic claims about the likely consequences of policies, historical analyses, international comparisons, statistical investigations, and political appeals. This sprawl is characteristic of American life: whenever we debate something of fundamental importance, the arguments avalanche. Racial and gender preference began as an issue in graduate and professional programs in the 1970s, expanded into all of higher education, found welcome in the armed forces, and by the late 1980s moved into the corporate world. As the use of preferences expanded, the ideology of preferences centered on the concept of diversity diffused throughout American life until it was granted Constitutional imprimatur in 2003 in Justice O'Connor’s opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger.

But behind the avalanche of arguments when Americans debate something of fundamental importance, there is always a central moral question. Or perhaps better put, there is a tightly knit cluster of moral questions. Who are we? Whom do we aspire to become? What is the right way forward?

By John Leo

Yale's burgeoning diversity program has another announcement: it wants to "incorporate the role of ethnic counselor into that of freshman counselor, who will become responsible for providing enhanced community support for cultural affairs on campus," according to the Yale Daily News.

What does that mean? Well, according to the News, which neglected to supply an English-language version of the plan, "students would become increasingly aware of extant cultural resources on campus, along with gaining knowledge of new support to be rolled out under the restructure."

Okay, that clears it all up. There is, however, dissent. "This is unbelievable. It reads like an article from the Onion," said the first reader comment on the News site yesterday. "Do these people realize they are becoming laughing stocks?" Apparently not. The feeling at Yale seems to be that most students lack sufficient diversity awareness and are in some danger of going mainstream instead of remaining in their identity cubbyholes.

Yale currently has 90 residential counselors in its 12 residential colleges and only 13 ethnic counselors, hardly enough by today's diversity standards. The Daily News says the ethnic counselors have a "sometimes nebulous role within the college community," but nebulousness seems destined to fade. The goal, as one ethnicity counselor told the News, is to change the culture at Yale so students aren't afraid to talk about diversity and race and "really understand the way in which ethnicity plays a role in their life within the residential colleges." To that end, the "intercultural educators" take a missionary position, planning speeches and intercultural events, and preaching the diversity gospel.

Color and Money: How Rich White Kids are Winning the War Over College Affirmative Action
by Peter Schmidt

Reviewed by George C. Leef

Exactly how important is a college degree from a prestige school? Many believe that having such a degree is extremely important - a virtual guarantee of success in life. The higher education establishment works hard at propounding the idea that without a college degree, a young person's life will be one of almost Hobbesian misery and the elite institutions go a step further and portray themselves as the essential training grounds for the nation's leaders. If you accept those views, the destiny of the nation is largely shaped by who goes to college and where.

Peter Schmidt has swallowed them hook, line, and sinker, which isn't surprising for a reporter who has been immersed in higher education for many years. In his new book Color and Money he writes, "In modern American society, many of us assume - or at least desperately hope - that the people in leading positions in government, business, and the professions are our best and brightest... How do we decide who deserves such status? Generally, we rely on academic credentials. We entrust the task of identifying and training our best and brightest to our elite higher education institutions..."

By Ward Connerly

David Leonhardt, an economics columnist for the New York Times, recently visited the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and took a careful look at the current admissions process of that campus in the wake of Proposition 209, the California ballot initiative that outlawed race and gender preferences in public education, as well as in public employment and contracting. In particular, Leonhardt examined the application and the fate of one Francis Harris, a black student from Sacramento, who became the case study for his article. Here is how Leonhardt describes Ms. Harris:

She has managed to do very well in very difficult circumstances, and she is African-American. Her high school, in the Oak Park neighborhood of Sacramento, was shut down as an irremediable failure the spring before her freshman year, then reopened months later as a charter school. Midway through high school, her father developed heart problems and became an irritable fixture around the home. She also discovered that he was not actually her biological father. That was a man named Leroy who, when her mother took Harris to see him, simply said his name was George and waited for her to leave. In Harris's senior year, her mother lost her job at a nursing home and the family filed for bankruptcy... Harris, for instance, scored a 22 on the ACT test - slightly above the national average and well below the U.C.L.A. average.

The underlying question posed by Leonhardt with regard to Harris is the extent to which her "disadvantages" should factor into her application for admission to U.C.L.A. As did Leonhardt, most college admissions officers look primarily at one facet of Harris's life: "...she is African-American." They start from the premise stated by Peter Taylor, a good friend mentioned in Leonhardt's column, that "race has an enormous effect on the lives of applicants."

By Ward Connerly

In his concurring opinion of June 28, 2007 about the use of race in student placement in elementary and secondary public schools, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas gave the American people some very valuable advice: "If our history has taught us anything, it has taught us to beware of elites bearing racial theories."

Throughout our history, Americans have been confronted with a host of theories about race, from the early notion that blacks were inferior to the current view that racial integration is crucial to equal opportunity for blacks in education. It might be useful to take a look at a few of these theories.

The first commandment in the bible of racial theories is the view that "diversity equals excellence." Until recently, this theory has been described in the elementary and secondary education settings as "racial integration." For more than 50 years, public school districts throughout the nation have been engaged in efforts to racially integrate their schools. They have been subjected to mandatory court desegregation orders and they have implemented "voluntary desegregation plans." The overall impetus for these activities has been the premise that a racially integrated America is socially desirable and that the process of racial integration should begin in the earliest years of education.

By Heather Mac Donald

There may be jobs requiring greater mendacity than a college affirmative action officer - college president comes to mind - but there can't be many. The ideal college affirmative action officer lies about his mission not only without regret but also without awareness, so brainwashed has he become in the foolish ideology of "diversity." The following false propositions form the cornerstone of the college diversity charade: