Affirmative Action Quandry

I don’t understand all this fervor over the Supreme Court decision that college admissions can no longer use race as a determinant in applicant selection. Like that’s going to happen. On the racial quota side, I understand that supporters, see it as a leg up in the admission process, an opportunity to be accepted to elite colleges without satisfying the requirements for merit-based acceptance. This policy does an enormous disservice to those minority students who claimed their place based on academic merit, an achievement tainted by the assumption by other applicants that they were accepted based solely on the color of their skin. Not nice. And now with the widespread elimination of the SAT as an admission standard, what’s left to use as a yardstick?  Ascribing social merit scores is at best arbitrary and how do you compare an academic record at one high school versus another?  “Gauged against your peers” actually depends on who your peers are. And the universities keep on relying on the premise that there is an educational benefit to diversity. Or as the Emory Dean of admissions said: “The best class for Emory is a diverse class.”  Tell me why? Wouldn’t you suspect that surrounding yourself with higher performing students who were accepted based on merit would push you to higher academic achievement as opposed to a student body selected predominantly on race? If that higher-performing student body happens to be diverse, then isn’t that special, but that shouldn’t be the goal, should it? In this case, I would suspect that scholarship always trumps color when it comes to academic achievement. And where is the data that supports the premise that diversity is somehow beneficial to an education? In my experience and that of my peers, I perceived racial diversity as a non-factor academically. If anything, it led to animosity. Black students had their own campus social organization and sponsored black-only events. Even the Jewish kids had their Hillel organization and migrated to the same fraternity house. As can be said with any ethnic group, like seeks like, and minorities, even non-minority ethnic groups, tended to band together. Looking objectively at the campus cafeteria, one would have assumed they were still enforcing segregation. Perhaps times have changed, and I am indeed ancient, but racial tensions in America seem worse than ever. Back then I recall overcompensation being the rule of the day. Concern over saying the wrong thing and having it misinterpreted as a “microaggression” led to pandering, nauseating efforts at virtue signaling, and dispensing unearned praise. I distinctly remember a black engineering student taking seven years to complete his five-year program. A white student would have been asked to leave and would find himself selling his textbooks on the quad. A black professional student, the only black member of the class, flunked two science courses, ordinarily an automatic dismissal, yet was privately tutored by the Academic Dean and allowed to stay. Interestingly he was later accepted into a highly competitive specialty program. How did that happen? A white classmate with the same academic failures was asked to leave. Is that fair?  Hardly. Is it justified in the name of diversity?  Well, that brings us back to the original premise. If you can prove to me that diversity has a positive effect on academic success, like the claim that diverse “work teams” outperform non-diverse teams”, then, by all means, let’s consider race-based acceptance. But if this is simply an exercise in politics, if indeed surrounding yourself with academic excellence is superior to a class selected for diversity, then I’ll choose excellence every time. That’s not racism, that’s common sense. Something that should appeal to scholars everywhere. You know, the students selected on merit.