Racist Reversion to the Mean... Or Less

Jeff Sessions' Justice Department goes after affirmative action's institutional racism

Admissions programs frustrate accountability because schools wield “holistic review” as a shield to frustrate scrutiny, judicial or otherwise. Holistic review can serve as a cover for the illegitimate use of race.

For example, Princeton professor Thomas Espenshade found that Asian students applying to selective private colleges are six times less likely to be admitted than Hispanic students with the same academic qualifications and 16 times less likely than black students. And despite being the fastest-growing population in America, Asians are admitted at Ivy League schools in remarkably similar numbers and percentages year-to-year.

That’s strong evidence that schools are discriminating based on race. It all hearkens to the less-than-illustrious history of the so-called Harvard Plan, which began as an alternative to explicitly capping the number of Jewish students.

Those are the sorts of things that the Justice Department should look into. Government lawyers must open the “holistic” black box and hold administrators’ feet to the constitutional fire. And that’s before we even get into the harm to the beneficiaries of racial preferences!

"Holistic selection" is merely Social Justice Class War in action. The designated "Victimhood" Class members will get preference despite their below-mean capabilities. And that is at the expense of above-mean applicants that are not in the "Victimhood" Class. The clue to the truth of this is the approval from SCOTUS for driving for "diversity" in student populations (qualifications become secondary to ideology). And true to Leftist/Democrat Uber-Racist history, diversity means discrimination based on skin tone and genetic heritage.

As a result, the reputations of universities and their "education" value suffers. More importantly, those who are graduated without receiving any increase in thinking skills find themselves thwarted when attempting to join the real world.

When the Fortune100 Electronics company I was working for back in the '70s made its attempt at Affirmative Action hiring, I got to see first hand the disaster which ensued. Every summer, the corporation hired from a class of graduating electrical engineers, and put them into a year of quarterly training rotations through various areas in the company (a really good deal for fresh graduates). The year of the AA hiring, graduating black engineers got the AA treatment. But they didn't know anything. Not only did they not know the basics of electricity (even not knowing Ohm's Law), they had no idea of the world itself. One might not know where the Nile River is, but thinking that France is in England is inexcusable.

For the first time, the corporation laid off the entire group of new graduate hires - all of them. It was obvious, although not stated, that the entire class had to go to avoid any semblance of racial discrimination. It would not have been racially motivated of course, because it was based on competence level and ability to perform. But the entire group of new hires paid the price.

Affirmative Action punishes the capable at the expense of the incapable. It is an equalitarian tactic for reversion to the mean, in the sense of "No Child Left Behind", which obviously means that the intelligent are sacrificed to the level and benefit of the least intelligent, and the education materials are designed thus. The runners must walk at the speed of the wheelchair.

The ONLY justification for this is Diversity, as if saddling the acute with the pace of the obtuse is some sort of benefit to education. There is no wonder that home schooling has morphed into home school complexes where students are individuals who are treated as such.