"DIVERSITY" - like "fairness" - has assumed a virtually unassailable position in modern American society. In the context of university admissions, the ideal of a diverse class is used to justify an entrenched and pervasive system of racial preferences. Racially discriminatory admissions policies, however, are ill-tailored to achieve their stated goals and, in most cases, generate more extensive negative effects than positive ones. The embedded position of racial preferences in modern academia needs to be subjected to a serious reevaluation.
The University employs a "holistic" admissions process, which combines objective and subjective evaluative components structured to result in the enrollment of a diverse and academically accomplished first-year class, according to Dean of Admissions Greg Roberts. He explained that grades and course selection are the most heavily weighted factors in a prospective student's application. Other student characteristics that play a role include, but are not limited to, standardized testing, essays, demonstrated leadership abilities, extracurricular involvement, recommendations, socioeconomic background, state residency and race.
The constitutionality of this type of admissions program was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2003 in Grutter v. Bollinger. In that case, the Court approved the University of Michigan Law School's use of race as part of a "highly individualized, holistic review of each applicant's file," which gave "serious consideration to all the ways an applicant might contribute to a diverse educational environment." The Michigan Law School did not use outright racial quotas; rather, race was considered as a "soft" variable along with other characteristics pertinent to broad-based diversity. The Supreme Court specifically approved the attainment of a diverse class as a legitimate justification for the use of race at the admissions stage.
Because Grutter permitted the Michigan Law School to justify its use of racial classifications by reference to the academic benefits of a racially diverse student body, most modern academic policies are shaped to serve this goal. Consequently, the concept of remedial benefits - racial preferences as compensation for past discrimination against minorities - no longer plays a substantial role in the education context. This displacement of the remedial justification is entirely appropriate as a matter of policy, apart from its constitutional implications, since disadvantaged members of society would be served far better by affirmative action rooted in socioeconomic, rather than racial, criteria.
Diversity, then, serves as the primary rationale for modern affirmative action policies. It is doubtful, however, that this interest is advanced by racial profiling at the admissions stage.
Intellectual diversity - not racial diversity - is ostensibly the relevant type of diversity in the university setting. Diversity based merely on appearances is vacuous. It is far from clear that race serves as a useful proxy for intellectual or cultural differentiation; to presume that this is the case seems predicated on a crude stereotyping of racial minorities as necessarily representing different points of view.
Furthermore, racial preferences, regardless of the purpose they serve, are unjustified in a democratic society. In admissions decisions in which race plays a role, an individual is chosen over another applicant simply because of his race - if this were not the case, the racial criterion would be superfluous and could be discarded anyway. It is unacceptable for the government to favor one individual over another simply because one is a member of a "preferred" racial group. Color blindness - not racial discrimination - should guide admissions processes.
Justice Clarence Thomas has noted aptly the pernicious effects that flow from even supposedly "benign" racial classifications. "Inevitably, such programs engender attitudes of superiority or, alternatively, provoke resentment among those who believe that they have been wronged by the government's use of race," he wrote in Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Pena. "These programs stamp minorities with a badge of inferiority and may cause them to develop dependencies or to adopt an attitude that they are 'entitled' to preferences."
Racial discrimination by institutions of higher education, by artificially stimulating the admission of under-qualified minority applicants, also masks the substantial inequities in the United States' primary school systems. In particular, the failure of inner city public schools disproportionately disadvantages minority children. The balm of college affirmative action, however, diverts attention from the actual cause of racial inequalities in education.
Racial preferences have become a standard feature of modern higher education and are used as a tool to promote the amorphous value of diversity. But we must be wary of allowing racial discrimination to continue to play an accepted and systemized role in our culture. As the Supreme Court stated in Hirabayashi v. United States, "Distinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry are by their very nature odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality."
Austin Raynor's column appears Thursdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at a.raynor@cavalierdaily.com.
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