Racial Preferences

It's the Rules and the Real Rules again, isn't it?

I haven't written much on the topic, because it automatically brings in discussion of standarised tests, which I bring up only when I have to - that is, when some actual unfairness or injustice is being proposed. The intellectual argument is long since over and has been for 50 years, though occasionally some new thought which potentially undermines the known truth has to be examined.  The facts are dreadfully inconvenient, and the standard thoughtless explanations for them are easily shown to be inadequate.  The accusations against testing are social, or cultural, or political, not scientific.  You can nibble at the edges, perhaps. So there is no point in bringing them up.

I am interested in the topic of racial preferences at colleges even though A) I think college as currently constituted is overrated and overpriced, save in a few fields, so I don't care what happens to them and B) It does not much affect me personally. As a good percentage of my readers are connected to colleges or used to be, I can well understand them being more intently concerned about what is going to happen to them. But I am interested without a dog in the fight because of issues of basic fairness, and applying reason and evidence to large decisions.  Y'know, unimportant hobbies like that, much as one would be interested in chess or bridge tournaments, or baseball statistics. Just practice for the important stuff like (NYT front page today) "Who won" on whatever we did with the debt ceiling - I'll bet it wasn't me; why people are going to poetry workshops*; where to go when visiting LA; and what Iceland's PM wants tourists to know. We sharpen our tools on the trivial topics like justice, morality, and practical considerations of whether America will survive the 21st C for stuff like that.

WSJ today has an article about how colleges will find sneaky ways to fill racial quotas anyway.  (There is a video about the NC governor imploring the public about how much school choice will destroy public education and civilisation in general, which I didn't click on, because I already know what he is going to say and why it's wrong.) They're not stupid, after all. Lots of jobs are on the line here over in administration and they know how to protect the money and PR for those. Plus, people do sense that something about the culture war in general and their whole opinion of themselves about the value of what they do is in jeopardy. How do you act when your job is on the line? Hopefully at least a little better.

Universities will engage in similar shenanigans if the Supreme Court rules against Harvard and UNC. They’ve done it before. When a voter referendum forbade Michigan schools to use racial preferences in admissions, they turned to preferences for applicants who live on Indian reservations or inside the Detroit city limits. Bilingual applicants also got a leg up. None of these preferences were for race, but rather for things highly correlated with applications from Native American, black and Latino students, respectively.

It's all move/countermove. The Supreme Court has already ruled clearly on lots of this and allowed specific exceptions. Colleges and HR departments have tried to expand those, even dishonestly and comically as above, which are now being challenged. I have little doubt the writer is correct.  This will just force them further underground.

*"Teacher, teacher, I know! Pick me! Pick me!" (Without having read the article.) "They go to meet other people who like poetry workshops, for good reasons and bad." How'd I do?