University diversity: Earlier this year, the University of Michigan Law School's admissions policies were ruled unconstitutionaly by a federal judge who said they were "practically indistinguishable from a quota system." - both sides

Matrix: The Magazine for Leaders in Education, Sept, 2001

This sort of discrimination is legally very problematic, but even if the Supreme Court ruled tomorrow that it is lawful, it would still be bad educational policy, highly unfair and morally wrong.

Leaders in higher education must be intellectually honest and acknowledge that, when they look at candidates differently because of their skin color or ancestry (sex discrimination is much less common in most university admissions), they are engaged in racial and ethnic discrimination. They then must ask themselves, is this discrimination justified? That is, what are the purported benefits--and then, most critically, do those benefits outweigh the costs?

In other contexts, preferences are sometimes justified as necessary either to prevent discrimination or to correct it. But these justifications do not work well in university admissions, and are generally no longer relied on.

It is not plausible to assert that, unless they deliberately discriminate in favor of certain minorities, admission officials will discriminate against them. Like it or not, these are the most politically correct people in the world.

Similarly, it is hard to point to slavery and the Jim Crow era as justifying discrimination in favor of 17-year-old college applicants. These young people were, after all, born in the mid-1980s, twenty years after passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This is not to say that discrimination no longer exists, just that it is no longer systemic and can, therefore, no longer justify systemic discrimination in the other direction.

Thus, the rationale now relied on is "diversity." The claim is that students learn more if they are exposed to other students from a variety of backgrounds and with a variety of outlooks.

There may be some truth to this, but not a lot. Certainly the data supporting it are weak. Common sense dictates that learning is a function of the professor and what is read rather than whom one is sitting next to.

But the fundamental problem with the diversity rationale is that it makes no sense to equate race and ethnicity with background and outlook. If you want diversity of the latter, fine, but there is no need to use race or ethnicity as a proxy for them. This kind of equation, in fact, used to be called stereotyping.

There are plenty of whites and Asians who went to impoverished public schools, or who are the first in their family to go to college, or who have working class parents--and plenty of black and Hispanic kids who come from solid middle-class or upper-middle-class backgrounds.

But suppose that you still believe that, all things being equal, it's better to have racial and ethnic diversity. The trouble is that all things aren't equal: Using racial and ethnic preferences to achieve diversity entails considerable and undeniable costs.

For starters, at a human level it is unfair to refuse to admit someone because of their melanin content or ancestry. Institutionally and societally, it also sets a terrible and dangerous precedent if discrimination is allowed so long as it is for a good cause (the cause will always be good). And it creates resentment among white and Asian applicants and their friends and families.