Positively Discrimination

As my Dad always explained it—he was a New Left OG turned wizened social worker—affirmative action worked like this. Imagine planting the same sort of seeds in rich fertile soil vs. scorched empty sand: which plants would inevitably grow larger? Until enlightened social democrats like us could ensure all the seeds got good dirt, you couldn’t just gauge a plant’s potential by how far it’d already grown, but had to carefully consider each case.

Decades later, I still find his reasoning persuasive; he’d himself been a poor kid from the wrong side of the tracks, never much encouraged, and through luck and pluck and after a stint in the Peace Corps had eventually earned a master’s degree. It’s true that those with every advantage often perform better on metrics than more talented people who’ve had fewer breaks.

The problem is that supposed “equity” as now expected and (still) enforced is no longer a thoughtful thumb on the scale to help better assess individuals, if it ever was, but a crude shortcut to convenient statistics and photo-ops. “Equality” is out—the progressive zeitgeist has moved to even explicit identity quotas being nowhere near enough; justice demands eternal reparations as overseen by ever-expanding bureaucracies and H.R. departments, no matter what the Supreme Court says.

In my years at Columbia I worked with lots of admissions officers—almost all awfully nice, and true believers in equating societal progress with the proper composition of elite schools. Aristotelian philosophers they were not, but nonetheless charged with determining an outsized chunk of America’s future leadership.

So I tend to roll my eyes when I see pious descriptions of policies “designed” to perfect the demographic balance, as if brilliant social engineers have painstakingly crafted some kind of incontrovertible clockwork. No, just broad institutional incentives and a class of well-intended professionals who sincerely believe that white men are disproportionately boring and irrelevant (the women too!), and Asians mostly math nerds lacking personality.

Beyond the fundamental unfairness of subjecting different groups to dramatically different standards, the old established taxonomies are growing increasingly obsolete. Most of my friends’ and family’s kids are multiracial, like more and more Americans, and ranking inborn privilege now involves digging further and further back into their lineages.

However terribly necessary the SFFA v. Harvard decision against legal discrimination in college admissions (and by implication perhaps other areas), it still broke some part of my heart. Intellectually I understand the essential bigotry of today’s DEI regime, having seen it myself, but sentimentally I want to believe in thoughtful experts struggling to do right by everyone. Yet that’s just a fantasy: mending the rotten system isn’t possible, and ending it the only option left.

As momentous a victory against official discrimination as the ruling represents, the massive resistance and trench lawfare have only just begun. Day by day, district by district, it’s bound to be an endless whack-a-mole of disingenuously packaged stratagems—"winks, nods, and disguises,” as Justice Ginsburg put it—backed by near-bottomless NGO funding. With another presidential term or two, professional progressives figure, they’ll regain a Supreme Court majority or at least the leverage to cut a deal supercharging DEI more than ever, and without the irksome baggage and ambivalence of Bakke and Grutter.

Even before the decision was released, selective universities began taking steps to eliminate paper trails and make their blatant discrimination harder to prove; Columbia became the first in the Ivy League to stop requiring standardized testing, justifying that deeply regressive action with some word salad about being “holistic and contextual.” (More or less their same justification for excluding Jews a century ago.) Others are cooking up “adversity scores” and other schemes to wriggle out of treating applicants equally.

The truth is, elite higher education is no longer in the business of producing knowledge or seeking truth, but anointing the ruling class. The experts already know everything, as far as they’re concerned, and treating human beings as individuals isn’t half as important as fashioning an aristocracy that “looks like America.” If you don’t check the right boxes, then you don’t matter.

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Next: Springsteen’s Great Forgetting

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