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Two Supreme Court decisions in 2023 struck down the use of race-based admission to colleges and universities, and proscribed various proxies for race like admission essays. But just a year out, the Wall Street Journal reports, “The group Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA),” who represented the Asian-American applicants before the court, “suspects this [violation of the rules] about Yale, Princeton and Duke universities, and on Tuesday it asked the schools for information on how they chose the current freshmen who will graduate in the class of 2028.”
Having spent more than 50 years of my life in universities, I’ve had a front-row seat for observing how universities over the years have juked their admission criteria to make sure they admitted enough “protected classes,” which means anybody except white males. In my university, for example, even after California in 1996 passed Proposition 209, which forbade the explicit use of race, the admissions and hiring process still comprised numerous opportunities for evaluators to discern the applicant’s race.
The former “Affirmative Action Officer,” for example, required the hiring committee to document each member’s sex and race, as well as the applicants’. After Prop 209, the university didn’t observe the law, but merely changed the title to the “EEOC Officer,” who still gathered the same data that were inappropriate if the process was truly merit-based, while reminding everybody that the federal agency Big Brother was watching.
So those experiences made me skeptical when “Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the 6-3 majority that students must be admitted ‘based on his or her experiences as an individual—not on the basis of race’ and that ‘what cannot be done directly cannot be done indirectly.’”
But the really damaging idea connected to affirmative action came from an earlier Supreme Court decision and still remains today. Despite the blatant violation of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act, these race-based policies were given the Supreme Court’s imprimatur in its 1978 Bakke decision. The court didn’t, as it should have, proscribe preferences based on race, but just numerical quotas, which were easily circumvented to reach the same end––choosing by race rather than merit.
Worse, the decision legitimized a simplistic concept of “diversity” that assumed superficial race-based differences provided educational benefits to all students. But this definition of “diversity” hearkened back to the days of “scientific racism” that reduced unique individuals to skin color or other physical attributes typical of millions of people across the world.
Moreover, it made victimhood the most important characteristic of black people, since even affluent well-educated blacks are still categorized as a “protected class” of victims to be compensated with set-asides, subsidies, and other goods provided by the government. This insulting idea–––as the African proverb has it, “The hand that gives is always above the hand that receives” –– is a variation of the old racist slur that all black people “look alike” or “think alike” or “believe alike.” All these are preposterous slurs reduce black identity and humanity to a dehumanizing stereotype.
Moreover, this reductive “diversity” was created in the wake of the Civil Rights Act to serve partisan factional interests by identifying which political clients received set-asides in government contracting, and later in university admissions and state and federal hiring.
As David E. Bernstein writes in Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America,
“Modern America’s racial and ethnic classifications do not reflect biology, genetics, or any other biological source. Classifications such as Hispanic, Asian American, and white combine extremely internally diverse groups in terms of appearance, culture, religion, and more under a single, arbitrary heading. The government developed its classification scheme via a combination of amateur anthropology and sociology, interest group lobbying, incompetence, inertia, lack of public oversight, and happenstance.”
The problem with reducing identity to such crude categories like race, is that true legitimate identity includes ethnicities, nations, regions, religions, customs, cultures, mores, cuisines, folkways, languages, dialects, accents, traditions, and histories. As David Hackett Fischer documents in Albion’s Seed, if one takes into account these and many other differences among the early settlers of the future United State, our country was and remains one of the most diverse on the planet. But racialist propaganda like “white privilege,” “systemic racism,” and “white fragility” reduces those early Americans to their skin color, the better to demonize our country as a global villain responsible for all of history’s miseries and injustices.
The Bakke decision injected this toxin of “diversity” into the body politic, which over the following 46 years has mutated into today’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion metrics. These promote policies that judge and evaluate people on the “color of their skin,” not, to paraphrase Martin Luther King, on the “content of their character,” talents, achievements, ethics, actions, habits, and virtues. And this toxin has spread not just to education, but to every dimension of our society from Wall Street to Hollywood––and more dangerously, to the training of professionals such as doctors and airline pilots.
This functionally racist set of attitudes is just one of the many dysfunctions now wrecking higher education. But ignoring true diversity, reducing unique individuals to simplistic group identities, compromises the university’s responsibility not just to train competent professionals, but to develop in students the skills, knowledge and abilities necessary for living as a free citizen.
Restoring higher education, then, means providing a traditional liberal education. Now more than at any time in our history, our young are exposed to new technologies of communication and entertainment that pollute their minds with dehumanizing images and content, even as schools are dominated by curricula that are philistine as well as ideologically corrupt, making a traditional liberal education more important than ever.
Alan Bloom in his 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind, made this same point: “Picture a thirteen-year-old boy sitting in the living room of his family home doing his math assignment while wearing his Walkman headphones or watching MTV. He enjoys the liberties hard won over centuries by the alliance of philosophic genius and political heroism, consecrated by the blood of martyrs; he is provided with comfort and leisure by the most productive economy ever known to mankind; science has penetrated the secrets of nature in order to provide him with the marvelous, lifelike electronic sound and image reproduction he is enjoying. And in what does progress culminate? A pubescent child whose body throbs with orgasmic rhythms; whose feelings are made articulate in hymns to the joys of onanism or the killing of parents; whose ambition is to win fame and wealth in imitating the drag-queen who makes the music. In short, life is made into a nonstop, commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy.”
How much more do our young––whose debased cultural environment makes the late 80’s look Victorian–– need a liberal education? Bloom explains: “By liberal education I mean education for freedom, particularly the freedom of the mind, which consists primarily in the awareness of the most important human alternatives” for living a life suitable for our minds, that is, a question of human identity and its purpose.
“A liberal education,” Bloom continues,
“means precisely helping students to pose this question to themselves, to become aware that the answer is neither obvious nor simply unavailable, and that there is no serious life in which this question is not a continuous concern. . . . Liberal education provides access to these alternatives, many of which go against the grain of our nature and our times. The liberally educated person is one who is able to resist the easy and preferred answers, not because he is obstinate but because he knows others worthy of consideration.”
In other words what we can call genuine “critical thinking,” the opposite of what cultural Marxism calls “critical thought,” which ends up being propaganda for illiberal, collectivist ideologies that line what Friedrich Hayek called “The Road to Serfdom.” One of those bad ideas is the cult of victimhood and racialist identities that have corrupted our universities into finishing schools for training the subjects of tyranny.
Angel Jacob says
DEI is the conditioning for mental slavery.
Spurwing Plover says
We don’t need any Diversity or special privlages and so Jessie Jackson and Al Sharpton can go pound sand
Allan Goldstein says
🙂
— and so Jessie Jackson and Al Sharpton can go pick cotton
🙃
Allan Goldstein says
The doctor who got into med school over Bakke killed a patient outrageously, and the MSM covered it up as best they could.
It will be difficult to locate a link for the story about Dr Patrick Chavis which can be fitted here in this comments section of frontpagemag, but it is well worth your time to look up.
https://www.deseret.com/2002/9/2/19675187/affirmative-action-turns-lives-into-tragedies/
THX 1138 says
“Philosophy of Education” by Leonard Peikoff
This course by Leonard Peikoff presents an account of the philosophy of education from an Objectivist perspective, addressing such questions as:
What is education?
What is its basic purpose?
What subjects should children be learning in school?
How should these subjects be taught?
What can we do about the dismal state of today’s public schools?
Based on recorded lectures given by Leonard Peikoff in 1985, these lessons focus on primary and secondary education, but many of the principles discussed apply to higher education.
Topics addressed include: different theories of the basic purpose of education; how to teach thinking methods, with special emphasis on the principles of proper motivation, integration and hierarchy; a proper curriculum; teacher’s colleges; and the politics of education.
1.) The Purpose of Education
2.) How to Teach Proper Thinking Methods
3.) A Proper Curriculum for Primary and Secondary Education
4.) Teaching Techniques, Teacher Training, and the Politics of Education
Intrepid says
“This course by Leonard Peikoff presents an account of the philosophy of education”………in other words, Objectivist propaganda.
Just what the world needs, a course in what to think and how to think it, by an Objectivist hack. Can I start laughing now?
I can see you have absorbed the entire tome and the results are obvious. You have mastered the art of copy/paste by all of your heros. I have yet to see any original thinking from you. Because what comes out of you is just as ridiculous as all of the hack teaching methods from the leftist teachers of the 60s and 70s into the 90s.
The best is your own version of medieval European history boiled down to “I hate Christianity” and the “Greeks are Great”, and “The Christian Dark Ages”
Who remembers “New Math” and the “Common Core”?
Spirit of TJ says
What a tragic commentary, that we Americans seemed to have replaced virtue (moral and intellectual growth) and equality of opportunity for imposed social engineering and equality of outcome. Under the latter vision, why even bother to excel? The point is one will not.
Why?
Because “success” either will be handed to you without merit, or you will never be given the chance to succeed. Sound familiar? It should. It is cultural Marxism by another name.
In contrast, the American experiment in liberty has been based upon the idea of God-given natural rights. That sublime ideal, first written into the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, was why America fought a Civil War (1861-1865), ultimately. Most other nations–other peoples–have not bothered to do that.
So, we now have in our midst those who wish to impose on all of us a form of cultural Marxism.
Perhaps the question should be asked of them: What personal sacrifice do you intend to make to better your fellow human being? I suspect we all know the answer, none, as it really seems to be more about personal fame, power, and wealth, not service, sacrifice, and altruism.
In the meantime, the idea of God-given natural rights tragically becomes, in the words of C.S. Lewis, discarded image.
Excellent article, Mr. Thornton
THX 1138 says
The American way of life is the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness.
What does that mean? It means that the moral purpose of life is to pursue, seek, achieve, gain, and keep values — not sacrifice your values and life away.
Which means that rational self-interest, rational selfishness (not altruism and self-sacrifice) is the moral ideal.
“All rights rest on the fact that man’s life is the moral standard. Rights are rights to the kinds of actions necessary for the preservation of human life. Just as “it is only the concept of ‘life’ that makes the concept of ‘value’ possible,” so it is only the requirements of man’s life that make morality, and thus the concept of “rights,” possible.
All rights rest on the fact that man survives by means of reason. Rights are rights to the actions necessary for the preservation of a rational being. Only an entity with a conceptual faculty has judgment on which to act, volition with which to select goals, and intelligence with which to create wealth.
All rights rest on the fact that man is a productive being. Rights presume that men can live together without anyone’s sacrifice. If man merely consumed objects provided in a static quantity by nature, every man would be a potential threat to every other. In such a case, the rule of life would have to be that which governs the lower species: seize what you can be before others get it, eat or be eaten, kill or be killed.
All rights rest on the ethics of egoism. Rights are an individual’s selfish possessions—his title to his life, his liberty, his property, the pursuit of his own happiness. Only a being who is an end in himself can claim a moral sanction to independent action. If man existed to serve an entity beyond himself, whether God or society, then he would not have rights, but only the duties of a servant.” – Leonard Peikoff
Spirit of TJ says
Peikoff is wrong, one could argue.
If there is no God, if there are no God-given natural rights, then man would still serve, but man would bow to a lesser god–other men and their “divine pronouncements,” the latter bellowed loudly from a would be Mount Olympus. .
Man’s duties as a servant would be then to obey the most powerful among us.
Also, in response to suggested moral relativety, bear in mind that moral relativity declared as an absolute truth is something declared absolutely, ergo it is an absurd contradiction.
Greg says
When the Supreme Court decided the Bakke case in 1978, a racial designation in the law was considered a “suspect” classification requiring the court’s “strict scrutiny” to assure that the law was “narrowly tailored” to satisfy some “compelling state interest.” The constitution, they said, was colorblind. By 2003, when the Supreme Court decided Grutter v. Bollinger, race preference had itself become the “compelling state interest.” Diversity had become our strength, you see. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor was concerned that such official racism have some sell-by date: “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest [in student body diversity] approved today.” Yeah, right. Surely, 2028 will come and go with DEI racial preferences a prominent feature in “higher” education. Perversely, the state of the law today is the same as the state of law in 1963 when racist Alabama Governor George Wallace proclaimed: “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever.”
Rob A says
What’s being taught in schools today can hardly be called an education. Education use to be about teaching students to become literate and informed adults. That’s no longer the case and the evidence for that fact is all over the internet.
By the way, network TV has become the equivalent of black & white TV and is being supplanted by the internet. The internet is teeming with podcasts that are far better than anything on network TV.
Full disclosure: I’m biased because the only allure network TV holds for me is the Science Channel and the Military History channel. The rest of it is uninteresting pablum that appeals to those with a two digit IQ.