That’s right, Clarence Page, the well known syndicated columnist, has joined those promoting the Iniquitous Ubiquitous Non Sequitur.
Stop the presses! I have run across what appear to be several classic examples of unfair preferential treatment in college admissions.
So shocking are they that I hesitate to report them for fear of widespread howling, heart palpitations and fainting spells.
But I feel it is my civic duty. After all, some of these examples happened at the University of Michigan, whose race-conscious admissions the U.S. Supreme Court has decided to review.
[….]
… [A]s important as grades and test scores might be, they never have been the sole factors on which universities base their admissions. The University of Michigan, for example, has 13 preference categories. They include geographic origins, talents, foreign origins, rural origins, family income and children of alumni over 50. Race is one of those categories.
One friend, a Northwestern University professor, quips that he got into Princeton “under affirmative action for Greek kids from Albuquerque.” Another friend, a Washington lawyer, says he got into Harvard under “affirmative action for Nebraskans.”
And besides, clever Clarence continued, compared to “major boost that affirmative action has given to blacks and Latinos since the 1960s, it has not been a huge inconvenience to very many whites, including the plaintiffs in the Michigan case.”
Thus I’m sure Mr. Page wouldn’t mind if, say, his son or daughter were denied admission to the University of Michigan because it already had enough blacks from Chicago and needed a few more downstate whites. If he protested, I’m equally sure that he would be mollified if an admissions officer patiently explained, “Well, Mr. Page, we’ve found that it takes only about 12% blacks in a class to provide all the diversity we need and, frankly, when your [son/daughter] applied we simply didn’t need any more blacks. Besides, this isn’t racist; we didn’t reject all that many blacks on those grounds, and we did reject some Detroit Muslims for the same reason. I hear that Wisconsin and Minnesota has nice universities. Maybe they still need some more blacks.”
