Terry Eastland of The Weekly Standard offers powerful and compelling advice to the administration on the Michigan affirmative action cases: “The right choice is to join the plaintiffs and make a full-throated argument against race discrimination.”
The country has now gone through two weeks during which no one in a position of elected leadership in the Republican party has really stood up for the party’s core principle, even as Trent Lott has made a fool of himself. Lott’s remarkable achievement was to have, within ten days, commented in favor of segregation and then also in favor of “across the board” affirmative action–positions that would have qualified him as a Democrat in good standing both in 1948 and 2002. (Indeed, Lott’s ultimate reparative act might have been to switch parties.) By filing a brief against diversity, the administration could reaffirm the Republican party’s and indeed the nation’s best principles. By coming down on the side of nondiscrimination and equal treatment, the administration would state that in America both hostile and “benign” racial classifications are presumptively wrong, and for the same reason: They violate the right of the individual to be treated without regard to race.
Eastland does a fine job of laying out both the principled and the political reasons for the administration doing the Right Thing, and you should read the whole thing. I do, however, disagree with one of his points. I think he is mistaken when he says that “[t]he claim made for diversity is empirical, not one of principle.”
Although there is certainly an empirical argument for diversity — that a student body of sufficiently varied hues makes for a better education, at its most fundamental level the argument for diversity is indeed principled. The underlying principle is that fairness requires proportional representation of races, ethnic groups, and soon, inexorably required by the logic of the argument, religions. It is a principle that requires constant monitoring and regulation of the racial/ethnic/(and later, religious) market to bring about the proper mix. As such, it is a principle at war with the non-discrimination principle, which bars distributing burdens or benefits to any person based on race or religion.
Because the demand for diversity is indeed based on a principle, it requires principled, not simply empirical, opposition.
Diversity is indeed useful. It remains to be demonstrated just how useful. Some observers have faulted the U-Mich assertion that diversity does indeed improve educational quality.
The question is what kind of diversity is useful.
For the top-tier schools, the entrants, even if given a major break for skin color, must be well-prepared and thus from stable families and the two in combination means rarely from the inner city and its failing schools. No underclass here.
So what we have is a bunch of well-prepared youngsters from similar backgrounds differing only in skin color. The horrors of racism are not likely to have been visited on the black entrants. Or, if they have, the horrors were remarkably deficient in impact.
For real diversity, we ought to have a big break for the children of military families. We ought to have a break for conservative Christians.
Those two groups, among others, would bring a real diversity of world view and life experience to a campus where, as a recent graduate explained to me, “Everybody wants to be an individualist just like everybody else.”
The constant reference to skin color is a cheap, easy, convenient substitute for fixing the problems of the underclass.
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