Take a look at the occasionally perceptive, occasionally exasperating article on The American Prospect web site by Prospect writing fellow Drake Bennett. True, it trips over a basic fact — Solictor General Olson and Kirk Kolbo did not “jointly represent[] both Grutter and Gratz”; Olson represented the United States — and it concludes with the judgment, which is at once both odd and opaque, that racial preference “helps society work toward a model where academic achievement is decoupled from the still very real limitations imposed by race and class.”
You “decouple” academic achievement from race by awarding achievement points based on race? After several rereadings, I finally figured out that this is just another shoot-the-messenger argument: if tests, grades, etc., reveal that some groups don’t do as well as others, throw out (or at least de-emphasize) tests, grades, etc.
There is, after all, something deeply offensive about the idea that there is nothing wrong with our current idea of merit if whole racial and socioeconomic groups consistently perform at levels far below others.
Still, despite these blemishes there are some perceptive observations of the Michigan argument here. For example,
Team Bollinger sounded rather touchy-feely. When John Payton, the lawyer defending the undergraduate admissions policy, defined the “critical mass” that admissions officers aim for — as the number of students of a certain ethnicity needed so that “they feel comfortable acting as individuals” — it sounded at once inexact and contradictory. Under pressure from Rehnquist, he defined an “underrepresented minority” as one that would not be represented by a “sufficient number” of students without affirmative action, and then defined a “sufficient number” as what was necessary “to meet educational goals.” The whole thing seemed like a rhetorical M
