If Diversity Here, Why Not Diversity There?

The Baltimore Sunhas an interesting article about a diversity controversy at the Vanderbilt law school. Racial preferences are employed in admissions — 13% of the students are minority — but not in selection to the purely merit-based law review.

Predictably, many are demanding that the law review abandon its purely objective selection criteria.

An ad hoc committee of review members considered alternative selection criteria and studied the procedures of reviews at other top schools. Some schools, such as Duke University and the University of Chicago, use strict merit-based criteria like Vanderbilt, the committee found.

But many others, such as the University of Virginia, have adopted some form of affirmative action – for instance, by having applicants submit a “diversity statement” on how they would add perspective to the review.

Ironically, one of the strengths of the current selection process is that it is anonymous, intended to prevent favoritism among friends. Students are selected purely on the basis of grades and a writing sample graded blindly (the identity of the authors is not known by the graders). It is ironic that such objectivity is now suspect, since one of the cardinal goals of the original civil rights movement was to remove “white male discretion” from the hiring and admissions process.

If it’s legitimate to take grades into account for admission to prestigious schools, many are asking, why not for selection to prestigious organizations within the school? Good question, which is difficult to answer, as nicely revealed by this opaque statement from the dean of the law school:

“It follows from the fact that the selection for law school and the law review is different, and that they serve different purposes, that the people selected would be different,” said Kent D. Syverud, dean of the law school. “It doesn’t follow from that fact that we should have an all-white journal systematically. When that happens with regularity, that’s something students have to pay attention to.”

Yes, but what should they do when they “pay attention”?

The problem, or at least a problem, is that the argument for racially preferential admissions tends to undercut all other colorblind practices, such as admission to the law review. Indeed, this is the quicksand Howell Raines stepped in at the New York Times when he held Jayson Blair to much lower standards of behavior than non-minority young journalists. It is at the core of an argument that has been raging at the University of Virginia for years that the honor system discriminates against minorities. (On that, see here.)

If admission to a highly selective school and selection for its highly selective law review should not be colorblind — indeed, if such colorblindness is senn as discriminatory — then why shouldn’t race be “taken into account” when grades are handed out. Or is it?