The following depressing tale appears toward the end of John Fund’s most recent column on the Taliban Man at Yale:
Indeed, I was told a chilling story of another Ivy League University that had two applicants from the same inner-city high school. Both were Hispanic. One applicant was a very good student who had participated in school and community affairs. The other was a mediocre student who had frequently clashed with authorities and even had a scrape with the law. A leading graduate of the school was trying to help the former student get admitted. The deciding factor might have come during his senior year when his parents managed to save enough money to move a few miles away to a suburb. “When I heard of their move I told the mother her son was doomed, because I knew how the admissions office thought,” the graduate told me. “Sure enough the more marginal kid got in, because he was viewed as a more ‘authentic’ representative of the Hispanic community.”
“Diversity” is not only built on a foundation of stereotypes; it reinforces them.
Fund then quotes Benno Schmidt, the immediate past president of Yale, who “supports diversity programs, but says that cases such as that of the Taliban Man demonstrate that ‘diversity simply cannot be allowed to trump all moral considerations.’”
Maybe not, but even Schmidt appears to have no trouble with allowing it to trump some moral considerations, such as the right to be free from burdens imposed because of race.
