“Blatant” Sex Discrimination?

The Chronicle of Higher Education blog reports the following today:

A new program at Towson University aims to admit more male applicants by accepting students with high SAT scores but low grades, a pattern typified more often by male applicants than female ones, according to The Sun, in Baltimore. The approach enables Towson, a state university, to pursue male students more actively, but avoid blatant sex discrimination.

Before making fun of this, perhaps it should be said that the Towson standard — discrimination is fine but “blatant” discrimination isn’t — is pretty much identical with the standard Justice O’Connor applied in Grutter. [ADDENDUM: Of course, it could be argued that comparing something to the standard Justice O’Connor applied in Grutter is making fun of it.]

Now for the fun. Among the various ways to describe students with high test scores but low grades, one that comes immediately to mind is “lazy” — and its doublespeak counterpart, “underperforming.” I suppose it could be argued, in reply, that lazy students do provide a certain amount of “diversity” to hard-working high achievers.

Since Towson’s intent seems to be to come up with some admissions gimmick that will admit more males, this does at least appear to be sex discrimination, whether “blatant” or not I’ll leave to others to decide. But appearances can be deceiving, and laziness on its face is after all both sex- and race-neutral.

Perhaps Towson should hire Patricia Gurin to do a study demonstrating the compelling benefits higher-achieving students receive from being exposed to lower-achievers. She’s had lots of practice, and demonstrated success with Supreme Court justices.