On Monday, the Supreme Court hears oral arguments in the two cases challenging the legality of racial preferences in college admissions. In this City Journal article, Wai Wah Chin of the Manhattan Institute argues that the Court should decide the cases to end the practice.
He attacks the vigor the idea at the core of racial preferences, namely that student bodies need to have “representatives” from all groups (or the groups that appeal to leftists, anyway):
Aiming for racial diversity means collecting a sampling of “some of this race and some of that race,” so that those picked from one race represent other members of this race, and those picked from another race represent others of that race. Admitting some students of each race allows Harvard to say, “Mission accomplished: all races are well-represented here!” The formalism of sampling for racial representatives also gives Harvard access to the faux-quantitative tropes of “over-representation” and “under-representation.” For obvious reasons, Harvard probably never documented how it collects racially representative samples of students to achieve its racial-diversity goals. But logically, Harvard must subscribe to the concept of racial representation—that an admitted student who is Asian represents Asians, and an admitted student who is black represents blacks. Otherwise, a class with Asians and blacks at Harvard would just be a class of the individuals as themselves—no racial diversity achieved, and no ability to talk about over-representation or under-representation.
What is so darned important about racial diversity, anyway? It’s not as if American college students were unfamiliar with, much less hostile to, students whose ancestry is African. Admitting a quota of them does nothing to ensure a “robust exchange of ideas” as Justice Powell suggested in Bakke. If schools like Harvard really wanted that, they’d have quotas for students based on philosophy, not race.