I know that’s a dog-bites-man story if ever there was one, but I thought I should note this op-ed that the Washington Post ran over the weekend, with the online title, “The misleading lawsuit accusing Harvard of bias against Asian Americans.” Here’s what I posted as a reply:

It’s the op-ed here that is misleading, not the lawsuit. It admits that, yes, schools like Harvard and Vanderbilt do consider race in admissions, which means that, yes, they do discriminate. No one believes that schools should automatically admit students based on SAT scores, but that’s not what’s at issue here. Most Americans, Asian Americans included, oppose racial admissions discrimination, and there is no good reason for it. A school doesn’t have to have a politically correct racial and ethnic mix to teach students anything.

And even if there were some benefit to such a mix, the costs overwhelm it. It is personally unfair, passes over better qualified students, and sets a disturbing legal, political, and moral precedent in allowing racial discrimination; it creates resentment; it stigmatizes the so-called beneficiaries in the eyes of their classmates, teachers, and themselves, as well as future employers, clients, and patients; it mismatches African Americans and Latinos with institutions, setting them up for failure; it fosters a victim mindset, removes the incentive for academic excellence, and encourages separatism; it compromises the academic mission of the university and lowers the overall academic quality of the student body; it creates pressure to discriminate in grading and graduation; it breeds hypocrisy within the school and encourages a scofflaw attitude among college officials; it papers over the real social problem of why so many African Americans and Latinos are academically uncompetitive; and it gets states and schools involved in unsavory activities like deciding which racial and ethnic minorities will be favored and which ones not, and how much blood is needed to establish group membership.