Prof. Thomas Fleming, who served on the Naval Academy’s admissions committee, has created a furor by stating that the academy is running a two-tiered admissions system, with much lower standards for politically favored minority groups. Fleming contends that the lower standards for a considerable percentage of each incoming class (35 percent of this year’s) is dumbing down the Naval Academy.

In this column, Pat Buchanan comments, “If true, the U.S. Naval Academy is running a two-tier admissions system of the kind that kept Jennifer Gratz out of the University of Michigan and was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.” Maybe, but I’m sure the academy would say that it’s not using a strict quota system but is engaged in a process that “evaluates the whole person.”

The Navy maintains that it’s doing a good thing in creating an officer corps that “looks like” the whole of the Navy, which is 42 percent non-white. That’s the familiar old groupthink notion that things work best when experts control and balance the composition of social entities so that they have the “right” percentages of individuals based on ancestry, gender, or other characteristics. Is there any reason to believe that the Navy will function better if the officer corps is 35 percent or 42 percent or any other percent “minority” than if the academy admits without regard to such considerations?

I doubt it. For one thing, enlisted personnel don’t take orders from “the officer corps.” They take orders from particular officers. Is there even the tiniest bit of evidence that sailors take the supposed group membership an officer into account when carrying out orders? If not, don’t we have to conclude that the idea that the officer corps should mirror the racial composition of the enlisted men is just a foolish slogan?

Isn’t the truth here that the Naval Academy is engaging in racial discrimination simply to appease powerful politicians?