Back on February 3, the local TV station WRAL featured a Q and A with UNC Chancellor Holden Thorp. People in the Raleigh area sent in questions, and he responded.

I find the fifth question and Thorp’s answer especially interesting. The questioner, a mother whose son was not admitted at Chapel Hill despite a very good academic record, wanted to know why. Thorp replied by saying that the UNC admissions people go over every application to “understand each student as fully and fairly as possible.”

The key word is “understand.” By this “understanding,” admissions people can then offer admission to those students they think “will give us the best entering class.” What that means is that they consider many factors besides academic ability, because they want to engineer the class body along many dimensions besides academic ability. They want “diversity” and keep out a lot of better students whose ancestry makes them presumptively uninteresting in favor of weaker students whose ancestry is considered interesting.

Thorp goes on to say that applying to Chapel Hill is like auditioning for an orchestra. Well, it’s not. Auditions focus solely on musical talent, not on vague notions of “understanding” the whole musician. But imagine how orchestral auditions would go if done like university applications. “Well, you played Bach’s ‘Chaconne’ perfectly, but we’re offering the opening in the first violin section to someone else. No, he didn’t play it well, but we think he’s had to overcome a lot of adversity in life and besides that, we don’t think we have a critical mass of musicians of his ethnic group yet, whereas your group is already overrepresented.”