Writing on his Discriminations blog, John Rosenberg skewers the silly assumptions the underlie the University of California’s new “holistic” approach to evaluating applicants. He calls it hokum, and that’s being polite. This is obviously another dodge for university administrators who apparently just can’t feel good about themselves unless they’re engaged in what they think is a quest for “social justice” by admitting students from certain minority populations who wouldn’t qualify on academic merit.

Thomas Sowell had trenchant observations about this foolishness as long ago as 1993, in his book Inside American Education. He wrote, “Moreover, even at elite colleges, the personnel attracted to college admissions are seldom themselves part of the intellectual elite. Yet their job is to select students unlike themselves, to be taught by professors unlike themselves, for careers unlike theirs. It can hardly be surprising that admissions personnel are drawn toward non-intellectual criteria and toward ideas not unlike the notion of judging ‘the whole person,’ as found among educators at the pre-college level.”