During oral arguments in Fisher yesterday, Justice Scalia addressed the problem of some students being mismatched to universities where they have a hard time competing. The left, typically, immediately declared Scalia to be a racist for suggesting such a thing.
This furor serves as the basis for WSJ columnist James Taranto today in his Best of the Web feature. (I’m afraid this is subscribers-only content.) After quoting a number of writers who were foaming at the mouth, Taranto writes, “None of these detractors bothered acknowledging the scholarly provenance of Scalia’s observation, which Richard Sander, a law professor at UCLA, elaborated yesterday in an essay published by the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy….” He then quoted from Professor Sander’s article, including this extraordinarily pertinent sentence, “But in my view, only demagogues (of which there is, unfortunately, no shortage) or people who haven’t read the relevant literature can still claim that mismatch is not a genuine problem.”
Moving on to the timing of arguments on the case, Taranto writes, “It has occurred to this columnist that the recent unrest on campuses across the country — including demands for censorship in the name of creating ’safe spaces’ for minorities — call into question the educational-benefits-of-diversity premise, which has never been clearly defined.” Indeed it does.