Writing at the Chronicle’s Brainstorm blog, Mark Bauerlein demolishes William Chace’s feeble case in favor of affirmative action (the euphemism for favoring certain applicants because of their ancestry).

Part of Chace’s argument is simply that he has a personal preference for institutions’ being “balanced” so that each group in society is proportionally represented. Freedom, however, doesn’t usually work that way, and no harm occurs just because a group of people (students at a university, fans at an NBA game, residents of a subdivision, etc.) does not have the proportionality that makes Chace and those like him happy.

Another part of his argument is that if we don’t get more minorities (specifically, black males) into top colleges, the result is increasing crime and imprisonment. Bauerlein shows how absurd that notion is (he calls it the “Yale or jail mistake”) by observing that all affirmative action does is to shuffle around a few of the black males who would have gone to college anyway. There is no reason whatsoever to think that going to Yale rather than a non-prestige college makes the difference between a life of success and a life of crime.