The MCRI victory last week, as well as the possible retaliatory legal challenge by the University of Michigan, furnishes us with an opportunity to revisit the truly unique rationale in favor of affirmative action provided by former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor in her majority opinion in the 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger decision, the ruling that precipitated the MCRI.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, in her opinion O’Connor did not employ a “level playing field” argument for affirmative action. She did not say that racial preferences are justified in order to redress past discrimination that has produced white/minority disparities in wealth, income, educational attainment, etc.

No Supreme Court decision has ever upheld racial preferences for the purpose of remedying historical racial injustices—not even Justice Lewis Powell’s majority Bakke opinion in 1978, which upheld the use of race as a “plus factor” in admissions and scholarships for members of minority groups. In fact, Powell specifically rejected the use of separate admission standards to right historical wrongs.

Rather than talking about remediation for past wrongs, O’Connor’s majority opinion invoked the “substantial benefits” that racial diversity supposedly produces in higher education.

Thus, high-achieving white and Asian students are the principal beneficiaries of O’Connor’s decision. According to her rationale, the leaders of tomorrow who are currently matriculating at the nation’s elite law, medical, and graduate schools need to rub elbows in their classes with black and Hispanic students in order to receive a quality education. Presumably, it doesn’t matter to O’Connor that most of these black and Hispanic affirmative-action recipients are themselves upper-middle-class, far removed from the barrios and ghettos of the inner city. Nor does it really matter to O’Connor that less qualified minority students are far more likely to finish in the middle or bottom of their graduating classes and that they have much higher attrition rates. Somehow their darker skin color confers “educational benefits” on elite white students at prestigious universities and graduate schools.

Of course, O’Connor’s decision isn’t concerned much either with the consequences that separate admission and financial-aid decisions have on white students like Barbara Grutter and Jennifer Gratz who don’t graduate at the top of their classes — as well as thousands of Asian-American applicants — whose places as undergraduate and graduate students are taken by minority students with less stellar credentials — for a compelling state interest, of course!