The Top Ten Percent law was passed by the Texas legislature back in 1997, as a race-neutral means to achieve “diversity,” in the wake of the 1996 Hopwood decision, which banned race-conscious admission and financial aid policies. The rationale behind the law was that top students from inferior urban and rural schools could still gain entrance to the state’s best public universities. And the law would also boost these colleges’ percentages of racial minorities.

Essentially, the law worked insofar as the percentages of racial minorities at Texas’s top universities did not decrease post-Hopwood. But the percentage of automatic, top-ten-percent freshmen admits at the University of Texas, for example, rose from 41 percent in 1997, the law’s first year, to 71 percent in Fall 2006. Of course, many students with stellar standardized test scores from highly competitive suburban high schools don’t gain admittance to UT because they finish just outside the top ten percent of their class, whereas inner-city students with much lower test scores are automatically accepted to flagship universities by virtue of their high ranking at less-competitive schools.

Obviously, the law doesn’t reward merit alone, which is a great concern for most of us. Yet in today’s diversity-minded environment, I think it would be a big mistake to repeal the law or even curtail it, especially in the wake of the 2003 Grutter decision, which allows states — except for California, Washington, and now Michigan — to utilize race as a “plus factor” in admissions and financial aid.

The University of Michigan’s recent reaction to Proposal 2 has convinced me that the anti-racial preferences camp should promote as much objectivity as possible in admissions, recruitment, retention, and financial-aid policies and programs, both at the student and faculty levels. Even if objectivity means an entering freshmen class of 71 percent automatic admits. Allowing the diversicrats subjectivity in admissions and recruitment decisions gives them too much “wiggle room,” in my opinion, to employ bilingualism or membership in certain “diverse” organizations, for example, as proxies for race and ethnicity.