The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article today on a new study that shows there may be some educational drawbacks to interracial contacts on campus. Here’s my posted response:

The purported “educational benefits” from using racial preferences in order to achieve “diversity” have always been marginal at best as well as disputed. What’s more, they do not outweigh the many costs of engaging in such discrimination. If it turns out that there are some purported benefits to weighing race in order to avoid diversity, I would feel the same way: Those benefits would be only marginal and will be legitimately disputed, and would not outweigh the many costs of engaging in such discrimination. The fact that social science evidence can be cited to favor and disfavor racial diversity is no surprise and nothing new: The opposing briefs in Brown v. Board of Education each cited social science (see this link ).

As a matter of policy and, certainly, law the correct approach is obvious: The best qualified students should be admitted, and skin color and national origin should be ignored.

And here, by the way, is a list of the costs of weighing race in university admissions: It is personally unfair, passes over better qualified students, and sets a disturbing legal, political, and moral precedent in allowing racial discrimination; it creates resentment; it stigmatizes the so-called beneficiaries in the eyes of their classmates, teachers, and themselves, as well as future employers, clients, and patients; it mismatches African Americans and Latinos with institutions, setting them up for failure; it fosters a victim mindset, removes the incentive for academic excellence, and encourages separatism; it compromises the academic mission of the university and lowers the overall academic quality of the student body; it creates pressure to discriminate in grading and graduation; it breeds hypocrisy within the school and encourages a scofflaw attitude among college officials; it papers over the real social problem of why so many African Americans and Latinos are academically uncompetitive; and it gets states and schools involved in unsavory activities like deciding which racial and ethnic minorities will be favored and which ones not, and how much blood is needed to establish group membership – an untenable legal regime as America becomes an increasingly multiracial, multiethnic society and as individual Americans are themselves more and more likely to be multiracial and multiethnic (starting with our president).