Education, not Affirmative Education.

The legacy of affirmative action in education is playing out in college classrooms and courtyards today.

“African-American students are telling us in no uncertain terms why diversity on campus is important,” said Sherrilyn Ifill, the president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc., which filed a brief urging the Supreme Court to sustain the University of Texas’ race-conscious admissions plan. “They are describing their own marginalization.”

At issue in the 2013 case returning to the Supreme Court is whether or not the fig leaf of providing racial diversity to upper-middle-class white students who have lived lives segregated from darker-skinned, less-affluent people is reason enough to discriminate against Asian-Americans and people not "of color" who have earned their way in with their academic preparation evidenced in competitive records like neutral-based testing and grade history.

Of course, working-class students don't need to be exposed to such diversity so late in their educational lives.  These students likely were exposed to "people of color" as classmates, neighbors, and co-workers long before college.  (Couldn't the upper-crust students who need diversity training to round out their college careers take a part-time job in high school where they might encounter people of color as co-workers and equals in a competitive, business-related setting?)

Here at the two schools of thought:

The point of allowing race to be used as a “plus factor” is to foster “values beyond race alone, including enhanced classroom dialogue,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority when the court first considered Abigail Fisher’s case in 2013.

[She is] a "white woman" with competitive admissions credentials who was denied admission to the University of Texas at Austin, and who says the university’s consideration of her race violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause.

The Supreme Court has forbidden the use of quotas, fixed percentages and other efforts to mirror the racial composition of the general population in admissions decisions. But it has allowed schools to take account of race as one factor among many in an effort to achieve a “critical mass” of minority students.

 Somehow, I don't think the justices thought that shouting down others and creating safe spaces on campus were the contributions to the classroom dialogue they were expecting by granting students with lower academic standards admittance.

Justice Kennedy may draw a different lesson from the recent upheavals: that campuses are in the grip of political orthodoxy, one that is impervious to the intellectual diversity that affirmative action is said to promote.

“I cannot help but think that even a subconscious link in Kennedy’s mind between blacks on campus and the suppression of speech -- justified or not, and I do not think it is justified -- will hurt U.T.,” said Richard O. Lempert, a law professor at the University of Michigan who filed a brief supporting the University of Texas.

 Others in the know agree:

“If you think that the student protesters are insisting on a kind of political correctness and capitulation of authorities to their demands, you might think that this just shows that affirmative action does not promote intellectual diversity in the way Justice Powell thought it would and the project is a failure,” said Cornell University law professor  Michael C. Dorf.

Here's who's harmed:

“Students who are recruited, because of their race, to colleges where the average entering credentials are significantly higher than their own will find themselves at severe academic disadvantage,” said John C. Eastman, a law professor at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., who submitted a brief on behalf of Asian students opposed to affirmative action.

“Basic human nature suggests that they will then try to blame others for their academic struggles, and when they look around and find a lot of similarly situated minority students struggling as well, the narrative of institutional racism would have great appeal.”

More and more, the country is realizing we have to compete in a competitive global marketplace. Ivy League students with trust funds, and sheltered backgrounds, can continue to privately contract for the company of students of color on their campuses via the admissions offices, if that is their wont.

But American students applying to publicly-financed, State-government Schools in the 21st century should find a welcome mat waiting if their academic performance* is up to snuff, no matter their race, color or creed... or mixture thereof.

------------------------
*  Measured competitively, like we do athletic performance.
**  Black law students I knew were not uniformly for affirmative action because others assumed they would not be admitted without the extra help provided by kindly admissions offices.  Some black students will compete just fine on the merits, and become our nations' doctors, lawyers, businessmen and contributors.  They're not in it just to tear down the work of others, and demand that others provide a preferential system of help.  They can compete, and win too, without the help of rich white elders with (guilty?) fingers in the game.

(Ta-Nehisi Coates... I'm looking at you.)