THE VANITY OF DIVERSITY

...But it reaches no further...

...Still, the diversity establishment's dire predictions of a fearful alternative if they are not allowed to maintain racial preferences— resegregation or institutional collapse—is a gross, condescending exaggeration...

...The royal "us" is Berkeley, the prestigious University of California campus over which Michael Greve is executive director of the Center for Individual Rights, the public-interest law firm that has litigated Hopwood v. State of Texas, Gratz v. Bollinger, and many other reverse discrimination lawsuits...

...In the wake of highly publicized lawsuits over racial preferences in student admissions at their school, University of Michigan president Lee Bollinger and provost Nancy Kantor have defended racial preferences as a necessary means of preventing the university's "resegregation...

...Confronted with the specter of meritocratic "resegregation" under colorblind norms, selective institutions will preserve minority enrollment by compromising their standards...

...Perhaps the objects of their sympathies won't be able to tell the difference...

...There was no credible claim that this racial set-aside would do anything to remedy discrimination in the elementary schools of Texas, or that it was required for reasons of fairness and justice...

...During the Hopwood litigation, the University of Texas pointed to sustained discrimination in Texas elementary schools (including and especially districts that have been run for decades by federal judges) and argued that therefore the law school should be permitted to import two dozen black out-of-state students under preferential admission standards...

...Because of Hopwood, the university now complains, "institutions in the state of Texas are at a competitive disadvantage in the recruitment of [minority] students...

...For precisely this reason, colleges and universities used to treat their dual admission standards as a state secret...

...But even on this demeaning assumption, the affirmative-action message is decidedly mixed...

...No other institution has so unctuously urged candor in the race debate—and so systematically concealed and lied about its own policies...

...In part, this is so because competitive schools outside California and Texas continue to administer preferences...

...Elite universities want an egalitarian veneer of minority students...

...We are being asked to believe that no good education can be had at historically black colleges...

...Instead, elite universities extol their own importance and demand a special dispensation from the non-discrimination norms that apply to everyone else...

...Now, two decades later, institutional concerns have come to be viewed as ends in themselves...

...Race is educationally important for all students, because understanding race in America is a powerful metaphor for crossing sensibilities of all kinds...

...No other institution has done so much to inflame racialist passions...

...Glazer emphasizes the country's "special obligation" to blacks, imposed by "almost 400 years of slavery, followed by state-sanctioned discrimination," and he insists that the virtual absence of blacks from elite institutions would send a "message of despair...

...Mutual respect and understand-ing—the "crossing of sensibilities," as Bollinger and Kantor put it—require a credible presumption of equality...

...Berdahl presides...

...The scholars Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom have argued that this shift may be a blessing in disguise...

...While substantial, this drop corresponds to higher minority enrollment at other, less demanding institutions in the University of California system, such as Riverside...

...Such a study would likely confirm the Thern-stroms' suggestion that the demise of racial preferences hasn't deprived a single black or Latino student of the opportunity to pursue a higher education commensurate with his or her talents and ambition...

...sense...

...No defender of racial preferences has seriously responded to the Thern-stroms' argument, and none is likely to pursue Wilson's research agenda...

...If a handful of elite campuses have fewer minority students than they think they should have, Americans will live with it...

...Glazer states this premise with brutal candor in a recent article in the New Republic—and without any awareness that the candor vitiates the policy...

...Affirmative action was extended from blacks to other racial groups and to women in large measure so as to elevate affirmative action from a humiliating special-assistance program to a general principle—compensatory justice at first, then, starting with Bakke, diversity...

...Many students who used to be quota-ed into the two flagship colleges predictably flunked out...

...To this day, elite universities insist that race is at most a minor factor in student admissions—in the face of incontrovertible evidence to the contrary...

...The institutional prestige of elite universities reaches far enough to avert such a spectacle...

...In explaining his change of mind on affirmative action, he mentions "unforeseen" realities—the collapse of the black family and the continued disintegration of inner cities...

...The University of Michigan deemed them worthy participants in an institutional experiment in racial integration...

...These sensible intuitions have failed to register with an establishment that views itself as a beacon of enlightenment in a sea of latent racism...

...Once affirmative action is widely known to be a make-believe policy, its message isn't that elite institutions care about blacks but that they pretend to care...

...The purpose, moreover, is not simply one educational model (among many others) that the University of Michigan has chosen to pursue...

...While aspiring to elite standards, the University of Texas, Berkeley, UCLA, and similar institutions lack the confidence to be elitist— or even to explain to the public (black, brown, or white) that meritocratic elite institutions, almost by definition, won't be representational by any measure, including race...

...In May of this year, the University of Texas regents authorized a second attempt to persuade the Supreme Court to overrule the Hopwood precedent...

...But even if racial preferences in admissions were outlawed across the country, qualified minority students would continue to be recruited like star quarterbacks...

...But for the establishment, it counts for nothing—because, race-neutral admission practices fail to produce the desired color scheme at a few top-drawer institutions...

...Were we to demand of university presidents the honesty and candor on diversity policies that we demand of, say, the management of Texaco, they'd all be in jail...

...The same mindset is in evidence at Berkeley and at UCLA, where colorblind admission practices were mandated by the 1996 ballot initiative known as Proposition 209...

...Enrollment of black and Latino students at the two elite campuses has since fallen roughly by half...

...that none can be had at state universities that, for demographic reasons, are predominantly white...

...The only constituency that wants the affirmative-action placebo is the higher-education establishment...

...UCLA professor James Q. Wilson has observed that "what happens at Berkeley and UCLA is not a measure of the college opportunities open to people...

...The defenders of affirmative action now rest their case on institutional needs, especially the purported needs of elite universities...

...Encountering differences rather than one's mirror image," Bollinger and Cantor have written, "is an essential part of a good education...

...The opinion described the "compelling" diversity interest as an institutional privilege...

...Up to a point, it turns out, we do exempt university leaders from the ordinary rules...

...The education establishment does not bother to dispute these observations...

...However, the placebo tastes extremely bitter...

...Powell's opinion permitted universities to use preferences (though not quotas) in their admissions procedures to ensure a racially diverse student population...

...The muted public response to the resegrega-tion jeremiads shows that, yes, the voters want diverse campuses, but not at the price of race discrimination...

...At the University of Texas, racial preferences were banned by a 1996 appeals-court decision, Hopwood v. State of Texas...

...Harvard professor Nathan Glazer, a recent convert to the cause of affirmative action, has a more cynical, or, as he calls it, "realistic" perspective...

...Now, under colorblind admission norms, minority students, like white students, are sorting themselves into institutions from which they are likely to graduate...

...The lower enrollment of black students, Berdahl complains, "diminishes us...

...President Bollinger knows this: Already, the University of Michigan has effectively abolished the SAT test as a principal admission criterion...

...Instead of obsessing over the racial makeup of a few elite campuses, Wilson suggests, we should examine the enrollment decisions of California's minority students...

...The runaway rhetoric of this argument barely conceals its chilling implications: Black students— those admitted under preferences, and those who would have made it anyhow—are a public good...

...The place of elite institutions—especially public elite institutions—in a democratic society is always somewhat precarious...

...However, Powell's "diversity" was plainly intended as a rationale to sustain race-based entitlement programs that could no longer be justified as remedial compensation for past discrimination...

...They do not believe that these institutions are remotely so important to American democracy, or that racial disparities at these institutions are remotely so devastating to blacks, as their leaders like to think...

...Rather, the law school's spokesmen argued that the school needed minority students to be perceived as fair...

...If different and lower standards for blacks—and, under Glazer's proposal, for blacks alone—signal concern, they also imply an assumption that blacks, alone among all ethnic and racial groups, cannot make it on their own...

...The public knowledge of dual standards erodes the purported benefits of preference-induced diversity...

...In other words, the University of Texas deserves to use racial preferences not because black and Hispanic Texans can no longer obtain a first-class education, but because they do obtain a good education—else-where, and on better terms...

...This faith is being urged and enforced day in, day out by the American Council on Education, the Law School Admission Council, the Office of Civil Rights, and a gaggle of accrediting and professional associations...

...The drop-out rate among black Berkeley students enrolled before Proposition 209 was an appalling 42 percent...

...We must have racial preferences, the argument goes, so that elite colleges may remain racially "diverse"— irrespective of what good, if any, racial preferences may do for the favored students themselves...

...His lament illustrates a curious twist in the civil-rights debate: Affirmative action is no longer defended for promoting racial equality, or minority rights, or equal opportunity for disadvan-taged individuals...

...But racial preferences cannot arrest (never mind reverse) social disintegration, and they can discharge the country's "special obligation" only in a symbolic public knowledge of dual standards erodes the purported benefit of diversity—so colleges used to treat them as state secrets...

...The exalted notion of the place of elite universities in American public life—the idea, as Glazer and others have argued, that Berkeley or Harvard must have a presentable number of black students because, otherwise, there goes American democracy—in the end arises from the fact that the leaders of our prestige colleges have no elitist convictions, only pretensions...

...The groundwork for this defense was laid by the Supreme Court 20 years ago in Justice Powell's opinion in the Bakke case, the high court's first substantive ruling on "reverse discrimination," and the first ruling to invoke "diversity...

...He argues that we should permit racial preferences, though only for blacks and only in limited areas— foremost, in admissions to elite colleges...

...The institutional purpose trumps any individual's actual rights, interests, or preferences...

...The preoccupation with institutional needs is most pronounced at elite universities in Texas and California, where the law now prohibits racial preferences in student admissions...

...No CEO of a private corporation could survive the racial animosity, the self-segregation, the minority attrition rates, and the wallowing in identity politics that have come to characterize the nation's campuses...

...The pretense that affirmative action is for all minorities—those who need it and those who don't—is essential to the policy...

...Public disclosures in the wake of Prop 209 and federal lawsuits have rendered this strategy impossible...

...It is "essential" to every institution of higher learning...

...The existence—the continued existence—of ample educational opportunities for kids of all races ought to be a point of pride for a democratic society...

...They want racial diversity for the sake of their own anxiety about appearances...

...Though not a minority right, diversity was seen as a way for the institution to do good for black students...

...Image is everything...

...Among all our institutions, universities should be the last to receive such a dispensation...

...Competitive universities fundamentally don't care that racial preferences are a make-believe policy...

...But the establishment's dogmatic faith has remained unshaken...

...In other words, affirmative action is a placebo at best...

...Diversity-based race preferences, defended in Bakke as a permissible option, have metastasized into orthodoxy—a prerequisite of any education worth having, at any institution of higher education in the United States...

...There is not a shred of evidence that a public policy of preferring some minority students under separate and lower standards facilitates education or racial integration, and the claim goes against all reason and experience...

...In an effort to disguise the naked pursuit of race for the sake of institutional vanity, some education leaders argue that racial diversity is essential to sound education...

...that none was had at the pre-quota Ivys...