Abigail Thernstrom, a member of the US Civil Rights Commission who brooks no nonsense on the subject of civil rights calls last week’s ruliing in Parents v. Seattle gibberish. Her piece in today’s Wall Street Journal is well worth reading; it’s available here.
The problem is that even the opinion by Chief Justice Roberts is wishy-washy on the permissibility of racial classifications, buying into the fashionable but silly notion that “diversity” is a really good thing for governments to promote. Thernstrom writes, “Seattle believed that racial balancing plans were the students’ first and (for some unexplained reason) last chance to learn citizenship in a ‘multi-racial/multi-ethnic world.'” That’s exactly the rationale behind college and university “diversity” plans: that without the wonderful guiding hand of social engineering by administrators, students just won’t learn how to get along with people who are “different.”
Chief Justice Roberts doesn’t challenge that idea, but only says that Seattle and Louisville were too blatant in their approaches. This sounds just like the muddle over the University of Michigan policies in 2003, where the “diversity” objective was all right provided that it wasn’t done in a way that was too forthright.
To make things worse, Justice Kennedy’s swing opinion blathers on about how “diversity” is a “compelling educational goal.” That idea was never really argued in the Gratz and Grutter cases; although some of the amicus briefs challenged the university’s claim that it wanted to use racial preferences to engineer a student body that would somehow maximize learning, that point never came up in oral arguments. So now we have constitutional law hinging not on the words of the Constitution, but just on a highly questionable pedagogical assumption that now seems firmly embedded in the minds of most of the justices.
