The heated battle over the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative just got quite a bit hotter, with the release of new statistics on the effects of racial preferences in admissions at the University of Michigan. Inside Higher Ed has the story.
The opposition to MCRI, the laughably named One United Michigan (as if maintaining race preferences in perpetuity does anything to unite) wants to confuse matters by saying that the data released by Roger Clegg’s Center for Equal Opportunity are misleading because the racial breakdown does not also include “economic class.” But so what? If they’d like to argue that U of M should not admit students from lower socio-economic ranks simply to have more diversity, fine. That’s hardly a reason to keep racial preferences.
At last weekend’s annual Pope Center conference on the theme of diversity, one pro-diversity speaker blurted out the truth when he said, “Diversity is about differences, and we’re all different.” Exactly. The right conclusion to draw is that colleges and universities would do everyone a favor if they just admitted students based on academic capability. The more homogeneous the student body is in that regard, the easier it is for professors to maintain academic standards. And whatever students are chosen, we would have “diversity” along many different lines — which is not to say that educational institutions need to worry about that. Schools did a better job of teaching students before the mania for diversity took hold.
