Diversity in college admissions devoid of meaning

Reminiscent of Justice Potter Stewart's anguished definition of obscenity, "I know it when I see it."

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas said he is clueless about the meaning of “diversity” in college admissions in a case challenging its constitutionally to justify discrimination favoring racial minorities. During oral argument, the Justice told an attorney representing the University of North Carolina, “I’ve heard the word diversity quite a few times, and I don’t have a clue what it means.”

It’s not because the idea is novel. It was born 55 years ago in an opinion by Justice Lewis Powell in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), and left in a state of infinite opacity by Justice Sandra Day O’Conner in Grutter v. Bollinger (2003).

We can define a diversity of ideas, i.e., differing views about the same subject or question. There are a diversity of views as to whether the Confederate States of America had a right to secede from the Union. Ditto for whether the Bolshevik Revolution was a cure worse than the disease of Romanov Tzars.

But there is no proof that race is a proxy for a unique perspective unshared by members of any other race. Viewpoints, unlike genes, are not inherited characteristics. Blacks, like all other races, do not all think alike. There is ideological overlap of non-quantifiable dimension among races.

The Civil Rights Movement featured both whites and blacks. My high school valedictorian address honored white Detroit housewife Viola Liuzzo who was murdered by the Klan in 1965 seeking to register black voters in Selma, Alabama. James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner (one black and two whites) were tortured and murdered by the KKK in 1964, near the town of Philadelphia, Mississippi, because of their civil rights activism and advocacy.

Proving a college applicant would bring more intellectual diversity to the campus than another is impossible. Front-burner issues change at warp speed. Viewpoints are also in constant flux based on experience and new learning. As Abe Lincoln noted, a person who does not grow wiser by the day is a fool.

And as a concession to the shortness of life, it would be impossible to ask every applicant for his or her viewpoints on the infinite number of issues that might be discussed on campus to determine whether they would be unique or duplicative. In over 55 years, not a crumb of evidence has been assembled indicating that racially diverse campuses graduate students with superior or more acute intellects than campuses with lesser racial diversity. The justification for the proposition that racially diversity means unique educational enrichment by Justices Powell and O’Connor was based on faith alone without proof or even intuition.

Diversity in college admissions as a reason for racial preferences is nonsense on stilts. It is fueled by the counterfactual racist assumption that all members of minority races think alike. Time to close the book on this 55-year-old flirtation with racism and move on.