The Supreme Court, which is the only counterbalance to the bonzo Biden Administration’s policies, essentially got rid of “affirmative action” in college admissions. In a country based on “All Men are Created Equal,” this product of the progressives has met its fate.
The result of affirmative action is clear. It has not been good. A quarter century of affirmative action has resulted in the advancement of more incompetent folks than the last name Biden has.
Biden, whose son Hunter got into Yale based on a poem he wrote for his application essay, says that in the wake of this ruling colleges should adopt diversity policies in admissions to mask affirmative action to “increase diversity” at elite colleges. He essentially told his head of the Education Department (you know, the one who pandered to college kids by trying to get their student loan debts erased), to hold the line on affirmative action policies. This head of the Department of Education for Biden (I assume his name is Dean Wormer) has been told to put colleges on Double Secret Affirmative Action.
This whole situation is about the inane desire of parents to get their kids into Ivy League schools. Everybody wants to say they went to Harvard and to brag about it. But keep in mind that Ted Kaczynski (The Unabomber) also went to Harvard. I worked with these cats. My kid graduated from an Ivy School. They ain’t all that.
With all the woke PC junk they make kids go through to get into the Ivies now, the product is not very good. Brandishing your leftist bona fides does get you in and through Ivy League colleges but then, when you get out, you are not that valuable to corporate America. It’s a detriment. Graduates tend to be arrogant and incompetent. The woman whose brainchild was the transvestite promoting Bud Light was an Ivy League grad. She now identifies her personal pronouns as “dumb” and “ass.”
If you look at the discounts on SAT scores African Americans were getting at the elite schools, they were not inconsiderable. On a 1600-max SAT, court papers say black applicants got in with an average of 230 points fewer than other groups. That is a lot. I am sure there are many African Americans who would have gotten in without affirmative action, but we do not know which ones did. So people assume they all did. I feel sorry for the medical doctor who made it on his or her own and would have been admitted without affirmative action. They are painted with the brush of affirmative action when they deserved admission on their own merits.
No one wants to wonder if his or her doctor, air traffic controller, pilot or VP of the USA was passed through with lower test scores. Maybe the elite schools could play affirmative action games in disciplines that do not matter, like Art History or Gender Studies. Not in jobs that have consequences.
The premise of advocates of affirmative action is that one class, black people, are victims and cannot overcome injustices on their own. This is the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” When you tell black kids they are less through no fault of their own and will always need help, you are sending the wrong message. Reparations are in the same mold. It is simple economics: when being offended stops making money for people, they stop pretending to be offended.
Now they are suggesting that, to get around the affirmative action ruling, applicants write in their admission essays about race and say they have been through a lot. Seventeen-year-old black kids today apparently suffered through slavery 8 generations ago. What have Japanese Americans ever had to endure in their own country?
The only way a white male can overcome all this in the college application process is to suddenly discover that he is gay.
A libertarian op-ed humorist and award-winning author, Ron does commentary on radio and TV. He can be contacted at Ron@RonaldHart.com or @RonaldHart on Twitter.
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