Harvard Students Are Better Than You - by TracingWoodgrains

Look, don't get me wrong. I agree with the decision on the merits. On the legal specifics of this matter, Neil Gorsuch—though, I must add, neither Clarence Thomas nor John Roberts—speaks for me. But I can't quite muster up the enthusiasm I see some expressing about the ruling.

First, there's the practical side of things. Coercion can only change unwilling institutions so much. Virtually everyone at every level of admissions at every selective university prioritizes racial diversity in incoming classes and is willing to make significant trade-offs elsewhere in line with that priority. Paradoxically, affirmative action is less disruptive the more blatant it is. Hard race quotas mean universities can reach their goals by selecting the highest performers of each race. Ban the simple approach, though, and they don't suddenly settle for admitting a radically different population of students. They simply make their admissions criteria more opaque, more arbitrary, and more Holistic in order to arrive at the race distributions they want.

More than that, I admit to some skepticism that colorblindness at all levels of society works, or that merit devoid of values considerations is the right way to select every prestige position. When it comes to roles like politicians and community leaders, who someone cares about and what they prioritize matters at least as much as what they know or what they can do. America gets myopic about its public policy at times, as if it's the only country that's had to solve some of the problems it faces, as if its black-white race relations are the only race issues in the world.

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