Why I don’t take opponents of affirmative action seriously

When it comes to the issue of affirmative action with respect to admission to colleges and universities, one often hears an argument of the following variety: “it ought to be on merit alone; giving a break to a racial minority is “reverse discrimination”".

Interestingly enough, I once said this at an ACLU meeting: “I’d be in favor of the following statement: “college admissions will be based on academic merit alone”, provided this policy would be rigorously enforced.”

People who know me (and know that I favor affirmative action) were aghast. I reminded them: “provided this policy would be rigorously enforced”, and the chances of that are next to zero.

Of course, we see things like George W. Bush getting admitted to Yale and Harvard. But those are private schools who have more leeway, and even William F. Buckley thought that such schools should be free to diversify their student body.

But what about public ones?

Yep, influence from the well to do is there too:

The University of Illinois scrambled Friday to explain how politically connected applicants with less-than-stellar resumes — including the relative of a convicted fundraiser for ousted Gov. Rod Blagojevich — gained entry into the school over more qualified students.

University President Joseph White said he plans to make clear to employees that no one should feel pressured to admit prospective students because the governor or anyone else with political clout takes an interest.

The scandal — reported Friday by the Chicago Tribune — riled state lawmakers. One said he wants any university trustee involved in trying to influence admissions to resign and another said he would press to end political appointments to public university trustee boards.

The university, considered one of the top public universities in the country, keeps a little-known list of applicants tracked by politicians and university trustees. The Tribune said the list often results in the admission of clout-heavy students over those with better qualifications.

“I’m putting out a communication today to the university community that makes it crystal clear that admissions are to be based on merit only and that our people are not to succumb to pressure to admit,” White told The Associated Press Friday.

The list included a relative of convicted political fundraiser Antoin “Tony” Rezko who got accepted to the school after then-Gov. Blagojevich made a request, according to the Tribune. The newspaper says Rezko’s relative was supposed to be denied admission before Blagojevich interceded.

Spokesman Thomas Hardy said Friday the problem was manageable and that likely only a handful of students at the university’s flagship campus in Urbana-Champaign are what he called questionable admissions.

“We don’t want a small number of questionable cases to lead to misperceptions about the quality of our process, the quality of our incoming class,” Hardy said. “The insinuation of pressure, either applied or implied, we need to eliminate that.”

Hardy said the list — dubbed “Category I” — contains more than 100 potential students each year whose applications legislators and trustees have been asked to check on by constituents, typically parents or other relatives of the applicants. This year, there are about 160 on the list, he said.

He said only some of those are admitted and noted that other universities keep similar lists.

The Tribune says 1,800 pages of documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act show 77 percent of the 800 students placed on list since 2005 for admittance to the Urbana-Champaign campus were accepted. Meanwhile, the acceptance rate among other applicants stood at 69 percent.

The Urbana campus typically gets 23,000 or more applications for about 7,000 seats. This year there were 26,000.

Students accepted from the list who were freshman in 2008 on average ranked in the 76th percentile of their high school class, the Tribune said. The same year, the average high school ranking among all freshman was in the 88th percentile. [...]

Gee, why don’t the “principled” conservatives raise a stink about this?

Here is one possible reason: look at who are some who make the most noise about affirmative action (and related topics).

True, this doesn’t represent all conservatives, but my guess is that this does represent a fair percentage of the extreme ones that you’ll see at places like CPAC.

I find it very odd that what conservatives consider “fair” just so happens to be what favors them!