What is at the root of the recent outrageous protests on college and university campuses? Stuart Taylor, writing in the American Spectator, gives the best answer I’ve seen: the racial quotas and preferences in admissions that result in most black and Hispanic students being admitted to schools where they are far less prepared to do well academically than their classmates. Taylor draws on his 2012 book Mismatch, co-authored with UCLA professor Richard Sander, which shows in detail how racial quotas and preferences work to the disadvantage of their purported beneficiaries. As Taylor writes in the Spectator, “this academic ‘mismatch effect’ forces them to drop science and other challenging course; to move into soft, easily graded courses disproportionately populated by other preferentially admitted students; and to abandon career hopes such as engineering and pre-med. Many lose intellectual self-confidence and become unhappy even if they avoid flunking out.”
As Taylor explains, it’s easy to understand why such students start hunkering down and complain about “microagressions,” supposedly racist Halloween costumes and the like and to “withdraw into racial enclaves within the campus.” You should be able to see that if you were in their shoes, you might do such things yourself.
Of course the violent and vicious behavior of some such students at campuses from Missouri to Yale to Claremont is abhorrent. And so is the perpetration of “hate crime hoaxes” by black and Hispanic students. But I join Taylor in placing the lion’s share of the blame on college and university administrators who systematically employ racial quotas and preferences and then systematically refuse to admit they are doing so. As I have argued before, systematic lying has become an essential job requirement for college and university administrators. They must swear that they are simply applying “holistic” standards, when in fact they are systematically employing racial discrimination in favor of blacks and Hispanics and against whites and, especially, Asians.
These people preen themselves on how they have advanced diversity and opened up opportunities for disadvantaged young people. But as Taylor and Sander definitively demonstrate, they are doing just the opposite, closing off opportunity for many and creating a situation in which institutions which should be bastions of learning and independent thinking are saddled with speech codes and re-education camps for those who flout them. These systematically lying administrators are not only hurting the people they say they want to help. They are working to degrade and perhaps destroy America’s great intellectual institutions. Shame on them.
