As everyone remotely familiar with higher education knows, the Berkeley campus is home to one of the most byzantine, impenetrable — and jealously guarded — affirmative action programs in the United States. It would take pages to fully explain this Orwellian system — if you have a copy of Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education handy, read chapter 2 — so suffice it to say that in order to live up to its motto, “Excellence Through Diversity,” the university quite intentionally lowers its standards for students with the requisite melanin count, to the point that the gap between the average SAT scores for those admitted on the basis of “academic criteria” and those admitted for the sake of diversity is almost 300 points. Naturally, the chunk of spots reserved for “students of color” exists at the expense of other, more qualified kids who would get in were the admissions policy “open” (i.e., fair).
Sound like “reverse discrimination”? Or at the very least a ticklish departure from Title VI of the Civil Rights Act? Not according to the Clinton administration’s Department of Education. The departments Office for Civil Rights has just released a report on Berkeley’s admissions policy, which insists that Berkeley “does not maintain illegal quotas for black, Hispanic, and Filipino applicants.”
The report took seven years to produce, the last two of which allegedly involved sending department offcials to method-acting classes, where they learned how to keep a straight face.
