Take a long, hard look at the arguments university officials and left-leaning political activists continue to advance on behalf of affirmative action policies.

They don’t deny that these programs discriminate against qualified applicants on the basis of race, sex and ethnicity. What they do say is that a certain level of discrimination should be permissible to achieve the greater goal of “diversity.” This is what the University of Texas at Austin successfully argued before the Supreme Court earlier this year.