Are We Affirmed Enough?
Are We Affirmed Enough?
SCOTUS says yes, in a very limited way. I, of course, have a better plan!
Do I really need to guess how most of these protestors got into an Ivy League school? Photo acquired with extreme prejudice from John Carter’s Substack, ref. below.
Have we been Affirmed enough already? Thursday, the Supremes said “mmm, yeah, kinda, sorta,” at least with regards to college admissions.
Cue screeching idiots on the Left. You know the ones. I’m not going to list any examples because 1) you’ve already seen them and 2) boring.
Some on the Right are spiking the football prematurely, as you’d expect. No, Affirmative Action is NOT dead. It is, however, wounded. I don’t know that I totally agree with John Carter’s excellent Substack on the issue—I have confidence in the ability of slimy DEI midwits to “reformulate”, reword and revamp their admissions (and hiring) criteria so they can justify their existences continue to blatantly be racist and discriminatory in their practices. After all, once enough people realize that systemic racism has no real meaning, that Affirmative Action has actually done more harm than good, and is actually racist like apartheid, the DEI midwits will be out of a job.
As Thomas Sowell said in Affirmative Action Around the World: An Empirical Study (Yale University Press, 2004):
“Despite sweeping claims made for affirmative action programs, an examination of their actual consequences makes it hard to support those claims, or even to say that these programs have been beneficial on net balance — unless one is prepared to say that any amount of social redress, however small, is worth any amount of costs and dangers, however large.”
John Carter goes one step further, pointing out that:
“(I)t’s the Affirmative-Action Americans that are the root cause of the competence crisis collapsing our civilization’s complex systems. Every incompetent diversity hire that gets elevated beyond their ability is a double-whammy, not only jamming an idiot into a position whose responsibilities they can’t meet, but simultaneously preventing a capable professional from filling that role. As our corporations, bureaucracies, agencies, and universities have filled up with Affirmative-Action Americans in pursuit of a triple-A ESG rating, they have grown steadily less functional. Everything takes longer and costs more even as quality degrades and accidents proliferate.”
If you see an “oopsie” like the East Palestine train wreck (thanks, Norfolk Southern!), Silicon Valley Bank or Credit Suisse collapses, you can find social media posts and corporate web pages touting their great diversity, inclusion & equity hiring practices—if you can find them before they vanish from the web, that is.
There was a very nice video on YouTube about how shifting a population’s IQ curve to the left (downward) eventually collapses a technological society, but it’s been deleted, as have so many others that go against The Narrative(tm). As it turns out, for our modern society to work, we need a certain minimum number of people who are slightly above average in IQ to keep the power on, the cell towers working, and the internet wires, cables and servers online. Without them, it doesn’t matter how much you feel you’ve been microaggressed—that high-end smart phone you’re so proud of is just a paperweight. Or, ammo at a “mostly peaceful” protest.
This is another example of the competence crisis John Carter mentions. It’s very, very real, and the original article by Harold Robertson is well worth reading.
As an aside, all those immigrants flooding over the southern border? Except for the several thousand Chinese, they’re NOT helping, as this map of the world’s IQ shows:
Global distribution of national IQs from psychometric measurements and international school assessment studies, supplemented by geographical averages (M=81.90; N=201; SD=13.47)
Affirmative Action, and its evil sibling DEI aren’t just dangerous to our society in the abstract. It has the potential to be immediately, catastrophically fatal. Just to illustrate the point, here’s one recent example where diversity hiring proved lethal.
OceanGate’s Titan submarine.
Something that few have ever noticed—and none on the Left talked about fully—is California’s experience since the state did away with Affirmative Action in its state-run universities. In 1996, California voters approved Proposition 209 by 54%-45%, which stated that "the state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting."
What happened? Initially, Black and Hispanic enrollment in the most selective institutions declined…but graduation rates increased by 4.4%.
Yes, that’s right. Graduation rates INCREASED by 4.4% as students and schools adjusted to the changes. Several other things happened as well, as the abstract to this paper details:
Proposition 209 banned the use of racial preferences in admissions at public colleges in California. We analyze unique data for all applicants and enrollees within the University of California (UC) system before and after Prop 209. After Prop 209, graduation rates increased by 4.4%. We present evidence that certain institutions are better at graduating more-prepared students while other institutions are better at graduating less-prepared students and that these matching effects are particularly important for the bottom tail of the qualification distribution. We find that Prop 209 led to a more efficient sorting of minority students, explaining 18% of the graduation rate increase in our preferred specification. Further, universities appear to have responded to Prop 209 by investing more in their students, explaining between 23-64% of the graduation rate increase.
In other words, it helped those at the bottom more, and encouraged schools to invest more in their students (instead of trying to force square pegs into round Affirmative Action holes).
That’s the ugly reality of Affirmative Action no Lefty wants to talk about. Placing people into positions they’re not able to handle just to meet a race-based quota isn’t just unconstitutional (as the Supremes said today), it’s also bad for the quota’d and society as a whole.
You don’t have to be a genius to realize this, at least in some respects. Even students at the University of Florida—who support diversity quotas in general—make one huge exception where admissions should be based primarily on skills.
Sports.
Yes, it’s true. UF students want what actually matters to them—doing well in the SEC—to be based on skills and talent, not diversity!
See, the Gators aren’t totally stupid. Not completely. Just mostly…but then again, they’re still in college (and they were dumb enough to go to UF), but maybe they’ll learn. Maybe. Hopefully.
All ragging on the Gators aside, that validates an idea I’ve been discussing for years that would make the Ivy League truly appreciate the value of skills over diversity, inclusion and equity quotas: require each Ivy League school to play one SEC team in football every year!
Think about it: the Crimson Classic—Harvard vs Alabama. The Dog (or Dawg) Fight—Georgia vs Yale. The Princeton Tigers could alternate between Auburn and LSU, and the Columbia Lions could have the Missouri Tigers (since Missouri is kinda sorta not really an SEC school).
Vandy would be wooed like never before. I’d like to see the Commodores play (and by that, I mean ‘beat the snot out of’) the Penn Quakers, but that’s just me. The rest, I’m sure, would sort themselves out.
It’s a great deal for both conferences. The Ivys get great TV exposure and a big check (and all that fan money pouring in when they’re at home), and the SEC gets a guaranteed cakewalk homecoming opponent for ever and ever. Can I get an Amen?
Best of all, my plan is superior to the SCOTUS ruling because it’s impossible for a DEI midwit to circumvent or dodge. It’ll only take a few seasons until students at the Ivys realize that skills and abilities really do matter in the real world, and that in life, like in football, there really are winners and losers, no matter how much you wish it otherwise.
After all, it’s not like a football blowout has never changed minds about integration before.
I think this is an idea whose time has come! Congress should pass this into law IMMEDIATELY so the schools can start the scheduling now. I know it’s not constitutional, but when in the last umpteem decades has that mattered to Congress. Even better, have somebody write up an Executive Order and bribe Joe with an ice cream cone to sign it—it’s not like he’ll notice.
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