Racial preferences marginalize black college students, argue Jonathan Haidt and Lee Jussim in the Wall Street Journal. “Many students spend four years in a social environment where race conveys useful information about the academic capacity of their peers.” Furthermore, creating “ethnic enclaves” such as identity studies centers and departments, and diversity training, is likely to backfire.
Today’s college protests were foreseen in 1969, adds Haidt, a NYU psychology professor, in Heterodox Academy.
Macklin Fleming, Justice of the California Court of Appeal, warned Yale Law Dean Louis Pollack about lowering admission standards to meet racial quotas. (Go here.)
If in a given class the great majority of the black students are at the bottom of the class, this factor is bound to instill, unconsciously at least, some sense of intellectual superiority among the white students and some sense of intellectual inferiority among the black students.
Fleming predicts that “black students, unable to compete on even terms in the study of law, inevitably will seek other means to achieve recognition and self-expression.”
Demands will be made for elimination of competition, reduction in standards of performance, adoption of courses of study which do not require intensive legal analysis, and recognition for academic credit of sociological activities which have only an indirect relationship to legal training.
“To overcome feelings of inferiority caused by lack of success in their studies,” less-qualified students will demand “the employment of faculty on the basis of race, a marking system based on race, the establishment of a black curriculum and a black law journal, an increase in black financial aid, and a rule against expulsion of black students who fail to satisfy minimum academic standards,” Fleming predicted.