Comment by CWuestefeld | Hacker News Reader

Comment by CWuestefeld | Hacker News Reader

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the justification is that these classes are/have been historically discriminated against and constitutional admissions which take race into consideration are a temporary measure to right these historical wrongs

No, that is not the justification being used.

The argument used to justify this racism is that a rich education requires exposure to diverse people and ideas, and so the educational mission of the school requires that they bring in sufficient numbers of otherwise-underrepresented racial groups. If they can't do this, they say, they won't be able to give their students a good education.

[Note that I'm just playing devil's advocate by citing their view; I actually think it's bollocks. Sure, being surrounded by diverse ideas is important in education. But if they were truly interested in this, then they'd be trying to recruit based on that actual argument, by looking for Protestants and Catholics and Mormons; tall and short people; introverts and extroverts; right-handers and left-handers; city folk and country folk. The fact that the only dimension along which they measure diversity is race reveals that the justification they give is nothing but a convenient rationalization.]

Is that the only dimension along which schools measure diversity? It's much easier to become a National Merit Scholar in some states than others; I imagine similar considerations are made in university admissions. A cursory search suggests that geography is indeed taken into account in admissions: https://qz.com/653167/if-you-want-to-get-into-an-elite-colle...

Similarly, coming from a minority religious or cultural background can also be a plus for a college application. Perhaps your complaint is that the process by which these benefit an applicant is less systematized than it is for race? Or that racial preferences are too systematized?

The other categories you mention are likely to be diverse by default---colleges already have a pretty good distribution of short and tall people, and the hand dominance distribution is also pretty representative. There aren't any mechanisms that impede the society-wide distribution of these traits from replicating itself in the student body.

They do in fact look at diversity along those lines too.

The argument used to justify this racism is that a rich education requires exposure to diverse people and ideas, and so the educational mission of the school requires that they bring in sufficient numbers of otherwise-underrepresented racial groups. If they can't do this, they say, they won't be able to give their students a good education.

Do they present any evidence to support this claim? I'm only aware of studies like that of Robert Putnam showing that diversity is extremely detrimental to community engagement and cohesion, among many other things.

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