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July 04, 2003
Rewards for the Staff
In many ways, Glenn Loury is the model of the black conservative that I have become. And yet I have completely neglected him on this site. I will attempt to remedy that beginning with this quote regarding the U of M case:
The second striking aspect of the court's opinion is its marked deference to those leaders from business, academia, and the military who filed an unprecedented number of friend-of-the-court briefs asserting the importance of maintaining diversity in their respective domains. Such claims are extremely difficult to convincingly verify with data, and have been widely disputed in the media by opponents of affirmative action. Yet the court avoided the temptation to substitute their relatively uninformed views on such a central question of fact for the considered judgments of the people who manage these institutions on a daily basis.This deference is significant because it shows that trust in the benign institutional motive of admissions committees, personnel officers, and other key actors is essential to the legitimacy of racial affirmative action. This court has effectively issued a categorical rejection of the analogy often employed by conservatives, which holds the prototypical liberal college president to be no better than the segregationist of yesteryear. By taking them at their word, the justices have affirmed that, far from being obstructionists ''standing in the schoolhouse door,'' today's ''racial discriminators'' are trusted public servants seeking to advance important social goals under difficult circumstances.
Having been a student advisor the the Minority Engineering Program at Cal State Northridge and the software programmer for Xerox's compliance program, I am intimately aware of the honest diligence of those admissions and personnel officers. I am very glad they have been rewarded.
Posted by mbowen at July 4, 2003 10:33 AM
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