Richard Cohen has an astonishingly well-reasoned column in today's Washington Post explaining yet again why affirmative action is not a good thing. It's astonishing because it cuts so cleanly through so much of the obfiscatory reasoning that has unfortunately been clouding this debate for far too long. Bollinger cautions us not to "lose the sense of history, the compassion and the largeness of vision that defined the best of the civil-rights era." I'm with him on that. But he is now the president of Columbia University and it, too, has a history -- a quota to limit Jews. What he defended at Michigan may not literally be a quota, but the numbers are reached by the usual methods: Certain people are favored and others are not on account of race. Certainly diversity is a worthwhile goal. But does 12 percent do the job and 7 percent not? And just as certainly, the goals of affirmative action even aside from diversity (producing black leaders in all fields) are good things -- very good things. But not even good things can be achieved by bad means.It's the elite schools where the battle is being fought. One of them is the University of Michigan, whose case is now before the Supreme Court. The university's former president Lee C. Bollinger writes (again in Newsweek) that he knew when he went to Michigan in 1997 that "affirmative action in higher education was under siege from the right" -- a sweeping characterization that must include me and the two-thirds of Americans who oppose such programs.
Jack Rich has posted another excellent column by Cohen on this topic at Haganah.
