Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

Ericka Andersen, Culture 11’s resident female rock-ribbed conservative, has a paranoid blast against state university systems trying to implement race-based admission policies “under disguise.” Specifically, Anderson thinks that since the voters of Texas and California have said they don’t want race to be a factor in admissions, and soTexas’ program of admitting the top 9% in a UT school and California’s new policy of requiring fewer standardized tests is necessarily illegitimate, because they will inevitably increase racial diversity in the school systems.

This view strikes me as relatively abhorrent. Anderson seems to think that the status quo admission system, which puts a relatively large weight on standardized tests, is the only legitimate system and any deviation from the results the current system is ipso facto an attempt to impose a racial standard on the make-up of the student body.

The bundle of ugly assumptions in her post is pretty shocking. Anderson seems to think that the only purpose of the public university system is to reward those who meet a certain standard of academic excellence. She appears to think that the SAT, or a system that gives the SAT more weight than class rank or GPA, is the only reasonable way to evaluate students. Public universities don’t seem to be a way to promote social advancement and equality of opportunity, but instead a way to entrench status quo differences in parents education, social class and income (which, of course, is an effect of weighting standardized tests heavily). 

Many conservatives who oppose race-based affirmative action say they support class-based affirmative action. This strategy (and it may very well be an honest conviction) allows conservative to outflank affirmative-action supporting liberals by letting them say that they support poor people, as opposed to the middle class and upper-middle class black benficiaries of affirmative action. But Anderson doesn’t appear to be making that play. Instead, she seems to think that any increase in the diversity of a student body is illegitimately subverting the will of the voters (in California and Texas, at least). This doesn’t leave her room to allow preferences for the poor, who are disproportionally non-white.

Also, the fact that the class-rank standard in Texas and California is implemented in a color-blind fashion seems to have no effect on Anderson’s thinking. 

Oh yeah, isn’t something happening tomorrow?