UCLA's Latest Display of Outrage

UCLA's Version of Rational Discourse

UCLA law professor Richard Sander has been the target of student protests at his university this week. Sander, a critic of affirmative action, published a report that argued UCLA’s supposedly “holistic” admissions process was quietly including race as a prominent factor in deciding who would be admitted to the university. Based on his analysis of admissions data, Sander argued that while UCLA’s holistic process, which included factors such as socioeconomic disadvantage in deciding who would be accepted, was not racially discriminatory by itself, admissions officers did not strictly follow the process and made offers to students who not only had relatively weak academic backgrounds, but even low scores in the holistic ranking. These offers, according to Sander, went disproportionately to black students. If Sander is correct, then UCLA’s admissions office has been surreptitiously violating California law, which prohibits the state’s universities from considering race in admissions or hiring.

The report, according to the website Inside Higher Ed, “infuriated minority student leaders at UCLA (not to mention administrators).” The students perceived it as “offensive” and described themselves as being “under attack.” UCLA Associate Vice Chancellor for Enrollment Management Youlanda Copeland-Morgan had not reviewed the statistics in the report and therefore could not judge the report’s accuracy, but nevertheless described Professor Sander’s analysis as “hurtful and unequivocal attacks.”

Professor Richard Sander

As I read through the Sander report, I could see no attempts to “attack” or “hurt” anyone. He makes an argument, based on evidence. One may disagree with his argument or, after having reviewed his evidence, conclude that the facts do not support it. But other than making vague claims that somehow the holistic process includes considerations that cannot be measured statistically, apparently no one has made any serious efforts to rebut Professor Sander’s reasoning. In an interview excerpted by Inside Higher Ed, Sander, who had attended the protest against his report (brave man), observed that "Some fairly cynical leaders saw an opportunity to create a cause ... and they are milking it to the full. There was no rational discussion. There was no identification of any mistakes in my report, and no concern about what it would mean if the analysis were correct."

I have no argument with the right to peaceful assembly and it would be perfectly legal for people to gather to protest the laws of physics, if they should choose to do so. Still, I find the events at UCLA appalling. A university should be a place where we encourage careful, dispassionate reasoning. Shouting slogans and shaking fists in the air do not lend themselves to the cultivation of rational analysis. While Professor Sander does not appear to be intimidated by outraged crowds, this kind of emotional display does make it more unpleasant to express unpopular views and therefore undermines the openness to intellectual diversity that should be the essence of university life.

Why diversity?

Abigail Fisher and her attorney

The Fisher affirmative action case has inspired Philosophy professor Chris Surprenant to contribute an excellent opinion piece to today’s New Orleans Times Picayune. Professor Surprenant suggests that the Fisher case should encourage us to think about the value of diversity and diversity-promoting policies in education. He begins by pointing out that the effectiveness of affirmative action in achieving the most common definition of “diversity,” increased representation of under-represented racial groups, is highly questionable. Since 1993, he tells us, black student enrollment at our top universities has actually gone down, even as these universities have actively pursued race-conscious admissions. I suppose one might respond that this enrollment could have gone down even more without these kinds of admissions policies, but that response would still leave a big problem. In writing the Supreme Court decision in the 2003 Grutter case, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor opined that using race to achieve diversity must be a temporary strategy and she stated that in twenty-five years affirmative action would no longer be needed or justified, presumably because there would be no more significant academic differences among groups. But not only were the selected under-represented group differences not going down at the time of the Grutter decision, group differences in academic preparation have actually increased, as I’ve pointed out elsewhere. So, I would accept Professor Suprenant’s point, and add to it that affirmative action has not only failed to increase black representation in selective schools, it has also failed completely as a solution to inequality across groups. I would also add that much of the growing “diversity” of American education has had nothing to do with affirmative action and has, in fact, occurred in spite of such policies.  There are today many more students of East and South Asian origin in our elite universities, a trend that might well be even more pronounced were it not for the fact that preferences for under-represented groups necessarily mean disadvantages for over-represented groups.

But Professor Suprenant’s main concern is to question what the ultimate purpose of “diversity” is supposed to be.  He asks why we value diversity. He suggests that the goal is to “make students less ethnocentric.” This goal is accepted without question “It's a product,” he writes, “of an educational system where the goal isn't to make students scholars, but to instill within them the virtues of tolerance and acceptance.” In this environment, the “diversity” of a campus has become a selling point, and universities seek to bring in minority students as assets.

Philosophy professor Chris W. Surprenant

Now, there are those who make the extraordinarily far-fetched argument that recruiting less-prepared minority students somehow has academic benefits for everyone. But the most common and most plausible claim is, as Professor Suprenant recognizes, that bringing in under-represented students will make other students more open to demographic variety. Diversity is good, in other words, because it makes students more accepting of diversity. For my part, I can’t see why black and Latino students will contribute more to open-mindedness than students of Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, Filipino, or Asian Indian backgrounds. But it remains the case that what our colleges are trying to achieve is not intellectual development, but attitudinal adjustment. Professor Surprenant is right that we should go beyond the question of whether affirmative action is achieving this goal, to the more fundamental question whether the goal itself is an appropriate one for our institutions of higher education.

Affirmative Fantasy

In one of the latest contributions to the commentary on the Fisher case, sociologist Thomas Espenshade speculates that institutions of higher education may be facing the end of affirmative action. Citing the study of affirmative action students he did with his co-author Alexandra Walton Radford, Espenshade acknowledges in a New York Times opinion piece that students admitted to selective colleges tend to graduate toward the bottom of their classes. However, Espenshade argues that no policy, including socioeconomic affirmative action, would generate as much racial and ethnic diversity as race-based affirmative action. “Most important,” he writes, “our study found that without affirmative action, racial diversity could only be preserved if there were no racial differences in learned skills and knowledge or in college preparedness.” In other words, he sees affirmative action as necessary precisely because it brings relatively unprepared students with comparatively low academic skills and knowledge into selective colleges, and these students tend to remain behind others throughout their academic careers.

Professor Thomas Espenshade

If affirmative action ends, Espenshade observes, maintaining racial and ethnic diversity will require either “giving more weight in admissions to those factors that are sometimes close substitutes for race” (i.e., engaging in subterfuge) or “putting their endowments and influence behind a comprehensive effort to close the learning gap that starts at birth.” Now, according to most indicators, contemporary colleges and universities are not doing a very good job of educating their own students. Yet, Professor Espenshade would have us believe that these institutions have almost limitless potential to re-shape the lives of children across the nation, taking over the work of communities and families, and ending all variations in educational preparation across demographic categories. If you believe that this is within the capability of higher education, I’d like to forward you some of the investment opportunities I’ve been receiving in my email from unknown parties abroad.

Class-Based Affirmative Action

Richard Kahlenberg

The website Inside Higher Education discusses a new report issued by the Century Foundation. Part of the debate on affirmative action on the eve of the Supreme Court’s consideration of the Fisher case, the report, authored by Richard Kahlenberg, argues in favor of replacing race-based affirmative action with class-based affirmative action. The report is an updating of policies Kahlenberg has been advocating for years, most notably in his 1996 book The Remedy: Class, Race, and Affirmative Action. Kahlenberg maintains that public policy should pursue preferences in educational admissions and employment based on socioeconomic class, rather than race. In his view, this would be more acceptable than racial preferences to the American public and it would accomplish the same goals as racial preferences, since people in the racial and ethnic categories favored by race-based affirmative action are disproportionately at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale.

Essentially, the Century Foundation approach would place public institutions in the position of the old Queen for a Day show, rewarding those who could tell the sorriest stories about their misfortunes. Since every college admission or job that one person receives is an admission or job that someone else will not receive, by definition class-based affirmative action must mean that public institutions would discriminate in favor of those with less fortunate and less successful family backgrounds and against those with more fortunate and more successful family backgrounds. Whatever families accomplish through work, ability, or luck will be counterbalanced (in theory) by systematic governmental discrimination in favor of families that have accomplished less.

One difficulty that I see with the class-based preferences approach is that it is clearly unconstitutional. The Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment forbids states from denying the equal protection of the laws to any person in their jurisdiction, and this clause is commonly regarded as applying also to the federal government under the Fifth Amendment requirement of due process. If states or the federal government adopt policies that give preferences to persons based on socioeconomic background, then the laws are clearly being applied unequally.  I have no doubt that a sophisticated constitutional scholar could find an elaborate interpretation demonstrating that discrimination based on economic standing is not denial of equal protection. But any straightforward reading of the clause leads to the conclusion that the law, and public policy as an expression of the law, must treat every person in exactly the same way. It cannot, through policies at public institutions, treat the children of the rich one way, those of the middle class another, and those of the poor still another.

Obama Ancestries and the Problem of Race Conscious Policies

I recently ran across a report of a genealogical study that found that President Obama’s mother probably had at least one African ancestor, in addition to her European forebears.  One of Obama’s now recognized distant cousins, who said that he has always considered himself “Caucasian,” had his DNA analyzed and found that he had sub-Saharan African genetic traits in his Y chromosome, indicating an African ancestor in his paternal line.  This has not been as widely reported as Michele Obama’s descent from Irish immigrants, but I think it is just as significant. The complicated White House ancestries suggest just how wrong-headed official racial categorizations and preferences are.

Recognizing the complexity of race does not mean accepting the American Sociological Association’s official dictum that race is nothing but a “social construct” without any biological foundation. If that were true, then the DNA tracing of racial ancestry would not be possible.  Work by geneticists at Stanford University, looking at large and representative samples of hundreds of sites on human DNA, has indicated not only that race has biological meaning, but that the statistical variations among genetic traits are largely consistent with popularly recognized races. The five clusters of DNA differences are linked to continents of origin: Africa, western Eurasia, East Asia, Oceania, and the Americas. (see Noah A. Rosenberg  et al. (2002) “Genetic Structure of Human Populations.” Science 298: 2381-2385. A newspaper report of the results is available here). The problem is not that race has no biological status at the level of populations, but that there is no good way to categorize individuals on the basis of statistical clusters.

As the example of Michelle Obama illustrates, some European genetic background is common among those classified as African Americans. Several years ago, I taught at a university in southwestern Louisiana, where many of my students had family backgrounds that blended so many physical heritages that they could not be readily classified on the basis of appearance. The genealogy of Barack Obama gives us the other side of the story: the phenomenon of “passing” in American history means that some unknown proportion of white Americans could claim to be “black,” if only they would make use of the resources that companies such as Ancestry.com now make available.  Would these newly discovered African Americans be eligible for affirmative action benefits?

In order for institutions to make decisions on the basis of categories there must ways of defining the categories and of placing people in them. If the categories are self-reported, job seekers and college applicants would be well-advised to find out what categories are desired and report themselves accordingly.  If appearance is going to be the criterion, who is going to decide who looks right? Or will every applicant need to provide a cheek swab?

The Hidden Costs of Recruiting Abroad

As reported in today’s New York Times, a number of U.S. universities are trying to make up their budget shortfalls by recruiting tuition-paying foreign students, especially from China. At public institutions, the foreign students pay the more expensive out-of-state tuition, usually without the discounts often available to American out-of-state students.  From a budgetary perspective, this makes sense. Higher education is something that we produce that is in demand in China and other countries, and the money the pupils from abroad spend on schooling in this country can help offset our trade deficit, in addition to bringing dollars into individual institutions.

Appealing to international scholars may also become more of a survival strategy for American higher education.  For the past few years, applications to colleges and universities in this country have been increasing due to the “baby boom echo.”  In the 1970s, when people born between the end of World War II and the early sixties were mostly in their teens and twenties, it looked like the nation faced a drastic demographic drop because the baby boomers weren’t producing many children of their own. From about the middle of the 1980s through the 1990s, though, members of the baby boom generation apparently became aware that they were not immortal and that their biological clocks were reaching the time of post-fertility, and they belatedly produced a little boomlet of their own.  The echo will soon fade into the historical distance though, and finding students from around the world may be a way that colleges can fill the spots left by diminishing numbers of young Americans. 

While foreign enrollments may serve the needs of institutions, though, the trend of international recruiting may not be such a good thing for many American students. As I have discussed previously, one of the reasons the costs of higher education have risen so sharply in recent years is that rising enrollments and government subsidization have largely removed constraints on expenses. Having more high paying students from other parts of the world is like having rich people suddenly decide a neighborhood is fashionable, pushing rents and housing prices up. An institution that can find foreign students willing to pay top dollar will have even fewer incentives to bring down costs.

In addition, there are only a finite number of seats in any institution and seats that go to some people cannot go to others. While more spots may become available in the future because of the likely demographic decline, for the present admitting foreign students necessarily means not admitting some U.S. students. Under the practices at most schools today, some categories of students already have structural advantages in admissions. While higher education is under legal direction to avoid openly using quotas, effort to bring in underrepresented minorities, mainly African Americans and Latinos, automatically disadvantage individuals who are not members of underrepresented categories. While the disadvantage unavoidably falls on all those not in the preferred groups, it falls heaviest on Asian Americans, who are overrepresented as a result of high average levels of achievement.

Native born Americans who are not members of preferred groups, then, find themselves caught in a pincer. Some spots go to high-paying foreigners and the native born who belong to putatively disadvantaged groups have the best access to the remaining spots. The competition for the shrinking educational space among other Americans, especially Asian Americans, becomes much more intense.

Within universities, the foreign students and the Americans from underrepresented categories go in two different directions. As a controversial study at Duke University recently indicated, the underrepresented tend to move out of the STEM fields. These, however, seem to be exactly the areas of study that draw many foreign students. It is reasonable to suggest that the admissions pincer may ultimately push American universities toward contributing to an imbalance in training between American-born and native students. While some of the latter may remain in this country, other s will take the skills acquired in this country home with them.

"Compelling National Interest" or "Pressing Public Necessity"?

Larry Purdy, one of the attorneys for Barbara Grutter in the 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger case, argues here that the Supreme Court should accept Abigail Fisher’s petition for certoriari and use the Fisher case to overturn Grutter.  The earlier Supreme Court decision accepted the use of race-conscious admissions policies at the University of Michigan Law School, where Barbara Grutter had been denied admission. Similarly, Abigail Fisher was rejected from the University of Texas at Austin in a race-conscious process. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals followed the Grutter decision in accepting UT Austin’s rejection of Ms. Fisher on the basis of race.

By a margin of 5 to 4, the Supreme Court upheld the use of race in admissions in Grutter primarily on the grounds of “compelling national interest.” Curiously, the author of the majority decision, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor acknowledged that the reason the national interest had to be “compelling” was that treating individuals differently because of race was indeed a problem for American legal principles.  This was a curious kind of legal logic, admitting that discrimination is inconsistent with equal treatment under the law, but claiming that it is ok if only your reasons are good enough.  It is uncomfortably reminiscent of the 1944 Korematsu v. United States decision, in which Justice Hugo Black justified the internment of American citizens of Japanese ancestry because of “pressing public necessity.”

As I point out in this law review article on the Grutter decision, O’Connor was also sufficiently cognizant of the problem of differentiating among people on the basis of race that she claimed that doing so to serve this “compelling national interest” could only be a temporary remedy. Therefore, she stated, race-conscious programs would lno onger be necessary in twenty-five years, presumably because strategic discrimination will have ended all variations among groups by 2028. This is where the empirical difficulties come in. If affirmative action policies are supposed to diminish achievement differences among racial and ethnic groups, they haven’t started to do so yet. And there is no evidence that they will do so in the foreseeable future.

I have posted here a chart of critical reading and math SAT scores. The gaps among the groups in the twenty-three year period from 1986-87 to 2009-10, precisely the time when not only affirmative action but other national strategies such as No Child Left Behind aimed at eliminating group differences, did not diminish. In fact, some of the gaps increased. Notably Asians have almost caught up with whites in reading, and will pass whites if the trend continues.  In math, Asians have been ahead of all other groups throughout the period, and their lead is growing. The scores of Hispanics, on the other hand, have gone down slightly in reading and remain flat in math. Since Asians and Hispanics are the fastest growing racial or ethnic categories in the United States, this suggests the gaps in the future will be larger among more people.  Moreover, because Asians are both the highest scorers and the smallest in numbers, policies that attempt to increase the representation of the underrepresented will negatively affect Asians much more than anyone else. Maybe Grutter resembles Korematsu in a number of ways.

Affirmative Action Comes Up Again

Notre Dame Professor James Sterba, in a rejoinder to comments by George Leef, recently repeated arguments in favor of affirmative action. Professor Sterba devotes most of his attention to race-based preferences, although he also states his support for class-based affirmative action.  As I’ve argued elsewhere,  proponents of socioeconomic preferences tend to present their case as if everyone could be upwardly mobile and our policies simply need to promote mobility from families at the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder in order to create a more diverse elite.  In fact, since positions in a society are limited in number at any given time, everyone who moves into a preferred position must displace someone else. There is no way around the fact that preferring individuals who come from lower income or less educated families means discriminating against individuals who come from higher income or well educated families. Socioeconomic  affirmative action systematically disfavors the success of some for no other reason than that their parents have been successful.

Professor Sterba, like other advocates of racial preferences, bases his advocacy on the social benefits that will supposedly flow from these preferences.  Chief among these is the putative role of affirmative action in propelling blacks and other minorities into highly desired elite occupations. Once again, since there exist only a limited number of top occupational positions, favoring members of some categories occupationally automatically means disfavoring others. In other words, we should have racial preferences in educational admissions because these will promote racial preferences in socioeconomic rewards throughout life. The argument in favor of such a continuing practice of discrimination is that it is a necessary evil in order to pursue the “compelling national interest,” in the Supreme Court’s term, of a more diverse society.  This, however, raises the question of the extent to which social policy can re-shape our society, as well as the question of whether a representative democracy should attempt to redesign its citizenry.

Group level differences in achievement and attainment constitute the fundamental characteristic of American society that bureaucratic efforts at diversification intend to eliminate. Race-based affirmative action would not exist if there were no variations in achievement across racial and ethnic groups. The Supreme Court recognized this in the 2004 decision, Grutter  v Bollinger, when Justice Sandra Day O’Connor portrayed race-based admissions as contrary to the principle of treating all individuals equally. Therefore, they could be justified only temporarily in order to achieve the diversity that supposedly would eliminate the variations in achievement.  As I have pointed out, though, there is no evidence that the group-level achievement gaps have diminished during the time that the United States has pursued affirmative action policies in educational admissions. In fact, these gaps have increased. While the performance gap between blacks and whites has remained relatively constant over the past quarter century, those between Asians and Hispanics, the two fastest growing groups in American society, have increased. This is largely due to the fact that average Asian achievement levels have steadily gone up. Inconveniently for supporters of race-based affirmative action, this means that preferences for under-represented minorities disadvantage Asians, vastly over-represented in elite educational institutions, more than people in any other category.  The continuing achievement gap, then, calls into question the idea that American society can be redesigned by the tinkering of policy makers. At best, it seems, we end up moving individuals from underrepresented groups into highly desired positions at the expense of individuals from other groups.

Like other supporters of affirmative action, Professor Sterba also maintains that racially preferential policies have benefits for those ineligible for preferences. Notably, he remarks that 8 out of 10 white law students at Harvard and the University of Michigan reported that discussions with students of other races affected their views of the criminal justice system. The role of minority students, then, is to teach whites the black or Hispanic truth. Professor Sterba expects minority students to act as group representatives, whose function will be to consistently remind other students of the goals and interests of the group. Like Irving Howe, in the Dissent magazine exchange with Ralph Ellison in the early sixties, Sterba lays on black Americans the obligation to perform as protestors.

Finally, Professor Sterba cites several studies that have found continuing discrimination in various sectors of American society and, following his expectation that affirmative action will enable minorities to educate whites, maintains that propelling more minority members into elite colleges and universities will create the “political will” to eradicate discrimination. He does not say what he means by this term, but I interpret “political will” to mean the exercise of governmental power.  He seems to be suggesting that affirmative action is desirable because it will lead to a massive inquisition and state intervention to eliminate all discriminatory behavior.  His advocacy of affirmative action, then, appears to be part of a larger authoritarian project for restructuring American society.

Legacies and Class-Based Affirmative Action

Richard Kalhlenberg is probably the foremost advocate of class-based affirmative action  in the United States today, although he has written about a variety of other educational issues, such as vouchers, charter schools, and teachers’ unions. Most recently, he has concentrated his attention on legacy preferences in college admissions, which he sees as “affirmative action for the rich.” Kahlenberg argues that since private universities receive funds from the federal government they do not have complete freedom to admit whomever they choose, that legacies for the sake of donations violate IRS rules because these rules forbid deductions for gifts that enrich the givers, and that legacy preferences violate the 1866 Civil Rights Act

I appreciate Kahlenberg’s approach to issues. In his books and his articles, he writes clearly, employs logical arguments, and avoids heated rhetoric and ad hominem attacks. Appreciating the way he lays out his views is not the same as agreeing with them, though. On the legacy question, I believe that Kahlenberg’s strongest point is that by accepting federal funds private universities subject themselves to state control. Here, though, I think he has really put his finger on one of the biggest problems of modern higher education.  Government subsidies have placed private institutions on the track to becoming government subsidiaries.

Freedom of association, for organizations as well as individuals, is essential to an open, pluralistic society. In order to have freedom of association and the freedom to define their own goals, private educational institutions need to make their own choices about criteria for admission. This means they should be able to choose to give preferences to young black men, women, fundamentalist Christians, Mayflower descendents, top SAT scorers, or champion Elvis impersonators. By becoming dependent upon federal funds over the past half-century, private universities have imperiled their own autonomy, and become quasi-public entities, with the central government defining their goals and limiting their rights of association. This trend of dependence and control is part of a larger tendency of American society toward the absorption of all aspects of life by the national state. We have not yet reached the point of everything inside the state and nothing outside the state, but we are well on our way.

So, I think Kahlenberg is right that federal funding opens the door to federal intrusion in admissions policies, but I don’t see this as a good thing.  In addition, the argument against legacies here is part of a larger argument about how political programs should define the goals of all of our social institutions. Kahlenberg favors prohibiting preferences for people from some family backgrounds at the same time that he favors mandating preferences for people from others.  Class-based affirmative action is essentially a project of discrimination against people who come from the “wrong” class.  

Upward mobility has historically been an intergenerational process, in which parents improve the chances for their children. One of the ways in which they have improved their children’s chances in life has been giving children educational advantages. These do not consist only of supposedly “unfair” advantages such as securing legacies, but also of putting all their resources toward improving the abilities and competitive preparation of the children.  Under class-based affirmative action, the state and those public and quasi-public educational institutions would actively discriminate against the children of the relatively financially successful or the well-educated in an effort to redistribute opportunities.  Readers of Kurt Vonnegut may remember the story of Harrison Bergeron, who is fitted out with mental and physical handicaps to balance his unfair inherent advantages. What is class-based affirmative action but a system of handicaps for successful families?

A Race with No Losers?

In his commencement address to Howard University in 1965, President Lyndon Johnson introduced what would become one of the most widely quoted justifications for the use of racial preferences in education and employment. Johnson declared that achieving the freedom of all individuals to “share, fully and equally, in American society” was not enough. “You do not,” the President said, “take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.” American society, in this view, is a competition, a race for high prestige occupations, for wealth, and for success in all of its many forms.  But races, whether “fair” or not, generally end up with contenders in first place, second and third place, and also rans, with at least one runner finishing dead last. We could, in the name of fairness, give our recently chained runner a good head start or even walk this competitor to the finish line before the starting shot and announce a winner. This would be an unusual and interesting athletic event.

Opponents of affirmative action frequently object to it not because they are against fairness but because they object to rigging the game. The objections are stronger than they would be in a footrace because the winners get those real prizes of widely desired jobs and good incomes. The response of the policy-making advocates of preferences has been to pretend, or to convince themselves, that the race of American life is one in which everyone’s a winner. Over the past half-century many Americans have decided that education is the track on which everyone can compete and end up at front.

In truth, though, like every race and every other competitive activity, the dash for educational benefits is a zero-sum game, just as the succeeding scramble for positions or opportunities in life will be a zero-sum game at any point in time. At my own university, the numbers of freshman admissions have been growing each year, so that we’ve been struggling to keep up with providing enough classes, but the numbers have still been limited in any given year. Everyone who gets in by definition deprives someone else of a spot.

Each advantage to one competitor of necessity becomes a disadvantage for another, a basis of discrimination. Footraces discriminate in favor of individuals with better training, greater inherent leg strength, and longer strides, and against those without those qualities. The more we try to compensate by giving head starts to those who (perhaps for reasons beyond their control) are weaker athletes, the more we discriminate against the better athletes and lessen their chances of winning the ribbons that will not go to everyone.

When we grant special consideration to any characteristic of competitors, we engage in intentional discrimination, not only for those with that characteristic but, by logical necessity, against those without it. Giving points for being non-white, poor, the first college applicant in a family, or having an unconventional sexual orientation must also mean taking points away for being white, non-poor, the scion of well-educated parents, or being heterosexual. Apart from the fact that these types of categorical discrimination are invitations for strategic self-misrepresentation (I think many of my fellow white Louisianians could reposition themselves as non-white with enough genealogical research), they also lead to some bizarre scenarios: Your parents worked hard to be successful or managed to make it through professional schooling, so we are going to hold that against you. We are going to mark you down because you prefer members of the opposite sex. Ultimately, though, we have to recognize that however we set the game up, it is not possible to simply pass around winning positions to a wider and more diverse set of players.