A Dubious Expediency: How Race Preferences Damage Higher Education

Is higher education on the right road? The authors of these eight essays are hardly the first to think not.

In 1976, in the now-famous Bakke case, the California Supreme Court had to decide whether what some view as the good kind of race discrimination-preferential treatment for minorities in college and university admissions-violates the Constitution. To Justice Stanley Mosk, up to then considered by many to be a civil rights hero, the answer was clear. Writing for the majority, he insisted: To uphold [the University of California’s argument for race-preferential admissions] would call for the sacrifice of principle for the sake of dubious expediency and would represent a retreat in the struggle to assure that each man and woman shall be judged on the basis of individual merit alone.

Alas, the university took its case up to the U.S. Supreme Court, where the Justices fractured into three camps. The result was to open the door to more than a half-century of diversity admissions.

These policies have never been popular. When voters get the opportunity to vote them down, they almost always do, beginning with California’s Proposition 209 in 1996. In 2020, California voters shocked that state’s political and business elite by decisively rejecting an effort by the legislature-known as Proposition 16-to repeal Proposition 209.

But voters in most states never get that opportunity.

At this late date, getting back on the right road-away from group preferences and from the cultural changes they have wreaked on campus-won’t be easy. Yet, as the essays in this volume demonstrate, it needs to be done-sooner better than later.