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Just a quick Sunday morning reflection, but just wanted to briefly float an idea about affirmative action, ethnic identity, and university reform. As most people probably know, the Supreme Court is widely expected to strike down affirmative action in the near future. However, speaking as someone well ensconced within the very apse of the Cathedral, I'm doubtful it will change much; Admissions inevitably involves a huge amount of illegible subjective decision-making, and the religion of DEI means that there will be no shortage of reasons to prefer candidates from under-represented minority backgrounds. Sadly, I expect this to continue trumping any kind of class-based affirmative action, for which a far stronger moral case can be made.
If the US is indeed headed towards a new regime of ethnic spoils, how can young Americans who don't benefit from being in an officially recognized URM group - especially those who are nonetheless disadvantaged - still reap spoils of their own in the higher education systems? There are two particular groups I have in mind here. The first is Asian-American students, long the ones who have paid most of the price for boosting enrollment of otherwise underrepresented minorities, while the second is white Americans, especially those from working-class or otherwise economically underprivileged backgrounds.
I wonder if a similar solution might work in both cases. Specifically, is there any reason a new private university couldn't declare as part of its mission statement that it is dedicated to "understanding and promoting Asian and Asian-American identities", or some such, and require all candidates to submit a personal statement spelling out their identity or affinity with one or more aspects of Asian or Asian-American culture? Of course, non-Asian candidates wouldn't be barred from applying, and you'd probably want to take a hefty chunk of non-Asian students anyway, but it would provide a plausible and conveniently illegible selection mechanism to ensure that Asians and Asian-Americans applying to the university would have a natural advantage in getting in.
Could something similar work for white students? As stated so baldly, I think not. "Whiteness" as an identity is seen as too toxic, too vague, and too novel an identity to ground any kinds of claims for preferential treatment; any scholarship program for self-identified White students would be regarded with utter hostility, and would be a poison chalice for any student foolish enough to accept it. What might be more acceptable is to found institutions dedicated to one or another group of "hyphenated-Americans", the most obvious candidate groups being Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, and Polish- (or more broadly Slavic-) Americans. Again, in each of these cases, you wouldn't have any kind of explicit cultural discrimination in place, but candidates could be assessed heavily based on how deep and sincere their affiliation, identity, or attachment to the given identity was, as expressed in their relevant candidate statement.
While any such institution would be the target of snarky articles from the New York Times et al., I think that if done sincerely (and ideally using the language of DEI) it would be hard to truly tar the endeavor with the charge of Asian- or white-supremacism. There's simply too much obvious conceptual overlap with existing programs that favor URMs, so to truly rail against it, commentators would have to say the quiet part out loud, so to speak, which would alienate moderates.
Of course, the really hard part would be making these universities places that students actually wanted to go to. For my part, I think the current higher-education system in most of the world is a stagnant cartel, with actual teaching being near the bottom of priorities, and the whole edifice is ripe for disruption. The main challenge to overcome would be the brand power of the old guard, especially the Ivy Leagues, and that's hardly a trivial obstacle to overcome. Perhaps the best two initial strategies in this regard would be (i) hiring a bunch of very good emeritus faculty, who could write excellent letters of recommendation for grad school etc., and (ii) focusing in the first instance on teaching disciplines with relatively legible outcomes, e.g., material sciences, machine learning, data science, mathematics, etc., rather than the humanities. Over a few years, I think it would be entirely possible to cultivate a reputation for providing a superb education in these disciplines, such that employers would have to take note.
All of this would require a large amount of startup capital, but there are Silicon Valley libertarian-types who could - ideally anonymously - bankroll this kind of operation (so Peter Thiel, if you're reading, get in touch).
But perhaps I'm being naive, and there are obstacles here that I'm not seeing. What do you all think?
I think the biggest factor this overlooks is that it's not like the Asian and White students who aren't getting into Harvard or a UC school aren't getting into any colleges- it's been a minute since I've personally looked into it, but my general impression is that you have to be pretty darn incapable to not get into any school. And there's not only no obvious reason to prefer a new private school to northwestern Iowa Tech, there's cost related reasons for the opposite.
Almost any high school graduate in the US can get into college. The affirmative action fight is about attending elite colleges, which are different because of prestige that can't actually be copied. Yes, MIT and Stanford probably have tougher courses than podunk state. But prestige is the main reason employers prefer MIT diplomas to podunk state diplomas, and you can't actually replicate MIT's prestige with a new college no matter how tough the courses are.
This is why the object of Any effective american class war should be to either nationalize the top 100 schools and force them to expand admissions til their brand value is dead, or ultimatum them into expanding or withdraw all federal funding/accreditation
It's rare that I wholeheartedly agree with you, but this time I do. At the very least the states should be incentivized to do what California did. Berkeley, UCLA, UCSD, UC Davis and UC Irvine are in the Forbes top 30, with only four more public universities from other states on the list. And they did it while competing with Stanford. There's no real reason why University of Texas or A&M can't compete with Rice or why CUNY and SUNY can't compete with Columbia and Cornell and Aquafresh.
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