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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   31375 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 24, 2023

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The progressive hissy fit over the end Affirmative Action continues to be hilarious. A few assorted thoughts:

  1. The sense I get is that progressives want to take a scalp as revenge for AA being over, but I don't think I've ever seen a widespread effort by conservatives to defend legacy admissions. The primary beneficiaries seem to be a handful of wealthy/connected applicants and the administrations of elite colleges, who get dump trucks of cash and connections to powerful people.
  2. The top 0.1% getting a significant bump has a marginal effect on overall admissions, and I doubt the beneficiaries skew conservative.
  3. Turning off a major source of funding for higher education seems like something progressives should avoid doing. Conservatives are already hostile towards higher education due to academia's dominant leftist political orthodoxy. If you believe in the signaling theory of education, then crude cuts to funding are the best first step.
  4. Similar to (3), ending legacy admits seems to be a good step toward reducing the prestige/social cachet of elite higher education.
  5. The smartest strategy for conservatives might be to have David French types write op-eds defending legacy admits. This way progressives think we care about it a lot, spend a lot of time and effort ending legacy admits, and removing influence/money from an important liberal institution.

The smartest strategy for conservatives might be to have David French types write op-eds defending legacy admits. This way progressives think we care about it a lot, spend a lot of time and effort ending legacy admits, and removing influence/money from an important liberal institution.

Does anyone actually care about what David French or anyone like him has to say? The NeverTrump conservatives have no base, no constituency, no audience, no influence and no viable vision for the future. The left gave them a few columnist positions because they might have been useful weapons to use against Trump, but other than that I don't think they're even worth thinking about these days.

Yeah my comment was mostly alluding to this. He has no influence over conservatism, but perhaps progressives who read the NYT might think he speaks for "the conscience" of conservatism.

Yes, progressive seem to have forgotten that "but legacies" was just a gotcha and not a real argument for affirmative action. The old guard that makes up the primary beneficiaries aren't even conservatives (or at least are conservative Democrats). And anything which reduces the prestige of the top schools is good for conservatives. So possibly the silence from that quarter is a matter of "never interrupt your enemy when they're making a mistake".

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