Battling editorials

The Supreme Court’s consideration of racial preferences in college admissions has prompted battling editorials on the America’s most influential editorial pages. The New York Times makes the traditional left-wing argument:

If the Supreme Court strikes down the program, it could undo affirmative action in higher education, sharply reducing the number of African-Americans in colleges and graduate schools.

And the Wall St. Journal counters with the relevant data:

The university is perfectly up front about its policy of discrimination and defends it as necessary for its “compelling interest” in having a diverse student body. But the experience of two other state university systems — Texas and California — shows that argument doesn’t hold water. Both institutions did away with affirmative action in 1996 — Texas under court order and California at the direction of the Board of Regents — amid prophesies of a “new segregation.”

This turned out to be a “complete fiction,” says Terry Pell, executive director of the Center for Individual Rights, the public-interest law firm that brought the Michigan lawsuits. Today every public university in both states has a non-Asian minority student body of 10% or more. In California earlier this year, minority enrollment at UC’s eight undergraduate campuses topped 19%, up from 18% in 1997, the last year racial preferences were in effect.

In California, the passage of Prop 209, outlawing racial and gender preferences, increased minority enrollment in UC, mostly at the minor campuses.

Of the two editorials, the WSJ’s is clearly the more honest. Affirmative Action continues to provide a crutch to those who don’t want to attack the real problems that disadvantage minorities, poor public schools and too many single-parent families. Understandably, every left-wing special interest group in the country has written a “friend of the court” brief supporting preferences.

Court watchers say O’Connor has switched sides and will vote to strike preferences down.