University admissions officers nevertheless maintain what Taylor in the preface calls an “enormous, pervasive and carefully concealed system of racial preferences,” even while claiming they aren’t actually doing so. The willingness to systematically lie seems to be a requirement for such jobs.
In 1904, journalist Lincoln Steffens wrote a book called “The Shame of the Cities.” At the time, Americans took pride in big cities, with their towering skyscrapers, productive factories and prominent cultural institutions.
Steffens showed there were some rotten things underneath the gleaming veneers — corrupt local governments and political machines, aided and abetted by business leaders.
In recent weeks, two books have appeared about another of America’s gleaming institutions, our colleges and universities, either of which could be subtitled “The Shame of the Universities.”
In “Mismatch,” law professor Richard Sander and journalist Stuart Taylor expose, in the words of their subtitle, “How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It.” In “Unlearning Liberty,” Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, describes how university speech codes create, as his subtitle puts it, “Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate.”
“Mismatch” is a story of good intentions gone terribly awry. Sander and Taylor document beyond disagreement how university admissions offices’ racial quotas and preferences systematically put black and Hispanic students in schools where they are far less well-prepared than others.
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