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Laws shouldn't dictate at all who gets into colleges and who doesn't based on race. The best candidates should always get in. If minorities or whoever have a more difficult path towards college, then work should be done to fix things at that level.
Yes, I haven't read the opinion (or dissent), but I think it's hard to disagree with that.
I find it hard to take Sotomayer seriously when she writes a 54 page dissent and then insists on reading it aloud when the decision was announced. From the little I've read of her opinion, it seems to me more like she wanted to decide it based on her own feelings and preferences rather than a Constitutional basis. I total get how a minority would feel personally invested in a decision like this, but it seems to me that she may be a bit out of line.
I tend to agree with this. By the time they get to college, it's probably too late to fix things. Let's face it: blacks and Hispanics, especially those in our inner cities, receive an inferior education. Some of this is there own fault, and some of this is our fault. Whoever's fault it is, as a society we need to work together to fix it so that those students can apply to college on an even level with everyone else.
If laws shouldn't dictate at all who gets into college, then shouldn't colleges, themselves, be able to decide what "best candidate" means and what the complete makeup of their incoming class/student body is?
Not if they accept public funding. If they take our money then we get an input.
How much funding? As of 2010, government funding, per student, in the University of California system is 59.7% of total spending per student. Link. By 2022, Stanford's School of Public Policy projects that, based on trends in the decline in government spending per UC student, funding for the UC system will run out in 2022.
They do, and it is, to a large extent, the result of the death grip that unions have on these schools. They have run these schools for decades and have failed miserably - and fight like crazy at any effort to improve them (look at the war on charter schools that de Blasio is up to - trying to destroy the bit of good education for the poor in NYC for his union buddies. Sickening). That is another discussion, though.
IMO, Sotomayer believes in a squishy constitution that changes with her view of the world. In a commentary on this decision someone reviewed this decision with respect to the dissenting opinion from Harlan in Plessy v Ferguson (which was a fascinating read, BTW). It is a pretty strong argument after reading that that the 6-2 decision was a pretty good one.GroveDiesel said:
It is determined by how much you can pay to live in a good school district. Not by race. But Hispanics and blacks do tend to be less well off in aggregate numbers. It's also choices. I could have had a house twice the size of mine now and be paying far less for it had I not decided to sacrifice that to move into a better school district for my son.
Welcome to progressive politics. Is this really a surprise?GroveDiesel said:
That's so incredibly dumb. This case wasn't about whether affirmative action is a good idea. It was about whether voters are constitutionally prohibited from constraining school boards' decisions about admissions policies.
On crazy liberal/progressive planet. There is serious hate for any black person that opposes anything lefty in nature.
All schools receive federal funds though Pell Grants. Princeton was sued a few years ago by an Asian student who got on the waiting list - he claimed there was an Asian quota at the school. I think he was right, but it's hard to prove.
The Plessy dissent is one of the greatest opinions - of any kind - ever, and it continues to influence more than 100 years after it was written. IMO it's even better than Brown vs Board. Brown relied upon a number of studies and very contemporaneous observations that were very limited to the times; the Plessy decision said laws based on race and dividing society by race was and will always be irrational. Maybe that had to do with the fact that in Plessy the man suing was 1/8th black, and there was no rational means for determining that he was "black" or "white" in the first place or why even if there was it should matter.
I think we would all do well to ditch the "I don't like this argument so I'll label it a 'meme' in a subtle attempt to disparage it" meme.
I'm not trying to subtly discredit it at all. I think its a bull#### argument. I'm being perfectly upfront about that. It's not entirely Roberts' bull#### argument. Powell deserves much of the blame for the mental gymnastics displayed in Bakke, but the very idea that remedying the effects of hundreds of years of racial inequality would somehow fail to serve as a compelling government interest is, IMO, ludicrous.
And yet many still know the difference between THERE and THEIR.
I agree with your statement. However I don't believe that affirmative action in terms of college admissions is the best means of remedy.
Perhaps fixing the primary and secondary educational systems so that bias in college admissions isn't necessary?
That's what I wrote earlier. But unlike you I don't see the unions as the main source of the problem.
I dont think it is the best means of remedy, but it certainly could be considered a legitimate tool in such a remedy.
Colleges don't usually bother trying to justify affirmative action on the grounds of remedying past injustice. (I know you know this, but others are bringing that up too).
It's not that they "don't bother" to do so. It's that the Supreme Court ruled that they cannot do so. Which is why I lay the appropriate amount of blame on the Bakke decision, which perpetuated the farce that the government has a compelling interest in promoting diversity on campus but not in ameliorating the effects of pervasive historical discrimination.
I can label that quote a lot of different ways. As an aphorism. As a quip. Even as a meme. What it is not, IMO, is a nuanced statement on affirmative action. Because (in the cases before Roberts and the Supreme Court) nobody is arguing that affirmative action is designed to "stop discriminating on the basis of race." What some, including Sotomayor, are arguing is that it should be (because it is not under current precedent) a means of ameliorating the historic effects of pervasive discrimination on the basis of race.
I haven't read Bakke since law school. I find it difficult to believe that remedying past wrongs isn't a compelling government interest, so I looked at the summary of the case in Wikipedia, and as far as I can tell from the summary, the plaintiffs didn't even argue that affirmative action was intended to remedy past wrongs. They argued that it was intended to increase the number of minority doctors (UC Davis medical school had racial quotas), to increase the number of doctors in areas currently underserved by doctors, and to increase diversity. Powell accepted only the third argument.
You believe that most people who benefit from affirmative action fail as a result of it? Do you have any evidence to back up this claim?
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