Lies of affirmative action at Harvard

Stuart Taylor Jr. is coauthor with Richard Sander of the indispensable 2012 book Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It. I drew on it for my 2013 Federalist Society talk “Bias in the air.”

Writing in the Claremont Review of Books, Thomas Sowell commented: “Sander and Taylor have written an outstanding book that deserves to be read and pondered in many places for many years. They have performed a major service for all those who have an open mind on affirmative action, however modest the number of such people may be—and a still more important service for those who think that black students on campus should be there to advance their own education and lives, not to serve in a role much like that of movie extras, whose presence enhances the scene for others.”

Sowell said of the taboo that has precluded acknowledgment of the book among the organs of the mainstream media: “[A] highly successful strategy used by academic administrators and other defenders of racial preferences in higher education has been to simply ignore any and all evidence that goes against their policies or the assumptions behind those policies.”

We now have a penetrating case study in the reality behind the euphemism that goes under the rubric of “affirmative action.” Taylor himself presents it in the long Weekly Standard article on the case against Harvard that gets its day in court this week. Taylor’s article is “Racial Preference on Trial as Harvard Goes to Court.” One will note that as is always the case when “affirmative action” is the subject and its practitioners are speaking, there’s a whole lotta lyin’ goin’ on.

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