Jonah Goldberg has a great column at Townhall.com addressing diversity and affirmative action programs at universities. I’ve expressed my feelings about promoting or ‘celebrating’ diversity in a previous post. I’ve also linked to columns by Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell on the subject. You can view these posts here.

From Goldberg’s column:

When the University of Michigan’s admissions policies were being reviewed by the Supreme Court, former school president Lee Bollinger explained that diversity was “as essential as the study of the Middle Ages, of international politics and of Shakespeare” because exposure to people of different hues lies at the core of the educational experience.

This is the problem I have with diversity programs: They assume that students at Yale benefit more from being exposed to a child of a black physician living in Connecticut than being exposed to a child of a white farmer living in Mississippi. In this sense diversity programs are racist. There are plenty of potential black students that are more like the majority of white Yale students than many potential white students.

If universities were really interested in building a diverse student body they would recruit students from across the country and from different socio-economic backgrounds — regardless of skin color.

Update: Jennifer Gratz, a young white woman who was denied admission as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, sued the university on the basis that the undergraduate college had unconstitutionally awarded other applicants a set number of points solely for not being white. The Supreme Court of the United States ruled in her favor. OpinionJournal, in an article by John Fund, reports that:

She believes universities could look to socioeconomic factors rather than racial ones when considering applicants. Economic elements “should be taken into account, regardless of your skin color.” (emphasis mine)

Obviously she is wise beyond her years — since she thinks like me.