Down with Meritocracy; Up with Diversity

Lately we have not heard very much talk about how we are going to compete against China in the world markets. We have not been talking about how we are going to compete in technological innovation, in manufacturing and in industry. One reason is: we believe that we are going to sue them into submission.

Onshoring manufacturing is a wonderful idea, but we must ask ourselves the difficult question: do we have the brainpower to do the job? Do American workers know enough to run factories? Do we have enough engineers and scientists to compete effectively against a nation that has been minting millions of them, year after year.

Well, stop your worrying. We might not have the best and the brightest. We might not have the most capable minds, but we have diversity. Or, at least we are going to have a lot more of it. 

Consider this on the easiest level. If you have a classroom filled with the brightest students you can stretch the limits. You can teach them the most advanced subjects and you will know that they can keep up. You will be producing groups of students who can master advanced math and engineering skills, and who will thus be capable of bringing manufacturing home to the USA.

But, if you have a diverse class where some of the students are significantly better than others, you will be obliged to dumb down the learning process, so that the lesser minds do not get completely lost. If half of your class does not know algebra, you are not going to be teaching calculus. The price will be that the best minds will not be challenged and will not achieve their best.

So, it’s all about affirmative action, and making America’s best universities look like America. We will be admitting students who cannot do advanced work in STEM subjects and will be hiring faculty who cannot teach it anyway.

As a result of the insurrection currently being played out on our streets, we will be seeing, Steven Hayward explains (via Maggie’s Farm):

... an expansion of explicit race-conscious affirmative action admissions and hiring.

We are competing against a viciously meritocratic educational system. And we have convinced ourselves that we need to scrap meritocracy. 

Twas not always thus:

The irony here is that the idea of meritocracy, and the development of achievement tests like the SAT, were the invention of liberals to open up university admissions to talented students and end the days of universities (especially elite ones like Harvard and Yale) being mostly finishing schools for the wealthy and connected elite.

But now, thanks to a better work ethic, Asian-Americans are profiting the most from their white privilege. The same was said in the past about Jews:

But the problem for the left is that at Berkeley, Harvard, and other elite universities, not enough officially sanctioned minorities (meaning blacks and hispanics) score well enough to qualify for admission on a straight-up basis, while too many Asians (who are increasingly considered “white” by the identity-mongers) score so highly on the SATs that Harvard, Yale, UC Berkeley, and other elite universities could fill perhaps 40 percent of their freshman classes right now with Asians. UCLA has for a while now been said to be the “University of Caucasians Lost among Asians.”

Obviously, schools that choose to ignore the SAT and ACT test scores, replacing them with fuzzy qualities like personality, are going to be dumbing themselves down. Or else, they are going to have separate programs for students who major in STEM subjects. Separate but unequal. 

As you know parents of Chinese students have sued Harvard because their children were disadvantaged because of their race. The parents lost in district court and are now awaiting a Supreme Court ruling. Hayward believes that these schools, given their respect for the rule of law, will do everything in their power to subvert an eventual loss in the courts:

Meanwhile, there is a torpedo in the water heading for the current “diversity” regime of race-based preferences. I suspect that the drive to jettison the SAT is a pre-emptive move in anticipation of an eventual adverse Supreme Court ruling in the lawsuit over Harvard’s discrimination against Asian applicants. If the regime of “diversity” and affirmative action admission is to survive, colleges will have to come up with a new scheme of “holistic” admission screening to get around the problem of meritocracy. Better to get a head start.