A More Diverse America Turns Against Racial Preferences

The Supreme Court will soon hear arguments about the use of racial preferences in college admissions. On this score, a curious divergence in opinion has arisen in recent years. While the public has moved sharply in one direction, academia has raced in the exact opposite.

Take California. In 1996 Californians voted by a 9-point margin to approve Proposition 209, a constitutional amendment to ban the use of racial preferences in public employment and college admissions. As the state’s electorate moved to the left in the subsequent years, it was widely assumed that support for the ban had evaporated. The University of California evidently felt bound by the letter but not the spirit of the law, as the system reduced its reliance on objective test scores so that it could use “holistic” judgments, effectively making it easier to hide its use of racial preferences.