Columbia Law School: send us a video (to show your race)

The Supreme Court’s decision to prohibit affirmative action has the racists who run our university in a pickle.

They want to discriminate based on race, but they are legally limited by the decision in the ways that they can pretend not to be.

Columbia University Law School came up with a clever plan: ask students to send in a video of them talking for no more than 90 seconds. Ostensibly the goal was to show how the student comes across. What are they like?

Except, well, 90 seconds. Not exactly a lot of personal data can be gleaned from 90 seconds of a nervous High School student who is desperate to impress.

“All applicants will be required to submit a short video, no longer than 90 seconds, addressing a question chosen at random,” the school’s admissions page said Monday morning. https://t.co/od6FB8qsBA

— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) August 1, 2023

And honestly, do you really believe that admissions officials who sift through hundreds of applications are desperate to watch these videos to get a sense of who these students really are? Or are they trying to come up with a plausible way to determine race and claim that they were bowled over by the persuasive powers of an HS kid?

We know the answer.

Critics slammed the move as a thinly veiled attempt to defy the Supreme Court’s ruling and practice affirmative action by other means, using appearance as a proxy for race. Columbia’s decision “has all the hallmarks of a willful effort to evade the requirements of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act,” said Edward Blum, the founder of Students for Fair Admissions, the plaintiffs in the June case that outlawed affirmative action. “What is a 90-second video supposed to legitimately convey that a written statement could not?”

Reached for comment by the Washington Free Beacon, however, a spokesman for the law school said it had all been a misunderstanding and, by 6:00 PM Monday evening, Columbia had scrubbed the language from its website.

Colleges and universities are desperate to use race as part of their admissions process. Their dedication to the ideology of DEI knows few bounds, and almost every single academic institution was outraged by the decision of the Court to ban using race as a key factor in admitting students to their institutions.

Regardless of what they say, or even of the possibility that their intentions are genuinely pure and not merely virtue signaling, the drive to consider race is not only unjust but also simply stupid. It will have almost zero impact on the actual distribution of wealth and privilege in society.

Why? Simple: few people will, in the grand scheme of things, ever benefit or be hurt by affirmative action. In a nation made up of hundreds of millions of people, the number of people who attend elite institutions is asymptotically close to zero. The schools’ decisions matter very much to the small number of people affected but change very little in society as a whole. Harvard and Columbia can feel good about their efforts, but graduating a hundred to two hundred more Black people a year changes nothing in the grand scheme of things, especially since those same people would have gone to a good, but less prestigious school instead.

Columbia’s decision “has all the hallmarks of a willful effort to evade the requirements of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act,” said Edward Blum, the founder of Students for Fair Admissions. “What is a 90-second video supposed to convey that a written statement could not?”

— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) August 1, 2023

In exchange for a few thousand people a year getting a slightly better job through racial preferences, the entire society is turned upside down. Blacks wind up suspecting that they got ahead because of their race, and worse, so does everybody else. The vast majority of Black people benefit not at all (often are harmed, in fact, by suspicions about their competence), while White and Asian students worry that they are harmed by their own race and got cheated.

Almost nobody actually benefits, yet social cohesion as a whole is undermined. Races are set against each other, all because some Lefties want to feel good about themselves.

By far the biggest thing America could do for disadvantaged Blacks is institute school choice. Blacks are most harmed in our society by being ill-educated. The public schools are utterly incapable and arguably unconcerned about actually preparing Black students for success in American society. No amount of help on the back side–employment preferences–can undo the damage done by the public schools.

Sure, there are other problems, particularly a toxic “urban” culture that rejects bourgeois values. But a record of success in education could chip away at that by helping students interested in succeeding actually do so.

If elite schools shut down tomorrow it would change a few people’s lives. The good researchers would find other positions, and the dross would go away. The students who can succeed through hard work and intelligence would do so anyway.

Want more social justice? Improve K-12 and eliminate the elite schools. Dump affirmative action and close prestige institutions. They simply distort the market and reinforce the exclusivity of the elite class.