The Supreme Court preserved affirmative action in university admissions today by a one-vote margin but with a forceful endorsement of the role of racial diversity on campus in achieving a more equal society.

"In order to cultivate a set of leaders with legitimacy in the eyes of the citizenry, it is necessary that the path to leadership be visibly open to talented and qualified individuals of every race and ethnicity," Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote in her 5-to-4 majority opinion upholding the University of Michigan's consideration of race for admission to its law school...

The result of today's rulings was that Justice Powell's solitary view that there was a "compelling state interest" in racial diversity, a position that had appeared undermined by the court's subsequent equal protection rulings in other contexts and that some lower federal courts had boldly repudiated, has now been endorsed by five justices and placed on a stronger footing than ever before.

There's a couple of reasons why this is a really bad thing. Firstly, it puts on legal footing the idea of "diversity", which is a term that means nothing except the right of institutions to pick and choose which minorities they consider worthy of charity and which they don't. In other words, whichever oppressed race the neo-Nazi Left chooses to fetishize on any given day. I wont go into the convoluted means by which universities do this, but Allen Dershowitz (a liberal no less) has demonstrated quite well how the university affirmative action system is a de facto quota on Jews and Asians. In other words, it discriminates in favor of blacks and Hispanics (which is a term which means nothing whatsoever, since its a linguistic term and not a racial one) and against Jews and Asians. Needless to say, the whole system is obviously racist and unconstitutional but, like many other aspects of our society, the Constitution becomes noticeably irrelevant where the ideology of the neo-Nazi Left is involved. The idea that "diversity" is in itself a value beyond all others, i.e. that a campus should be racially diverse before it is anything else, is the principle catalyst behind the environment on American campuses we see today: racially diverse and intellectually monochromatic. The idea that the color of one's skin automatically confers some sort of mystical "otherness" which inherently contributes to the intellectual life of a campus or a nation is Hitlerian thinking, pure and simple. Affirmative action can only be supported by someone who ascribes supernatural forces to the factor of race, who lives in a world where there is such a thing as "black" history, "Jewish" science or a myriad of other racialist concepts which now dominate the academy. This is intellectual sophistry at best and psychotic racism at worst. The university system should be a total meritocracy, based on nothing but intellectual competence and ability. Of course, to achieve this we would have to fire almost the entire faculty of every major university (since they are nearly all hired for political reasons and not their intellectual ability) and rearrange most of the system of admissions as well. If such a merit-based system results in the dominance of certain ethnic groups, so be it. As D.P. Moynihan has noted, ethnic groups often have distinct cultures which push their members towards specific professions and sectors of society. The attempt by the neo-Nazi Left to engineer this fact away is, like all its other attempts to engineer away human nature, doomed to failure and much destruction in the process.