Report from the Front: The Court's black and white decision.

June 27, 2003 -- Much will be written about the legal flaws of the Supreme Court's decision on the University of Michigan's racial preferences admissions policies. The court found race-based admissions in the name of "affirmative action" to be constitutional, upheld that university's law school admissions criteria, but struck down Michigan's practice of automatically awarding points to government-approved minorities for undergraduate admissions.

Of course, private schools should be free to use any admissions criteria they wish and all schools should be private. But most schools are government operated or funded and when governments are involved, they should not treat individuals differently based on race. And unfortunately the Bush administration, while opposing Michigan's particular policies, supported the concept of affirmative action.

As Objectivist Center Executive Director David Kelley pointed out recently, "diversity" is a code word of the cultural Left, whose "agenda is based on the view that an individual's identity is essentially a function of his race, class, and sex, and that such groups are engaged in ceaseless conflicts of oppression and resistance." (See Ban Government Racism, Not Discrimination .) It is through moral confusion, degeneracy or worse that many Americans actually believe that individuals should be judged based on accidents of birth rather than on their own achievements. It is also revealing that many who support affirmative action in the name of diversity also support political correctness policies on campus that curtail the most important form of diversity on a college campus: diversity of opinion.

These facts illustrate the need to fight for a free society based on the principles of individualism. In a culture in which individuals, in the words of Martin Luther King, "will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character," neither students, their parents, alumni, nor foundations and businesses that fund universities would tolerate the race-based policies upheld by a morally and politically confused court.

(For further commentary on racial issues, see "Character and Color")