When it became clear that no court was about to tolerate that approach, it switched to giving a large number of bonus points to applicants with the right ancestry, a shrewd way to get the same results. Diversity may sound like an irreproachable goal for a university community. But it turns out that there is less to diversity than meets the eye. At the law school, African Americans are favored, but not Africans. Puerto Ricans born on the American mainland enrich the school's diversity, but not Puerto Ricans born in Puerto Rico.
Diversity is a concept elastic enough to fit whatever a university administrator wants it to cover.
Asian-Americans encompass a variety of backgrounds and cultures, arising from places as different as Japan and Bangladesh, but none of them, it appears, contributes to diversity. Just the opposite. One of the little-noticed facts about racial preferences in university admissions is that applicants of Asian ancestry are penalized, not helped. Not because they've suffered less discrimination on average than, say, Latinos. The diversity Michigan seeks is an oddly one-dimensional kind.