It is a far greater tragedy that the President of the University of Michigan advocates racial discrimination in the evaluation of applicants to the law school and to every other division of the university. One can infer from Bollinger's support for racial preferences that he actually believes that white and Asian-American applicants who are rejected because of the skin color are not entitled to equal protection under the law. In fact, he seems oblivious to the injury these applicants have suffered because of an external characteristic they cannot change. Racial preferences are inherently discriminatory. For every black applicant who is admitted to universities on the basis of race, there is another applicant like the plaintiff in the case, Barbara Grutter, who is white, who is rejected on the basis of race.
Racial preferences hurt people.
Sometimes they hurt people badly. But these same university presidents don't give preference in either student admissions or faculty hiring to applicants who are conservative or Republican, both of which are woefully underrepresented on college campuses. Surely their presence in numbers approximating their percentage of the general population would diversify the intellectual climate at universities far more than the recruitment of students who are told on their arrival on campus that American society is irredeemably racist and sexist and that those of them who are white are oppressors of those who are black. Instead, they seek a student body and faculty that is racially heterogeneous but on political issues believes the same things, including and especially that racial preferences and racial diversity are socially useful and morally just. By itself, racial diversity does not create diversity of opinion.