I know this is dated, but...

In my assorted reading I run across all sorts of interesting stuff and this article was a response to a remark Scalia made during the Texas affirmative action case. The article itself is worth reading. My comments were made in response to someone critical of the author.

https://radicalscholarship.wordpress.com/2015/12/11/scalias-racism-exposes-higher-educations-negligence/

I'm not sure you read the article which had less to do with racism than was a stinging criticism of higher education's failure to teach. Paul Thomas was using the media criticism of Scalia's remarks to suggest that higher education is not addressing the needs of individual students.

A couple of quotes: "A significant number of students are admitted to colleges and universities for the benefit of the institution (full-pay students and athletes, as the most prominent examples). Often, these populations fall into the deficit category of “remedial,” or would be the exact type of student Scalia has now further marginalized with the damning blanket of racism." and "vulnerable populations of students admitted to colleges and universities (often black, brown, poor, and English language learners)—those who need higher education the most, in fact—are being neglected by the very institutions who admit them, often after actively recruiting them (again, the athletes)."

As the parent of six black children, I have learned the expectations of teachers are a real problem. Over and over I saw how my kids were assumed to be deficient even though they were often smarter than the rest of the class. As a society I fear we will never be race-blind so what we need to do is focus on strong educational support at the lower levels, especially high school and then let all students compete for college entrance, but colleges (especially the elite ones where students can educate themselves with little help from professors who most often delegate that teaching to grad students anyway

Affirmative action has outlived its usefulness and I fear liberals, in particular have been much too paternalistic toward the disadvantaged and make the *false* assumption that black students aren’t as smart as white ones and therefore should be admitted even though their qualifications (their words not mine) may not be as high. The whole qualifications/merit debate is silly anyway since universities have given preference to all sorts of groups from children of faculty to athletes to some with special abilities, many of whom would never meet the supposed minimum standards which usually just measure ability to take tests anyway. Not to mention than any black, Hispanic, woman student who is now on a major university campus is immediately labeled as an affirmative action admission even though he/she may be far better prepared than his/her white colleagues.

We also have to get beyond this idea that you have to go to Harvard or Yale to get a good education. I’m an Ivy League grad who has worked in community colleges and if you want superior teaching go to a community college. At elite four-year schools you get lots of bright kids who can basically teach themselves and are led by grad students who often have less preparation and graduate credits than are the minimums required to teach in community colleges. Universities have got to do a better job at teaching its students. That’s the point of the article I cited.