Bloomberg: "Supreme Court Ruling Requires New Diversity Efforts"

I incline to disagree--but this isn't crazy.

   My general view is that "diversity" (a complicated idea hidden under one word...and here resulting in an only partially-intelligible sentence) isn't an inherently defective idea. But, like everything the radical left touches, it has been turned into a monster in the service of an insidious form of soft totalitarianism. And the idea that it is a replacement for affirmative action--basically its origin story--gives the lie to the whole enterprise. 

   I remain--in my gut of guts--sympathetic to moderate affirmative action efforts. I even think that taking considerations of "demographic" heterogeneity (aka "diversity") into account could/can be reasonable under some conditions. It's not that the ideas are--IMO--inherently defective. It's, rather, that they have been turned up to 11 by the progressive left--and, unfortunately, liberals, too--in order to achieve tangentially-related political goals. "DEI" is an institutional virus that is destroying academia. Not because there's no reasonable interpretation of "D," "E," and "I," and not because such ideas cannot ever be salutary...but, rather, because the progressive left corrupts everything it touches and, true to form, it's turned DEI into an all-pervasive and ever-metastasizing mechanism for institutional capture and re-engineering.

   So, though I see no alternative to nuking AA and "DEI"--best to take away the weapons of the enemy if possible--the problem is the irrationalist, anti-liberal, prope-Marxist, anti-Western left. Which has already made its intentions clear with respect to the new ruling: it will make every effort to get around it. 

  Remember, it was Powell's comment in Bakke that got us "diversity"...which, IMO has been much more destructive than affirmative action. The Supremes left another--seemingly much narrower--door open in Students for Fair Admissions, with Roberts writing: "Nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant's discussion of how race affected his or her life." We might look back on this in ten years and think 'Tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door, but...