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I'm gonna tap the sign.
My position is that I like meritocracy, and I also understand that 'merit' has a bit of a floating definition that means different things to different people. There is probably no true 'objective' measure of merit that we can calculate, and certainly not one everyone will automatically accept.
Be that as it may.
Subjectively all I am asking for is assurances that your attempts to tweak the numbers toward your preferred distribution are tied to responsibility for outcomes that results in that you are on the hook for, and ideally that YOU are eating the cost of those tweaks both up front and on the back end.
If you're going to MANDATE racial quotas of one form or another, and also extend special protections to those who engage in such quotas, and also actively try to deflect any blame for the possible harms/negative outcomes people point out, then I'm going to have a problem. I of course will apply this logic to those who insist that we should have white people in charge of everything too.
Fundamentally, my objection is actually not that Harvard Et al. have racial preferences in admissions, I object to Harvard Et al. getting paid by a government that redistributes the gains of society so Harvard incurs no risk when selecting students (i.e. shields Harvard from consequences, to some extent) AND that Harvard Et al. are acting as gatekeepers into the very halls of the elite and upper echelons of government that are deciding how these racial preferences are defined and how the money is distributed. Nobody at any point in this chain has any 'skin in the game' that will filter them out if they turn out to be making bad/wrong decisions (defined here as those decisions that actually harm people they are charged with representing/assisting).
For example, HBCUs tend not to bother me in the least, I don't really begrudge blacks having a college 'set aside' for them, provided they're not teaching/endorsing hardcore racial animus. They have a 'plausible' argument that a school designed by and staffed by blacks may be better suited to providing for and supporting the education of other (culturally similar) blacks. I don't buy the need to protect the students from racism, but I see a tight feedback loop where the decisionmakers are directly accountable to most stakeholders.
Are HBCUs "anti-meritocratic?" From the 10,000 foot up view, probably! But they are presumably 'allowed' to impose their own internal version of 'meritocracy' that selects for features that aren't colorblind and advances a goal that isn't defined merely by "the best person for the job as defined by test scores and performance."
Just, don't force my participation.
So the question is, if Harvard is having an outsized influence on who gets to be President, who gets on the Supreme Court, who becomes CEO of huge corporations, and various other privileges enjoyed by elites, where exactly can I, a mere state-school peon, register any particular grievances I may have if the people they're putting out are not actually good at their jobs and are causing problems which directly impact my life?
I, lily white and with an appearance which goes from "aryan nordic" in the summer to "vampiric" in the winter, could go to an HBCU if I wanted to. I don't, and most other whites don't either. These schools are also not in the present day helping the black community very much; they are not very prestigious and going someplace else is a better decision for people who have that option(admissions requirements are extremely low at most HBCUs). I don't begrudge keeping a few universities around for low performers; future claims adjusters and receptionists have to go somewhere when our society won't acknowledge that there's a cheaper way to prove basic literacy, but the fetishization of HBCUs is entirely for historical reasons.
I don't know nearly enough to make any judgment call on this count. Just making the point that 'merit' can be defined differently or take a back seat to other concerns in certain contexts, but I don't want to be forced to participate in the system that intentionally goes for a different definition than I use.
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Unfortunately, a bunch of the racial preferences are mandated to some extent by the government. (For example, in the government and everything that acts as a government contractor, which is something like 30% of the economy.)
Yep. And I marvel at the way businesses will ruthless adapt to/exploit this sort of incentive without regard to its initial intent.
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