Racial Preferences Under Siege

The intellectual case for preferences is looking increasingly shaky. Last month, a packed auditorium at Harvard Law School featured an Open to Debate formerly known as Intelligence Squared U.S. debate on whether ‘affirmative action does more harm than good.’ Harvard professor Randall Kennedy, the author of the book For Discrimination, and Columbia professor Ted Shaw, the former head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, argued that diversity is an important and noble goal that universities must pursue. UCLA professor Richard Sander, author of the book Mismatch, and University of San Diego professor Gail Heriot, a commissioner on the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, presented statistics from over 20 peer-reviewed studies that showed how the good intentions of affirmative-action supporters have had disastrous results.