NYT’S Leonhardt Misses The Real UC Quotas Story By Steve Sailer

The most publicized frontline in the fight over the ethnic spoils system (a.k.a., affirmative action, diversity, or multiculturalism) is freshman admissions to the University of California.

Sunday's New York Times Magazine article The New Affirmative Action,  by David Leonhardt, praising the (illegal) push to get more minorities into UCLA is only the latest example (September 30, 2007).

Heck, I've written about this issue more times than I care to remember.

In the early 1970s, the University of California system quietly put in place a quota system for lower IQ minorities. In the 1978 Bakke decision over the UC Davis medical school, Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell outlawed "quotas" but permitted "goals". In practice, this merely turned out to require a semantic change.

In 1995, the UC Board of Regents, led by Ward Connerly, abolished racial and ethnic preferences in admissions. In 1996, California voters approved Proposition 209, authored by Thomas Wood and Glynn Custred, which inscribed a general ban on preferences into the state's constitution. UC administrators have met this anti-discrimination law with "massive resistance"—the tactic invented in the South’s school desegregation wars fifty years ago. They have been conniving to get around California's constitution ever since.

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