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There’s Your Problem Right There, Elena
Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan (Princeton, Oxford, Harvard) is reported to have said, during oral arguments in the recent affirmative action admissions case, that universities are “the pipelines to leadership in our society.” She was joined by her colleagues Sonia Sotomayor (Princeton, Yale) and Ketanji Brown Jackson (Harvard) in trying to rescue the universities’ arguments from skeptical questioning from John Roberts (Harvard) and the conservative justices Clarence Thomas (Yale), Samuel Alito (Princeton, Yale), Neil Gorsuch (Columbia, Harvard, Oxford), and Brett Kavanaugh (Yale). Apparently, Amy Coney Barrett (Notre Dame) was also present.
If your argument in favor of racial discrimination is that “leadership in our society” inevitably comes from a handful of historically elitist institutions then, I humbly submit, you’re looking at the wrong part of the plumbing.
Published in General
I guess we’re not doing that “diversity is strength” thing.
The writer and management consultant Peter Drucker wrote, circa 1969:
One thing it (modern society) cannot afford in education is the “elite institution” which has a monopoly on social standing, on prestige, and on the command positions in society and economy. Oxford and Cambridge are important reasons for the English brain drain. A main reason for the technology gap is the Grande Ecole such as the Ecole Polytechnique or the Ecole Normale. These elite institutions may do a magnificent job of education, but only their graduates normally get into the command positions. Only their faculties “matter.” This restricts and impoverishes the whole society…The Harvard Law School might like to be a Grande Ecole and to claim for its graduates a preferential position. But American society has never been willing to accept this claim…
It is almost impossible to explain to a European that the strength of American higher education lies in this absence of schools for leaders and schools for followers. It is almost impossible to explain to a European that the engineer with a degree from North Idaho A. and M. is an engineer and not a draftsman. Yet this is the flexibility Europe needs in order to overcome the brain drain and to close the technology gap.
American society today has come a lot closer to accepting Grande Ecole status for HLS than it had when Drucker wrote the above passage.
Kagan is going to have her hands full for the foreseeable future. Imagine having to carry the whole intellectual load of leftist argumentation at the court, now dragging two deadweights instead of just one.
The idea is that Kagan, is an intellectual leftist and the other two are stupid leftists.
I believe you. I’m not up to speed on the subject, and you are.
I can however take on the DA role, and decide what charges to press against the three Progs in the Court of Appeals to Conscience.
The facts make her service on the high court a criminal wrong, whereas that of the other two is a civil one.
Kagan
I’d press criminal charges because as an intellectual she is doing evil with malice aforethought, and lying about it. No true intellectual can fail to see that leftism it is a built upon a foundation of falsehoods, and that it promises good in order to gain support from the claimed beneficiaries, when it can only deliver them into wretched slavery.
The other two
Civil charges only. They are doing evil but are too stupid to do it intentionally, according to my expert witness, Mr. Barfly.
We’ll have to argue that. I hold that stupidity, being a behavior freely chosen by the individual, is independent of intelligence, a largely unalterable characteristic of the individual.
In questioning, she proved yet again how big of a Racist she really is. She was like why can’t I only hire clerks based on the color of their skin because we need diverse looks.
Your Honor, I request a one-day recess while I confer with my expert witness. I may wish to change one or more of the charges.
How hard is it to see that if you feel you have to help somebody because he is black it is just as racist as if you feel you have to hurt him because he is black?
They are both demeaning, and insulting – in short, racist.
Can’t you just leave them alone, mind your own beeswax? “Stop helping us” as both Morgan Freeman and Frederick Douglass have begged.
Unless it’s too hard to stop “helping”, because you don’t really want to find out that black people actually are the same as you.
Consuela! Does this guy have a red check? I can’t believe he doesn’t have a red check. If not put him down for one.
I wonder which one of them leaked the Dobbs decision? Kegan or Sotomayor?
I won’t hold my breath waiting for Kagan to enlighten us on where “pipelines to leadership” are discussed in the Constitution.
Did you hear that in those oral arguments “Wise Latina” Sotomayor revealed that she does not know the difference between de facto and de jure?
I am struck silent by the idea that my prosperity and liberty depends on those who didn’t have the HS grades needed to compete for college admission.
Surely if the courts can decide that IQ tests cannot be used for hiring, we can end job discrimination against the non-collegiate.
Or, better, in the name of fairness we can start awarding masters degrees for graduating high school. Then we’ll rank higher in education than all those loser Western nations with all their fancy schoolin’!