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Nov. 3, 2022 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
29:34
Affirmative Action and the Genesis of the Elite

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit radixjournal.substack.comOral arguments in the Supreme Court just started over a case that affects Affirmative Action in college admission, and perhaps much more. Richard discusses how, beyond issues of fairness, this is really about institutions’ ability to generate, maintain, and evolve an elite. The group then discusses this topic and more …

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I was actually going to talk about affirmative action.
I didn't listen to the entire five hours of oral arguments, I'll admit.
But I listened to at least two, maybe even three hours of it yesterday as I was just taking care of some things in the morning and at the gym.
And it was fairly interesting.
It got a bit repetitive and you could more or less see how this is going to shake out.
But I think if I were a betting man, and I am, I would definitely put money on this case succeeding.
And so I'm going to talk a little bit about that, and then I'm going to make a deeper point about the function of the university and the creation of an elite class after that.
But I first would like to set it up just a bit.
So I've seen some headlines that have indicated this sentiment, which is basically like the Supreme Court is about to overturn a landmark, decades-old precedent, but this time the public is fully behind it.
In fact, this is going to be really popular.
Getting rid of affirmative action is actually even more popular than I imagined.
There was a recent Pew Research study from spring of this year.
I was pretty much amazed by it.
75% of the public were willing to tell a pollster that they did not feel that Race or ethnicity should be a factor at all in college admissions.
And 20% of the public said that it should be a minor factor.
And then 7% said that it should be a major factor.
So that is a pretty overwhelming case of public opinion being against something.
This basically means that every conservative is against affirmative action.
And in fact...
Most liberals are.
I even think the minor factor question is almost kind of a euphemism.
Like, you don't really like it, but might it be a tipping point between two candidates?
So, among white people, opposition to affirmative action is even higher, but opposition to affirmative action is actually pretty high among even African Americans, and it's certainly high among Asians as well, although less than whites, interestingly.
But overall, this just seems pretty radically unpopular, actually.
And I think it might even be one of those issues that does create not just polarization, but that notion that there's something...
Rotten in Denmark.
It's like the elite class are just not listening to the public.
They might even be evil, maybe even Satan worshippers.
I'm kind of exaggerating there, but you get my point.
It's just this extreme disconnect between the public and elite institutions.
The other interesting thing about this case is that The Supreme Court really set up an overturning of its decision.
In 2003, there was a case against Michigan Law School that was a Title VI claim.
It's basically an identical claim to what is happening now.
It was called Grutter v.
Bollinger.
The decision was written by Sandra Day O 'Connor.
And just these last words of the decision, the court takes the law school at its word that it would like nothing better than to find a race-neutral admissions formula and will terminate its use of racial preferences as soon as practicable.
The court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved of today.
So the court really set up this case.
This was by no means a definitive decision.
And even that decision was also a bit wishy-washy.
This is one of the, I guess, two major ones, Bakke, which involved the University of California Law School, and then Grutter, which involved Michigan Law School.
These were basically kind of pushing these schools.
Against outright quotas and towards using race as a kind of one among many criteria for allowing a student to gain admission.
It's actually fairly interesting.
There was a good book written about 15 or 20 years ago called The Affirmative Action Hoax by I believe his name is Joseph Farrow.
But it's still around.
You can find it.
It's a good book.
He actually made one pretty compelling argument that outright quotas are actually just better because the process is so mysterious.
And in some ways, the Supreme Court urging institutions to engage in this touchy-feely, wishy-washy version of affirmative action.
Is actually kind of worse.
And that you should just have an outright quota.
First off, it's simpler.
You can reduce the admissions officers and bureaucracy.
But also, it's just kind of a plain and honest admission of what is going on.
And what is going on is that elite schools are more or less attempting to capture the...
Why don't we just admit to it in a way and not engage in these kinds of things?
One of the big questions here is the notion of compelling interest.
And I think this gets to my larger point about What is a compelling interest?
What is the university all about?
What is it trying to do?
And what is the meaning of the, say, 1,500 youngsters who matriculate to Harvard every year?
So in the oral arguments, Clarence Thomas said, you know, I've heard the word diversity.
And I have no idea what you're talking about.
Well, we kind of do know what the university is talking about.
They are trying to achieve racial, and to a lesser degree, but to a significant degree, religious diversity.
And they also, I mean, with North Carolina, it was interesting because they actually said some things remarkable, which was that...
I believe it was a high number.
It's like four in 10 students are actually from rural North Carolina, and they actually are trying to achieve rural urban diversity as well, and so on.
So I think they are trying to do that, but it's really, you know, where the rubber hits the road and what really gets people up in arms is this notion that there are two candidates that are more or less identical.
The African-American just gets the brass ring.
There's also some things.
I remember this past summer, there was a case of this young girl who is African-American.
And, you know, I'm sure she's smart and so on.
But she was literally accepted to every big-name school you can imagine.
She got into Harvard, Princeton, Yale.
Cornell, Stanford, Duke, wherever she applied, she was allowed in.
And I think this also gets to a kind of bigger problem, which is that there are, you know, intelligent, attractive, well-rounded African-American students, and these big colleges are just kind of getting the first bite out of the apple.
And you're bringing these students that aren't really more excellent than others and they get into all of the schools while these other students are really struggling just to get into one because things have become so hyper-competitive.
But you're basically just rewarding, say, a wealthy African-American family that already has, you know, a good...
You're not really helping out African Americans.
There are plenty of Black people in poverty, etc., who aren't benefiting from the fact that this one girl went to Yale and will now, you know, one day serve on the board of GE and the Metropolitan Museum of Art or something.
This is not really helping African Americans at all.
I was kind of thinking about this a little bit.
So what is the university and what is a compelling interest?
Now, obviously, academia has its origins in the monasteries and the church.
You can even see this in the architecture of many of these institutions.
Harvard, In particular, Thomas Jefferson's University of Virginia is a little bit remarkable in that it was a colonial architecture kind of looking towards Plato's Lyceum and the Greeks, the Romans, more than it was looking towards the medieval monastery.
There is a very medieval chapel on campus just right outside.
The lawn, it's kind of the exception that proves the rule in this case.
It looks very much out of place with the larger architecture.
So what do these schools become?
You know, I think to a large degree, they have become adult daycare centers or country clubs.
And even for me, I'm not...
Terribly old, but the degree to which these universities have become, you know, luxury gymnasiums is pretty remarkable.
I mean, even in my case, your living environment dorm was fairly spartan.
There wasn't a climbing wall in every student center.
I remember the meals at the University of Virginia were cafeteria-style, pretty basic.
We had a gym, of course.
We were getting to where we are now, but it's obviously clear that a lot of the, say, top 100 schools, and even on down from there, they have become Club Med, and that is a bit ridiculous.
It's especially ridiculous when you kind of compare it to what was going on before.
So I think there is this kind of weird, compelling...
When you say, is it legal for us to do this in behalf of a compelling interest?
You're begging the question of what that compelling interest really is and what you're trying to achieve.
And again, before I talk about class, let me just go in a little digression on sports.
The first Heisman Trophy winner actually attended the University of Chicago.
I'm forgetting his name.
It was something like Ray B. Wenger.
He had some kind of funny name.
He was a Heisman Trophy winner in the 1940s.
So he was a great football player and he attended the University of Chicago.
It's a trivia question at this point.
The University of Chicago does not have any...
A football program, anything like, you know, the University of Alabama or Notre Dame or something, and consciously so.
They took themselves out of the college sports game, and they have a team that is, I forgot what it is, Division II or whatever.
They might have a few scholarship athletes.
They're not trying to win.
They see football as a kind of add-on to the school or maybe even an experience that you might have.
You know, when I was in high school and I played football, no one...
Oh, actually, I think one might have actually played college football at a somewhat high level, but it wasn't about that.
It was about the experience.
I remember my father, who attended Lawrenceville in New Jersey, he said that...
And I don't know if they still have this tradition, but there's a house football program where everyone plays.
And so the quality of the football on the field is extremely low.
You have, you know, 90-pound weaklings playing right tackle or whatever.
It's all about the experience.
So in that case, they were trying to use sports and athletics as they should be as a way of...
Building character and building community and bonding among the students.
They never imagined, and the University of Chicago consciously did this, they never imagined that the school had a compelling interest to effectively have a professional football team on the field.
I wouldn't be surprised if the University of Alabama could defeat an NFL team.
Maybe that's reaching a bit, but it's not reaching too much.
It is effectively a professional program.
The coach gets paid millions.
Now the students are allowed to kind of get paid in some form by sponsorship or something.
The whole thing is a billion-dollar industry, and it becomes this kind of grotesque parody of...
Student-athletes.
And this notion of a compelling interest is just radically different.
We now have a compelling interest to present an effectively professional team every Saturday afternoon.
For what?
For the students' enjoyment, for the reputation of the school, etc.
It's just bizarre.
And the fact that the, like, when you say, like, can you legally do this for a compelling interest, you're just begging the question of what the university is really all about.
And what is it about?
Is it, I mean, I think you could probably fairly argue that the University of California, the University of Texas, the University of North Carolina, which is involved in this suit, that they have a kind of...
Democratic or egalitarian motive, you could say.
That, yes, it's secondary education.
It's not for everyone.
But it's a government program.
And it is there to help out the people.
They can go learn.
A practical trade, like agriculture or business.
They can at very least kind of expand themselves in a way that they otherwise couldn't.
This should be subsidized through the taxpayers, etc., in order to have this institution that, again, has democratic and egalitarian motives.
You could definitely say that.
There's also, and you could...
In the oral arguments, you could hear them hint at another motive for the universities.
And they said things like, well, the university, and I think they used this exact word or exact term, it's the training ground for leadership in our society.
So they didn't use the word elite, they used leadership.
So basically, if you're going to become a Supreme Court justice, if you're going to become And so they kind of got at this fact that the university system is about constructing elites.
And they even got at this with one of the arguments that was made by the plaintiffs.
And that was echoed by Gorsuch and Thomas, among others, which is that Harvard has this history of racial exclusion in admissions.
And that isn't this new diversity regime, isn't this, despite its intentions, reproducing this racial...
Antagonism that we saw throughout its history.
And it is very clear that admissions at Harvard were discriminating against Jewish students.
And there was actually a funny moment when Amy Comey Barrett said, and I don't want to speak any longer on Harvard's history of anti-Semitism.
It was just kind of funny to hear out loud when we think about these.
Places today, which of course is the bastion of political correctness.
But Jews were discriminated against.
They weren't discriminated against in the way that African Americans were.
They were discriminated against due to the fact that they would be overrepresented by a large margin if you simply took, say, basic test taking or your high school record into account.
And that Harvard didn't quite want this.
It didn't want a class that would have been, say, 20% Jewish.
And thus, it created some admission standards that, very much like today, used euphemistic categories in order to prevent Jews from getting into Harvard, at least in disproportionate numbers.
So it would actually give favor regionally.
So if you were very smart from Montana, you had a little bit of a leg up against the very smart kid from Exeter Academy, which is a famous Harvard theater.
They kind of wanted to broaden themselves.
And you can kind of see the fact that that would be exclusionary to Jews if you're going out to the broader country.
As just an anecdote, it's interesting that Richard Nixon...
He went to Whittier College.
He actually was accepted at Harvard and couldn't afford the train travel across the country that that would entail.
Pretty interesting.
So basically, at least when we're talking about the top level of We're talking about the selection of an elite.
That's what's going on.
Previously, in the history of academics, these monasteries were purely religious, and they might have been, to some degree, a way of keeping these people outside of the community.
In the monastery, so they wouldn't do too much harm due to their kind of fanaticism and asceticism, etc.
But in that case with Jews, and in the case today, it is about selecting a new elite or maintaining an elite and maybe evolving an elite.
And that is what every Harvard class is about.
So, I hope affirmative action is overturned.
I absolutely do.
And I also chafe at the just patent unfairness of it all.
And it could affect my...
It will.
Well, it could.
I used to say now, I do think it will be overturned.
It could affect my own children.
So, I have a dog in this fight as well.
But I think just thinking of it...
Purely in terms of unfairness is kind of missing the point, at the very least when it involves Harvard, and I think to a very large degree when it involves a good public school like the University of North Carolina.
So there are 1,500 to 2,000 slots at Harvard College every year.
Now, they actually put out a tweet today, and this didn't surprise me at all.
I have heard all of this, even when I was applying to colleges in the 90s.
Anything's changed.
So this was tweeted out by Harvard University.
2,000 available slots at Harvard College, 8,000 U.S. applicants with perfect GPA.
Therefore, they could fill a class four times over with the amount of 4.0 GPA high school students.
And 4,000 are ranked first in their class.
18,000, that is incredible.
Scored 700 plus on SAT reading, writing.
20,000 scored 700 plus on SAT math.
Now, we're kind of back to the old scores.
If you get above a 700 on reading or mathematics, that means you're exceptionally bright.
Now, obviously, people get higher than that, but that's a baseline of you can basically do anything you want.
So they're using this as an argument of, we actually want a different student body.
And we want one that might be kind of well-rounded, however you want to describe that.
But let's kind of take this even further.
I mean, there are 1,500 to 2,000 slots at all of these big-time universities.
Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Duke, Stanford, etc.
Now, do you get the kind of arbitrary quality to all of these classes?
They could almost allow people in at random and probably have an equally strong class as the one they arrive at by actually reading their thousand-word essays.
You know, if you're applying to Harvard, you already kind of think highly of yourself.
It probably means that there's something going on there.
And you can kind of take this further, like, let's say the University of North Carolina, or even a kind of, you know, a bit lesser university like the University of Montana.
Could you find 2,000 Harvard-worthy students from UNC or University of Montana.
I bet you actually could.
And I bet the classes would be pretty similar.
Now, maybe it would be taking from the top 20% or something, but you get my point.
There is just a kind of randomness and arbitrary quality to the selection of these classes.
And so maybe it's not exactly the case at UNC or the University of Montana, where they have a different compelling interest.
But certainly at Harvard, their compelling interest is to construct an elite.
Two things I think are important here.
First off, this elite has, in a way, already been constructed.
So, if you look at, say, the Princeton, the 2022 Princeton class, a strong majority, and I think it's actually about 60%, are people of color.
That is, they are Asian, African American, Hispanic, or multiracial.
So, at Princeton, for these young people who, through great grades, Some special talent or just downright luck.
They got into this class.
And again, I would stress that luck plays a huge factor here.
They are already, like we already have an elite group of people who are going to matriculate to other institutions after this, who are already kind of well beyond like 2050 America or something.
In fact, whites are a large but clear minority in these classes.
And you can see this in your local news.
You can see this in your national news.
You can see this less so on the boards of corporations, but you can certainly see this in hiring practices at top levels of Boards, not boards, but leadership, etc.
You obviously see it in Hollywood in terms of casting to a large degree.
So the real compelling interest of these top schools is generating, maintaining, and evolving an elite group.
And they are largely successful at that.
And the other thing that I would say is that this kind of new post-white American elite class has already been constructed.
Like, we're already seeing this now.
So even though I am enthusiastic about affirmative action ending, and I do think it will affect things, maybe even in unintended ways, doing a completely race-blind admissions might...
You might have UCLA as a 75% East Asian university.
So there are going to be some remarkable things and not necessarily things that are pro-white or so on.
But I do think that it should end.
I'm very happy about it.
But I kind of also want to keep my eye on, like, what is the actual...
The purpose of these elite institutions, what are they doing?
And what have they, in some ways, already succeeded at?
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