There’s just something about it they don’t like

Atrios has a post up about John Edwards coming out against legacy admissions, a position which is immediately derided by some as being silly because the federal government can’t do anything about such things.

This is true, of course, but then the Government can’t make people go out “and love a neighbor like you’d like to love yerself,” as our President preaches, but he says it anyway.

The point is that Edwards is using the legacy issue as a way of drawing attention to the fact that there are many dispensations given for a variety of reasons in college admissions, so why is the race issue being used as the only example of discrimination in this area? It’s a smart way of putting the anti-affirmative action forces on the defensive by making them explain why one is so much worse than the other. After all, if a student is denied access to the college of their choice because someone with lower scores was admitted due to their race, how is it that no one complains if the same person is denied admittance because someone with a lower test score was admitted because their father graduated there? If one is discrimination, isn’t the other?

Clearly, the GOP is trying to mislead the public into believing that affirmative action is the only impediment to colleges being a pure scholastic meritocracy, which is nonsense. Admissions take many factors into account, race being only one of them. One could easily ask whether it is fair that a musically gifted student should be given admission even though her test scores and grades are lower than some others. Certainly many athletes are given preference over others with far more impressive academic credentials. Any one of these jocks could have “taken the slot” that would have gone to the student who would have made the cut if only scores and grades had been taken into account.

When you frame the issue this way, it makes you wonder why affirmative-action has become the only focus of these supposed legions of white students who have been denied admission to college because someone less qualified took their place. You have to wonder why they are so sure that their place was taken by undeserving African-Americans or women or Hispanics. Is it not just as reasonable that their place was taken by an undeserving football player, legacy C student or ballet dancer?

Why is it that only “less qualified” minorities make everyone so upset?