In fact, there’s something interesting about Streisand’s moronic effusion, if one pairs it with the Left’s reasons for approving the Supreme Court’s latest assault on the Constitution.

Those who support the admission of unqualified students are denigrating intellect. They are the same people who disapprove of instruction in grammar, spelling, arithmetic, and other disciplines that assume that some answers are right and others are wrong. They’re the same people who encourage eight-year-olds to pontificate on world problems, since obviously no knowledge is needed to do so. Everyone’s opinions are as good as everyone else’s.

Including those of Barbra Streisand and black students who can’t read.

Both race-based admissions and the respect accorded to semi-educated celebrities reflect ingratitude to our country’s scientists, scholars, and other high achievers, and to God for the gifts of intellect and curiosity that a rigorous education channels productively.

Frieda is of course correct, but I would make one qualification. What these elite universities are striving to do is hold on to a dual-track system in which one track is based on academic qualifications and ability, and the other track is based on proportional representation of blacks and Hispanics. If racial proportionality were thrown out, the universities, given their religious commitment to diversity, will end up simply lowering standards across the board in order to get the requisite percentage of unqualified minorities. Instead of top universities having high standards for whites and Asians, but no standards for blacks and Hispanics, the university would end up with no standards at all. This is what the elite institutions are seeking to avoid.

As Justice Scalia said in his blistering concurrence with Thomas, the “educational benefit” which Michigan actually cares about—and which is considered a compelling state interest justifying racial discrimination!—is the ability to maintain itself as a prestige institution even while admitting lots of unqualified blacks.

Mr. Auster’s scenario would last only a limited time.

The City University of New York’s various colleges tried just that: they invented an abomination called “open admission” and threw out standards for everyone. Of course they then had to institute basic-reading courses, to teach what an earlier generation had learned in elementary school. As a result, the degrees granted by those colleges, which for the first two-thirds of the twentieth century had identified highly educated men and women, became worthless. Well, those same colleges have recently reinstituted real standards and are undergoing reforms pointing to a real education. Just imagine what would happen if the whole country duplicated that history! I suppose one might call the experience being mugged by reality.

My basic point—that our country is suffering from a virulent case of anti-intellectualism, illustrated by both Steisand’s excessive and unjustified “self-esteem” and the dilution of academic standards—could of course be illustrated in other ways as well.

The affirmative action students represent consistent liberalism, and in parallel strict academic standards for whites are the institutionalized unprincipled exception that provides ongoing life support to the liberal parasite. This sort of dualism is ALWAYS necessarily there in every concrete manifestation of liberalism, because as Frieda points out the particular instance of liberalism otherwise destroys itself.

Look for the institutionalized equivocation. It is always there without exception. Liberalism only ever exists as a parasite; often enough a self-aware parasite that keeps the host alive on purpose.