Leading affirmative action critic treats Grutter as technical legal issue

Here’s one index of how serious neoconservatives really are about their supposed central credo of America—individual rights—being replaced by racial proportionality. During the week from July 7 through July 12, The Weekly Standard’s online edition had a grand total of one article dealing with Grutter v. Bollinger or Lawrence v. Texas—a short, rather technical column by Terry Eastland, the Standard’s publisher and a frequent critic of affirmative action, on how Grutter might be reined in at the margins. Eastland’s main point is that, given Justice O’Connor’s statements about the desirability of race preference policies coming to an end in 25 years or as soon as they are not needed (hah hah), such policies ought to be phased out. He constructs scenarios of how the Civil Rights Division of the Education Department might enforce Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act on schools and try to push them toward ending race conscious policies. But, he admits at the close of the article, it’s all extremely tentative:

If the Education Department doesn’t assert itself—if timid White House officials hold it back—preferences in admissions aren’t likely to encounter much resistance, save from litigants whose cases will take years to resolve. The administration has an opportunity to govern in behalf of right principle—and in furtherance of the court’s judgment.

In other words, nothing is going to happen. And that doesn’t seem to faze Eastland one bit. Nowhere in his article does he give any indication that he regards the situation as alarming or troubling or in any way out of the ordinary. As far as the tone and content of his treatment suggests, Grutter is nothing more than a technical legal issue.

This is the bloodless, detached way that a prominent neoconservative responds to the leftist “diversity” revolution that has transformed the very meaning of America.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 16, 2003 09:33 AM | Send