By Jim Hightower
Photos: Video & YouTube Screenshots
Here’s an embarrassing turn of events: The six right-wing ideologues now controlling the Supreme Court recently decreed that helping some students get into college through affirmative action programs is henceforth unconstitutional.
This is somewhere between clueless and cynical, since at least five of these six aloof Supremes got into colleges and law schools through higher education’s most-entrenched channel of affirmative action: Family affluence and elite connections.
America’s higher ed establishment has long promoted a self-serving conceit that entrance to its campuses is based on meritocracy. Blatant racial and gender discrimination, however, put the lie to that, so schools adopted affirmative action policies to help rebalance the mix.
The six supreme partisans killed this effort, replacing it with… nothing.
Meanwhile, our college system is becoming even more exclusive because of a deeply ingrained institutional bias that deliberately shuts out millions of the best and brightest, no matter their race, gender, or religion. That bias is economic class.
From prestigious private schools to most big-name state universities, recruitment and admission procedures overwhelmingly favor those families privileged to have money and social standing. No matter how smart or promising working class and poor students are, they’re largely left out.
New York Times columnist David Leonhardt reports that this class divide is sharp, with some colleges enrolling more undergraduates from the wealthiest one percent of families that from all the families in the bottom 60 percent!
These far-right political justices, blind to the special privileges they’ve been given in life, are imperiously negating our people’s hard-won progress toward… well, toward justice for all. Moreover, their elitist monkeywrenching of college enrollment eliminates a ladder of unimpeded opportunity that is essential for the well-being of our country as a whole.
All six need to be replaced, not merely with better judges, but with better human beings.
By Jim Hightower\Listen to Hightower here.
