There were five words entirely and glaringly missing from the Times editorial: “cost,” “Asian,” “teenager,” “standards,” and “endpoint.” The words and their meaning are related in a way it’s easy to summarize. There will be a cost in fairness and excellence to be paid for continuing the present scheme of race-based admissions, and it will be paid almost entirely by white and Asian teenagers who (1) are not responsible in any form for the racism allegedly afflicting higher education and (2) earn their own admission by working to meet high standards. And the scheme has no endpoint, because it’s not the moral imperative the Times portrays but instead has become a politically inbred entitlement its beneficiaries will be prepared to relinquish on the Twelfth of Never.
One of the classic methods of cheap advocacy is to talk about (and often exaggerate) the costs of what your opponent proposes but just sweep under the rug the costs of what you propose. We see this all the time in debates about criminal justice reform. For example, reform proponents talk endlessly about the costs of a maintaining a high prison population — and indeed there are costs — but say not a word about the costs of having incarcerated criminals somewhere other than prison. This is because the alternative placement of criminals is back on the street. Reform proponents know this full well, but scamper through their glib case to make you think that, if convicted criminals aren’t incarcerated, they’ll just disappear. Part of this is just hoping you won’t notice; part is dishonesty; and part is confidence that the Left owns the public megaphone, so if you’re rude enough to point out what they’re hiding, you’ll get drowned out anyway.
All this is going on in the NYT’s affirmative action editorial.
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