American Law Unjustly Abandons ExcellenceAmerican Bar Association set to increase diversity by throwing out the LSAT
Rod Dreher
Nov 21, 2022
Yesterday I was on a panel at a conference in Warsaw, listening to a retired German professor sitting next to me, saying that Europe is going to lose badly to China, in terms of economic gains, because its workforce is not able to compete in terms of educational rigor. The professor said this is one deleterious effect of open migration, bringing in large numbers of people into Europe who must be educated and accommodated, but who do not have the cultural capital to participate fully in an advanced industrial democracy. The professor's point was that Europe's bleeding heart for Third World migrants is rendering it unfit for competition. He mentioned German factories that had relocated to China looking for qualified workers.
I thought about that when I saw this news just now, from the WSJ:
An American Bar Association panel voted Friday to drop a requirement that law school applicants take the LSAT or another standardized admissions test, amid debate about whether the tests help or hurt diversity in admissions.
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Public comments over eliminating the testing requirement have been polarized, largely around the issue of diversity. The legal profession has long been criticized for a lack of women and people of color in its top ranks, and the panel’s debate comes as schools are bracing for a decision from the Supreme Court on whether race can be a factor in college admissions.
“In the grand scheme of things, folks of color perform less well on the LSAT than not, and for that reason, I think we are headed in the right direction,” Leo Martinez, an ABA council member and dean emeritus at University of California, Hastings College of the Law, said at the meeting. “I am sympathetic that it gives people like me a chance.”
This is what we are becoming as a country: a place where our elites cannot bear to live with what the information gained from testing reveals to them about people, so they are banning the test. It's a country where the people in charge of shepherding our institutions have surrendered to a radically egalitarian racial ideology that views merit and excellence as immoral. I will never, ever forget what one of these leadership elites told me in an argument once, when I pointed out that this ideology causes us to sacrifice quality for the sake of diversity. The person said, in all sincerity, "But diversity is a component of quality."
Would you go to a doctor who was unqualified for medical school, but who got through it based on the guilt and pity of medical school administrators? Would you want to hire a lawyer who was second or third-rate, but got into law school, and made his way through the profession, because the people in charge of the profession threw standards in the trash, because they produced an unequal outcome?
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/american-law-unjustly-abandons-excellence/
