Story highlights Mark Bauerlein: NY Times reflexively mis-characterized Justice Dept.'s affirmative action initiative as discrimination against whites

He says liberals uncomfortable facing 'Asian factor' in college admissions and with Trump administration transgressing progressive sacred principle

Mark Bauerlein is a professor of English at Emory University, senior editor of the journal "First Things" and author of "The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future; Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30." The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own.

(CNN) If you doubt that affirmative action policies in college admissions need a bright dose of sunlight, just read the first sentence of The New York Times story that purported to reveal a new Justice Department initiative to examine those policies. The story, which the administration has disputed, asserts that the aim of the Trump administration is to investigate and sue schools over actions that "discriminate against white applicants."

Mark Bauerlein

Do you see the problem? It's a common one in liberal defenses of affirmative action. We realize it in an admission a few sentences later in the story. The Justice Department document that The Times has obtained, you see, says nothing about white people. In fact, the document doesn't identify any specific victim of affirmative action, only the procedures of "intentional race-based discrimination."

Now, most people assume, as the Times reporter does, that white applicants are the ones who suffer when schools lower the bar for minority students. When the Supreme Court decided against Abigail Fisher in her challenge to affirmative action policies at the University of Texas, the interim president of the University of Houston Downtown predicted that while "moral order has been restored in the universe, there will be more aggrieved whites." A journalist for The Root cast threats to affirmative action as the restoration of "white-collar white supremacy."

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When we look at affirmative action policies at selective institutions, though, it isn't whites who will benefit the most if they are restricted. It is, potentially, Asians. In 2004, a Princeton University study of 124,000 applications to elite selective institutions, looked at SAT scores and found that "Asians experience the greatest disadvantage in admissions vis-à-vis other comparable racial/ethnic groups." The researchers claimed that being Asian is "comparable to a loss of 50 SAT points."

The big surprise in the study was that Asians had to score significantly higher than whites, as well as blacks and Hispanics. Despite having a higher average SAT score, Asians have lower odds of admission than do "comparable whites."

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