John Rosenberg's Discriminations has been down with technical difficulties for the last couple of days. But the indomitable John is still blogging. Check out his latest below, and cross your fingers for the speedy recovery of the Discriminations blog.

--------------

MIT is very good at taking race into account. Just ask it. Actually, someone did, in the form of an interview with Charles Vest, MIT's president. Yesterday, Vest was the featured speaker at a press conference in Washington, representing a number of universities who will be filing amicus briefs in support of Michigan's use of racial preferences.

At MIT race may well be only "one of many factors" taken into account by the admissions office, as Vest claims. But his comments nevertheless reveal the extent to which the establishment now regards race as a privileged category, due government deference, as opposed to a protected category, walled off from government favor or disfavor.

We don't want to rob people of their identities, and race and culture and economic status and whether you're from a big city or a little town -- all these things are important components of who these students are and what they have to offer and what advantages they’ve had or obstacles they've overcome ... Risk-taking and demonstrable passion for particular intellectual pursuits, all of these things we try to take into account as we read the cases and decide who we’ll actually offer admissions to.

One of the other points that we will make in our brief is that one of the most fundamental academic decisions a faculty makes is who should study in their university, and we don't believe that it's appropriate for the federal government to take all of these important factors that define people and remove one of them and say "you can consider everything, but you can't consider this."

The fact is that when you array this whole pool of thousands of young men and women who apply to [colleges], you are really trying to judge them as individuals and consider all of these characteristics. Now if you want to build a class that has reasonable [geographic] representation ... and you want to have some reasonable distribution of race in the pool, then by definition, the probability that an individual who meets one of those criteria will be admitted is going to be higher than the probability of an individual who does not meet that criteria -- just because you have a large pool defining some of those sets and smaller pools defining the other sets.... The real point is that [admissions are] subjective. We don’t have a quota, we don’t have a formula, we don’t assign points, but these are factors that we think about and I think if you were to look at the whole structure of a class, you would see that they are very diverse in this broad set of things.

I think to some extent, self segregation goes on in every group -- at MIT and in the country. We just hope that in general people do a lot of mixing and get to know each other and learn from each other and value each other, but I don't think it's up to me to say that one group can't spend most of its time socializing with the other or what have you. ... [Self-segregation] is not something you enforce -- you create opportunity....

Thanks so much to Erin for giving me a home away from home! I hope I don't have to intrude much longer. Also, readers here, accustomed to Erin's style, will not be surprised to hear that in editing my post for appearance on her blog, Erin self-effacingly removed my acknowledgement -- which I hereby repeat -- that it was she who brought the Vest interview to my attention in the first place.

Thanks again!