Things have slowed a bit here at TMV.
I was going to write about the Supreme Court’s affirmative action decision. I have some sketchy notes; I was thinking about the fact that the vast majority of US students don’t attend the selective sorts of institutions where affirmative action ever applied. I was thinking about how this is a disappointing decision, but it could also be an opportunity to re-envision the whole process. I like Timothy Burke’s take on this: We should stop working so hard on various schemes to allocate the limited spaces on the lifeboats — we should get more lifeboats instead.
Then I was going to zoom in on the odd footnote 4 in the majority opinion. This is where Roberts off-handedly exempts the military service academies from the ruling. I was going to point out that the US’s amicus brief and oral arguments talked about the importance of a diverse officer corps, which is not the same thing as diversity at the service academies. In fact, fewer than 20% of military officers come from the service academies. The majority of officers go to “regular” colleges through ROTC programs. I think it’s interesting that the fraction who go to college, then later decide to join up through OCS or direct commission, is roughly comparable to the fraction who come through the service academies. All of this seems like research one of Roberts’s clerks could’ve done. The footnote strikes me as a real weakness.
Anyway. That’s what I would have written about.
But a week ago, on July 2, my Dad died. So if you’re reading this, I encourage you to let go of some notes that haven’t coalesced into whatever they were supposed to form. Go hug your kids. Or go hug your parents. Or go hug whoever’s important to you and you’re not sure you’ve let them know. I don’t have some Important Wisdom to Impart; I don’t think it works like that. It’s not like my Dad died and I was granted some epiphany and now I understand what’s really important. But I don’t think you can go wrong with some hugs (with consent, of course).
