Exit strategy

Better schools can help us transcend racial preferences | Marvin Olasky

Today my oldest son and several thousand other students graduate from the University of Texas at Austin. Pete has worked very hard, and he's also had three visible advantages: the Bible, two parents, Christian schools. How should we be kind to potential college students who don't have those helps?

The official way to help has a public-relations name that's now notorious: "affirmative action." It treats students from racial and ethnic minorities as if none of them had any advantages. It treats white kids as if they all did. That's nuts, but anyone who says so encounters harsh criticism.

My university's controversy-of-the-year came earlier this term when Ward Connerly, a black conservative who two years ago led a successful California drive against affirmative action, came to speak. Try to, that is: Demonstrators with sneering faces and snarling language hooted and hollered so much that he ended up doing only a few minutes of Q&A.