Is tolerance intolerant?

[bennyboy]

The issue is that schools are allowed to look at students "holistically," i.e. to arbitrate acceptance without depending solely on grades.  Community service, leadership capacity, diversity, and so on.  What they aren't required to do, so far as I know, is to define any of those non-academic contributing factors or establish any reasonable metric for them.  So far as I can tell, it pretty much means that schools can select whoever they want, so long as they aren't stupid enough to say "We're not going to accept you because we already have way too many Asian students."

That's fine, benny, but even if true, that's not an argument against affirmative action unless you're arguing that admissions (or job hiring) should only be based on quantitatively measurable metrics.  When you do that, you're not making an argument against affirmative action but simply asserting a preference you have, and one that would mean ignoring any qualitative traits a candidate might possess, or how doing so might negatively impact perfectly justifiable societal goals.  You're not arguing against affirmative action per se, but rather that you think other things are preferrable to it.  So far, and I still haven't read a lot of your response, your argument is largely ipse dixit and ignores very real factors in maintaining racial disparity (such as prenatal inequity, which your "pay to play" suggestion earlier sounds abhorrent at best, unethical, and likely to simply further racial disparity and inequity than reduce it [primarily by making intelligence contingent upon black mothers giving something back in exchange for correcting social inequities]).

Remember that when I said those things, it was at your request to consider the Republican position.  But let's walk through it in a less one-sided way.

The idea with an explicit contract is to make the one thing some single moms can do, raise a baby, her job.  She's not meant to be seen as a stupid and valueless citizen whose offspring is a burden to society.  She should be seen as a producer of a future American: a soldier, a tax-payer, a future citizen-producer.  She is quite literally a productive member of society.

I don't mean this euphemistically.  I have a vested interest in seeing America maintain its global influence-- the day China overtakes the US is the day I'm out of a job. It's quite frustrating watching America dick around with demented party politics while China builds warships.