• I must remind you again about casual solecisms that you do not catch and remove from your writing. This is not a good first sentence for an essay, because it presents not an idea but a familiar response to a question coming from nowhere. But writing this sentence more simply, and grammatically, is easy: "One reason diversity policies exist is to counter racism." You need to make yourself conscious of sentence structure, both when you write and when you edit. If necessary, read your prose out loud to yourself during the editing phase. You harm yourself more than you realize by not achieving accuracy.

Increasing integration and diversification can theoretically ameliorate the ills caused by generations of systematic racism in society; to accomplish this, programs of affirmative action have been created. There are many arguments used in support of these policies, with some being stronger than others. Included among these are balanced representation, compensation for past injustice, and of course, the promotion of diversity. The former two are among the many I will not delve into in this paper, although they certainly deserve consideration. I also center the analysis on educational uses of affirmative action, namely the ‘diversity in the classroom’ argument.

• You're going to analyze the "diversity in the classroom" argument for what? Not "affirmative action," surely? That's some broad general term people have emotional reactions to and habits of thought about. So let's get specific. I think you are discussing the "diversity in the classroom" argument for giving some consideration to the balance of ethnic backgrounds in admissions to large public university programs, where selective institutions are supported more or less entirely by public money. So you should not only be making statements about what diversity means (to them, not to you), but also comparing their levels of sensitivity to ethnicity with their sensitivity to geographic location, secondary school, musical talent, condition of being a veteran, "goodness" at trivial athletic rituals, and a host of other arbitrary criteria? Including donor status of the parents, right?

• This graf doesn't make any sense to me.
  1. Aren't "whites" almost always the most disproportionately represented people? Take, just for a moment, us here at CLS. Whites are not a majority in this city, they're not a majority of the population of all the countries in the world from which Columbia Law School admits students, but you can't say we don't have quite a disproportionate bunch of white people around here.
  2. And who are these "Asians"? What's the point of having a category that treats Syrians, Indians, Koreans, Vietnamese as the same, but completely different from the "Europeans" (another form of white people), who inhabit a peninsula of northwest Asia?
  3. Does the last sentence of your graf mean that you have a number somewhere that shows black people are over-represented in US publicly-funded law schools? Or even that there's some law school somewhere that's got disproportionately many black people in it?

• Why ask the question you mean to ask in this form, which contests tautology? Obviously it benefits the people who get a chance they would not otherwise have. The question then is whether reserving some chances for some people is good for the public.

If the goal is to merely look diverse, then clearly this meets the objective; however, this simplistic notion does not seem to capture the true potential of the policy. The real objective should be to have a diverse classroom of ideas, such that it creates a broader understanding between potentially disparate peoples.

• That's you determining what diversity means. But hadn't you better start, given that the task is to evaluate an argument made in a context, with the context? What does a highly-selective public university do to effectuate a commitment to equal opportunity?

• This is straw-man construction. Someone responding to the argument you have so far advanced would not choose to present a less sophisticated rejoinder; the problem with the argument you've presented so far isn't that it's too nuanced and needs to surrender to an even more brutal oversimplification. The university or school within the university exists in a political and social context, which includes the Regents or Trustees, state legislators, citizens' watchdogs, political operatives, and litigators with axes to grind, as well as large numbers of taxpayers who understand the value of the public education system to their children, and an even larger number of taxpayers who don't want to pay more taxes. Admissions to highly-selective institutions are professionalized in order to avoid even more complex pressures exerted by individuals seeking admissions. But basic issues of social policy remain. If the university wants to have an orchestra, there will be reservations for clarinetists. The university cares about equal opportunity because the society of which it is a part cares, and its address to equal opportunity questions should be expected to reflect the values of the larger society. In the Netherlands, selection to oversubscribed programs is by rigid lottery: they Dutch too believe in equality, so they give every student an equal chance. We believe we believe in equality, but what we behave like we believe in is "merit." White people, who have a natural tendency to be admitted in numbers they consider adequate (until some other sort of reservation system starts producing lots of non-white people), tend to see no problem with the definition of merit, however scientific or unscientific it is, that produces the sort of institution they're familiar with. When someone challenges that conception of "merit," however, they fail to see that the question being raised is valid at all: "merit is merit is merit, and who is that fellow to question it?" tends to be the response. The Dutch—whose view of what happens when different communities see merit differently was formed in the latter 16th century, and is not a happy one—just wonder at the stupidity of Americans who don't hold lotteries.

• Shall we talk about India?

• In other words, you should look at the real environment of decision-making and the available alternative theoretical perspectives, ones that also have consequences that can be studied on the ground.

• The major missing piece in the essay is the concept of equality. That institutions should be striving to achieve it, and that in order to achieve it they have to define it, and that their definitions arise out of the historical experience of the society and the current political and social conditions in which they act, and that their acting consists of making many micro-decisions about people that aggregate to macro-decisions about policy—all of this is absent from the analysis because the starting-point is absent.

• I think the place to start, then, is with the social commitment, which is to equality. Understanding what it means, and why we have unequal expectations of its meaning, and how our unequal expectations of its meaning emerge from our unequal historical experiences, might be a reasonable background to a conversation that presently transpires in the form of imagined dialog about "an argument" so divorced from its context as to be discussable using categories with little empirical utility and illustrations with little connection to present social reality.