I know that I'm obsessing on the Supreme Court ruling in the Michigan case, but it's just such a breathtakingly awful ruling. Still, I'll try to let this be the last thing on it--at least for a couple of days:

Peter Wood has written perhaps the best analysis of the case I've seen yet, over at National Review Online. Most Americans simply have no idea of the Pandora's Box that has been opened in this case. These Supreme Court rulings open doors years down the road that one cannot even forsee at the time (something to remember in connection with the Texas sodomy law case as well). Among the highlights in Wood's piece:

Diversity is a compelling state interest. In these mild words the Supreme Court has effectively amended the U.S. Constitution. We now live in a nation where the highest court has endorsed the principle of group rights. The "diversity" in question is the idea that Americans are properly seen in relation to each other as members of racial and ethnic groups, and not as individuals who have equal rights before the law. The word "diversity" continues to ring in ears of many Americans as though it were a simple description of the way we are: people of diverse ancestry and a variety of cultural traditions. But that is not what "diversity" means to the administrators at the University of Michigan, or to diversity's academic advocates around the country, and it is clearly not the "diversity" that Sandra Day O'Connor just wrote into the Constitution.

All of this has supposedly done in pursuit of the absolute value of "diversity." And yet, you'll ironically find more self-imposed segregation inside these "diversified" institutions than outside of them. The effort to "diversify" campuses, as anyone who's been on a one in the last 25 years can attest, has only resulted in universities that are divided into individual little balkanized islands, with almost no interaction between them. Wood is worth quoting at length here:

25 years ago, when Justice Louis Powell speculated in his opinion in the Bakke case about how universities might justify a limited use of racial preferences, no one foresaw the generation-long elaboration of his ideas about "diversity" into a doctrine that would justify racial-theme dormitories, separate minority graduation ceremonies, revamping of whole curricula to make college for diversity-friendly; the attack on the SATs and other standardized tests as an impediment to diversity; and the pro-diversity litmus tests in the hiring of college administrators. In the world of universities, diversity became an encompassing and almost totalitarian doctrine, and then it began to spread — to business, the arts, the churches, and virtually everywhere. The popular-culture version of diversity spread everywhere — and all this despite the fact that the idea had no legal authority behind it.

O'Connor now has supplied that lack. Diversity is the legitimate law of the land. I can't help but think that the transformation of America into a regime of group rights has only just begun. The danger of hereditary groups pursuing their interests as organized factions — the danger that so worried Madison and that deeply informs our Constitution — has been waved away by the Court. Don't worry, the Court says, we can have the benefits of racial categorization to correct our inequities, and then we will retire those categorizations in 25 years or so when they are no longer needed. But factions are interest groups, which are not known for fading away when you supply them with government incentives. No, the social divisions of diversity are here to stay, along with their inherent nastiness.

If diversity is now a compelling state interest, it means that if you are in one of the groups that does not contribute to "diversity" in the eyes of the rulers (which on college campuses, as Michelle Malkin points out, even includes Asian-Americans--a smaller minority than African-Americans!), you will be the one being "compelled"--compelled to leave, compelled to quit, compelled to move. Instead of being regarded as worthy of equal protection under the law, we are now instead regarded as part of a group, and your standing is determined by which group you're classified in by which institution, no matter how disparate your individual condition might be from the average within "your group."