Talk about sanctimonious!
Someday, one of these college administrators will explain why ‘diversity,’ defined as racial, gender, ethnic quotas, is more important than simply having the very brightest students of any race, gender or ethnicity.
In the US today, a competitive college like W&M could easily have a majority of students ‘of color’ simply by admitting all the qualified Asians who apply. That’s not good enough for the likes of Nichol and his fellow ivory tower crowd.
MIT faces this issue. The way they solve it is to create two classifications for minorities; regular minorities and "underrepresented minorities". The latter are all minorities whose percentage in the MIT student body is less than that of the overall U.S. population. Any underrepresented minority that applies and meets admissions criteria is accepted. Any other minority (e.g., those of Asian heritage) competes at the same level as all other students.
That this is not just an end-around to artificially change the makeup of the student body through quotas regardless of academic qualifications can be proved by the fact that underrepresented minorities have stayed that way throughout the years of this policy. And the percentage of students of Asian heritage still far outstrips the number you'd see if they were artificially held down to the level that they are in the overall population.