The Racist ABA

Gail Heriot in the WSJ discusses how the American Bar Association forces law schools to adopt racial preferences in admissions policies:

If you have ever wondered why colleges and universities seem to march in lockstep on controversial issues like affirmative action, here is one reason: Overly politicized accrediting agencies often demand it.
Given that federal funding hinges on accreditation, schools are not in a position to argue. That is precisely why the U.S. Department of Education, which gives accreditors their authority, must sometimes take corrective action. George Mason University's law school in northern Virginia is an example of why corrective action is needed now.

GMU's problems began in early 2000, when the American Bar Association visited the law school, which has a somewhat conservative reputation, for its routine reaccreditation inspection. The site evaluation team was unhappy that only 6.5% of entering students were minorities.
Outreach was not the problem; even the site evaluation report (obtained as a result of Freedom of Information Act requests) conceded that GMU had a "very active effort to recruit minorities." But the school, the report noted, had been "unwilling to engage in any significant preferential affirmative action admissions program." Since most law schools were willing to admit minority students with dramatically lower entering academic credentials, GMU was at a recruitment disadvantage. The site evaluation report noted its "serious concerns" with the school's policy.

Having worked in academia, I can testify that accreditation agencies such as NCA and SACS can often be a joke. The main criteria for whether or not a university receives accreditation is how well they can prepare the reports that the agency requires. That is why diploma mills like the University of Phoenix and Nova Southeastern can get accredited, even though degrees from those universities have little or no meaning.

In such an environment, it is not surprising that charlatans like the ABA would use their authority to promote their hateful political philosophy.

It would be interesting to know what Barack Obama's undergraduate GPA and LSAT score were when he was accepted at Harvard Law School.