In response to Howard Kurtz's aside

Of course, the folks who seem most upset by affirmative action don't seem terribly concerned about preferential treatment for children of alumni.

Instapundit argues,

You hear this all the time. But I think it's a bogus comparison. The reason why we have laws against race discrimination, rather than laws demanding strict meritocracy in all things, is -- or at least so I thought -- that race discrimination is much, much worse than merely favoring alumni.

This will mark me out as some awful kind of techno-turd, but I've never really understood why universities prefer to tinker with the admissions in all kinds of ways, refusing to simply seek out academic excellence, but also seeking not just racial diversity, but also ethnic, economic, ideological and geographical diversity; and for the really big name places, whether your parental units went. I know, Admissions' hearts are in the right place, but I believe it's a dubious experiment in social engineering. For the record, I attended this undergrad school. My admission to grad school was presumably on the basis of my GRE and undergraduate grades.