Welcome to beg to differ. The bull works weekly round table discussion featuring civil

conversation across the political spectrum. We range from center left to center right.

I'm Mona Charen, syndicated columnist and policy editor at the bull work and I am joined

by our regulars Bill Gaulson of the Brookings Institution in the Wall Street Journal.

Damon Linker who writes the sub-stack newsletter notes from the middle ground and Linda Chavez

of the NISCAN and center. Our special guest this week is Washington Post columnist Megan McCartle.

Welcome, one and all. Well, we had a very active Supreme Court term that ended last week. We had a

chance to discuss it a little bit, but it pays I think to pay a little bit more attention to

some of those decisions in particular, the decision in students for fair admissions be

Harvard, the decision that strikes down race preferences. Linda, I'm going to start with you.

One thing that people frequently get wrong about affirmative action is that they see it in

straight black and white terms in all senses of that phrase. That is they see it as advantages

either going to African-American or white-Americans, but of course the whole point of this case against

Harvard was that the minority group that was most victimized by this policy was Asians.

That's exactly right. And by the way, that's not unusual in most of the institutions that have

very strict admission standards where it's very, very competitive. Asian students spare the

worst under affirmative action programs. And Harvard's case was particularly egregious. Harvard

jumped through all sorts of proofs to try to ensure that they could come up with a class that had

more blacks and fewer Asians than would have been admitted if it was simply on the basis of

their grades and test scores. And they actually devise a variety of factors. One of them was they

rated students on their personalities and low and behold, Asian students came up not having

very good personalities according to the interviewers at Harvard. Surprisingly often. Yes,

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