Campus beat: Still Playing Race Games

“Higher education institutions across the country,” note The Washington Examiner’s editors, “have continued racist [admissions] practices with creative workarounds” despite “the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision finding that race-based admissions standards violated the Civil Rights Act.” Notably, medical-school accreditation is still premised on “achieving mission-appropriate diversity outcomes,” leading to overt discrimination against white men. The claim that a diverse “healthcare workforce improved health outcomes for black and Latino patients” has been debunked, but administrators still “employ intimidation and shaming tactics” to pressure staff to continue using “race unlawfully in admissions decisions.” The Trump administration has shown “dogged determination” in pursuing race-blind admissions, but “a return to blatant racism in the medical profession is just one election away.”

From the left: AI Sucks at Poetry

The Nation’s Katha Pollitt tested several AI programs’ ability to write poetry in her voice. The resulting poems have “all the tics of contemporary mediocre poetry,” with “nothing fresh or original” to them, no “wit or zing,” no “pressure on language or form or voice or thought.” The AI version of Katha Pollitt is the “uncanny-valley version of me, a Stepford writer.” Writers should take note that “AI can’t make you a better writer,” only a “more conventional, lazy one.” Using AI may help a writer avoid “struggle and suffering and self-doubt,” but also “discovery and joy.”

Eye on NY: Preserve Fairness in NY Courts

The socialist ethos “has taken over New York’s federal appellate court,” observes Michael A. Fragoso at City Journal, where a “divided panel” has “thrown a lifeline to Argentinian socialists” while undermining “the sanctity of New York’s envy-of-the-world capital markets.” After Argentina privatized its national oil and gas company in 1993 and listed it on the NYSE, it “provided strong guarantees against future nationalization” — which it then disregarded when it “re-nationalized” the company. New York’s “sophisticated commercial courts” ruled that New York judges had jurisdiction over a lawsuit by investors, but then the Second Circuit overruled it, saying only Argentina’s courts could try the suit — even though they’d likely “be motivated primarily by whatever is good for Argentina.” Get this “perverse decision” reversed, or it “will undo global trust in the fairness of New York’s courts.”

Democrat: More Unites Us Than We Think

“Our collective politics has the ability to improve when we loosen our grip on certainty,” argues Steve Israel at The Hill after recently interviewing authors Malcolm Gladwell and Dana Perino, who share “the same conclusion.” Most Americans “are not ideological absolutists, interested in permanent warfare”; indeed, “they hold conflicting views simultaneously.” They can “distrust institutions but still hope those institutions can work.” There’s no red and blue America; it’s “a far more complicated shade in between.” The nation’s “Founders built a republic on disagreement managed through compromise,” one where “no faction could permanently impose its will on everyone else.” To make it work, we must accept “that people we disagree with may still possess valid experiences and pieces of truth we ourselves cannot see.” Maybe that is how “the country begins to find its way back.”

Libertarian: Dems’ Newest SCOTUS ‘Fix’

James Thayer 140 years ago “made a sweeping case for the doctrine of judicial deference,” arguing that the Supreme Court “was almost always out of bounds when it struck down an act of Congress for violating the Constitution,” observes Reason’s Damon Root, and that claim is winning new fans as more liberals endorse “a version of Supreme Court ‘reform’ that has been called a ‘consensus requirement.’” This would “impose a supermajority requirement on SCOTUS” to overturn a congressional act, but leaves open the question of “judicial review of the executive.” Hmm: It “seems odd” to give the Court “more power to check the constitutional missteps of one branch of government than it has to check the constitutional missteps of the other branch.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board