In a recent think piece from The New York Times, the lefties at the Gray Lady present a way for colleges and universities to effectively get around the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling against race-based student admissions policies.

The Times makes this intention clear with the article’s opening statement: “After the Supreme Court effectively ended affirmative action in 2023, many selective colleges said they still prized racial diversity and planned to pursue it. But how might they do that?”

The article is titled “Can You Create a Diverse College Class Without Affirmative Action?” Notice that the “diversity” excuse is front and center, but as the graphics-heavy article continues it becomes clear that diversity is merely a euphemism for pushing blatant racism. It’s a guise for justifying the “need” for continuing some form of affirmative action.

To make matters worse, the Times exposes its Marxist underbelly in its push to figure out how to maintain race-based school admission programs. How? By throwing upper- and middle-class students under the proverbial bus. “Notably, our simple affirmative action model produces far less economic diversity than all of these alternatives,” the Times contends. “That was also a frequent criticism of such policies: Yes, colleges used them to admit more Black and Hispanic students, but those were overwhelmingly middle- and upper-income students.”

In addition, the Times’s piece is replete with racist assumptions against racial minorities that ironically undercut the very rationale for higher education in the first place.

For example, the paper’s scribes assert the soft bigotry of low expectation: “Black and Hispanic students, who tend to be poorer and have less access to opportunity, often do worse.” Or this one: “Affirmative action policies helped colleges admit more Black and Hispanic students.”

But what’s the problem with a solely merit-based admissions system, in which a prospective student is considered for admission based entirely on academic aptitude? After all, isn’t higher education supposed to provide a means for further directed and specialized knowledge in a given field, often for the express purpose of using that knowledge for investing in a career in that or a related field?

Of course, the woke Left’s problem with merit-based admission programs is that they don’t tend to produce a student body that is as racially diverse as the Left’s desired equity-based diversity vision. This lack of a sufficiently racially diverse student body — one that exactly reflects the racial diversity of the wider American society — equates to “injustice.” Because sameness is fairness.

Merit-based admission standards like SAT scores are seen as problematic by the Left because they don’t guarantee equity-based racial diversity of a school’s student body. Furthermore, merit-based systems serve to undercut the Left’s identity politics metrics.

Are people defined more by what they do or what they look like? Are people defined more by their racial makeup or their individual choices? When it comes to politics, the question of the individual versus the collective has been the primary basis for the dividing line between the Left and the Right.

As noted above, in this Times article, we see those on the Left seeking to circumvent the Supreme Court’s ruling as they continue to push their socialist racial vision for the nation. On the other hand, a meritocratic system that rewards individuals based on their personal achievements rather than their connection to a certain racial demographic is anathema to the Left. And they simply can’t have that, for it represents an existential threat to their political power aims.