US/UK affirmative action
Recently came to know of this scholarship (https://www.ucl.ac.uk/computer-science/study/scholarships/aspire-award-undergraduate-scholarship) selected and awarded by a prestigious British university, and one of the eligibility criteria is "must be black or mixed-black." Along with the recent U.S. Supreme Court case on affirmative action (Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College), this rekindles my skepticism of race-conscious affirmative action.
1. Logically speaking, UCL's criteria are connected by "and" (i.e., A and B and C and ...), so the fastest way to whittle down candidates is to pick the most stringent one and apply it first. Nonblacks don't qualify anyway so that criterion alone can strike lots of people out. It's arguably the sole reason for rejecting an applicant. Also, how do you quantify blackness? We surely cannot go back to the "one-drop rule."
2. If this were a U.S. public university (as UCL is public), the strict scrutiny analysis is that you need a compelling state interest and it must be narrowly tailored for the public and the government. My question is how can a (black-only) scholarship program that discriminates against diverse candidates in favor of one racial group be narrowly tailored to advance the interest of diversity? This runs directly afoul of Grutter v. Bollinger.
3. The UK does not have a compelling reason to erect a reparative criterion for black migrants, especially with British taxpayer money. I sound like a raging conservative but I don't think I'm being irrational or extreme here. The UK parliament can do all sorts of things to help underprivileged people through legislation, but doling out public resources such as scholarship programs and public university admission cannot be one of them.
