The Issue at a Glance

Separatism vs. Integration: Can Separate Ever Be Equal? (https://doi.org/10.1007/s12129-019-09822-4)

Gene Dattel, author of Reckoning with Race: America’s Failure (Encounter, 2017)

In the first article for our Distinctions feature, Gene Dattell explains how the integrationist goals of the postbellum civil rights movement, emblematized by the effort to integrate schools, has mutated into the racial separatism we are now practicing, once again most conspicuously in our schools.

College Admissions Ride the Equality Roundabout (https://doi.org/10.1007/s12129-019-09831-3)

John Staddon, Duke University

America’s institutions of higher education face an intractable problem: excellence and equality—the two principles college admissions offices are ostensibly committed to—are mutually incompatible. Replacing merit-based criteria with the goal of diversity—a proxy for race—does little to resolve the conundrum, and poses a range of difficulties for colleges beyond the admissions office.

Merit vs. Equality: Careers Open to the