After no more than a few minutes of conversation, he started to discourage me from applying for admission. The reason? There was a Jewish quota on the campus, he said, and it was already filled. The fact that I had served my country for three years, including several months under intense fire on Okinawa was totally irrelevant. To the best of my recollection, I was more astonished than angry. Anyway, he succeeded in discouraging me, and I enrolled at a different school.

Now, given all the civil rights legislation that has been put into place over the last thirty years or so, the common perception today appears to be that that kind of outrage just couldn’t happen again.

Well, not true.

You see, if you want a student body made up of such and such a percentage of blacks, such and such a percentage of Orientals, such and such a percentage of Hispanics, and so on, you don’t have to institute a system of racial quotas.

Or if you want a work force of so many this and so many that, again you don’t have to institute a system of racial quotas. No Sireee. That would be unAmerican. And we can’t have that, now, can we? So instead, all you have to do today in both cases is institute a system that you call "Fairness Percentages" or "Equalizing Ratios" or "Cultural Parity." Or even "Balanced Handicaps." You see, these are not racial quotas, ‘cause neither the word "racial" nor the word "quota" appears in any one of them.

Now tell me, ain’t education wonderful.

Think about it.

[The foregoing piece was written and broadcast somewhere around 1997. We now have a new wrinkle to the whole idea of a quota system that doesn't use the word "quota." It’s known as "underrepresentation."

The term is generally defined as "Those racial and ethnic populations that are underrepresented in the (say) medical profession relative to their numbers in the general population."

Which means, I suppose that if Group A constitutes 40% of the population, and if the members of Group A make up only 30% of the (say) medical profession — and here it’s not clear whether that would mean only physicians or physicians and nurses and attendants and researchers and administrators and a host of other employment categories involved in the medical profession — then that group is underrepresented.

Which is troublesome to begin with, given (it's claimed) that in such a situation, racism of one kind or another must be the sole reason for that "underrepresentation."

But even as dumb as that whole idea is when applied to the (say) medical profession, that hadn’t stopped our PC folks from spreading it around whereever "suitable."

So women are "underrepresented" among hard-science college faculties (the recent Lawrence Summers flap at Harvard, for example). So it's got to be sexism.

And blacks were "underrepresented" in Howard Dean’s cabinet when he was Governor of Vermont and still are among NFL coaches. So it's got to be racism. 

But you know, I’ve never heard anyone claim that whites are underepresented in major league baseball, in the NFL, and in the NBA.