Racial discrimination at Annapolis

Can the U.S. Navy afford to be biased against the best cadet applicants?

America has had, on the whole, pretty good admirals, such as these guys:

Sure, the three on the left won the Battle of Midway. (The fourth admiral, Willis Lee, won the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal, turning back the Japanese invasion fleet by sinking the enemy battleship flagship in a one-on-one fight. He also won five gold medals in shooting at the 1920 Olympics. And he was a distant relative of Robert E. You-Know-Who.)

But, as you may notice, Spruance, Mitscher, Nimitz, and Lee were the Wrong Race and Gender. Therefore, something must be done.

Zach Goldberg has a fascinating study of racial preferences at the Naval Academy. Not surprisingly, Goldberg writes:

USNA [United States Naval Academy] simultaneously claims to have no insight into what the racial composition of its classes would look like absent the consideration of race. By its own admission, it has never conducted modeling to explore this question and offers no clear explanation for why such an analysis has not been undertaken. At the same time, USNA argues that eliminating racial considerations would cause minority enrollment to “drop dramatically,” a claim that stands in tension with its characterization of race as a minor and non-determinative factor in admissions. …

Of course, selecting Naval Academy cadets has been a highly political issue since 1857, when nominating candidates for the military academies was assigned to members of Congress.

Also, Annapolis likes to let in a few enlisted personnel, as well as kids of Navy people.

And the admirals love football. Navy plays Notre Dame every year. Annapolis usually loses because it insists upon four years of service before turning pro. (Navy Heisman winner Roger Staubach might be a worthy rival to Tom Brady for the greatest quarterback of all time if he didn’t spend age 22-26 in Da Nang.) So it no longer gets NFL prospects. Still, Navy has beaten N.D. four times going back to 2007.

Given these distributions, a race-blind admissions system that selected all applicants from the top four WPM [Whole Person Multiple] deciles would yield a markedly different racial composition among admitted students. Under such a system, the share of non-BCA [Blue Chip Athlete] /non-prep admits would shift to 71.4% white (compared to 61.3% in actuality), 14.3% Asian (16.7%), 8.5% Hispanic (11.8%), and just 1.9% Black (6.1%). If applied to the entire qualified applicant pool--meaning BCAs [Blue Chip Athletes] and prep applicants would no longer be virtual admission shoo-ins--whites would constitute 70.4% of admits (compared to 58.7% in actuality), Asians 13.8% (14.3%), Hispanics 9.3% (12.5%), and Blacks 2.7% (10.5%).

Can America tolerate 2.7% of Naval Academy graduates being black?

I’d say so, but others may have more extremist opinions than a moderate like myself.

Annapolis is one of the few prestigious colleges that are more discriminatory against whites than against Asians.

Paywall here.