On: UCLA law school accused by justice department of illegally using race in...

3 October 2026

A law school stands accused of one thing; its accusers, I suspect, should stand accused of another. The government says the school weighed race unlawfully. The school denies it and declares its commitment to compliance. Here is the document I have learned to read first: not the statement, but the practice. What does the institution actually do with its hours, its attention, its judgement of a young person’s worth? A pledge of compliance is a sermon. The Monday conduct is the test of it, and neither side has shown me theirs.

But I am more troubled by what the quarrel leaves untouched. Both parties conduct their audit as though admission were the whole of education - as if the great question were who passes the gate, never what is built beyond it. A nation that fights furiously over the doorway while neglecting the schoolroom has its priorities inverted. Where are the good teachers for the poorest children? Where the habits of reading, diligence, and self-command laid down early, so that no committee need weigh a deficit at eighteen because nobody remedied it at eight? Deficiency is manufactured long before any admissions file is opened. The dispute at the gate is a dispute about the harvest; the field was left untended a decade earlier.

And I notice the accusers’ own formation. An administration that scrutinises universities with such zeal, yet shows little for the schools, the apprenticeships, the small daily instruction where character is actually made - this tells me its concern is not education but victory. Zeal that spends itself on enforcement and hoards itself from provision is not justice; it is sport.

I have no patience for either party’s impatience. Forty years is the honest measure of such work. Build the school, not merely the lawsuit.