At An Elite School, As I Learned, Brains Aren't Everything

Antonin Scalia -- aka Donald Trump in a robe -- is holding forth again:

In the oral arguments Wednesday for a Supreme Court affirmative action case, Justice Antonin Scalia -- a well known critic of affirmative action -- suggested that the policy was hurting minority students by sending them to schools too academically challenging for them.

Here's what Scalia said:

From transcript, what Scalia said today on whether black people would be better served at "less advanced" schools pic.twitter.com/ikYGnjqM5p

— Irin Carmon (@irin) December 9, 2015

As I've mentioned a number of times on this blog, I'm the white child of two high school graduates who made it to the Ivies and emerged with a sheepskin. I'd gone to a selective public school in the city (not the suburbs) of Boston -- admission was based on a standardized test. A number of my friends from high school also made it to the Ivies or to similarly exclusive institutions.

But a lot of my friends dropped out short of graduating. And I made it through only because my default response to social anxiety is to withdraw and burrow, which made my college years lonely and miserable but left me a lot of time to get the coursework done.

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