Jonah Goldberg writes about institutionalized racism in the academy.

I recall reading such a tale in Dinesh D'Souza's 1991 book Illiberal Education - different Asian-American, different campus (UC-Berkeley) same Jim Crowism. Managed to find a Time Magazine article on that story.

I think the liberal justification is that they need to break the cycle of poverty for black students coming from poor high violent inner city neighborhoods. After all, how can you expect a black student to study as well as a white or Asian student when they have rats in their kitchen, dad is beating mom, and bullets are whizzing over head. Their impression is that all blacks experience this type of environment which to me is just another form of prejudice and racism.

In fact I saw an episode of ER, highly liberal writers, where the black surgeon was asking his boss to let another black med student into the surgical rotation. The boss man objected because his MCAT scores were so low. The black surgeon said, "What do you expect from his academics, he came from the South side! I know how hard it was for me to rise above all of that. This kid is just looking for the same break I got."