The real scandal of Mamdani’s college application

While the fact that Zohran Mamdani had identified as black on his Columbia University application stole the headlines, the hack that exposed this information highlighted something much more insidious in the college admissions system.

Admitting the accuracy of the leaked data, Mamdani claimed that he was simply trying “to capture the fullness of [his] background” by checking the “Black or African American” box in 2019. New Yorkers raised an eyebrow.

But what would have alarmed them more was the revelation buried in the trove of hacked data: that affirmative action is alive and well in America. The leak of Columbia’s admissions data demonstrates that, even after the Supreme Court ruled affirmative action policies unconstitutional in SFFA v Harvard, the school remains committed as ever to its racialized social project.

Columbia, like many elite schools, is test-optional, meaning that applicants who did not ace the SAT or ACT can withhold their scores and bank on the admissions board taking other factors into account. As of the Court’s ruling in 2023, those “other factors” must explicitly exclude race. Yet the test-optional policy creates a work-around to the ruling.

This became clear when the same hacker targeted NYU data earlier this year, showing that the school was flouting the Court’s ruling. Now, Columbia is the second data point in a likely much larger trend.

Anonymous Substack wonk Cremieux, who published both hacks, found that Columbia was still significantly favoring black and Latino applicants over their more qualified white and Asian peers in 2024. The average rejected Asian student scored about 20 points higher on the SAT than an accepted black student, while the average rejected white student scored a whopping 130 points higher than his black competitor who was also rejected. However, when many students withhold their scores, pinpointing explicit racial discrimination versus other legitimate admissions factors becomes a statistical exercise. “Masking discrimination is the real point of test-optional policies,” writes Cremieux, who went on to crunch the numbers.

“This race interaction effect is large and significant regardless of how you permute the models, and it always indicates that, at the same level of legitimate qualifications, Blacks are more likely to be admitted than Hispanics, who are more likely to be admitted than Whites, who are more likely to be admitted than Asians,” he continues. In other words, “Columbia is still discriminating, ”but simply trying to “cover their behinds.”

It’s no surprise to find American colleges are acting duplicitously to further their political goals. What is significantly more surprising, however, is that The New York Times, the newspaper that revealed Mamdani’s old college application, is covering the issue at all. Checking the “Black or African American” box “could have given an advantage to Mr. Mamdani” given the college’s “race conscious affirmative action admissions program,” writes The Times, setting off a predictable firestorm from academics, commentators and even The New York Times employees determined to hide the ball. Notably, however, the scrutiny of Mamdani eschewed the larger admissions scandal – an issue that cuts to the heart of the liberal establishment over the last 60 years in its pursuit of extreme egalitarianism.

Some of the criticism questioned whether the story was “newsworthy” at all, given its focus on a dated, subjective self-assessment of identity, and dinged The Times for unethically publishing hacked material. Despite the veneer of principle, you’d be hard pressed to find Mamdani supporters defending The Times for its refusal to publish hacked Trump campaign files leaked by the Iranian government last year. And you’ve certainly never heard a leftist downplay the centrality of identity before. However, rather than focus on the story itself, detractors mostly attacked the supposed “white supremacist” behind the leak.

The Times caved somewhat, updating the story to describe Cremieux as a someone who “writes often about IQ and race” – a field hated so fiercely by the liberal press that it got him doxxed by the Guardian as a promoter of “organized scientific racism.” Many would prefer to write him off as a quack rather than engage with his data.

“[I] think you should tell readers if your source is a [N]azi,” The New York Times opinion columnist Jamelle Bouie snarked on Bluesky, referring to Cremieux. What a funny thing to say about a data wonk who advocates for up to a 72 percent Asian student body based purely on “meritocratic” excellence.

To its credit, The Times has mostly stood behind its reporting, sending a strongly worded defense to the Columbia Journalism Review which hilariously sought to compile these ankle-biting malcontents in a moral “outcry.”

“Your question suggests that the ethical issue is based on whether the story was important and newsworthy enough to justify using this material. I would ask, important and newsworthy enough to whom? What is the basis on which these media critics decide whether a story about any particular politician is important?,” assistant managing editor Patrick Healy told the CRJ.

Perhaps The Times, arbiter of respectable liberal opinion, is not quite on board with communist revolution on its own turf. And maybe, just maybe, the rest of the Democratic Party will heed its cue. Still, without grappling with the broader implications of race-based admissions — that a society organized around racial privileges cannot possibly keep its promise of true equality — The Times cannot possibly hope to stem the rising tide of radicalism the paper itself helped unleash.

The promise of America is that race shouldn’t matter to your station in life. And whether it’s college admissions or politics, it’s about damn time we start acting like it.