[biggermike]

I'm not sure what's more nauseating: the fact that we're willing to destroy the best schools in the country to improve poorly defined diversity metrics or the author's sheer horror that white people may benefit from the school's proposed diversity initiative.

That being said, the proposed change is one of the better ones I've seen as far as diversity initiatives go. The students are sampled at random with equal probability from a subpopulation that meets a minimum threshold required to succeed in the school (3.5 GPA but this can be tuned to whatever number/metric is more appropriate, even maybe a test score). The group selected here is likely to be far more diverse (across measured and latent categories) than it would be by simply discriminating based on basis of race as the author recommends.