UCLA’s School of Medicine: Practicing Racism?

The matter of having race as a component part of the admissions process of a school in California university in the U.S. came to the fore once again on May 6, 2026 when the U.S. Department of Justice publicly announced its finding that the UCLA School of Medicine “illegally used race as a selection criteria (sic) for candidates and admitted Black and Latino students who had lower academic qualifications than their (W)hite and Asian counterparts.”[1] The racial discrimination was against White students and students from Asia who had higher academic qualification. Accordingly, assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon wrote, “Racism in admissions is both illegal and anti-American, and this Department will not allow it to continue.”[2] In fact, it could be argued that the sheer existence of race in the criteria for the admission of medical students is racist, taking that term to mean “pertaining to race” without the pejorative connotations that racism has. To be sure, the unique historical disadvantage of Black Americans, including when the institution of slavery existed in the antebellum period of the South, arguably justified making up for the legacy of continuing prejudice by preferential treatment in college admissions. It is important to acknowledge that affirmative action programs contained racial prejudice against another race, and in the twenty-first century the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the racial harm over institutional efforts to redress racial prejudice, perhaps because the latter had diminished considerably especially since the 1960s. UCLA may not have caught up with this recognition because ideology tends to lag changes in the world due to emotional investment and the long-standing nature of values. So the justice department’s accusation that the medical school (and thus the university) intentionally violating the relevant court rulings can be viewed as a sort of recalibration as well as an assertion that laws should not be violated.

The full essay is at "UCLA's School of Medicine."

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1. Lauren Trautenberg, “DOJ Alleges School of Medicine Racial Discrimination,” Daily Bruin, May 8, 2026.
2 Ibid.

Nietzsche on Promise-Keeping: Sex and Relationships

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote on promise-keeping in Genealogy of Morals as being a result of a refined, and thus cultivated “breeding” of our species, rather than as an innate part of human nature that can be taken out for a spin on day one. In contrast, lying is more expedient and thus primitive in our nature, as if an instinctual urge that is more reflex than refined. In terms of romantic relationships, whether marital or not, “cheating” sexually is definitely a sign of weakness because it places momentary pleasure above being held as reliable (i.e., trustworthy) in terms of promise-keeping. A boyfriend who admits that he might hurt his girlfriend emotionally by engaging in infidelity is really telling her that he is weak-willed and thus not good boyfriend (or husband) material. To be sure, a couple could agree that both can have sex separately with other people, so not being monogamous need not involve violating a promise. I don’t think Nietzsche’s philosophy goes so far as to embrace such an arrangement (especially if romantic feeling or connection is allowed in the separate sex), but neither is monogamy advocated, given the nature of Nietzschean strength that should be allowed out of the cage of societal convention periodically (but not on a regular basis). The concept of strength plays such a powerful role in Nietzsche’s philosophy that even the occasional raw expressiveness of strength beyond a societal straitjacket of moral convention would not be viewed as violating promised monogamy. 

The full essay is at "Nietzsche on Promise-Keeping." 

The E.U.: A Political Union

Strong’s The Antifederalist is a series of essays critical of the American federal system in which governmental sovereignty is “dual,” meaning that both the Union and the member-states have at least some such sovereignty that the other cannot abolish or override. Had more credence been paid to the arguments in that text, perhaps the state governments would have more power at the federal level to protect their retained sovereignty from federal encroachment. The drafting of the E.U. paid more heed to those arguments in terms of safeguarding state sovereignty by considerable direct involvement of state officials at the federal level. Even so, Euroskeptics have warned of a centralized state in the process, and the U.S. has furnished them with an actual instance of a nearly consolidated empire-scale federal system. The warnings may thus be valid even with the additional safeguards that the E.U. has but the U.S. lacks, at least as of 2026, but claims that the E.U. does not have a federal system and is not a political union of states ring hollow as they are utterly false. So too, but the way, is the mislabeling of the E.U. as a bloc. The E.U.’s parliament alone knocks out all three of these ideological claims.

The full essay is at "The E.U.: A Political Union."