We hear almost incessantly that colleges and universities need to use “affirmative action” (that is, preferences for students who happen to have certain ancestries), but in today’s Pope Center piece, Professor Robert Weissberg argues that the kind of affirmative action they ought to engage in is to seek to recruit a “critical mass” of students from a truly “underrepresented group” — students who are serious about learning. With more students like that, professors who often put in minimal effort might respond to them and raise the level of their teaching.