>What’s next? Cities imposing such restrictions? Should NYC or Austin require people to pass vibe check to ensure that the city life is vibrant?
That's pretty much what HOAs and micro-managerial local ordinances are. The whole point of them is that they make it an expensive hassle and generally crappy to either live in an above your social class. It gets kind of plausibly deniable on a city level when you've got nice neighborhoods and poor neighborhoods and they just differentiate by the degree of enforcement.
Obviously none of this stuff is water tight. It's all a sick game of relative probability. Some low class new money professional sports/entertainment types will retire to some waspy neighborhood in the Hamptons and persist but less of those people will do so than if places like that didn't actively try and be a nuisance to live in for the "wrong type of people". Likewise some guys who have a dozen cars in their yard will persist in their locations as the neighborhood gentrifies around them, much to the annoyance of their neighbors, but most of them will cash out and move out because having your neighbors constantly calling the government to harass you using laws that didn't even exist when you moved in gets real old real quick.
> You can join any private club you want with any composition of well-rounded people. What does that have to with higher education?
I believe that a key component of an effective education is studying the roots of philosophy. Surely you agree that the State should not prevent me from forming a private university that mandates freshmen take a philosophy class.
I also believe that a key component to an effective education is exposure to peers who come from a wide variety of different backgrounds and life experiences. Surely you agree that the State should not prevent me from forming a private university that considers the creation of a diverse student body as one minor factor in admissions.
Realistically, formal higher education is not simply a private matter. It's a part of the complex web of accreditation, government subsidies and entrenched social institutions (not necessarily state institutions).
A university is a public accommodation. You can certainly create a book club among your friends and forbid people of the opposite gender to join or require everyone to be of a different gender, maybe you can even call it a university; but that wouldn't be the same as doing such thing on the level of a large educational facility that e.g. provides the degree of Juris Doctor that allows you to take a bar exam.
So to answer your question, "Surely you agree that the State should not...", I would say "it depends on the particulars".
Private universities aren't. They get loads of research funding, tax breaks, people paying for their education with government backed loans. All American universities are to some extent public.
"Surely you agree that the State should not prevent me from forming a private university that considers the creation of a diverse student body as one minor factor in admissions."
The SCOTUS decision on affirmative action in college admissions has at least restricted race from that consideration.
> Having everyone maxed out on test scores at the expense of such diversity would be a travesty to the thing that makes campus life vibrant.
What’s next? Cities imposing such restrictions? Should NYC or Austin require people to pass vibe check to ensure that the city life is vibrant?