"For all intents and purposes, overruled."
June 29, 2023 7:58 AM Subscribe

Supreme Court Strikes Down Race-Based Admissions at Harvard and UNC (NYT, WaPo, NBC News)

The Supreme Court restricted consideration of race in college admissions, overturning 45 years of court precedent. The 6-3 ruling in the UNC case saw Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson dissent (Jackson recused from the Harvard case).

Every Supreme Court post needs a Supremes song (I'm really trying to make this a thing), so here's 'A World Without Love.'

posted by box (138 comments total) 11 users marked this as a favorite

Washington Post write-up (gift link)
posted by aught at 8:05 AM on June 29, 2023

Did they also strike down legacy admissions?
posted by GenjiandProust at 8:07 AM on June 29, 2023 [132 favorites]

It would be a great day for Biden to give a "And I wish the Court the best of luck on enforcing this decision" comment to the press.
posted by Slackermagee at 8:09 AM on June 29, 2023 [16 favorites]

Infuriating, if not exactly surprising. Trump's appointees are doing exactly what they were hired to do, and they're just getting warmed up.
posted by Optamystic at 8:09 AM on June 29, 2023 [18 favorites]

From within the world of higher education, articles at the Chronicle and Inside Higher Ed.
posted by doctornemo at 8:11 AM on June 29, 2023 [2 favorites]

So what's to keep colleges to ask applicants for photos, y'know, to get a fuller picture of the student?
posted by AJaffe at 8:11 AM on June 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

It would be a great day for Biden to give a "And I wish the Court the best of luck on enforcing this decision" comment to the press.

I suspect the "enforcement" will be the threat of further expensive lawsuits against higher ed institutions by groups like Students for Fair Admissions.
posted by aught at 8:12 AM on June 29, 2023 [3 favorites]

Suddenly I'm wondering - where did Paul Singer or Harlan Crow go to college?......
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:12 AM on June 29, 2023 [6 favorites]

HOLY SWEET SHIT POPSICLE

....so, I was being tongue-and-cheek when I wrote that comment above. But then I looked it up.

....Paul Singer went to Harvard.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:15 AM on June 29, 2023 [8 favorites]

I like this quote from the Chronicle article:

“With let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, today, the majority pulls the ripcord and announces ‘colorblindness for all’ by legal fiat,” Jackson wrote. “But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life.”
posted by pangolin party at 8:16 AM on June 29, 2023 [36 favorites]

....Paul Singer went to Harvard.

It's not just that their shitty kids are being rejected from Harvard in favor of Those People that really chaps these assholes.

It's that their shitty kids who do make it into Harvard will end up interacting with Those People.
posted by Etrigan at 8:21 AM on June 29, 2023 [23 favorites]

Did they also strike down legacy admissions?

Nope, only racial. Nepotism that helps mostly white people is A-OK with them.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 8:22 AM on June 29, 2023 [29 favorites]

California can offer a preview of the next few decades, based on the effects of Proposition 209 from 1996. (Ballotpedia)

"Berkeley and UCLA, the most selective public universities in the state, saw a declines in Black and Hispanic enrollment of about 40% immediately the year after the Proposition was implemented." Quoted from Princeton Economics professor Zachary Bleemer's study (46-page PDF)

This conservative ballot initiative was the high-water mark for the racist policies supported by governor Pete Wilson. Prop. 209 contributed to the diminishing electoral results for Republican state-wide candidates in California.
posted by JDC8 at 8:32 AM on June 29, 2023 [15 favorites]

Did they also strike down legacy admissions?

I was wondering about this recently, knowing this decision was coming and how it was expected to go, if there is any way that legacy admissions could be vulnerable to a lawsuit as well?
posted by Dip Flash at 8:36 AM on June 29, 2023 [11 favorites]

This is of a piece with the 2013 Voting Rights Act decision. Nope, no racism to see here anymore. Guess we don't need these laws to help fix our racist society.

It did get Mike Pence to respond...
“There is no place for discrimination based on race in the United States, and I am pleased that the Supreme Court has put an end to this egregious violation of civil and constitutional rights in admissions processes, which only served to perpetuate racism."

Wonder if anyone will ask him how he feels about policing, housing, and other policies that uphold structural racism.
posted by kokaku at 8:38 AM on June 29, 2023 [13 favorites]

Tom Houseman's response to Jamelle Bouie's Tweet on the decision hits* the nail on the head:

It’s very convenient how often originalism seems to mean “but how would a racist person want this amendment to be interpreted”?

*Sometimes a hammer is all you need in your toolbox...
posted by y2karl at 8:41 AM on June 29, 2023 [74 favorites]

Mike Pence: "There is no such thing as structural racism"

Anyone who would consider voting for Pence: "Sounds good to me"
posted by Reverend John at 8:41 AM on June 29, 2023 [6 favorites]

Wonder if anyone will ask him how he feels about policing, housing, and other policies that uphold structural racism.

we really don't have to wonder about anything

these people have been rigging the game so long it's not like they are worried about inconsistencies and hypocrisy, none of that matters
posted by elkevelvet at 8:42 AM on June 29, 2023 [24 favorites]

So racism is over and everybody's good now? Cool cool cool.
posted by Capt. Renault at 8:43 AM on June 29, 2023 [5 favorites]

It’s very convenient how often originalism seems to mean “but how would a racist person want this amendment to be interpreted”?

Yep. All of those Southern Evangelicals who just missed out on a Harvard slot are gonna be thrilled about this.
posted by Optamystic at 8:45 AM on June 29, 2023 [11 favorites]

How does this work, practically? There can be so many signifiers to one’s race in college applications. And I was interviewed in person for admission to my particular major.
posted by girlmightlive at 8:47 AM on June 29, 2023 [4 favorites]

Guess we don't need these laws to help fix our racist society.

Liberals have argued that we need affirmative action for diversity and diversity is good for rich white kids at Harvard. That may be true but who gives a shit. The argument originally was, and should always have been, that affirmative action is an effective tool to redress historic wrongs. Once that shift happened, we lost.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 8:48 AM on June 29, 2023 [32 favorites]

There are only three possible takes on the racial disparities in college admissions:

1) This is a serious problem and as a society, we have to fix it.
2) BIPOC people deserve worse outcomes, so this is fine. (Nakedly racist.)
3) BIPOC people do not deserve worse outcomes, but I don't care if they happen anyway. (Also nakedly racist.)

I don't know why we let people make this look so complex. It's not.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 8:49 AM on June 29, 2023 [29 favorites]

It's complex because Black and White is nakedly racist when there's a whole lot of Gray.
posted by grokus at 8:50 AM on June 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

What is that supposed to mean?
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 8:58 AM on June 29, 2023 [10 favorites]

as expected, the court has inverted the 14th. an amendment written explicitly to directly ameliorate the conditions of race hierarchy becomes in conservative hands an amendment that says it’s illegal to try to directly ameliorate the conditions of race hierarchy (Jamelle Bouie on Twitter)

It’s very convenient how often originalism seems to mean “but how would a racist person want this amendment to be interpreted”?

One thing I miss about being on Twitter is reading James Bouie's comments on history & historiography. He read a lot of the same stuff I was interested in, only way more of it, so it was a combination of book recommendations and Cliff's Notes for the stuff I didn't read.

Foner's book The Second Founding focuses on the Reconstruction Era amendments (13th, 14th and 15th) and the Radical Republicans who passed them, and is a pretty quick read. As the title suggests it's an argument that these so overhauled the Constitution that it needs to be understood as a fundamental shift in what the document means.

And no, the courts have never given a damn about the founder's intent when it comes to that part of the Constitution. They were undercutting it just a couple years after it was passed.

(I'm rereading this before posting and realizing I'm apparently too angry/depressed to talk about the decision head on.)
posted by mark k at 9:00 AM on June 29, 2023 [18 favorites]

You and me both.
posted by y2karl at 9:04 AM on June 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

Heh. Given that the ethnically-neutral admission process of the MIT Class of 2027 has resulted in 40% Asian-American vs 38% White, I wonder how quickly this decision gets reversed.

"You know, maybe racial quotas aren't such a bad thing...."
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 9:05 AM on June 29, 2023 [15 favorites]

While I'm certainly not going to suggest this decision is not a bad development, I feel pretty confident that universities will figure out different ways to get to the same place. UT Austin already uses the approach of admitting the top 10% of every high school class, which has more or less worked so far keeping the university body diverse. Universities could also start prioritizing "disadvantaged zip codes" and still be in compliance. And the ruling itself says "nothing prohibits universities from considering an applicant's discussion of how race affected the applicant's life" so while I'm curious what lawyer Mefites think and perhaps I'm missing something, but it would seem like this ruling is a bit more narrow than some of the headlines I've seen suggest.
posted by coffeecat at 9:05 AM on June 29, 2023 [20 favorites]

The opinion notes that Harvard's way of looking at race isn't particularly sophisticated - i.e. no differentiation between East and South Asians or between different countries within those, no difference between refugee and skilled immigration ancestry, treating "Hispanic" as one category which, yeah I guess one might fairly say that Harvard's system was originally designed to deal with the American original sin of anti-black racism and had other elements added to it over time without a lot of sophisticated consideration but... surely the remedy to that is to think more carefully about how to deal with racial equity in admissions? Not to ban the little consideration that there is.

But of course the whole argument is in bad faith so there's little point engaging with the substance.
posted by atrazine at 9:06 AM on June 29, 2023 [3 favorites]

Leonard Leo works both sides of this case:

Students for Fair Admissions:

"SFFA also received a $250,000 donation in 2020 from The 85 Fund, a trust connected to conservative lawyer and Donald Trump ally Leonardo Leo. James S. Murphy, a senior policy analyst at think tank Education Reform Now, said much of Blum’s success in bringing his battles to the Supreme Court would not be possible if not for wealthy donors."

“None of this happens if [Blum’s] not raising millions of dollars,” Murphy said. “The only way that [SFFA] can afford this case is through these organizations that funnel money from very wealthy individuals to causes like his.”

The Judges:

"All four of these organizations hold ties to the Federalist Society, a network of primarily libertarian and conservative lawyers. In 1982, Calabresi co-founded the group at Yale alongside students at Yale Law School, Harvard Law School and the University of Chicago Law School. Now, six of the nine sitting Supreme Court Justices — Samuel Alito LAW ’75, Clarence Thomas LAW ’74, Brett Kavanaugh ’87 LAW ’90, John Roberts, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett — are current or former members of the society."

I guess Students for Fair Admissions can disband, now that they have effectively prevented future students from sullying their elite institutions with the audacity of their race. Maybe these conservative ghouls can reallocate their funds to taking away birth control from college students.
posted by JDC8 at 9:08 AM on June 29, 2023 [11 favorites]

UT Austin already uses the approach of admitting the top 10% of every high school class

Interestingly there were a few studies in the early 2000's that showed that being in the top 10% of the high school class, no matter how shit the district was, was a good predictor of success in college. It seems like a viable system.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 9:09 AM on June 29, 2023 [8 favorites]

I remember reading research that the top 10% rule really didn't change the student body that much, will try and find it.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 9:10 AM on June 29, 2023 [2 favorites]

Harvard's response which begins with:

Today, the Supreme Court delivered its decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College. The Court held that Harvard College’s admissions system does not comply with the principles of the equal protection clause embodied in Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. The Court also ruled that colleges and universities may consider in admissions decisions “an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.” We will certainly comply with the Court’s decision.

posted by vacapinta at 9:13 AM on June 29, 2023 [11 favorites]

It's probably worth saying that this has been status quo at public universities in California for a few decades now (since Prop 209 in 1996) and...the sky genuinely hasn't fallen, and the UC system has managed to maintain a highly diverse student body.

There was a public referendum in 2020 to restore affirmative action in California (prop 16). It failed by 15 points. Affirmative action is not popular.
posted by kickingtheground at 9:16 AM on June 29, 2023 [10 favorites]

UT Austin already uses the approach of admitting the top 10% of every high school class, which has more or less worked so far keeping the university body diverse.

What I haven't figured out about this system is how it can handle demand. (Is it really just UT Austin or the whole UT system?) The UC system has the statewide guarantee which is a similar mechanism, but guarantees admission to a UC and you have to apply to all of them (and pay all nine application fees) to trigger tbe guarantee. It really hasn't translated to the UC system reflecting the California population, nevermind at the campus level.
posted by hoyland at 9:17 AM on June 29, 2023 [3 favorites]

Good for Asians, bad for Blacks and Hispanics, whites largely unaffected? ("Whites" or "whites"? Not American, don't know all the nuances. Apologies if required.)

Look forward to a disproportionate (relative to the population!) number of academics being of Chinese descent in thirty years, like the late-20th-century preponderance (relative to the population!) of Jewish people. Assuming Asians go in for academia, of course.
posted by one more day at 9:18 AM on June 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

It's probably worth saying that this has been status quo at public universities in California for a few decades now (since Prop 209 in 1996) and...the sky genuinely hasn't fallen, and the UC system has managed to maintain a highly diverse student body.

In 2022, Berkeley's incoming class was 3.6% black.
posted by prefpara at 9:19 AM on June 29, 2023 [49 favorites]

UT Austin (which is, by the way, where Harlan Crow got his degree, since someone was asking upthread) cannot handle the 10% demand very well. My understanding is that if you're not in the top 10% in your school, you're pretty much not going to UT. Source: lots of friends with kids who have gone through/are going through college admissions in Texas, so anecdotal.
posted by gentlyepigrams at 9:21 AM on June 29, 2023 [2 favorites]

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/study-harvard-finds-43-percent-white-students-are-legacy-athletes-n1060361

Study on Harvard finds 43 percent of white students are legacy, athletes, related to donors or staff

The number drops dramatically for black, Latino and Asian American students with less than 16 percent each coming from those categories, the study said.
posted by girlmightlive at 9:23 AM on June 29, 2023 [22 favorites]

Just to insert a bit of a rant, instituting the race level at uni entrance is too late. The inner city elementary and high schools should be improved to the point that parents in the ritzy burbs scheme to get their kids bussed downtown.

Make early education a priority.

Yeah, imposible, all it takes is one less aircraft carrier.
posted by sammyo at 9:24 AM on June 29, 2023 [40 favorites]

It's probably worth saying that this has been status quo at public universities in California for a few decades now (since Prop 209 in 1996) and...the sky genuinely hasn't fallen, and the UC system has managed to maintain a highly diverse student body.

From the conclusion of the previously-referenced study:

"Proposition 209 banned race-based affirmative action at public California universities starting in 1998. In the years immediately after the ban, [Under Represented Minorities] UC applicants’ university enrollment sharply shifted away from UC’s most selective Berkeley and UCLA campuses, causing a cascade of students to enroll at lower-quality public institutions and some private universities."

"Contrary to the mismatch hypothesis, less selective university enrollment did not lead UC’s remaining URM students to earn higher grades in challenging courses, but it did cause URM applicants to become less likely to earn STEM degrees and any graduate degrees, and undergraduate degree attainment declined among lower-testing URM applicants."

"These poorer educational outcomes in turn contributed to a 5% average annual decline in Hispanic—but not Black—applicants’ early career wages, exacerbating inequality by decreasing the number of early-career URM Californians earning over $100,000 by at least 3%. Prop 209 also discouraged thousands of additional academically competitive URM students from sending applications to public research universities, likely leading to additional reductions in California’s high-earning URM workforce."
posted by JDC8 at 9:29 AM on June 29, 2023 [18 favorites]

My read on the Harvard statement is that this will not affect Harvard's admission policies except cosmetically. They have always maintained they look at applicant's "holistically" and now, instead of considering race they will consider something like "the impact of race on their lives" and essentially continue as before. It is the admissions policy itself that was under attack here not the results of those policies.

Page 8 of the Summary left all that completely wide open.
posted by vacapinta at 9:35 AM on June 29, 2023 [6 favorites]

Scholar Catherine Tan tweets: Even w affirmative action, Black and brown students were still deeply under-represented in higher ed. The only undeserving students are legacies. This was never about fairness or meritocracy."

Uche Blackstock, MD, tweets: The Supreme Court's decision to strike down affirmative action, including in professional schools, like medical and nursing, will have detrimental consequences on Black health for generations to come. This is about life & death for us. Today, we are only 5% of physicians.

Also, wasn't part of the ridiculous audacity of the Abigal Fisher lawsuit against UT because she wasn't in the top 10% of her high school but still thought she deserved a spot?
posted by TwoStride at 9:36 AM on June 29, 2023 [16 favorites]

UT Austin's cutoff is 8%, because of the demand. It's 10% for other Texas Universities. (At least it was 4 years ago, when my kid graduated HS.) It's a Texas College thing, not specific to the UT system.
posted by Spike Glee at 9:38 AM on June 29, 2023 [2 favorites]

Thanks for the clarification, Spike Glee. Still, though, the bottom line was that she didn't make the objective cutoff.
posted by TwoStride at 9:40 AM on June 29, 2023

Worse, I think there were 40 admitted students who had lower grades and test scores than Abigail Fisher.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 9:41 AM on June 29, 2023

checkbox diversity programs have always struck me as problematic [hand wave in the general direction of Justice Thomas] so as long as unis are allowed to look at family background and other systemic handicaps like crappy local schools to boost acceptance in spite of test scores and academic record I'm OK with that.
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 9:43 AM on June 29, 2023

Just chiming in to say (as an Asian American who's been a student/faculty member at selective universities nearly my whole adult life) that Asian Americans disproportionately support affirmative action. The figures: 74% of Asian Americans (who have heard of aff. action) say it's a good thing, and 21% of all Asian adults say race/ethnicity should be considered in college admissions. That 21% figure might seem headline-grabbingly low, but that figure is only 15% and 16% for White and Hispanic adults, and 17% overall (28% for Black adults).

Basically every Asian person I know sees affirmative action as usually disadvantageous for Asian people*, yet supports it nonetheless, because we don't look at it in a vacuum. Obviously white legacy kids getting easy admits is a far worse issue, and affirmative action is still a useful (yet flawed and very blunt) tool to redress both historical and ongoing severe inequities and disadvantages baked into our country.

It's always frustrating to see conservative white folks frame this as an Asian vs Black issue as they always do (see: discourse re: affordable housing, crime, and education in, e.g., the SF bay area), when of course the real issue is much broader and more structural than one racialized minority vs other racialized minority.

*interpersonally speaking -- I can't speak to the legality of any of this.
posted by bongerino at 9:43 AM on June 29, 2023 [49 favorites]

UT Austin already uses the approach of admitting the top 10% of every high school class, which has more or less worked so far keeping the university body diverse.

Wrong. UT Austin is not very diverse (for being a flagship university) which is what keeps it getting in trouble. It admits over 2% of it's freshman students from only 2 wealthy school districts, and 0% from over 700 school districts in Texas (ie: not even the valedictorian goes, so top 10% is irrelevant) out of 1250 districts. It's hispanic and black numbers also don't come close to matching the general state population which is close to majority hispanic. Also, the automatic admit only admits you to the university, you still have to rank qualify for the most popular colleges (business & all stem), and the system has complained relentlessly about the quality of the top 10% admits, so it's down to top 7% now.
posted by The_Vegetables at 9:44 AM on June 29, 2023 [7 favorites]

The 10% rule is Texas-wide, not UT Austin specific. In the case of UT Austin, it's actually around 6%, in order to be able to have room for stellar students that don't fit that requirement. As noted above, the percentage rule has not been adequate to support racial diversity at Texas colleges. More effective might be going "test-optional." Since COVID, many universities have stopped requiring SAT scores for admission. Since test scores are correlated with wealth and race, going test-optional has a side effect of introducing a more diverse student body.

Some folks above have commented that race could still be considered because you can generally tell a person's race by looking at them. It's generally not the case that each student is accepted or declined based on their own merits. Enrollment caps mean that there will always have to be decisions made between sets of perfectly qualified applicants. Colleges build their student body at a population level, and need demographic metrics tracked to do so.
posted by tofu_crouton at 9:45 AM on June 29, 2023 [5 favorites]

Dear other White people (I'm Jewish and identify as such, but am clear the world sees me as a white lady),
I went to a 2nd tier UC (that continues to rise post my matriculation) and a "top 100" law school. Somehow, my family has done plenty just fine. Despite my measly pedigree, we're still in the whatever % . Dear White People, you too can go to mediocre schools and come out on top! Ughhhhhhh
posted by atomicstone at 9:48 AM on June 29, 2023 [14 favorites]

If truly race blind criteria are implemented, I think we will see marked increases in the proportions of students of Chinese, Indian, and other Asian descent at elite colleges and universities.

And if that doesn’t happen, I hope those students and their families, as well as their communities, will sue the asses off those colleges and universities.
posted by jamjam at 9:54 AM on June 29, 2023 [3 favorites]

UT Austin already uses the approach of admitting the top 10% of every high school class
posted by coffeecat at 9:05 AM

UT Austin's cutoff is 8%, because of the demand
posted by Spike Glee at 9:38 AM

it's down to top 7% now.
posted by The_Vegetables at 9:44 AM

In the case of UT Austin, it's actually around 6%
posted by tofu_crouton at 9:45 AM

Extrapolating this trend, we have less than an hour before UT Austin’s cutoff falls below 0%.
posted by mbrubeck at 10:05 AM on June 29, 2023 [101 favorites]

It never ceases to amaze me how the right wingers on the Court will appeal to historical understanding to justify their positions (and are often correct, even if I don't think that's how the law should be understood!), but then throw it out at the drop of a hat just because.

They're definitely operating under the maxim of "consistency is the hobgoblin of simple minds," which is exactly the opposite of what anyone with sense wants out of a system of law.
posted by wierdo at 10:06 AM on June 29, 2023 [2 favorites]

Add 4 or 5 progressive supreme court members and/or some corruption clause to kick out these fucking cronies.
posted by GoblinHoney at 10:19 AM on June 29, 2023 [6 favorites]

This is terrible.
posted by cupcakeninja at 10:25 AM on June 29, 2023 [3 favorites]

UT Austin already uses the approach of admitting the top 10% of every high school class, which has more or less worked so far keeping the university body diverse. Universities could also start prioritizing "disadvantaged zip codes" and still be in compliance.

UC has allegedly recently started emphasizing the “disadvantaged ZIP codes/schools” factor more, or something that makes it so that strong but not absolutely top tier students from high schools that have a lot of competitive applicants are noticeably less likely to get into the most desirable UCs, and there are a whole lot of outraged articles about that so… I think this decision is as likely to kick off a whole new fight as anything.
posted by atoxyl at 10:27 AM on June 29, 2023

There may be dismay but certainly no shock as this is exactly the ruling even the most casual SCOTUS observer expected. The GOP has labored long and hard to make the courts the de facto ruling bodies and it's paying off. The Congressional clusterfuck is just a sideshow to keep eyes off what's going in the judicial.
posted by tommasz at 10:29 AM on June 29, 2023 [6 favorites]

But I was told that there's no difference between Democrats and Republicans.
posted by Reverend John at 10:31 AM on June 29, 2023 [8 favorites]

But I was told that there's no difference between Democrats and Republicans.

Democrats sure are fighting tooth and nail to stop it. /s
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 10:35 AM on June 29, 2023 [2 favorites]

When Harvard is sending out press releases to the Supreme Court that says, "yeah, cool, but, whatever... You missed this part you dumb fucks"

Your Supreme Court has a serious fucking problem...
posted by Windopaene at 10:41 AM on June 29, 2023 [16 favorites]

Kind of puzzled that people are making this a Black vs white issue. If you read the analysis of who is admitted Asians need higher test scores and are consistently lowest in personality/leadership ratings. If these rulings are actually implemented the main change in college racial makeup will be a higher proportion of Asian students and fewer students of all other races.
posted by hermanubis at 10:41 AM on June 29, 2023 [4 favorites]

Democrats sure are fighting tooth and nail to stop it. /s

Democrats nominated the three dissenting votes. Republicans nominated all of the concurring votes. Looks to me that Democrats did all they could with the electoral support they had. Maybe if they had more electoral support we would have seen more support for affirmative action by the court.
posted by Reverend John at 10:43 AM on June 29, 2023 [24 favorites]

it is crazy to me how these elite institutions have managed to avoid any real criticism for their stranglehold over perceived entry into the upper class.

Everyone should have access to a harvard education! Class size is an arbitrary restriction meant to enforce artificial scarcity!

As mentioned earlier, affirmative action as a policy struggles with approval ratings (regardless of the fact that its needed). I think progressives need to be asking why elite education isnt free.

IME higher education admissions entry is just so structurally unethical - education should be free and available to all - while pleading that they are trying to foster “fairness” in admissions policies… give me a break! Very ironic that these institutions dont seem to even consider the injustice embedded in their business model.
posted by web5.0 at 10:44 AM on June 29, 2023 [7 favorites]

In a footnote, Roberts grants as amicus curiae an exemption for military academies due to "potentially distinct interests" -- Sotomayor picks this apart in the dissent.
posted by credulous at 10:48 AM on June 29, 2023 [10 favorites]

I've been thinking along the same lines Windowpaene.

Anyone who knows the court and specifically Roberts better than me, is there any chance he saw a 5-4 decision coming and decided to join the majority so he could write the least binding opinion possible? Am I giving him way too much credit? I just don't understand how he sides against the universities current practice but then says "I mean, feel free to keep asking about race in the essays or whatever, idk".
posted by jermsplan at 10:50 AM on June 29, 2023 [3 favorites]

> So racism is over and everybody's good now? Cool cool cool.
No, the real racism is admitting racism exists and doing something about it.

---

> The Court also ruled that colleges and universities may consider in admissions decisions “an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.” We will certainly comply with the Court’s decision

Oh my - how about:
* Was one of your ancestors enslaved in the USA? Please describe the relationship to that ancestor and how you know it.
* Was one of your ancestors discriminated against by the US federal government for racial reasons, such as the WW2 internment camps, racial marriage laws, denied the right to vote for racial reasons, etc? Please describe the discrimination and how you are related.
* Was one of your ancestors admitted as a refugee to the USA in the last 100 years? Please describe the ancestor, your relation to them, and the cause of the refugee.

If legacy white-boy admissions are legal, how is legacy-enslaved emissions not?

Because I'm guessing 75%+ of people qualifying as non-Hispanic white will answer no to all 3 of the above.
posted by NotAYakk at 10:51 AM on June 29, 2023 [8 favorites]

As a mixed-race person descended from plantation slaves whose parents were the first to go to university, with the understanding that this is a charged decision, of which the full legal, emotional, and socio-political ramifications may not be fully accessible to non-US persons such as myself, I have to say that "race-based admission" seems extremely problematic in both theory and practice, and in so far as it constitutes a Good (or even just a Necessary Evil), after nearly 50 years, it seems the evidence of it being such a Good (or Necessary Evil) remains exceedingly thin.

In so far as this decision is taken to indicate A Society edging closer towards The Abyss, it is Bad, of course, but again, that's perhaps not as readily apparent to to non-US observers when contrasted against the deeply, inherently problematic concept of "race-based admissions".
posted by dmh at 10:55 AM on June 29, 2023 [4 favorites]

Am I giving him way too much credit?

Almost certainly. His whole schtick is fucking over Black people.

is there any chance he saw a 5-4 decision coming and decided to join the majority so he could write the least binding opinion possible?

That only goes so far -- he can assign himself to write the notional majority opinion, but he still needs to get other justices to sign on to his opinion. If the other 5 shitbags sign onto another opinion, that's the majority opinion and his is just a concurrence.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 10:55 AM on June 29, 2023 [7 favorites]

it seems the evidence of it being such a Good (or Necessary Evil) remains exceedingly thin.

Look just a teeny bit? In this thread people have pointed out that the UC system has like a 3.5% black enrollment rate. If they had affirmative action, it would be higher.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 11:00 AM on June 29, 2023 [8 favorites]

The thing I'm having trouble wrapping my head around is how this can apply to private universities without directly infringing on right to assembly. I get this can apply to public schools, and I don't like it, but the part I like even less (even as someone who does not think highly of Harvard as an undergraduate educational institution) is that the supreme court has say in the admissions of a private school.
posted by thecaddy at 11:03 AM on June 29, 2023 [3 favorites]

@sammyo:

> Yeah, imposible, all it takes is one less aircraft carrier

I wonder how much time you have spent in and around public schools that have deeply disadvantaged student populations.

While it is true, to a good first approximation, that "throwing money at the problem" has never really been tried, just intervening at the schools will not do the trick. One reason that there's never anything nice at a really poor school, in my observation, is that when people try to provide nice things, they don't get taken care of. If they don't get vandalized. I mean, this is what happened at the school my organization tried to provide nice things for. (I'm a member of a community band. For many years we rehearsed in the band room of a high school with an overwhelming majority of free-lunch students which is probably < 15% White. In addition to paying rent to the band program we made in-kind donations of capital equipment. For example, over the course of the 20 years I rehearsed there with the band, we bought them complete sets of new music stands at least 3 times. These were serious professional-grade music stands that literally last indefinitely if they're not mistreated. The kids would trash 60 or 80 of them in a few years.)

I think there is some cultural capital that needs cultivating, so that the populations that send students to these schools have some sense of ownership of public goods and see them as something to be preserved for their own interest, and not just as property of The Man that's not only not worth keeping up, but is probably more moral to sabotage.

We did have a lot better results with making gifts/grants to individuals. In particular, musical instruments. And by the way, if you were in band back in the day but haven't touched your horn or flute or whatever in 10 years, consider finding a way to donate it to a middle- or high-school kid who can't afford one. Musical performance is another one of those areas where the barriers to entry keep going up for people who aren't comfortably well-off, and it's a reliable way to do some good, getting a kid to turn into a musician.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 11:10 AM on June 29, 2023 [6 favorites]

While it is true, to a good first approximation, that "throwing money at the problem" has never really been tried

No. Nearly universally, giving schools more money leads to increased performance across a range of metrics.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 11:15 AM on June 29, 2023 [23 favorites]

UT-Austin's racial breakdown for the fall of 2022 class (with overall state percentages following, all values approximate):

White 35% (State ~39%)
Hispanic 25% (~40%)
Asian 21% (5%)
Black 5.3% (12%)
Other/International/Unknown: 15%

Make of that what you will.

On another note, the whole "mention race in your essay" point does seem a massive loophole for applicants.
posted by Galvanic at 11:15 AM on June 29, 2023

The president of my undergrad school -- the first Black president in its 238-year history -- already issued his response to the ruling (perhaps easier to do, because he had a lengthy op-ed on the subject published in the Chicago Trib two weeks ago). In it, he made a point that is fairly obvious, when you think about it, and yet rarely considered:

... this Supreme Court decision will make our work more challenging.

That’s disappointing on several levels, not the least of which is the fact that the debate on affirmative action – at least as it relates to institutions such as Union – is based on the false premise that in order to level the playing field for students of color other, more accomplished, students are being left out.

This is simply not true at Union. Every student who receives an offer of admission to this college has the intellectual capacity and educational background necessary for success, or they wouldn’t have been admitted.

There's a link to the Chicago Trib piece in there as well, which is also really worth your time.
posted by martin q blank at 11:24 AM on June 29, 2023 [14 favorites]

While it is true, to a good first approximation, that "throwing money at the problem" has never really been tried

No. Nearly universally, giving schools more money leads to increased performance across a range of metrics.

I went to a good school district absolutely loaded with cash (North Allegheny) the "things get vandalized" bit is just kids and it happened there plenty. You put 1400 kids in a space for 3/4 of a year for deathly boring classes and subjects you are going to get doodles, carvings, etchings, marker art, key-scratched profanity, and more. Those music stands will never, ever survive because the kids don't understand exactly how they fold up, the teacher doesn't have the time/energy to instruct and monitor that, and they may just be getting pushed around by a janitor at the end of the day.

Also: throwing money at a school and generating safe afterschool care, hobby, and study spaces that are free so the overworked parents don't bleed money to child care in our age of putting CPS onto the trail of every kid who comes home alone? Priceless.

Will we ever get that without a bunch of "Well to qualify you need to be destitute in exactly X, Y, Z ways and have energy to respond"? Maybe we already do but if I was a betting man I'd say no.
posted by Slackermagee at 11:27 AM on June 29, 2023 [14 favorites]

"race-based admission" seems extremely problematic in both theory and practice, and in so far as it constitutes a Good (or even just a Necessary Evil), after nearly 50 years, it seems the evidence of it being such a Good (or Necessary Evil) remains exceedingly thin.

Affirmative action was never about "find some random POC and admit them regardless of their abilities and regardless of the qualifications of other candidates in order to fill a quota". That is how it got spun by the right and how it passed into myth. It has always been about broad goals, patterns, aggregations and considering race as one factor in admissions. Even when affirmative action was strong, it was still difficult for students of color to get into top-tier programs except in unusual circumstances.

For me, a white person, I think that affirmative action in its strong form is needed in order to overcome hard-wired bias by whites against BIPOC. I observe this bias all the time and I'm sure I'm guilty of it myself although I try to have self-insight. I've experienced a lot of bias myself as a queer AFAB fat person, and I am confident that no matter how nice and good everyone tries to be, students of color need affirmative action as a corrective to the down-scoring they already face.

White people are brought up into racism and racial resentment, and it takes work to be aware of that and try to overcome it. That was a weakness in affirmative action from the start, but our stochastic terrorist right wing has spent my entire lifetime stoking racial resentment even as actual racial justice programs have been destroyed.

I would have more sympathy with the "working class white people have it hard too, college is prohibitively expensive and the debt can crush you and we need universal programs rather than affirmative action" line of reasoning except that racial justice programs have been attacked and weakened more and more over my entire life. There isn't a cheat code for working class BIPOC that working class whites don't get. That's fantasy. Working class white people - and all other white people - have the responsibility to understand what exactly is going on. Even if we are justified in fighting the hardships we face under capitalism, we're not justified in fighting against a fantasy of privilege for BIPOC.
posted by Frowner at 11:32 AM on June 29, 2023 [42 favorites]

Periodic reminder that white women have been the biggest beneficiaries of affirmative action (much like with welfare).
posted by TwoStride at 11:39 AM on June 29, 2023 [14 favorites]

I wish that college admission was a lottery. Like if Harvard took the lowest GPA and test score of an admitted student last year and then said anyone with scores equal or above that would be placed in a lottery for admission.

And then all the kids could go back to being kids instead of juggling sports and clubs to get an edge.
posted by MadMadam at 11:49 AM on June 29, 2023 [17 favorites]

I don't know why we let people make this look so complex. It's not.

Yes, it is. It's damn complex. I'm in favor of AA, but the very real arguments against it are simpler and often more persuasive than the arguments in favor.

That might be why public opinion is against it. Pew: "As you may know, some colleges and universities around the country are selective, which means they have many more applicants than they can admit. One of the factors some of these colleges take into account in admissions decisions is race and ethnicity, in order to increase the racial and ethnic diversity of the school. All in all, do you approve or disapprove of selective colleges and universities doing this?" Overall, 50/33 against. Among Asian respondents, 52/37 against; among Black respondents, 47/29 in favor. That is, about 40 percent of Black respondents with an opinion oppose.

Roberts wrote earlier, "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." That's wrong, but the counter argument is much more...complex. It's complex to explain why a Black or Hispanic applicant with similar academic achievement has much higher odds of being accepted to a selective college than a White or Asian applicant. (From Zach Bleemer, whose research on the effects of University of California's ending of AA has been widely cited to support the policy: " So imagine kids who have roughly a 1300 SAT score out of 1600 and a high school GPA like - of, like, a 3.8 on a four-point scale - a quite good high school GPA. You'll have many universities where students with those scores and grades, if they are white, are very unlikely to be admitted to the university, whereas if they're Black or Hispanic are very likely to be admitted to the university."

It's complex to argue why we shouldn't simply substitute socioeconomic status for race. It's complex to explain why, with a policy that is often justified on the basis of the effects of slavery, 41 percent of black Ivy League students are first or second generation immigrants.

Saying "It's a simple issue" is effectively saying that anyone who disagrees with you is a bigot or a fool. Some but not all are. Many disagree because of the substantive arguments against the policy. And yes, there are hypocrites, but many of them are also against legacy and athletic preferences.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 11:50 AM on June 29, 2023 [9 favorites]

"imagine kids who have roughly a 1300 SAT score out of 1600 and a high school GPA like - of, like, a 3.8 on a four-point scale - a quite good high school GPA. You'll have many universities where students with those scores and grades, if they are white, are very unlikely to be admitted to the university, whereas if they're Black or Hispanic are very likely to be admitted to the university."

To put it bluntly, who gives a shit? I guess these kids and their parents. But why is this a problem?
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 11:54 AM on June 29, 2023 [3 favorites]

Harvard does care about socioeconomic status, they have a whole program for first generation college students.

Men are also beneficiaries of affirmative action.
posted by chernoffhoeffding at 12:04 PM on June 29, 2023 [3 favorites]

US culture is really strongly against collective solutions, and that attitude is stoked by the right. Affirmative action makes things better for everyone in various ways and degrees. It is not about maximizing each individual's advantages. If we have a less unequal society, all kinds of things improve, even if you individually do not receive a bigger percentage of life's good things - bigger pie, bigger slice.

It's also one of those mid-20th century things that we chose to destroy instead of fix. Public housing has some problems? Tear it down and kick people out! Welfare has some problems? Get rid of it and don't track the people who lose benefits! Affirmative action is only partially successful? Smash it, don't fine tune it!

We could always say, "white women are the biggest beneficiaries and this program does not reach everyone it is supposed to reach, let's refine it so that it works better", just like we could have said "let's repair and renovate our public housing stock to preserve its benefits and get rid of its failings!" But of course, that would require pro-social thinking, relatively sophisticated media, politicians with morals instead of our usual whoever-crawled-out-from-under-a-gilded-rock, etc, so we just have to let society get worse.

This stuff makes me so mad. People really fought to get these programs established. The mid-20th century was a one-time historical opportunity. We could make things better but instead we'll all collaborate to make them worse.
posted by Frowner at 12:06 PM on June 29, 2023 [38 favorites]

36 years ago: http://www.jamestaranto.com/rooster.htm (this incident has largely fallen off the internet so have to use that link, alas)

this social issue has long been a rich vein for GOP reaction mining
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 12:08 PM on June 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

How hard would it be to design an objectively gradable assessment of an admission candidates understanding of the world of the less privileged? That seems like a useful thing to have.
posted by amtho at 12:08 PM on June 29, 2023

And yes, there are hypocrites, but many of them are also against legacy and athletic preferences.

I really look forward to seeing non-hypocrite non-lawyer Edward Jay Blum continue to leverage his wealth, connections and power to remove legacy admissions.

I'm certain that the remaining Koch brother will happily fund that effort. I'm sure that there is a pending SFFA-sponsored case to remove legacy admissions pending a court date, right?

I'll choose to ignore the other priorities listed on the SFFA website: "The Education Department Helps Combat Woke Discrimination", "The Military Should Reject CRT and DEI" and "The Equity Delusion and its Marxist Roots."
posted by JDC8 at 12:23 PM on June 29, 2023 [5 favorites]

You know what, I have no idea how affirmative action actually worked. Did they have a quota? Did you get special points? Did it affect private schools as well as public? I don't know! Anyway the great racial mystery is over, if you're white or Asian and you don't get into Harvard you have no one to blame but yourself.

I suspect that private schools won't see much change in admissions and public schools will.
posted by kingdead at 12:33 PM on June 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

The selection process is described quite clearly in the summary I linked above.
posted by vacapinta at 12:42 PM on June 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

AP has a story on how hard it is to work around bans on affirmative action, and how diversity has suffered in the wake of state bans:

As Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action, colleges see few other ways to diversity goals, AP, By Collin Binkley and COLLIN BINKLEY (sic; is even AP cutting editors?)
posted by kristi at 12:51 PM on June 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

@ MisantropicPainforest:

> Nearly universally, giving schools more money leads to increased performance across a range of metrics.

"Giving schools more money" is not the same as "throwing money at the problem." Perhaps the latter is an anachronism, but once upon a time it was a commonplace in American discussions about Government programs of various kinds. "Throwing money at the problem" was what built the nuclear Navy and the Apollo Program. That was never tried, for the relief of poverty or the improvement of education.

@Slackermagee:

> ... the "things get vandalized" bit is just kids... You put 1400 kids in a space for 3/4 of a year for deathly boring classes and subjects you are going to get doodles, carvings... Those music stands will never, ever survive because the kids don't understand exactly how they fold up...

A couple of things here.

1. Note that I spoke of this school in the past tense. Our organization no longer rehearses there. Instead, we are at a high school that serves, not affluent, really, but families who are economically well-off enough to be full participants in American culture, basically. The kids at that school don't go through a 100-year supply of music stands in 20 years. They have a supply of stands that looks to be about 30 years old, mostly in fully usable condition.
2. I may be old, but I remember what it was like to be a high-school musician myself. At a school with probably 70% other white kids, but a lot less economically-segregated than the schools I see these days. We had 2000 kids enrolled every Fall, and the poorest of them were the poorest kids in town. The richest kids in town were over on the other side, but there were enough not-poors that it didn't become a burnt-out zone. I think the music stands there were probably 30-some years old when I was a student, and some of those might still be in service 40 years later.
3. This kind of music stand does not fold. It stands. All you have to do is not lay it on end and stomp on it, and when you go to put it away, you pick it up in one place and put it down in another, instead of picking it up and seeing how far you can hurl it.

OK that was 3 things.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 1:10 PM on June 29, 2023 [3 favorites]

"Giving schools more money" is not the same as "throwing money at the problem."

The former is a clear statement about what the policy should be, the latter is vague---what is the problem?
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 1:17 PM on June 29, 2023

Oh, and since I'm not supposed to edit a comment to insert something I forgot...

> doodles, carvings, etchings, marker art, key-scratched profanity, and more.

None of those things interferes with the utility of the music stand! It still works fine no matter what is scrawled on it!

For reference, the thing I'm talking about looks like this. I wasn't bullshitting when I called it "capital equipment." To break the desk off of one of these, or bend the feet so badly that it won't stand level anymore, takes something a lot more disrespectful than scratching the word "fuck" in the paint with the point of a key.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 1:21 PM on June 29, 2023 [4 favorites]

Roberts is said to view the status and place in government of the SCOTUS as both precious and precarious. And so, he’s supposed to be very protective of its reputation and is embarrassed by things like some justice flushing a toilet on a Zoom call.

And yet every time the SCOTUS overturns a Roe (so to speak), the idea that the SCOTUS (as it operates now with lifetime terms) is good for a healthy democracy takes a hit heavier than one hundred Alito flushes.

Even if you are a lover of White supremacy and this particular decision, these things make it obvious that the SCOTUS that this “reverent high priest of the law” posture is just an act. Justices are just congresspeople that don’t have to be elected, and if they’re on your side, great, if not, you’re fucked.
posted by ignignokt at 1:28 PM on June 29, 2023 [7 favorites]

Liberals have argued that we need affirmative action for diversity and diversity is good for rich white kids at Harvard. That may be true but who gives a shit. The argument originally was, and should always have been, that affirmative action is an effective tool to redress historic wrongs. Once that shift happened, we lost.
(this comment)

This is a good point. This isn't a huge shift from prior rulings, just a step in the same direction as other major cases on this very issue.

The reason folks have argued "diversity is good for the white kids, too" wasn't because they truly believe that is the real/best reason, but because 45 years ago, the Supreme Court said that was the only compelling state interest that might possibly withstand the level of scrutiny required to permit a race-based policy like affirmative action. Justice Powell's plurality opinion in Bakke explained that redressing historical wrongs was too attenuated to be a permissible reason.

Maybe it was foolish to adopt that rationale to justify Harvard's & UNC's policies, especially in public discourse. However, it probably made strategic sense when trying to win at the lower courts within the framework set by previous SCOTUS decisions and when arguing before this Court. It's not like this Court was going to rule more expansively than Justice Powell.
posted by alligatorpear at 1:31 PM on June 29, 2023 [7 favorites]

@ MisantropicPainforest

> The former is a clear statement about what the policy should be, the latter is vague---what is the problem?

You really are dead-set on finding something to be offended by, maybe?

I tried to explain that my choice of phrase was once a common one in American discourse, though possibly that is forgotten. It was often preceded by "You can't solve the problem by ..." though in fact, when "throwing money at the problem" was tried, it was mostly successful! It was generally a Republican denying that a problem could be solved by throwing money at it. Generally the problem were ones Democrats were interested in addressing. Specifically, education was a problem that was supposedly intractable when money was applied.

My comment, upon which you are nitpicking, was that even with infinite budget, you couldn't "spend it on schools" in a way to make the schools where the poorest people live into ones that rich suburban White parents would want to send their kids to. Because when you look at the poorest people's schools, they have issues that require engagement outside of the school somehow.

You have picked at this nit on my first comment enough times. If it will help you feel you've won something to say something else about it go ahead, but I won't be responding.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 1:36 PM on June 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

On another note, the whole "mention race in your essay" point does seem a massive loophole for applicants.

I cannot imagine that this will hold. Anything that really looks like an attempt to maintain a racial quotas will work, in the same way that the (probably bogus) "personal score" didn't work.
posted by a robot made out of meat at 1:39 PM on June 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

I mean, this is what happened at the school my organization tried to provide nice things for. (I'm a member of a community band. For many years we rehearsed in the band room of a high school with an overwhelming majority of free-lunch students which is probably < 15% White. In addition to paying rent to the band program we made in-kind donations of capital equipment. For example, over the course of the 20 years I rehearsed there with the band, we bought them complete sets of new music stands at least 3 times. These were serious professional-grade music stands that literally last indefinitely if they're not mistreated. The kids would trash 60 or 80 of them in a few years.

Owning the disclaimer first that I'm cishet and white, so I'm not speaking for people of color....but, I am speaking for students at public schools, of which I was one.

And that's why it struck me that this kind of argument sounds awfully like a hands-thrown-up scold - "oh, they're just going to trash things, why bother, giving schools more money won't help because they'll just trash things."

Well, I was one of those students in the music department. And yeah, there were students who got bored and etched dicks into the music stands or whatever. But - they were in the minority. And meanwhile the rest of us had to just put up with the DickStand for months because we didn't have enough money in the budget even just for paint to cover it over, and the reason we didn't have enough money in the budget because "oh, well, throwing money at the problem doesn't work and look we gave them stuff and they trashed it". It felt like a shrugging "well, they're poor, that's just how they are, what can you do" dismissal - and that was demeaning. And - it's likely that being demeaned in that way just lead to even more kids thinking "well, shit, if this is what they assume I'm gonna do, then fine, I'll give in." Which just made things worse. (Me, I just sulked in my room and counted the days until I could get the fuck out of that town.)

And if I was getting those vibes in my lily-white-ass Connecticut town, imagine how much worse it'd have been if I wasn't lily-white.

Yes, sure, sometimes when we give schools more money, the things they invest in get broken. SO THE FUCK WHAT - raising children is an investment. And some investments take more work and input than others.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 1:40 PM on June 29, 2023 [24 favorites]

Ok, now do legacy and athlete admits.
posted by bluesky43 at 1:53 PM on June 29, 2023 [5 favorites]

It’s, at best, incredibly weird to type this many words in a discussion about how the US Supreme Court just ended affirmative action in higher education on how some nonwhite kids destroyed a couple of music stands.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 2:04 PM on June 29, 2023 [21 favorites]

I think it's really difficult to talk about deprivation and behavior, partly because privileged people are all primed to see marginalized youth as destructive or reckless, even if we see them as sympathetic.

I think behavior can't be a starting point because it's too equivocal. Sometimes kids trash stuff because they're rich, spoiled Bullington Club types, sometimes they trash stuff because they see no future for themselves. Similarly, sometimes something is treasured because someone sees it as a natural appurtenance of comfort and privilege, and sometimes something is treasured because someone sees it as a rare, fortunate thing. Sometimes a rich kid sees no future for themselves due to other factors, for that matter.

My feeling is that in fact if we lived in the type of society where we could have meaningful reform instead of hoping for a smash and revolution, we should throw money at the schools, accepting that some programs will fail or be counterproductive and that trying new things (and buying new things) is how improvements will emerge. (Also jobs - we could be creating all kinds of jobs in and around schools doing all this stuff.)

It would probably take at least a couple of cycles of freshman-to-graduation before kids in a school really felt like "of course things are pleasant, safe and fair here", so you've got to let programs run instead of starting them and declaring them a failure after a couple of years. People have to get used to feeling safe and valued so they can let go of feeling angry and disposable. You're only going to do that when you really start throwing money around.

Throwing money at things works for rich people's personal lives - if they have a computer and it gets broken, they get another one, probably an even nicer one, and then they continue to have a computer.
posted by Frowner at 2:04 PM on June 29, 2023 [15 favorites]

I really want to see a lawsuit against legacy admits as unconstitutional under a disparate impact theory. Those policies are literally designed to perpetuate the power structure of prior generations, which sounds like a discriminatory purpose to me. The lawsuit would almost certainly lose (schools will say they do it for the money, not to be bigoted), but it's still worth it to push Harvard and all the other schools issuing statements today that no, really, they are so upset by this ruling and super duper care about diversity. Do you really? Or do you care about your wealthy alumni more?
posted by alligatorpear at 2:06 PM on June 29, 2023 [11 favorites]

It's complex to argue why we shouldn't simply substitute socioeconomic status for race.

No, it really isn't. The problem is that the explanation tends to make people uncomfortable as they realize their complicity in a system that has in the past and continues to put minorities at a disadvantage. But that's not complexity.
posted by NoxAeternum at 2:15 PM on June 29, 2023 [10 favorites]

Saying "It's a simple issue" is effectively saying that anyone who disagrees with you is a bigot or a fool.

Was I unclear? That is specifically what I am saying.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 3:01 PM on June 29, 2023 [13 favorites]

Of the 29 percent of Black respondents who oppose affirmative action, are there any bigots, or are they all fools?
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 3:16 PM on June 29, 2023

Jebus.

Sixteen years ago, affirmative action was banned in Michigan. With upcoming Supreme Court lawsuit, it may be banned nationwide. (2022)

Affirmative action at the University of Michigan.

Grutter v. Bollinger.

Gratz v. Bollinger

Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action

U of M statement on Supreme Court’s Affirmative Action ruling
June 29, 2023

Michigan's largest universities react to Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action.
'A state constitutional ban had already forced the University of Michigan to scrap its affirmative action program, leading to a drop in /Black undergraduate enrollment.' (Freep)
posted by clavdivs at 3:32 PM on June 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

Bigotry and foolery are equal-opportunity and race-blind.
posted by klanawa at 3:34 PM on June 29, 2023

>are there any bigots, or are they all fools?

They're no doubt conservatives so that's an either/or . . .
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 3:41 PM on June 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

Of the 29 percent of Black respondents who oppose affirmative action, are there any bigots, or are they all fools?

There's a reason Aaron McGruder created Uncle Ruckus.
posted by NoxAeternum at 4:02 PM on June 29, 2023 [7 favorites]

How many Americans understand how affirmative action worked initially and how many understand how it has worked since the Bollinger decision in 2003? We have all been told again and again, in the comics, in sitcoms, in political debates, in private conversations, etc that the way it works is that if there's one spot and a woman of any race or BIPOC man is applying and a white man is applying, the woman of any race or BIPOC man gets it automatically no matter how talented the white guy is. We've all been told that there is this constant run of talented white guys getting done out of the best jobs, scholarships, etc because the school or office "had to" hire a minority. That's been the constant refrain as long as I have been alive, and I can tell you that it's what my father heard when he was job searching in the seventies.

That is not how affirmative action ever worked, and it really wasn't how it worked after Bollinger in 2003.

When people say they oppose affirmative action, they're very often saying that they oppose the lie that the right has been selling them. I can easily imagine someone thinking "I don't want to be handed a tokenistic job, I want to get one on my merits, therefore I oppose affirmative action even though it would in theory benefit me". I'm not saying that employers and schools never make tokenistic hires - we can see all too clearly how often marginalized people are hired and ignored or steamrollered by faux-progressive places. But that is not what affirmative action the government program is about.

Most people don't understand how affirmative action worked. This has been true as long as I've been reading about the issue - I remember very clearly reading about this in the run up to Bollinger, when I didn't know how affirmative action was supposed to work. Personally, I always figured what the hell, if a group has been trampled on for a long time, give them some advantages regardless, but I too still misunderstood based on right wing pop culture.
posted by Frowner at 4:50 PM on June 29, 2023 [30 favorites]

Of the 29 percent of Black respondents who oppose affirmative action, are there any bigots, or are they all fools?

Only someone that does not interact with or know any black people would ask that type of question.
posted by anansi at 5:56 PM on June 29, 2023 [3 favorites]

The only complexity in this debate is the complexity of white folks' inability to face-up to racial guilt and actually live with justice.
posted by anansi at 5:57 PM on June 29, 2023 [6 favorites]

Frowner, thank you for so eloquently stating something that has long infuriated me when having discussions with people about affirmative action.

I know so many people, from across the spectrum of groups in these United States, who have exactly that understanding of AA: that it "steals" opportunities in business and academia from white people to give them to undeserving, unqualified people of color.

The progressive folks I know who hold this view are many, and they usually follow up their statement of their stance with something along the lines of "Yeah, that's not ideal, but I guess it's okay for a little while to even the playing field a bit" -- with the strong implication that "a little while" means 3-5 years or so more, then racism is solved and over, close the book.

Everyone else is adamant that AA should never have been implemented in the first place because, echoing Mike Pence and many others, they are certain that there is pretty much no structural racism in the US and never has been, because the moment the slaves were freed, everyone was on equal footing.

I grind my teeth when I'm anxious, and I have ground them near to nubs during some of the conversations I've had with people about AA.

As a black American -- and, incidentally, a Harvard grad -- I want to take a moment to touch on something you don't see much in discussions of affirmative action: the way it can mess with your head when you're a minority. I can't (and won't) speak for every person of color, but in my younger days, I'd internalized some of those messed up beliefs about affirmative action, and it led to all kinds of guilt and fear that, yeah, maybe I didn't actually deserve to be at Harvard and I was just a token.

And I continue to feel that way. I've been in the professional world for decades, I've won awards and recognition for my work at various companies, and I still am often plagued by intrusive thoughts of "You know you're just a diversity hire, right?" with alarming regularity, regardless of how I'm performing and how I'm being perceived by my colleagues. It's like some extra foul flavor of Imposter Syndrome.

Don't really know where I'm going with this other than to say that, somewhat like the case with welfare, if white people think people of color are out here celebrating how we pulled a fast one on white America via these kinds of programs, they've got another think coming because 1) they don't understand how the programs actually work and who the primary beneficiaries are and 2) even legitimately being a beneficiary of these programs can lead to lifelong shame and guilt. (For the record, I was also on welfare growing up and have ground my teeth to nubs listening to people of all kinds of political bents crap on that program too.)
posted by lord_wolf at 6:36 PM on June 29, 2023 [44 favorites]

I’ve been in several discussions among university faculty and administrators about how we should do hiring in order to have our hires look at least a little closer to the racial distribution of the general population, which everyone agrees is a good goal (or at least nominally agrees, since they have the awareness that expressing an opinion that there are intrinsic racial differences in intellectual ability is fairly obviously and directly racist). So there are all sorts of proposals about how to diversify applicant pools to increase the chances of someone from a historically excluded group making it into the top three or actually securing a position, and proposals about having equity representatives sitting in on hiring committees to keep an eye out for unconscious biases, etc. And it’s all very complicated.

But the thing is, in order to increase the diversity of your workforce, you have to hire more people from historically excluded groups. And the most direct and successful way to do that, and the only way that is not subject to unconscious and structural biases, is to make membership in a historically excluded group a position requirement. This is exactly what hasn’t been allowed in US affirmative action programs for hiring, but all of the usual objections betray the biases of folks making the objections: think about the following Venn diagram. There is a big circle of qualified applicants (and, realistically, we can never produce an exact linear ranking of applicants because people have different strengths and weaknesses and aren’t always exactly comparable, even before we bring in the observable lack of both accuracy and consistency amongst anyone or group of people evaluating others - the “merit” based idea of “the best candidate” is a complete fiction - we can only group people into tranches, such as the tranch of applicants who would do a good job in the position). There is a smaller circle, completely contained within the larger circle, of qualified applicants who are also from historically excluded groups. If the goal is to hire someone from the smaller circle, then the most effective way to do so is to search for candidates only within that smaller circle, and not waste your time considering candidates outside the smaller circle - that’s just basic sampling principles.

But people seem to have this picture in their heads where the two circles only overlap in part rather than the smaller circle being completely contained in the larger circle - they think that they’ll end up hiring an unqualified candidate from a historically excluded group somehow, despite setting qualification criteria that candidates must meet. This is what unconscious bias in action looks like: assuming, or thinking it even potentially possible, that a candidate of color who has met all of the search criteria to qualify for a position will still somehow be unqualified. (And yeah, internalized oppression means that many folks in the smaller circle of qualified candidates who are also from a historically excluded group also have the incorrect Venn diagram picture and have internalized the fear that they aren’t qualified.)

Fortunately we don’t have such shitty, racist, “color blind” restrictions in Canada. So far, at least, the relevant legal framework here acknowledges differential impact as discriminatory. Of course, what this Supreme Court ruling says, in part, is that this idea that your select group of meritorious people should at least somewhat reflect the racial make-up of the population at large isn’t an allowable goal to have - it’s a repudiation of acknowledging and seeking to remedy discriminatory impact.

Anyway, all the above translates fairly straightforwardly to college and university admissions as well, although measuring “qualified” is a little more complicated in the student context given the huge racial disparities in grade school educational opportunities and the variety of factors that impact students’ likelihood of successful completion of a degree program. I second whoever mentioned upthread the idea of having a lottery among the pool of applicants to a university such as Harvard who are considered qualified by whatever criteria are used, alongside the imperfect kludge of devising qualification measures that ensure an applicant pool that more accurately reflects the general population.
posted by eviemath at 7:28 PM on June 29, 2023 [7 favorites]

if there is really no difference between qualified candidates then increase the class size. Harvard can let in as many students as it wants.
posted by web5.0 at 8:01 PM on June 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

This is a very interesting thread overall. I happen to be particularly interested in the "sub-issue" (raised by some commenters above) of more funding/assistance for public schools with a majority of students living in impoverished circumstances. In my opinion, the decades-long deliberate underfunding and dismantling of quality public education in the US has had a devastating effect on the critical thinking skills of far too many people.

Frowner really hit the nail on the head. I have a decade of work experience overseeing funding and programs at schools with the highest poverty rates in my city—including before and after school programs, family resource centers in schools, on-site daycare in a high school, adult education for parents, etc. Among the measured results were better school attendance, improved test scores and increased graduation rates.

While this is great, what is needed for justice in public education in the US would come from equality of funding (currently, at least in my state, funding depends on the tax base so that urban and rural schools receive significantly less funding than wealthier suburban districts) AND changing how school districts are determined geographically. Draw an approximate circle around a metropolitan area or county, with the most densely populated area as the center, and divide it in slices so each slice includes urban, suburban and rural areas. In this scenario, schools are both racially and socio-economically diverse. Then, you don't have the kids who get less at home also get less at school and those who get the most at home also get the most at school.
posted by Scout405 at 8:23 PM on June 29, 2023 [9 favorites]

Just adding that whatever the percentage of students admitted to UT Austin is right now (I believe 100% it's smaller than 10, though I clearly don't know the exact number) it's gonna be hard for UT or any public institution to use proxy statements or other information to increase diversity because Governor Abbott just signed a bill banning diversity offices in higher education last month.
posted by gentlyepigrams at 8:31 PM on June 29, 2023 [2 favorites]

The roberts court is easily the worst court of the post-jim crow era. ghouls. i wish only ill upon the ruling majority.
posted by dis_integration at 8:34 PM on June 29, 2023 [5 favorites]

BUSH v. GORE, 531 U.S. 98 (2000)
United States Supreme Court
(Slip Opinion) Cite as: 531 No. 00-949
Argued:
Decided: December 12, 2000
posted by clavdivs at 9:47 PM on June 29, 2023 [3 favorites]

eviemath I think a lot of people are not familiar with the world of highly selective admissions (and hiring) so they assume that AA means hiring someone who otherwise wouldn't meet the qualification bar rather than the reality which is that for many positions we have 5-10x qualified and probably excellent candidates for every opening. So how do we pick?

Given that there likely is no absolute ranking of how good someone would be (because that would require an unambiguous definition of good to begin with), and that any way of evaluating such an absolute ranking is imprecise, the best we can do is pretty vague assignment to a high aptitude set.

In the absence of a canonical selection rule we actually can't even theoretically pick a subset without invoking the axiom of choice.

So given that, it is the case that there must already be an arbitrary selection rule which is not related to the ranking. Otherwise how would we pick?

AA just says that, given that is the reality, let's be explicit and make this part of the process.

This is also how nepotism works of course. It is pretty rare for someone who is genuinely completely unsuitable to get elite jobs or academic admissions but if you have 20 brilliant candidates for an internship, why not just give it to a friend's nephew who got through the CV screening? They'll do as good a job as anyone else who did, more likely than not, and this way your mate Emily owes you one.

As others have said, Harvard already and as part of this exact same "lop" process include considerations of legacy admissions and athletic ability (something which would be anathematic in most countries for university admissions).

Alternatively.
posted by atrazine at 2:37 AM on June 30, 2023 [4 favorites]

Some surprising people are in favor of ending the legacy admissions as well. (Surprising to me, anyway.)
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 3:56 AM on June 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

This is exactly what hasn’t been allowed in US affirmative action programs for hiring

This is exactly what hasn't been allowed to be written down as a formal criterion for hiring, but is sometimes communicated informally.

To be clear, I am not saying I have been involved in searches like that.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 4:01 AM on June 30, 2023

While it is true, to a good first approximation, that "throwing money at the problem" has never really been tried

No. Nearly universally, giving schools more money leads to increased performance across a range of metrics.

I went to a good school district absolutely loaded with cash (North Allegheny) the "things get vandalized" bit is just kids and it happened there plenty

Really quite pleased and amazed that my comment got a ~~bunch of favs~~ was noticed. To the responses by Aardvark Cheeselog, I quite agree about "throwing money" -- what I said was that "poor" schools should be upgraded somehow to be the very best. Do not know how to do that. It could be done. Probably requires more teachers and personnel with huge effort and empathy that are paid better then elsewhere and not over burdened daily. And will probably take decades until a social change occurs. Which at a minimum is expensive. Actually a couple three aircraft carriers. ;-)

And elementary school is probably late, so a generational problem. But I certainly am not defending the SC ruling, but if we're to work towards an ideal as important as affirmative action is/was, it was a huge step in the right direction but also we should be looking at bigger and deeper steps, at least aspirationally.
posted by sammyo at 5:50 AM on June 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

You can't just keep increasing the class size to let in more people. There are real world caps on resources, such as housing in the area, or researchers working on X project. You could, say, switch to online classes with infinite capacity, but at that point you are not really providing the Harvard/UT/whatever experience that students are competing for.
posted by tofu_crouton at 6:04 AM on June 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

Comment and a response removed. Do not start a derail that litigates the 2016 USA presidential election, thank you.
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 7:54 AM on June 30, 2023 [3 favorites]

More comments removed about the above mentioned derail. Stop it. If you have questions or concerns, Metatalk or the Contact Form should be used instead of replying to or asking questions about removals in this thread.
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 8:08 AM on June 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

There are real world caps on resources, such as housing in the area, or researchers working on X project.

True, but if you think colleges are honest brokers of housing, that would be incorrect. They have occupancy goals for university owned or affiliated housing they want to meet and do speak against any housing that they think will cause their occupancy rates to decline. They also regularly purchase land around universities to limit housing competition.

Housing is generally at least a minor profit center for universities, not a straight expense.

Research is a bit more variable, but at most Tier 1 Research Universities, the majority of the research is funded by the US Federal Government, not by the university itself. Of course there like 150 universities rated Tier 1 for research, so there is a lot of competition for federal dollars.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:12 AM on June 30, 2023

None of those things mean that there is room for limitless growth.
posted by tofu_crouton at 8:28 AM on June 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

Roberts wrote earlier, "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."

That sounds so pithy, so simple. He must be right. I've now seen several commenters on other sites echo some version of this even though this was from a previous case.

But what is wrong of course is that, yes, the state can and does act in order to provide balance. The simplest example is income inequality. The state has the power to address this with progressive taxation which libertarians can and do argue is unfair and discriminatory. Welfare, it can be argued is discriminatory too since we should give the same assistance to everybody.

The American Disabilities Act prohibits discrimination based on disability. All well and good but in order to accomplish this, extra services are created to achieve and enforce that equality. A bus or train that is outfitted for accomodation may be discriminating against the non-disabled who might now have less access (i.e. less space for other seating)

The list goes on. Every benefit that helps parents, discriminates against the childless. Every freeway expansion discriminates against everyone who does not use cars, etc.

This argument of his sounds like a tautology but it is in fact an ideological statement grounded in a conservative, libertarian view of the role of government. It asks you to assume that all discrimination is unlawful and so is conflating two senses of the word. Let me rewrite it:
"The way to stop negative discrimination on the basis of race is to stop positively discriminating on the basis of race."
Now it is not only not a tautology but it is also clearly wrong.

Or I might quote Justice Sotomayor:
"The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to speak openly and candidly on the subject of race, and to apply the Constitution with eyes open to the unfortunate effects of centuries of racial discrimination."
posted by vacapinta at 8:48 AM on June 30, 2023 [19 favorites]

Texas Tribune on the 10% plan and other affirmative action history in Texas (for those interested).
posted by gentlyepigrams at 9:42 AM on June 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

Roberts wrote earlier, "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."

That’s a great idea, but everyone has to be on board if it’s going to work. We know exactly what happens when we leave it as a free-for-all.

"Though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; . . . the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression"

Robert’s apparently stopped reading at the first comma.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 12:34 PM on June 30, 2023

The Biden admin has been anticipating this.

Un/fortunately, race drives so many variables, you can pick two or three variables and replicate a map of race.

It s insane, but this is a Supreme Court that denies that water exists. Money is a powerful evil.
posted by eustatic at 2:16 PM on June 30, 2023 [3 favorites]

How do the various societies approach a justice to speak at an event? Oh.

Roberts wrote earlier, "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."

Members of the tautology club should make a concerted effort to invite him, at least with an honorary award.
posted by sammyo at 7:54 AM on July 1, 2023

yeah calling statements I think are stupid a 'thought-terminating cliché' is an intellectually lazy habit, but damn if it doesn't fit in this case.
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 8:25 AM on July 1, 2023

CNN.com - Lawsuit alleges Harvard gives preferential treatment to legacy admissions, who are ‘overwhelmingly’ White
posted by soundguy99 at 5:56 AM on July 4, 2023 [3 favorites]

> I happen to be particularly interested in the "sub-issue" (raised by some commenters above) of more funding/assistance for public schools with a majority of students living in impoverished circumstances... what is needed for justice in public education in the US would come from equality of funding (currently, at least in my state, funding depends on the tax base so that urban and rural schools receive significantly less funding than wealthier suburban districts) AND changing how school districts are determined geographically.

colorado tried to pass something like this a decade ago:

BRUNDIN: Amendment 66 is predicated on the belief that a child's zip code shouldn't determine the quality of his or her education. It targets money at the kids who need it. Hickenlooper explains that high-poverty districts like Denver would get up to 40 percent more money per at-risk student because they're costlier to educate.

HICKENLOOPER: And that money follows the kid. For the first time in the United States, if a kid drops out, the school stops receiving money from the district at that moment.

BRUNDIN: A big incentive, the governor says, for schools to keep students from dropping out. The driving force behind the measure is a young Democratic senator from Denver, Mike Johnston. He says districts with low property tax bases would get more state funding.

posted by kliuless at 7:20 AM on July 4, 2023

"You know you're just a diversity hire, right?"

If it helps, I often think that I've only risen to the position I have because I'm an upper-middle class white male. For myself I know that it's largely driven by my anxiety problems. Untangling all that just makes me more anxious, I can only imagine what it must be like for you.

I'm also interested in your perspective on something related to being an ivy grad. It's been my experience trying to start a business that to obtain any kind of decent VC or other funding it's basically a requirement that one or people involved are an ivy league grad, former CEO, former hedge fund manager, or some/all of those combined. It's like a signal that it's okay for rich assholes to give you money and it doesn't much matter if you fail or succeed, you're one "their kind of people" now.

Being an ivy league grad seems like a massive unfair advantage in that context (and I assume others), I remember seeing a few people of color when looking around but I didn't take data on the matter so I don't really know. If you don't mind, I'd appreciate your take. How do you think being an Ivy, and specifically Harvard grad has affected your professional life while also being a black man in America?
posted by VTX at 8:00 AM on July 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

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