Assuming, arguendo, the Supreme Court holds that race-conscious college admissions are unconstitutional, then what? Given that universities are dedicated to the existential cause of diversity, equity and inclusion, regardless of what the Supreme Court has to say about the matter, the likelihood is that they will change the head on the corpse in an effort to accomplish the same goals of increasing minority admissions without calling it, or admitting that it is, race conscious.
One possible avenue was that seized upon by the University of California after affirmative action was banned in 1995.
But in 1995, policy at the University of California—the biggest public university system in the country—changed when the Board of Regents barred race-based admissions on its nine campuses.
Ultimately, the task force concluded that, to achieve racial diversity and not violate University of California policy, it had to deemphasize quantitative yardsticks like grades and test scores and focus on other things. “The prevailing opinion was that if we focused on these qualitative assessments of a person’s interests, lived experience, that would contribute to the diversity of students,” Carson said.
On the one hand, rejecting the “quantitative yardsticks” that served as a means of comparing students had the benefit of shifting the focus from objective head-to-head comparisons of merit to subjective “holistic” decisions. After all, the problem wasn’t that admissions were diverse, but that diversity was achieved by using race as a plus, for black, Hispanic, women and LGBT, students, and a minus for white, male and, especially, Asian students. When there is no identifiable basis for admissions, you can’t blame it on race.
Or does the disparate impact of supposedly race-neutral admissions policy, whether called holistic or anything else, suffice to find it race-based even if it claims not to be?
Green said that the old, meritocratic way of determining who gets into elite universities was actually discriminatory. “Being colorblind is racist, because it erases part of somebody’s identity,” Green said. “By saying that you don’t see someone’s race or you don’t see their color and you just see them as a person, it tells black students that you don’t see the communities that they’ve grown up in and you don’t see the experiences that have made them who they are.”
She suggested that Asian Americans who felt as though they’d been discriminated against by elite universities should rethink that. “I don’t think it’s just because you’re Asian,” Green said. “It’s probably because the school didn’t see you as being a good fit, or the school didn’t get to know enough about you as a person.”
Is it, as the Harvard admissions office seems to conclude, that Asians as an identity group just don’t have the desired “personality” that black students have? Should Harvard no longer be permitted to hide behind the subterfuge of finding Asians “aren’t a good fit,” thus leaving seats inexplicably available for black students, what then?
Full disclosure: I believe that diversity brings value for all students in higher education. I have supported the old Bakke/Fisher rationale that after vetting students for qualifications and concluding that between students equally qualified, achieving a diverse mix of students serves a pedagogical function that’s worthy of preserving. Many disagree with me, which is fine.
But what I don’t know is whether and how this can be accomplished in a post affirmative action admissions world. To believe that colleges will go race-blind in admissions seems brutally naive given how they’ve become dedicated to the cause. But if not race, then what? Or will they merely react to the Supreme Court as Jackson did to Marshall?
*Tuesday Talk rules apply, within reason.
Discover more from Simple Justice
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Wow. Imagine if Green had said the same thing about Muslims, or hispanics, or blacks after the kind of discrimination the schools have shown against these kids. We just don’t think “X” are as good as PEOPLE is what they are saying. It’s unbelievable. It’s racist. The idea that liberal educators would say something like the Harvard and other administrators have said boggles my poor mind.
One does not have to be colorblind. Recognizing that among similar candidates, black kids may have faced disadvantages white kids do not is understanding the kids. But that requires first that they come up with measures that allow such comparisons. For example, a white kid from a middle income family in a suburban school vs a black kid from a middle class family from a similarly or lower performing urban or suburban school. It doesn’t take much insight to see that the black kid probably had a rougher time of it and might well be a better choice. That principle is not endless of course (there may be differences in writing ability, math ability, etc., needed to succeed) but it’s a place to start. That means identifying criteria that make kids more likely to succeed and trying to create an average of those who succeed and looking at statistical measures — like the standard deviation, etc.
Oh, and eliminate alumni preferences, donor preferences, athletic preferences, family preferences and the like.
And I am in favor of affirmative action — taking race into account – at elite academic institutions. As entrance to so many of the elite institutions of society comes through attending a small number of schools, to have a diverse elite — one that likely reflects the community and can lead the community — will require affirmative action for some time. The idiots/ideologues at Harvard and the like aren’t helping.
No more about this. It’s not at issue here and will be deleted.
Currently, “disparate impact” is not a basis to challenge facially race-neutral government procurement programs, as long as that impact is pro-DBE. This will probably become true in the post-affirmative action university admissions context as well. If the universities can develop a facially race-neutral proxy, that is what we should expect to happen.
Isn’t this what the personality scores at issue in the Harvard case were, though? The black applicants kept getting these amazing personality scores, while the Asian applicants got personality scores even worse than white ones. This country isn’t just black and white anymore; I don’t know how you design a facially race-neutral criterion that will *only* place white people at a disadvantage, nor why we would want that. This is probably why disparate impact analysis in general, whether for employment, government contracting, or anything else, is going to end up on the chopping block: it’s viable when the country is 7/8th one race, 1/8th another that is very disadvantaged, as it was in the mid 1960s, not so much when the country is a racial and ethnic hodgepodge and a constant stream of immigrants from all over are pouring in.
Part of the point of college was traditionally to take you out of the community you came from and turn you into a Yale Man, Harvard Man, Dartmouth Man, whatever. Yes, the goal was to erase your identity: you go from a kid in some small town in Indiana and college changes you into an educated small-l liberal professional. I don’t agree with Mr Green, who just declares this to be “racist” on the grounds that it severs people from their racial identity (we used to aspire to this for everyone, and certainly alarm bells still go off if a white person says they feel a deep connection to white identity and white communities…), but his vision of college is fundamentally different than what university has been for hundreds, if not
a thousand, years: the institution has no right to shape you, no expectations are made of you, you just show up with your diversity, goof around for four years, and get your diploma.
While I’m not entirely sure this is what you were talking about, assimilation and bourgeois values were once consider virtues, the path to success. This is no longer the case, and one is considered a “race traitor” to go to college and come out a Harvard Man.
It’s almost as if no college is going to end up fixing what ails people who insist that hard work, merit, punctuality, etc., are evils to be eradicated.
Harvard and the handful of similarly mega-prestigious schools are different. Their admissions problems go way deeper than affirmative action and probably can’t be fixed.
State university systems are very different. Fisher v. U of Texas was, as I’m sure you remember, mostly about the prestige of the Austin Campus. That’s an issue that can be addressed by spreading the goodies around down somewhat: music school here, engineering school there, etc.
“Diversity” is a slippery slope to “race science” where some amorphous group of DEI “professionals” is creating diktats on the correct ratio of races. As we have already seen with Harvard’s “holistic admissions” to lock out Jews and [Asians] the colleges will find ways to be racist regardless of laws prohibiting racist practices. Zip codes, names, sports teams, organizations can all be proxies for skin color.
“‘Being colorblind is racist, because it erases part of somebody’s identity,’ Green said.”
To take the pressure off everyone, let’s just stipulate that everybody is racist. You’re either racist for being “colorblind,” racist for not being colorblind in a consciously nefarious manner, or racist for not being colorblind in an incompetently malignant manner. Strategic essentialism = strategic racism = strategic white supremacy.
MLK specifically called for race-neutral solutions in the Freedom Budget For All Americans, knowing that the way to fix racial disparities is not to cook the books and/or to further racialize society (which is like trying to flood the highlands) but to implement race-neutral solutions that would have disparate benefit for those communities in disproportionate need.
If they come up with an admission policy that is “race-conscious” in impact but not in name, more power to them. Because as it is now the DEI brigade are a bunch of late stage capitalist identitarians burning down the house. They appear to care less about the solutions and outcomes for the communities in question and more about the numbers and about building a perpetual racism machine.
“between students equally qualified, achieving a diverse mix of students serves a pedagogical function that’s worthy of preserving”
If that was what they were doing, it would probably work out fine. It’s not. The “education” system has abandoned merit and is sacrificing everything for “diversity”, “inclusion” and “equity”. Some corporations are attempting this also.
“Diversity” means discrimination against competence and especially against excellence.
“Inclusion” means seeking out the incompetent, the stupid and the mentally ill and elevating them to positions of power and influence.
“Equity” means progressive handicapping of competence and wisdom, so that the incompetent and the unwise will face no obstacles in their quest for “success”, and everyone will achieve a similar level of mediocrity.
The end result of all this is the degradation of the product. At corporations this doesn’t last long. Customers quickly realize that the quality of the product has degraded, and they stop buying it, and corporate managers change their strategy, or else the company fails. Universities can continue down this road for a long time. The degradation of the product (competent employees) happens over many years, and their customer base is naive. Graduates with $200K in student loan debt working at Starbucks may realize that they have been conned, but this knowledge doesn’t necessarily filter back to the incoming freshmen who still believe that a college degree is a golden ticket to success.
You asked what universities will do. They will make their admissions decisions as opaque as possible, so they can continue to discriminate but make it impossible to prove that they are doing so. They will start by making SAT/ACT scores optional, as many already have. Then they will admit some percentage of students from the highest scoring testers, all or almost all of whom will be white or Asian. They will admit the rest of the students (and the percentage admitted from testers and non-testers will be entirely up to the university) from the non-tester group, based on completely indeterminate criteria such as “overcoming adversity,” “striving for success,” and “contribution to university life.” In the admissions office itself, there will be strict quotas mandating the racial composition of the admitted student body, but nothing will be in writing except the scores of each applicant on the indeterminate criteria. The university will magically end up with exactly the racial composition it wants, and nobody will ever be able to prove a thing.
This is likely, but I wonder how far elite universities and flagship state schools would go on this: by effectively removing the most objective gatekeeping mechanism in the SAT/ACT scores, you’re opening the floodgates in terms of what quality of student you’re allowing to matriculate at the school. Which in turn diminishes the signalling value of your school’s diploma to prospective employers, because you’ve openly removed anything that would ensure the message of “we only let brilliant kids attend this school, so if they graduated, you know they’re really brilliant”, and the quality of education has likely dipped due to having to lower class standards for what-had-previously-been unqualified students.
Maybe the NASDAQ 100 businesses can use connections to figure out who is really good, but I think most other employers would have to go back to the pre-1970 world, when taking employer examinations in order to get a job were common. The federal courts de facto axed these over disparate impact concerns, but the expectation then that was that university degrees would remain a valuable signal of ability; if objective measures are removed, then that signal becomes mostly white noise. Businesses need some way to discern who is able and who isn’t.