I have a deadline for a Thing I agreed to write this week, and another a week and a half later, plus we’re doing a bit of travel this week to visit family. That makes it a bad idea to attempt to write anything coherent about a really complex issue. At the same time, I sort of feel obliged to put something on the record about last week’s big Supreme Court decision, given that I’m an elite-college academic of long standing, and this is an issue that’s been presented as an existential threat to our industry. But, again, I’m pressed for time, and dashed-off thoughts on something this touchy can be really risky.
So I’m kind of going to punt, here, and just post links to stuff written by other people, quoting a paragraph or so that caught my eye in one way or another. I don’t think I fully agree with any of these, but I don’t fully disagree with them, either. It’s a mess. These are reasonably representative of elements of the argument that I keep turning over in my head, though; whether they will ever assemble into something coherent enough to share is an open question.
—The Sad Death of Affirmative Action, by Jay Caspian Kang: “The real tragedy here is that the most consequential ruling on affirmative action had to come out of the Harvard case, given that there’s so little to admire or even defend about the most exclusive and élite institution of higher education in the U.S., perhaps even the world.”
—Is it Too Soon to Stop Punishing 17 Year-Old Asian Kids for Slavery? by Jeff Mauer: “We, as a society, must improve the prospects of the victims of slavery and Jim Crow. And we all know who those victims are: White kids with one Hispanic grandparent. We must move mountains to ensure that white kids with one Hispanic grandparent have preferred access to this country’s elite institutions. The same goes for Andover-educated children of professional-class Nigerians who emigrated in 1998 and kids whose parents are from, like, Lebanon, and everyone’s too polite to ask “Aren’t you…white?” Those people must have special consideration that takes their disadvantage into account.”
—American After Affirmative Action, by Noah Smith: “Supreme Court decisions tend to act like moral coordination mechanisms for the American people. The fact that the 1978 Supreme Court case that allowed affirmative action did so on diversity grounds, but not as a remedy for past racial injustices, is probably a big part of why Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs are called that, instead of just Equity and Inclusion programs. A company that’s 25% White, 25% Black, 25% Latino, and 25% Asian is technically more diverse than one that’s 75% Black and 25% Latino if you go by some objective measure like a Herfindahl Index. But most Americans would probably call the latter one more “diverse”, because for decades we’ve been using “diversity” as a stand-in for the representation of traditionally underrepresented minorities. And the reason we did that is probably because the Supreme Court effectively told us to, back in 1978.”
—On the Affirmative Action Decision, by Timothy Burke: “A point that goes alongside this thought is that preferencing diversity in higher education ended up tightly tied to the professional and personal trajectories of individuals, which is precisely where a logic of preferencing categories (which are socially real and have a major impact on all individuals tied to them) collides with the ways that almost everyone has a fundamentally liberal and individualist self-understanding of their own aspirations and achievements. E.g., a lot of social policy aimed at improving the lives of disadvantaged communities is enacted at scales that match the targets for improvement. Rural electrification or improvements in water quality in poor post-industrial towns aren’t highly individuated even when their impact is visible in individual lives and households. But affirmative action in its various forms can’t help but cross into domains that we otherwise intensely individuate and thus to create unease even for the beneficiaries.”
—The Deceptive Reality Behind Affirmative Action by Rob Henderson: “We have learned that it is not enough to have the same resume as the group we aspire to join. We have to hold the same values as them—the same luxury beliefs, which are ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class while often inflicting costs on the lower classes. Asian Americans are now adopting the luxury beliefs of upper-middle-class white Americans, which is an indicator of assimilation. Assimilation used to mean supporting an ethos of hard work and merit, but not anymore. A couple years ago a Japanese American professor disclosed to me, “If you tell me what to do and what the rules are, I promise you, I will work harder at it than anyone else. But I’ve always been terrible at ‘reading the room’ and decoding unspoken rules and schmoozing.” Today, hard work, of course, is still important. But assimilation is more and more coming to mean overlooking the former quality (hard work) and getting good at the latter (“reading the room,” i.e., knowing which opinions to express at the right time).”
—19 Thoughts on Affirmative Action, by Matt Yglesias: “Because progressives are uncomfortable with straightforwardly defending affirmative action, they often pivot to whataboutism regarding admissions benefits that primarily benefit white students — legacies, athletes, donors’ kids, people from rural states. And there are a lot of good criticisms of those programs. But I think one of the biggest is that they are all ways of assuring that the burden of adjustment related to affirmative actions falls, unfairly, on Asians, while ensuring the most privileged strata of white society are insulated.”
—Affirmative Action Thoughts in an Inelegant List Format by Freddie deBoer: “It’s a truly bizarre thing, to look at elite college admissions, and say “this can be made equitable and egalitarian.” It can’t be. The whole system exists to create an elite! That’s the system’s most basic function! You have one hierarchy (college rankings and perceived exclusivity) that looks to another hierarchy (high school students with the best resume, whether earned, purchased, or stolen) to generate a third hierarchy (most elite college graduates) which places people in a fourth hierarchy (people with the most enviable, highest-paying jobs). This is not the world of actual social justice. Those two worlds have nothing to do with each other.”
—Thoughts on this Week’s Supreme Court Decisions, by Josh Barro: “I also want to note that a lot of the public commentary on the decision has been excessively focused on the policy question of how college admissions should be conducted, or even on the policy question of what kinds of discrimination should be illegal, when the court’s job is simply to say what the law is. For example, AOC says the court should have abolished legacy admissions. The reason the court didn’t do so is obvious: not only was the question not before them in this case, they would have had no legal grounds to do so even if it were. The Constitution and the Civil Rights Act restrict the ways in which governments and recipients of government funding may discriminate on the basis of race. They are silent about discrimination on the basis of legacy status.
Of course, the law could be changed. Congress could pass a law prohibiting colleges from considering legacy status in admissions. I don’t raise that purely as a theoretical point — I think it would be a perfectly valid policy response for Congress to respond to the end of affirmative action by moving to prohibit a currently legal admissions practice that reinforces advantages accruing to students whose parents also attended college.”
So, yeah, that’s a bunch of stuff. Make of it what you will. If you want to see whether I ever make anything of it, here’s a button:
And if you feel so moved, the comments will at least start out as open, though if this unexpectedly draws a flood of angry stuff, I reserve the right to close them abruptly, because we’re traveling this week and I don’t need the hassle. So tread carefully.
Excellent article that could use a little more historical context. The UC case (Bakke) was filed by white conservatives on behalf of white applicants who discovered that they were having trouble competing with Asian applicants. “Asian” applicants means for my purposes students from the “Confucian cultural sphere” - China, Korea and Japan. The conservative move was to attack black and Latino students so as to make more room for white students. Today Berkeley and UCLA are plurality Asian and have Black and Latino students as small minorities. I once heard a Japanese mother in Los Angeles describe UCLA as “our” university.
There is a grand irony in all of this, of course: The Supreme Court has established a bizarre inversion, allowing for negative discrimination, or discrimination *against* (against LGBTQI most obviously, but creeping toward a return to allowing white supremacy as legal doctrine as well) while erasing opportunities of "discrimination" *for* (banning Affirmative Action, debt relief for student borrowers) that isn't even really discrimination in any meaningful sense. In this inversion affirmative action is a sort of unacceptable racism and actual racism (or homophobia, or what have you) is somehow protected.
The only silver lining is that with university and college admissions, only a tiny slice of schools really are involved here -- the vast majority of places in the US are at best semi-selective, and almost definitionally, the kind that are truly selective have the kinds of resources to create clever workarounds.
The most frustrating thing to me is that the people who bring these cases always assume that they were just one or two admissions decisions away from being accepted at Harvard or UNC, when the reality is that in any of these selective application pools there were literally hundreds of better or equally qualified students from nearly every demographic pool who also did not get in. I guess I just cannot imagine being so delusional as to think I am entitled to go to Harvard AND to then believe that if I do not get in it's the fault of the 5% of the admitted class that is Black and not the 43% that is athletes, legacy, donor progeny, and the children of faculty and staff. Honestly that person should be rejected just for being a fucking dipshit.