Since this is an academic blog and I am a university professor, I ought not to forgo commenting on the large legal bombshell that just dropped on American higher education. I am, of course, referring to the ruling in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. University of North Carolina et al.
I summarized my views on Twitter, and I'll repeat them here:
I think this decision ending "affirmative action" is basically right on the law. In my view, explicit racial considerations clearly violate Title VII. Affirmative action admissions policies also, at the very least in the case of public institutions, clearly violate the 14th Amendment.
The Supreme Court went a bit further and said that for both types of institutions, explicit consideration of race violates the 14th amendment. That seems to imply that even in the unlikely case Title VII were to be repealed, affirmative action would remain illegal everywhere. Practically, however, the result is the same as under my reading because Title VII is here to stay. Explicit consideration of race will no longer be allowed in college admissions.
As an aside, I actually wouldn't mind trying a system where public schools were bound by race-neutral measures, but private schools were allowed more flexibility -- not just with Title VII but with other laws too. That was of course never going to happen and can't happen for even more reasons now.
Of course, many schools will still try to achieve a target racial balance by getting rid of the SATs and other objective measures that may catch them discriminating. They may even pull out of rankings to try to hide the hit to their reputations. But elite institutions can only do so much of that without losing many good students to their competitors and therefore their prestige over time.
In the end we should strive to judge people as individuals, on their merits and perhaps their hardships. These considerations may of course may correlate with race, but blindly using race as a factor creates many more problems than it fixes. So I think this ruling is a big step in the right direction and am hopeful that a fairer system will emerge.
