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Quelle surprise, just as everyone remotely intelligent predicted, the SCOTUS case did nothing.
With Trump coming into office, won’t he now have ammunition for his justice dept to go after them? Will he? Maybe we need to send in the National Guard so that Ivy leagues will respect Civil Rights if whites and Asian students
On what basis? The ruling said they can’t nakedly discriminate against Asians on the basis of race, it didn’t demand that they only consider meritocracy (in any case they still clearly have legacies, athletes etc). If Harvard wants admission to be dependent upon some nebulous character assessment that is completely legal unless there is recorded evidence that the assessors involved openly and explicitly discriminate, which there certainly won’t be from now on.
To stop it congress would have to pass a law mandating (for example) that all colleges that receive federal funding must use solely x meritocratic test to determine admissions. I have my doubts that would pass in any event, regardless of what happens with the filibuster.
it feels weird because this the whole point of 'disparate impact' decisions from the courts in the past. apparently, some groups were coming up with proxies to derive their desired racial preferences instead of using explicit discrimination but now Harvard and other universities are doing exactly that and its magically ok. its even more messed up because i'm pretty sure i've seen them make statements into the public record saying this was exactly what they were planning to do.
Disparate impact is very powerful in Title VII cases that govern employment issues (hence why justice can sue police departments for using IQ tests to hire cops). When it comes to colleges it’s more vague, because the ‘purpose’ of admitting a student isn’t clear (is it to have a diverse class, is it to create the most successful professionals, to produce the highest quality academics, to have a good time and make friends).
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No, this isn't the case. The court in Griggs explicitly accepted that Duke Power was NOT using proxies to derive their desired racial preference. That would have been illegal without accepting "disparate impact" as being a violation in itself.
"If the court accepts that, than the court is a ass — a idiot."¹
The Wonderlic test was first written in 1939; Duke Power Co. only adopted it as a requirement on the same day they could no longer legally discriminate directly on the basis of race.
The case should have fallen under the doctrine of noli meiere in cruro et dicere pluviam.
¹Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist.
...So on the day the law said they could no longer screen by race, they stopped screening by race and started screening by IQ test. And this proves to you that they were still screening by race, because they... complied with the law to stop discriminating by race?
What screening method should they have switched to, in your view?
The fact that they explicitly discriminated by race as long as they could legally do so indicates mens rea; that they sought to exclude Black Americans for being Black Americans.
The same method they used to screen white people prior to the Civil Rights Act.
@The_Nybbler:
That would have been somewhere in the vicinity of a plausible conclusion if, sometime between 1939 and 1964, Duke Power Co. had started requiring an IQ test for all applicants and stopped considering their race. The fact that they made the change not when the Wonderlic test was introduced, not when overt racial discrimination was becoming frowned upon, not when the Civil Rights Act passed Congress, but at the very last moment they thought they could get away with, points toward the grown-up equivalent of hovering one's finger 5 mm from someone's face while saying "I'm not touching you! I'm not touching you!".
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Ass or not, the court accepted it. Perhaps they felt Duke Power was not using the Wonderlic as a proxy for race, but had been using race as a proxy for what the Wonderlic measures.
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