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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   34959 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023

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affirmative action is officially unconstitutional.

The majority opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts, which all five of his fellow conservative justices joined in, said that both Harvard’s and UNC’s affirmative action programs “unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points.”

“We have never permitted admissions programs to work in that way, and we will not do so today,” Roberts wrote.

The majority said that the universities’ policies violated the equal protection clause of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment.

the decision leaves open the ability for universities to consider how an applicant's race affected their life "concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university".

A silver lining amongst the clouds—judging from today’s reactions in public discourse, it appears that the center of the mainstream Overton window has moved from 2) to 3) in recent years.

Where 1) is a dated and quaint: “The impact of affirmative action is minimal; it’s just a tie-breaker between two otherwise equally qualified candidates.”

Then 2) is its evolution, Schrodinger’s affirmative action: “The impact of affirmative action is minimal and just a tie-breaker, but it’s a good thing that we as society need and paramount for diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

And 3) is “The impact of affirmative action is massive and that’s why it’s a good thing that we as society need.”

At least with 3) there is greater agreement all around as to the facts on the ground, that the impact of affirmative action is massive. Progress!

Or maybe I’m just hopped up on hopium and we’ll be forever stuck in limbo at 2).

I don't know if that's what the center of discourse reads as, but Jackson's opinion reads more like combining (2) and (3) along with the flimflam of the celebration parallax. Yes, it's vitally important that universities engage in discrimination, but don't worry, it's actually quite small, and might even benefit whites! Seriously, she actually wrote this:

Thus, to be crystal clear: Every student who chooses to disclose his or her race is eligible for such a race-linked plus, just as any student who chooses to disclose his or her unusual interests can be credited for what those interests might add to UNC. The record supports no intimation to the contrary. Eligibility is just that; a plus is never automatically awarded, never considered in numerical terms, and never automatically results in an offer of admission.84 There are no race-based quotas in UNC’s holistic review process.

Mainstream discourse that I see involves the same sort of insistence that large pro-black discrimination is necessary and good, but also not happening, but the court ruling will destroy it and is therefore bad. I don't think the intellectual reconciliation to consistency that you're looking for is happening.

Will colleges drop federal funding to be able to continue affirmative action?

They can, and I expect some will.

To quote Roberts' footnote 2,

Title VI provides that “[n]o person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” 42 U. S. C. §2000d. “We have explained that discrimination that violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment committed by an institution that accepts federal funds also constitutes a violation of Title VI.” Gratz v. Bollinger, 539 U. S. 244, 276, n. 23 (2003). Although JUSTICE GORSUCH questions that proposition, no party asks us to reconsider it. We accordingly evaluate Harvard’s admissions program under the standards of the Equal Protection Clause itself.

So while the constitution is brought into play, the relevant statute is still Title VI. This only applies to "any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance."

Any college, then should be able to circumvent this by refusing federal funding. Indeed, some colleges already do this (though this is more for Title IX than Title VI). This includes scholarships and loans.

Harvard in particular has a perfect score, per Forbes, on financial health. With a 50 billion dollar endowment, if we assume a yearly return of even only 2%, they can continue perpetually into the future spending a billion a year. They don't need money, and could easily drop federal funding. University of North Carolina is a public university, but a state one, so I'm not as acquainted with how that could work, but I expect they too could drop federal funding if they really wished to do so.

So the elite schools, at least, could easily openly maintain affirmative action in this way. This becomes much less true of colleges which are in harsher financial constraints, or rely more heavily on tuition—dropping federal funding could cause them to be outcompeted by other schools which can use the funding to offer more aid, resulting in a downward spiral of increasingly dire financial distress.

Whether many colleges will drop federal funding, then, will depend on several factors. Ideological factors, of course—how strongly are they committed to this. Image—how prominent do they want affirmative action to be associated with them. Finances, obviously. How easily they can achieve their objectives otherwise, through more nebulous and less explicit means—Roberts spoke against doing so, but colleges will undoubtedly try, and we have yet to see how such attempts will go.

So I think ultimately this case will fail at one of the main goals, stopping affirmative action at elite colleges. But at the same time, it might reduce the amount of subsidies going to students (maybe—I haven't actually acquainted myself with how federal student loans and scholarships are funded and allocated), which is a good thing (except that it will disproportionately harm those who need the aid more). And it does establish that affirmative action is no longer just the thing schools do, which may make it less acceptable in public opinion, even if it continues on at the highest levels.

Edit: I realized I forgot about federal research grants. That's a big deal as well.

I can't see it. It's one thing to turn down various sorts of squishy bits of federal funding, but Harvard isn't going to pick up the tab for the research scientists that are presently on R01 grants. Even if they were willing to, the restructuring would be absolutely enormous and potentially undermine the credibility of research science there. These aren't just about the funding, they're about the prestige and credibility of being part of the nationally funded network of scientists.

For better or worse universities are all government institutions, with the possible rare exceptions of places like Hillsdale.

My understanding of the ruling is that Title VI applies only to institutions who receive federal funds, but that the Equal Protections argument is separate and affects any government institution under the Constitution, including Universities for the several States.

Ah, you're probably right.

From my understanding these schools get massive amounts of federal funding from research grants. Did some quick googling and looks like Harvard gets over $500mm a year. Certainly not chump change.

Yeah, that'll make them a lot more hesitant to go no-federal-money.

Awesome. When can we start talking about reparation for Asians and Whites?

I'm serious. Here in the UK, the RAF was forced to pay out 5 grand to me it had been deemed to have unfairly discriminated against:

https://news.sky.com/story/raf-recruiters-were-advised-against-selecting-useless-white-male-pilots-to-hit-diversity-targets-12893684

Anyone White or Asian who was refused a place at a university while a lower-GPA beneficiary of affirmative action received a place in the same intake year should be entitled to compensation, in my view. Paid out of the university's pockets, naturally.

But this goes to show how great of power SCOTUS wields, not just absolute power but also relative power, as other branches struggle to do anything. Passing legislation is like giving birth, but SCOTUS can nullify laws deemed unconstitutional (which the court gets to decide what qualifies as such) or set precedent, at the stroke of a pen. Presidential elections are less about policy, but about choosing judges, whose rulings can have far and reaching consequences long after the confetti is cleaned up.

I mean, can always pass a constitutional amendment. Prenumbras and emanations can only exist to a point in the SCOTUS.

SCOTUS is an elderly patriarch. He determines the nature of the rules, but he relies on others to enforce them and, if they don’t want to, his power is limited.

Really, because the university will more than likely find ways to get around this law fairly quickly. The same thing was made illegal in CA, and it just meant that measures that whites/Asians did well at got devalued in college applications.

Really, because the university will more than likely find ways to get around this law fairly quickly

They will find work arounds, and people will challenge those work-arounds. What I want to know is how much money is on the line. If people can smell 100 megabuck payouts then they will go for it and attack at all angles. That will change the risk calculus among university admins and slowly change the culture.

But if it's just a few court losses with smallish fines, then it's business as usual.

I suspect the money isn’t there and that the cases will be very hard to prove. Unless the university is in the habit of telling students why they’re rejected, there’s no real smoking gun, especially given the reliance on non-objective criteria for admission. Essays, life-experience, and in some cases meeting the students can give admissions officers plenty of “I-can’t-believe-it’s-race” reasons to exclude whites and Asians. Your essay about visiting your ancestral home in Korea might simply not meet standards. Had nothing to do with you outting yourself as Asian. We just didn’t like the essay.

Unless the university is in the habit of telling students why they’re rejected, there’s no real smoking gun, especially given the reliance on non-objective criteria for admission.

But this is not the way American anti-discrimination law works. For decades lawyers and civil-rights bureaucrats have been successfully going after every more implicit forms of putative discrimination. "Here's my statistical evidence that Foo has a disparate impact on Bar. I was FooBarred, now give me $$$$$$$" is standard practice.

That cat really will be among the pigeons if the Court can make that particular sword cut both ways. My guess is that over time the court system will follow the leader, but the EEOC will not unless the Republicans take over the government and gut the thing.

As far as bringing a case sure, but I don’t think anyone wins the case. In most employment cases, you actually have a hard time because of at will employment. I can fire you if I don’t like your haircut. This makes those kinds of cases hard to prove because unless you have some sort of evidence in your possession that race figured into it at all, the defense simply has to cite any other reasons why you got fired and unless you have proof or witnesses, they win.

Reading Sotomayors and Jackson’s dissents all I can think is: “this is an excellent example of why affirmative action needs to be banned”

An opinion piece in the WSJ calls out poor numeracy. It appears the false claim was copied from an amicus brief, still it appears sloppy. I'd have thought statistical claims especially would receive specific attention / validation.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson enumerated purported benefits of “diversity” in education. “It saves lives,” she asserts. “For high-risk Black newborns, having a Black physician more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live.”A moment’s thought should be enough to realize that this claim is wildly implausible. Imagine if 40% of black newborns died—thousands of dead infants every week. But even so, that’s a 60% survival rate, which is mathematically impossible to double. And the actual survival rate is over 99%.How could Justice Jackson make such an innumerate mistake? A footnote cites a friend-of-the-court brief by the Association of American Medical Colleges, which makes the same claim in almost identical language. It, in turn, refers to a 2020 study whose lead author is Brad Greenwood, a professor at the George Mason University School of Business.The study makes no such claims. It examines mortality rates in Florida newborns between 1992 and 2015 and shows a 0.13% to 0.2% improvement in survival rates for black newborns with black pediatricians (though no statistically significant improvement for black obstetricians).The AAMC brief either misunderstood the paper or invented the statistic. (It isn’t saved by the adjective “high-risk,” which doesn’t appear and isn’t measured in Greenwood’s paper.)Even the much more modest Greenwood result—which amounts to a difference of fewer than 10 Florida newborns a year—is flawed. It uses linear regression, appropriate for modeling continuous normally distributed variables like height or LSAT scores but not for categorical low-probability events like “newborn death.” The proper methodology would be a logistic model. The authors did one, hidden deep in an appendix rather than the body of the paper.There, the most highly specified model still shows an improvement in black newborn survival. But if you know how to read the numbers—the authors don’t say it—it also shows black doctors with a statistically significant higher mortality rate for white newborns, and a higher mortality rate overall, all else being equal.

You've been warned repeatedly for low-effort booing. This post is nothing but culture war and sneering.

Banned for three days.

In today's dissent, Sotomayor observed that "the Constitution places no value on discrimination". Maybe she just really believes in stare decisis? "Whelp, as of yesterday, I had thought that discrimination was a compelling interest, but the Court ruled otherwise, so now I guess that discrimination has no value whatsoever."

If she'd been cheeky enough to cite SFFA when she wrote that, I'd give her some credit.

Thomas is an affirmative action appointee too; no way was a non-black person getting Thurgood Marshall's seat.

One well known reason to oppose affirmative action even for minorities is that just the possibility of it taints the achievements of any minority who is capable enough to have succeeded on his own. Of course, the left doesn't pay attention to this and it's inherently hard for white people to point it out, but it seems as though you have just given an example of it.

Such an argument is a losing one automatically, as it implicitly agrees with the pro-affirmative action premise that something is only good(bad) if it’s good(bad) for non-Asian minorities.

Affirmative action privileges non-Asian minorities over Whites and Asians; non-Asian minorities hardest hit.

The left's answer to that problem, at least as materialized at a certain large Internet search firm, was to demand that you do not notice it and you're subject to adverse employment action if you do. "How dare you assume your co-workers aren't competent?". It's amazing how many otherwise-intractable problems are amenable to the use of force if you just have enough force available.

Of course, it doesn't work on Internet forums like this... but nobody cares what I think.

Of course, it doesn't work on Internet forums like this...

I feel kind of dirty saying that you of all people are too optimistic, but... have you forgotten about the doxxing mobs that go around phoning HR departments?

He at least had the good sense to feel ashamed of it

i remember reading a report or a narrative about yale law school affirmative action and them mentioning Thomas (or named him in it, before he was famous). It basically implied he wasn't that great of a student compared to his white peers. I might be remembering incorrectly though - if anyone knows what im referring to, please drop a link

I sorely hope I am never judged on my classroom participation at college.

edit: ignore me, I'm confused

Bork was nominated to replace Justice Powell, not Justice Marshall. That seat ultimately went to Kennedy.

I think the academia has been preparing for this for years, moving from "objective metrics with AA bias on top" (like SAT scores, but the passing score is different for different races) to "plausible deniable 'holistic' judgements" - where one can't really prove any bias at all. Yes, if you measure by any objective merit criteria, the bias is apparent, but you see, we're not using these criteria, we are using "holistic view", which does not explicitly name race as a factor, good luck proving in court we're using it heavily. They'll just start being more careful about that and develop a newspeak that ensures discrimination is called something else. If academia is consistently good at anything it is at producing impenetrable jargon.

This is why I think the pre-Bakke quota system some universities had was actually the best, as it was far more transparent. Set aside some minimum percentage of place for black students (and possibly also Natives) and Asian students, for instance, at least know they are competing on an even-playing field for the 95%, or whatever, of places left, and thus there is less scope for sour grapes. As you say all this ruling seems to achieve is to make things even more obscure and impenetrable.

I think the academia has been preparing for this for years, moving from "objective metrics with AA bias on top" (like SAT scores, but the passing score is different for different races) to "plausible deniable 'holistic' judgements"

This is where the fun starts, but does not end. This is an anti-discrimination ruling. In broad strokes, anti-discrimination is an area where America has been building up jurisprudence for decades cracking down on any behaviours that might indirectly behave like discrimination.

The Ivy's will certainly try that kind of indirect discrimination, but lawyers from around the land will be looking for lucrative test cases, and they'll be doing it in an environment where the top court in the land has just told the world that anti-discrimination law cuts both ways.

If Harvard tomorrow decides to condition entry on basketball skills, they can. Their mistake in this case was failing to apply their own purported standards equally to different groups, in the sense that they discriminated against Asians who in every sense passed the university’s threshold for acceptance and so could only have been nakedly discriminated against because of their race. If Harvard abolishes objective admissions criteria entirely and admits purely based on ‘personality fit’ and ‘unique perspectives’, they can admit people in whatever proportions they wish and there’s nothing anyone will be able to do about it. The only reason a group could complain is if they were highly underrepresented (eg. Asians are 5% of the population, but made up only 1% of admissions). But Asians have always been and still will be overrepresented at elite colleges, so this approach won’t work.

So, for example, in 2022 the proportion of black freshmen at Harvard was about 16%. Say that next year, Harvard moves to purely subjective criteria for admissions and this rises to 20%, while the percentage of Asians rises by 1% and the percentage of whites falls by 5%. What can anti affirmative-action campaigners do? Absolutely nothing, because Harvard can simply claim the criteria have changed and they now prioritize recruiting people based upon their ‘personal resilience’ or something as evaluated by AdCom.

The best historical parallel is the post civil war amendments, 13-15. Virtually everything 14 and 15 were designed to accomplish should have been accomplished by 13.

Read historically 13, 14 and 15 read as:

Free the slaves.

No, like, really, free them, they're people now, citizens and everything.

No, fucking really, you have to let them vote too.

Then the Democrats made alliance between inner city Irish immigrants and Southern lost causers, the government lost interest in enforcement, and until the 50s the whole thing sat in abeyance.

It will take several more major court decisions, and a government interested in enforcement, before this decision will actually mean AA permanently ends. But it's an important first step.

It will take several more major court decisions, and a government interested in enforcement, before this decision will actually mean AA permanently ends. But it's an important first step.

We won't have the second, and we probably won't have the first -- next time there's a decision the court will have changed and it will go the other way. As usual the decision is "heads the left wins forever, tails the left holds the line now and wins forever later".

yeah . holistic admissions is just a way to smuggle in affirmative action

Doesn't this ruling mean that White/Asian applicants have a pretty good shot at suing and winning a discrimination lawsuit against a University implementing such a system?

A University needs to get the message to dozens of employees in the applications office but somehow not have any emails/text messages that could come up in discovery.

Yes. The ruling specifically calls out "indirect" ways of re-implementing the same system. They can try it, but my guess is most of their lawyers will be advising against it because they will auto-lose if anyone sues.

Their lawyers are fully on board, ideologically. And Harvard has already released a statement pretty clearly indicating they're going to use Robert's talisman to get around the ruling.

The problem is that with ‘holistic’ admissions decisions the plaintiffs would be unable to prove that they were discriminated against. They can’t point to admissions statistics and say “that 15% of freshmen are black and only 25% are asian shows I’m being discriminated against” because Harvard can just say that a) Asians are still overrepresented compared to their share of the population and b) that holistic admissions is based on intangibles, not grades, so SAT scores, GPA etc don’t by themselves prove anything.

I covered some of it here: https://www.themotte.org/post/550/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/114107?context=8#context but if you're lazy, you could make it easier - "Diversity and inclusion is our strength!" is pretty much enough to signal what policy is expected, but I am not sure it'd be easy to win a lawsuit claiming "diversity" is an inherently racist criteria. Of course, there could be one or two employees in the admissions office who would not understand that "admitting diverse applicants" means "admit less whites and Asians" - but these could be identified and targeted at the next round of right-sizing, until everybody knows how the system works.

A University needs to get the message to dozens of employees in the applications office but somehow not have any emails/text messages that could come up in discovery.

The case has to GET to discovery. Which means the complainant must demonstrate a reasonable likelyhood to succeed on the merits, which means among other things that they have to show that but for the alleged discrimination they would have been admitted. And they have to do that before discovery. When the complainant is of the wrong color (white or yellow), the courts will interpret these requirements VERY strictly and the cases won't go anywhere.

The case has to GET to discovery. Which means the complainant must demonstrate a reasonable likelyhood to succeed on the merits

No, to get to discovery the plaintiff just has to allege sufficient specific facts to constitute a violation of law assuming they're proven to be true. You might be mixing the standard up with the one for a preliminary injunction, which requires (1) a showing of irreparable harm should the status quo not be maintained, and (2) a showing that the requesting party is likely to succeed on the merits.

If I were the university, I'd be most worried about whistleblower complaints leading to embarrassing discovery reveals. That new admissions hire with sterling SJ credentials, who talks the lingo fluently? How sure are you that she/they aren't a plant from some right-wing org looking for a big payday? What about the handful of white men still working in those roles, can they be trusted? Progressive ideology plus institutional inertia will definitely incline schools towards noncompliance with the new regime, but Ivies sitting on multibillion endowments are a big fat target, and a single lawsuit can change the tune of the board of trustees in a hurry, even if their school wasn't in the crosshairs this time.

Admissions staff are largely former students who are too lazy to enter the real world but also aren’t good enough to become faculty / do a PhD. They are perfectly selected to conform to the admissions bis of their predecessors.

There will continue to be bias, but I think the difference now is that there is actual clarity in the law and monetary consequences for the losers. Any kind of wink-nod policies are going to have to survive potential whistleblowers and legal discovery.

When the complainant is of the wrong color (white or yellow), the courts will interpret these requirements VERY strictly and the cases won't go anywhere.

I don't think this is the case after today. Any lawsuit like this would get national attention and won't get quietly swept under the table. I know progressive judges can go off the rails sometimes, but it's still considered a mark against you if your rulings get overturned by a higher court.

it's still considered a mark against you if your rulings get overturned by a higher court.

Only if the higher court is good people. If it's bad people, like Trump appointees, you're a member in good standing of #Resistance.

My question now is will this extend to DEI hiring/promoting practices in corporate America. I’m at a mega corp and we practice what certainly looks like racial/gender discrimination (for example leadership teams and # of managers have to comply with HR DEI %’s). I’m honestly not sure how we get away with it when racial/gender discrimination in the workforce is already illegal in the US, but either way would love for this ruling to push companies to reevaluate these policies or even better for another case to make it to SCOTUS around corp DEI policies.

My question now is will this extend to DEI hiring/promoting practices in corporate America.

These are already black-letter illegal. Racial discrimination in employment practices was never considered acceptable, even for the "diversity" fig leaf; note employment and education are covered under different parts of the Civil Rights Act(s). But those implementing the practices and those overseeing them (e.g. at the EEOC, and in the lower courts) don't care.

I've always wondered how corporations are able to get away with setting goals to hire a certain number of female/black/latino people and then publicly celebrate meeting those goals.

Perhaps they could say that it's the result of outreach efforts and not discrimination in the hiring decision itself, but would that fly if a business decided they wanted to conduct outreach efforts exclusively to white men?

Yes, outreach efforts are fine. Eg, if I hire a random selection of every applicant who scores over X percent on my employment test, but only 2 pct of my applicants are Hispanic, there is nothing illegal about advertising my job openings heavily on Telemundo.

As for outreach only to white men, that is also legal if for some reason white men are underrepresented at your company. It would obviously raise some suspicions, because historically such efforts have tended to be intended to exclude non-whites and women, but it is not inherently illegal.

As for outreach only to white men, that is also legal if for some reason white men are underrepresented at your company.

Would it be illegal to continue outreach programs only to certain minority groups if those minority groups happened to be overrepresented at your company?

Presumably.

Also at universities? Thomas sure seems to be fine with HBCUs. Do you think there could be trouble a-brewin' there?

I don’t know that HBCUs discriminate racially in admissions. Rather, I am pretty sure that relatively few non-black students apply. And many are not particularly selective. See data here

Have they been sued over the former?

Yes, the lawsuits just disappear into a morass of procedural obstacles.

When the President of the United States can hire a public employee to the highest court in the land with a brazen declaration that Progressive Racism will be followed to the exclusion of the majority of qualified candidates, it’s probably quixotic to imagine change in your local workplace. Consider Biden the alt-Woodrow Wilson and yourself the alt-target of Wilsonian federalized bigotry. Going by the original timeline, we’re 50 years off from civil rights.

The President has much more free hand there than a rank-and-file bureaucrat. It'd be very hard to sue the President for not nominating me to Supreme Court because I am a white male. It's a very exclusive unique position, and it'd be almost impossible to argue - even if I were an accomplished law scholar, which of course I'm not - that I deserve that particular position, and while the racism here is indeed brazen, formulating a legal policy that would prevent it while not unduly constraining the President's choices would be very non-trivial. On the other hand, university admission or hiring practices or any other governmental action applied en masse is easier to regulate, since it requires some rules, procedures, official criteria, etc. It won't be sustainable if Harvard president had to personally decide on each case. There would be institutional procedures. That's where you can look for discriminatory policies. Of course, it's possible to hide them, and I am sure Harvard will try their best to do just that, but at least they couldn't do it in the open anymore. It's not the victory over racism, but it's a step in denormalizing it, with is a necessary precondition to victory.

Roberts' poison pill of allowing race to be discussed in personal essays and then allowing universities to take that into account mostly nullified this decision. As others have noted, this tactic has been used by universities in several states like California in previous years.

I would say this is a small and positive step, mostly for normative reasons, but in practical terms it's a whimper rather than a bang.

Obviously universities will look to get around this, but I don't see a "poison pill" here:

Roberts: "But, despite the dissent's assertion to the contrary, universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today."

Doesn't this leave universities open to lawsuits if they attempt to racially balance? The 14th amendment has a strict scrutiny standard.

Not that you're likely to get punished for lying in your essay, but if you were a white man who wanted to take advantage of this signaling without lying, you could just refer to yourself as a disadvantaged minority.

They’ll realize at interview…

I forgot that top tier schools have interviews. My state schools did not.

Blackface isn’t illegal, they’ll just ask you to leave if they guess.

It probably bar them from explicitly instituting a policy that mentions race. But it won't ban something like "if you come from a community that previously experienced hardship and bigotry, and is under-represented in higher education, you get +100 points", while the determination of the "community" is such that nobody white or Asian would ever qualify.

Not necessarily. The Court took pains to explicitly disallow the use of racial stereotyping. I take this to mean they can't assign points for being the same race as other people who experienced hardship and bigotry, but they could assign points if you, personally, experienced hardship and bigotry.

Well, we can see from their reactions that Harvard et al. interpreted it exactly as "you can assign points for being the same race as other people who experienced hardship and bigotry, if you write an essay about it". Just mention "systemic racism", and it's done. So at least until they are successfully sued for it - again, they'd try to keep on doing the same thing.

but they could assign points if you, personally, experienced hardship and bigotry.

If you're black, you can write "As a black person in America I of course experienced hardship and bigotry on account of my race", and this will count favorably towards your admissions decision (no attempt will be made to check if it's even plausible). If you write "As a Chinese person in America I of course experienced hardship and bigotry on account of my race" this will not count favorably, and the Court is fine with this.

I know these institutions seem like hiveminds, but there has to be some level of actual coordination to pull off affirmative action as it has been practiced. If Universities attempt an end run around the ruling, then the whole admissions process will be open to discovery and one email or whistleblower will blow the whole thing up. I know Middlebury and Harvard PR teams have put out statements to this effect, but I think cooler heads will prevail. University endowments are a big fat target for lawsuits and alumni donors won't appreciate it being ransacked for progressive brownie points. Universities won't be able to operate in the shadows knowing that they will need to meet a strict scrutiny standard for their admissions process.

They will not actually be subject to that strict scrutiny. They will present the talisman Roberts handed them and the courts will accept it.

The fact that universities have gone considerably far beyond what they were previously allowed to do indicates that there is a substantial degree of coordination going on.

That's correct, there was a lot of coordination. Today's decision had the following text from UNC admissions officers:

"[P]erfect 2400 SAT All 5 on AP one B in 11th [grade].”

“Brown?!”

“Heck no. Asian.”

“Of course. Still impressive.”

Do anyone think this will be allowed going forward?

I wonder... What's the authentication process for a college application? There's one study design used for employment markets that tries to reveal discrimination by sending in two fake applications, which are substantively identical but have different superficial racial (or gender, depending on the goal) identifiers to them. Would it be possible to run studies of a similar design for college apps? I don't see the ethics of that being any worse than doing that for job applications.

Even if so, it seems a student that's actually harmed would have a hard time proving the discrimination affected them in particular.

I don't see the ethics of that being any worse than doing that for job applications.

Such studies are unethical when they come to the wrong conclusion, as Peter Boghossian could tell you.

There is going to be a lot of legal scrutiny for any institution that tries to implement the old system by other means. How does a University actually implement this policy without incriminating texts/emails? A University can't have emails to their admissions officers that "being from a black community is hardship wink" or they'll be violating the Civil Rights of other applicants.

Here's one evasion technique you could use that's very simple and powerful.

"Any racial discrimination is very bad and wrong. We also know that blacks have been discriminated against in the past. Therefore take extra care not to discriminate against BIPOC individuals or risk facing consequences".

Is it illegal to be extra careful against discriminating against a specific race? I think not. And of course, the admissions officer would quickly get the point.

... not sure why I'm giving them ideas.

Admissions offices are ideological, I just don't think they're this suicidal. I don't think this decision is some silver bullet, but any "tinkering" that Universities will do will make them targets for lawsuits. Affirmative action will continue in some form, but it's going to be much more marginal as opposed to a heavy thumb on the scale. There is only so much Universities can accomplish without explicitly using race as a criteria.

I'm pretty cynical, but many posters here are taking it too far. If you're opposed to affirmative action, this is a good day not only for the decision but for the embarrassingly bad arguments put up by Harvard, UNC, and the dissenting justices. It's also a wildly unpopular policy, so the public will back up the decision.

Indeed, for all their attempts to evade the law, the UC system only managed to get the black percentage up to 8% as opposed to 18% at Harvard. Now 8% is probably higher than it would be naturally, but still- that’s more than a 50% reduction in affirmative action.

Given that California is significantly less black than the national average (5% vs. 12%), it's a similar amount of over-representation when compared to the catchment population.

Right, and with this decision there will be a lot of pressure for UC to become less enthusiastic about skirting the law because it just takes one admissions officer or dean of whatever to say the quiet part out loud in an email.

More comments

I've read an article a couple of years ago (unfortunately, link long lost) about how they did it in California (where explicit racial discrimination is banned). They hire a set of "evaluators", which evaluate the candidates and rank them by their acceptability (I don't remember the exact details of ranking mechanism, but it's largely irrelevant here). They have the training program, which never explicitly mentions race of anything like that. The most they get is the standard "we value diversity, inclusion and treating everybody in the most inclusive and welcoming manner" spiel. And they have a set of supervisors, which oversee the training. The training is done as a set of fake (or maybe real, from past years?) student profiles, which the candidate evaluator has to evaluate, and then the supervisor reviews it and tells the candidate where they may be wrong, if they are. The author of the article was one of the candidates. The supervisors, again, never explicitly mention the race or any prohibited criteria, but if the candidate evaluates certain profiles not in the "correct" way, the supervisor suggests they may want to reconsider - maybe they didn't take all the necessary factors into account, or overlooked something? They may remind them to re-read the policies, etc. That is repeated, until the candidate "gets it" - and starts producing the results that satisfy the supervisors - or the candidate "doesn't get it" even after a set of repeated suggestions, and then it turns out their services are not required at the present time. The author of the article was one of the latter.

If you see similarities to some other, currently popular, area of research - it is probably not coincidental. But it's hardly possible to prove that any racially discriminatory criteria were used. Of course, somebody has to train the supervisors, but it's California we're talking about, Berkeley could supply thousands of such supervisors which wouldn't need a word of discoverable explanations to produce the correct results.

For all the obvious-in-hindsight problems with disparate impact, you can kind of see how it might have made sense at the time.

Mechanical Turk + Gradient Descent

I've honestly never really understood the obsession with "merit" and college admissions. Like what exactly are you solving for if you think that you should just accept the most meritorious students? The discussion really seems to be wrapped up in some notion of rewarding hard work or talent. But why should we reward that as opposed to something else? Why treating Harvard admissions like a prize the right thing to do?

As a society the people we should be sending to Harvard are those who will get the largest Harvard marginal treatment effect. I guess it could be the case that the kid with the highest high school GPA will get the largest treatment effect, but it's not really obvious to me that this is true. Maybe it's the legacy white kid who will be able to build out his connections; maybe it's the black kid who had to endure a shitty high school and by a gritty miracle ground out a 1300 SAT score; maybe the 1600 SAT score asian kid is going to do great no matter where he ends up.

People need to do a bit more work in connecting the dots here IMO.

Like what exactly are you solving for if you think that you should just accept the most meritorious students?

Consider what harvard graduates do. They become doctors, surgeons, chemistry professors, CEOs, judges, politicians. Each of these (except perhaps the last) greatly contributes to the well-being and/or advancement of society. Better surgeons mean you're less likely to die on the operating table. Smarter chemistry professors mean that, via convoluted causal channels, in twenty years your computers will be faster and your consumer products will be cheaper. CEOs, again, more capable society and cheaper consumer products. All of these matter much more even by sum-hedonistic ethics than the individual effect of Harvard on a student. Take the best individual tutor in the world and he can probably raise a 105iq person's SAT score more than the top scorer (who has a perfect score), but that's a waste of society's resources. Who benefits more from college-level mathematics, a child young tao or a randomly-selected underrepresented minority?

The claim is that the most 'meritorious' people are smarter and more capable, and will be better able to create, understand, and improve society than the less intelligent. G, IQ, intelligence, whatever you want to call it, some people are clearly more capable, generally, than others. And much of the cause is genetic.

Consider, from the parable of the talents, Scott Alexander's brother, who

When I was 6 and my brother was 4, our mom decided that as an Overachieving Jewish Mother she was contractually obligated to make both of us learn to play piano. She enrolled me in a Yamaha introductory piano class, and my younger brother in a Yamaha ‘cute little kids bang on the keyboard’ class.

A little while later, I noticed that my brother was now with me in my Introductory Piano class.

A little while later, I noticed that my brother was now by far the best student in my Introductory Piano Class, even though he had just started and was two or three years younger than anyone else there.

Well, one thing led to another, and my brother won several international piano competitions, got a professorship in music at age 25, and now routinely gets news articles written about him calling him “among the top musicians of his generation”.

Of course it's framed, in the story, as an example of how different people have different talents, a personal berkson's paradox. But, absent a strong genetic effect and some shared cause of general capability, how plausible is it that Scott, a talented writer followed by some of the smartest people in the world, just happens to be the brother of a world-class musician? Clearly Scott's brother had something that made him generally capable, and whatever it was was shared somehow. I think the marginal treatment effect of piano classes was larger for Scott's brother than the average child. This is why merit matters! And why society-wide tracking of skill and targeting the most skilled for training is very useful.

Consider what harvard graduates do. They become doctors, surgeons, chemistry professors, CEOs, judges, politicians. Each of these (except perhaps the last) greatly contributes to the well-being and/or advancement of society.

Why should Harvard care about that? What they want is people who will donate generously to their alma mater and who are likely to bring additional prestige by doing something important and/or unique. They don't really want to admit Amanda Chang who will become a CFO of a Fortune 500 company, own three homes and a yacht and bequeath the rest of her fortune to her children.

Not sure I understand your point? The super-rich love making donations to their alma mater. Ken Griffin's $300M to Harvard made the news, but it's pretty common, it's where half the buildings get their names. This article names a variety of others of various occupations.

And professors / judges / politicians 'are likely to bring additional prestige by doing something important and/or unique'.

What I meant is that Harvard calibrates its admissions to increase the benefit to itself, not to the country at large. If Asian applicants have shown themselves to be generally unremarkable and tight-fisted as alumni, Harvard will deprioritize them. Wealthy Nigerian applicants might be equally intellectually unremarkable and tight-fisted as alumni, but they pay well for their education and legacy students like to study next to well-spoken Black people and not next to grade-obsessed Asians.

Sure, but that kind of partial incentive misalignment is legion. Capitalism cares about the personal wealth of capitalists, not social benefit. Individuals care more about status than doing valuable things. People will gamble or play video games or drink instead of working or 'pursuing meaning' or whatever. But capitalism, individual labor, and Harvard are all still useful to society.

The system still mostly works, and both in education and connection-making Harvard and other top unis provide valuable services to society! Not that they couldn't be provided better in other ways, but existing institutional knowledge and inertia isn't nothing

Harvard in particular isn't focused on getting the best of the best (although getting much of that is a side effect of its actual goal). It's to serve as a reproduction ground for the elite, metaphorically but also very literally.

Access to Harvard and its sister institutions is about gaining entry to the elite. Which serves the elite well, as it enables bringing in the most meritorious members of the middle class, but only to an extent: a truly and fully meritocratic system would result in the current elite still being admitted very disproportionately but not enough for the reproduction of the current elite.

You are hitting on the three competing and unreconcilable goals of education: Democratic equality, social efficiency, and social mobility.

We actually already have pretty good evidence which option works best here. Economic analysis shows that the productivity of high ability people goes up almost exponentially when in close proximity to other high ability people. This is an example of what is known as a “network effect” the flip side of which is when we put antisocial criminals together in a prison we accelerate their criminality. Like attracts and works best with like.

According to these principles diversity is a major obstacle to innovation and productivity. No one demanded that the Manhattan project be more diverse. Somehow a highly homogeneous team of male Hungarian Jewish geniuses pulled off major innovation, if DEI existed back then we would probably have never developed the bomb.

Anyway, hence we need high ability people together to get the most out of them. That’s if you actually care about society as a whole and not myopically focused on the welfare of a few antisocial criminal underclass cultural groups.

It is interesting response to “diversity is our strength.” That argument goes that there are biases so even if you don’t always hire the best person you have a better team.

A response is that diversity has benefits and costs so figuring out the direction and size of the direction is difficult.

Your point is that talent is exponential; not merely additive.

It’s a silly argument. Does anyone seriously think a diversity in work ethic makes for a better team? A diversity in intelligence? How about a diversity of medical conditions?

For there to be a true diversity to prevent biases you’d need viewpoint diversity. Somehow that one never makes the cut.

Like what exactly are you solving for if you think that you should just accept the most meritorious students?

  1. Probability of successfully graduating and acquiring knowledge and skills defined by the curriculum

  2. Establishing a social environment where one is among high-achieving peers which would support each other in achieving (1) and is able to establish networks that would help them post-graduation

  3. Allow professors to teach on a level that is suitable for high-achieving students instead of being bogged down by the need to cater for the lowest common denominator - which will also allow access to higher level of teachers

  4. Establish a basis for at least part of the graduates to become superstars, adding their prestige to the prestige of their alma mater

  5. Establish a lifelong relationship with a large number of highly successful people, who would support the college financially, socially, organizationally and culturally.

If you accept a bunch of random people, some of which drops out and some barely graduate with a bunch of C-, none of this works well. For some colleges, the "gimme money, I give you the papers" model works, but Harvard obviously wants to be more than that.

You could try to maximize social utility, but Harvard would stop being Harvard really quickly if it stopped admitting scions and legacies. That strata of society - the connected, the wealthy, the exceptionally bright and motivated, would immediately find some new signal for their status because they have the means and ability to do so. It’s the signal and network that are the value proposition here, not the education.

Okay fine, but I hope people with this view are ready to bite the bullet and support admitting a ton of legacies and athletes and CEO's kids.

The theory for "merit" is that schools are intended to teach people useful things, and that "merit" is supposed to track the ability of individual students to learn from and engage with those useful things, such that they are more productive in later life and contribute additional impact to society. The extent this is realistic depends pretty heavily on the topic and school, since med or engineering students having certain skills is a lot more important than law fields, but it has supposed to be part of the spirit constantly.

As a society the people we should be sending to Harvard are those who will get the largest Harvard marginal treatment effect.

I'm not sure I buy that -- for my criticisms of 'merit' as applied to Harvard, if it turns into a university pinata we might as well just seize the endowment and apply EA to that instead -- but even presuming it's true we actually still have both constitutional and federal law specifically prohibiting the government from making "largest treatment effect" analysis based on race without far more serious cause than present here.

((And I don't trust Harvard, or even the local YMCA, to apply a race-aware largest-treatment effect analysis in such a way that would recognize minorities they disfavour.))

Even on utilitarianism, meritocracy is useful. The erosion of meritocratic norms and increasing resentment may cause more harm in the long run than it benefits a few black Harvard students.

But 'society' doesn't get a say in who gets to go to Harvard. The school itself does, in partnership with its prospective students and their potential future employers. They all follow their local incentives

Students: go to the school that impresses the most employers, and at higher levels allows for the best networking opportunities, which in both cases is usually the highest status school that will have you (gaining some skills is a nice bonus)

Employers: hire students from the schools that filter for the cream of the crop (having them get a general education is a nice bonus)

School: keep your audience happy by being selective in admissions, scrubbing out fakers, and statusmaxxing in other ways to pull ahead of your competitors

If there were an Education Tsar (a real one) then maximizing social utility from the process might be a priority. As it is, we have an elaborate workaround to the fact that hiring based on IQ tests is illegal.

But 'society' doesn't get a say in who gets to go to Harvard.

We're literally discussing SCOTUS, abstractly representing society, having a say in who gets to go to Harvard so it's worth thinking about what we as a society are aiming for.

We're literally discussing SCOTUS, abstractly representing society, having a say in who gets to go to Harvard so it's worth thinking about what we as a society are aiming for.

This is so misleading as to be inaccurate. SCOTUS isn't determining what Harvard's admissions standards ought to be; they're determining (determined) what sorts of discrimination is and isn't allowed when organizations like Harvard choose their admissions standards. In that context, the question of "what we as a society are aiming for" has to do with, "Do we want organizations, even private ones, to be able to discriminate their admissions against individuals on the basis of that individual's race?" Whether Harvard wants to prioritize students who would have the largest "Harvard marginal treatment effect" or whatever is up to Harvard; all SCOTUS (society by proxy) is telling them is that one thing they're not allowed to prioritize is the students' race. If Harvard wants to scrap the meritrocratic approach and look for students with the largest "Harvard marginal treatment effect," they're free to do so in a race-neutral way.

They're restricting the space of inputs that Harvard is allowed to use when making admissions decisions. I don't see how it's misleading at all to characterize that as SCOTUS having a say in who goes to Harvard.

In that context, the question of "what we as a society are aiming for" has to do with, "Do we want organizations, even private ones, to be able to discriminate their admissions against individuals on the basis of that individual's race?"

There's one line of argument that's saying, AA is bad because race-based discrimination is bad. I guess I agree with that but I'm kind of a libertarian at heart so my prior is that Harvard should be able to do what it wants. But anyway, I'm not interested in that part of the discussion.

There's another line of argument, which I'm asking about, which is saying that AA is bad because it's not meritocratic, and I'm trying to understand why we should really care about that per se.

There's one line of argument that's saying, AA is bad because race-based discrimination is bad. I guess I agree with that but I'm kind of a libertarian at heart so my prior is that Harvard should be able to do what it wants. But anyway, I'm not interested in that part of the discussion.

There's another line of argument, which I'm asking about, which is saying that AA is bad because it's not meritocratic, and I'm trying to understand why we should really care about that per se.

It's misleading, because SCOTUS is ruling on the first paragraph up there, about whether "race-based discrimination is bad," not on the 2nd paragraph, about whether "AA is bad because it's not meritrocratic," though the original statement was about the topic of the 2nd paragraph. SCOTUS - society by proxy - has nothing to say on whether or not Harvard choosing (pseudo-) meritrocracy for its admission standards is bad. Your claim was: "As a society the people we should be sending to Harvard are those who will get the largest Harvard marginal treatment effect." You responded to the claim that society doesn't have much of a say in this by saying that SCOTUS (representing society) just handed down a ruling which implies that they do have a say. But that's misleading, because the part society has a say in is only about the racial discrimination aspect of it, not on the overall standard of Harvard choosing meritrocracy or not. It's a shift in topic from "society getting to dictate what standards Harvard uses in admissions" to "society getting to dictate that Harvard and similar organizations can't racially discriminate in admissions." Just because they're both placing limitations on admissions standards don't make them the same thing.

Again, society has no say on whether or not a private institution like Harvard decides to pursue a meritrocratic approach in admissions. What we do have a say on is if they get to be racially discriminatory during it.

This feels like semantics so I'm going to drop it after this, but I'm responding to someone saying "But 'society' doesn't get a say in who gets to go to Harvard" by pointing out that if society is restricting the ruleset by which Harvard can choose who gets into Harvard, then clearly, plainly, obviously, society is on its face having a say in who gets to go to Harvard. I'm not sure what's complicated about this tbh.

Correct, it's semantics, and it seems like you're playing semantic games by responding to the person's point with an unrelated but technically semantically correct point that doesn't address the person's point in any meaningful way.

Our elite colleges claim to admit people based on merit. They ought to either actually do that or stop claiming they do; I wouldn't have cared either way as long as they were consistent. In reality we should have clearer distinctions between different types of schools with distinct admissions policies (Ivy League-type incubators for future elites, Caltech-type schools that admit solely based on test scores, trade schools, etc.).

Why treating Harvard admissions like a prize the right thing to do?

I don’t particularly care about Harvard admissions- I’m not getting in whether they have affirmative action, no affirmative action, bias towards southern whites, etc- and I think the actual effect of affirmative action tends to be overstated(white and Asian men who go to a podunk state that has rejected exactly one applicant in the past five years mostly do fine), but I do think establishing the precedent that it’s legal to discriminate against me, and only me, is a bad thing.

Why treating Harvard admissions like a prize the right thing to do?

Because it is a prize. This is an objective, undeniable fact. It confers a great deal of status on the person who receives it. Basing admissions on academic achievement rather than the subjective whims of the admissions officers is at least an attempt at making it "fair".

Unless you just think that upward social mobility itself is not something that society should be optimizing for. But then that's a separate discussion entirely.

It confers a great deal of status on the person who receives it.

Right, so how do we decide who gets this status? Is it the person who benefits the most, or is it the person who got a 1600 on their SAT? It's not clear that these are the same people. They might be, I don't think I've ever seen an anti-AA person clearly connecting the dots.

Most anti-AA people also take a libertarian-ish view of economics and they think that wealth should be distributed based on merit. The person who works the hardest gets paid the most. The person who works the hardest should be given the most status. Not the person who "needs" it the most. I don't see what dots they're not connecting; they're being internally consistent, at any rate.

So do they think inheritance should be taxed at 100% so as to prevent lazy heirs from benefiting?

Otherwise, what is the metric for wealth distribution? Is it who works the hardest? Is roofing in the summer as a redhead especially lucrative?

All of which is to say hard work is not the only or even the main determinator of who makes the most money. So why shouldn’t the spoils go to people with the he most need? Or of a specific race?

What should determine the distribution of wealth?

Otherwise, what is the metric for wealth distribution?

How useful you are to the people with the money to pay you. Which generally implies being willing to take on extra work, or having done a bunch of work yourself for free to build expertise, so that you're useful later. The children of the wealthy are generally considered extreme outliers, who tend to lose the money within a couple generations, and don't really have much of a long-term effect.

Is roofing in the summer as a redhead especially lucrative?

Suffering doesn't buy the boss anything. Working hard may require suffering, but the suffering itself does not have any value, unless the boss is a (literal) sadist, in which case it may provide quite a bit of value. The value is generally in the work, and if you can find a way to do the work without suffering (example: the redhead wearing a wide-brim hat to protect their neck), basically nobody would say you should charge less.

To a Libertarian wealth should not be distributed at all, based not on merit or anything else, but rather sit with the person who generated it until they decide to do whatever they want with it. I think a Libertarian would argue that wealth belongs morally to the person who created it because its an extension of bodily autonomy, personal freedom, and the fact that all civilization rests on freely agreed to contracts.

And if "whatever they want" includes giving it to their heirs to squander, the state should have no opinion on the matter. Inheritance taxes are an infringement on the dying man's right to his property being disposed of in the way he wishes (in his will).

Even on utilitarianism, meritocracy is useful. The erosion of meritocratic norms and increasing resentment may cause more harm in the long run than it benefits a few black Harvard students.

Why do these libertarians take the view that their abstract notion of merit entitles them to a Harvard education? Why suddenly hate the laisses-faire outcome of Harvard deciding how to allocate Harvard's resources?

Why suddenly hate the laisses-faire outcome of Harvard deciding how to allocate Harvard's resources?

This is Culture War, the integrity of the debate crumbled long ago. As is often said here: My rules applied fairly> your rules applied fairly > your rules applied unfairly.

If all universities receiving federal funds were allowed to discriminate on the basis of race and could discriminate against any race, I think libertarians would have a more tempered view. But when its only against Whites and Asians, the one-sidedness of the argument becomes apparent and we enter the matrix above.

Our rules >> your rules applied fairly >>>> your rules applied unfairly.

We might prefer laissez-faire to anti-discrimination law, but anti-discrimination law only applied when the discrimination is against certain races is worse than either.

I agree with this, but it's a different argument than the meritocracy argument.

Everyone seeks status, and the more unequal, more diverse and more fractured a society is, the more important status is. In Denmark, status is relatively less important than it is in America, where it is in turn less important than it is in India (which is not to say that there are not surely many social-climbing Danes, but their struggle is less desperate).

Status is security, it’s freedom, it’s opportunity, above all it’s protection. At the floor, an undergraduate degree from Harvard in a major with decent employment prospects is the surest guarantee of a comfortable life in America’s upper middle class. At the ceiling, it’s a pathway into the true ruling class (return for a JD, clerk for a SCOTUS judge, get set, go).

The Harvard degree acts as a proxy for status in the U.S. It is not perfect, and it is far from the only indicator, but it is widely accepted by everyone from employers to your fiancé’s parents to dinner party companions and clients. It is not necessarily Harvard’s “fault” that this is how it is, but when a single institution becomes a core bestower of status in a country, scrutiny is always justified.

Right, what I'm asking is why it's so obvious that the decision rule we use to decide who gets that status should be based on who got a 1600 on their SAT in high school, or some similar measure of pre-college merit. Why shouldn't it be based on our best estimate of who will benefit most from that status? Maybe these things overlap, but it's not obvious that they do.

Are the people who 'need' more status the ones best equipped to reap it from higher ed? There's some data that suggests shoehorning such candidates into positions that are beyond their level of merit or capabilities only ill serves them and increases the rate of drop-outs and failures. Maybe 'Harvard flunkee' has more status than a community grad, but ehh.

You say more work needs to be done to connect the dots and explain why merit-based ascent is the way to go. While I'll admit this model is fuzzy and imperfect, I am having trouble imagining the alternatives and what their decision-making matrix even looks like, or how it would be any less abstract or illegible than the status quo.

As a society the people we should be sending to Harvard are those who will get the largest Harvard marginal treatment effect.

I disagree. There's room for organizations like that, but I wouldn't want Harvard to fill that role, and I doubt Harvard itself wants that either. Elite institutions like Harvard are places where I want - and I believe the institutions themselves want too - people to get educations that allow them to contribute the most to society. And I'd want the people we send to Harvard to be people who are most able to take advantage of the education to get to a state where they can make such contributions. I'd rather send A+ students to Harvard in a way that turns them into people who contribute amazing world-changing things, than sending C- students to Harvard in a way that turns them into upper-middle class middle management, even if the latter would mean larger Harvard marginal treatment effect.

Of course, some of this hinges on what one means by the "effect" in "marginal treatment effect." If the "effect" here is referring to something like "ability to meaningfully contribute to society," then it seems clear to me that the people who do enjoy the largest marginal treatment effect will overwhelmingly be people who have already demonstrated a combination of hard work and talent. Pushing people who are at the top of those things even further will almost definitely create greater, more significant contributions to society than pushing people who are at the middle or at the bottom up to the top or middle.

I'd rather send A+ students to Harvard in a way that turns them into people who contribute amazing world-changing things, than sending C- students to Harvard in a way that turns them into upper-middle class middle management, even if the latter would mean larger Harvard marginal treatment effect.

Really what I'm asking for is some evidence for the assertion that sending A+ students to Harvard is the way to maximize the number of people who contribute amazing world-changing things, and that the C- student who got affirmative actioned into Harvard isn't doing that.

I doubt that any specific evidence of that sort exists. I think it's a pretty good guess, though, based on how we know things like intelligence and drive interact with academic performance and overall life achievement. Given the limited number of seats at elite institutions and the observation that achieving amazing world-changing things tends to be easier if one is highly intelligent and driven, it seems to me that filling those seats with people who have a track record that indicates high intelligence and drive is likely to result in more amazing world-changing results than filling those seats with people whose track record indicates mediocre levels in either or both.

If there were somehow evidence that pointed in the direction that taking a bunch of mediocre people and uplifting them to become slightly above average is more conducive to great innovation and prosperity in society than taking a bunch of extremely capable people and uplifting them to be elite even by those standards, then changing the attempted-meritrocratic system seems reasonable. I don't think that is the case, though. I think it's the same reason why MLB teams tend to draft people who already have a track record of good baseball performance - someone who already has that good track record is likely to be a better player than someone whose track record is mediocre, even after subjecting both of them to the same sort of training from the team and farm system.

I sort of have the view that Harvard/Stanford/Whatever is good at churning out elite but not exciting folks like programmers and doctors and bankers and lawyers, but for truly world-changing things to the extent that there's any correlation there it's all selection rather than treatment. If Harvard is good at doing the former and not the latter, I think it kind of makes sense to "uplift" a bunch of people into those positions that don't require true genius to do well, and not really worry whether the next Einstein goes to Harvard or Ohio State for undergrad. Anyway, as you said, it would be hard to identify this in the data anyway, but I just don't think it's the open and shut case that a lot of people here make it out to be.

Who are the lots of people making it out to be an open and shut case?

I sort of have the view that Harvard/Stanford/Whatever is good at churning out elite but not exciting folks like programmers and doctors and bankers and lawyers, but for truly world-changing things to the extent that there's any correlation there it's all selection rather than treatment. If Harvard is good at doing the former and not the latter, I think it kind of makes sense to "uplift" a bunch of people into those positions that don't require true genius to do well, and not really worry whether the next Einstein goes to Harvard or Ohio State for undergrad.

That's a huge "if," though.

And there's the big issue that there's no particular reason why Ohio State couldn't just as well as Harvard "uplift" a bunch of people into those same positions that don't require true genius to do well. And Ohio State (representing any generic state school) has a lot more seats and lower tuition. Why would we want an elite institution like Harvard to do that work when cheaper, more plentiful tools exist? Unless you mean Harvard and other elite colleges just shouldn't be elite and all colleges should have the same status? That seems untenable given the natural status-chasing inclination of people who run organizations. And given how network effects work, it seems valuable to me to have colleges that are specialized for bringing the best of the best at certain things together, potentially far more valuable than having those people dispersed.

For my part, it's simply that the equal protection clause exists. If that's no good anymore, then okay, let's amend the constitution according to the process it lays out. But laws for thee and not for me is not an acceptable equilibrium.

I still think extending the 14th Amendment to apply to private universities on the basis that they accept federal funds is a massive overreach, but it's one that's done in plenty of other venues, so it is what it is.

NAACP CEO Derrick Johnson blasted the ruling, saying in a statement, “Today the Supreme Court has bowed to the personally held beliefs of an extremist minority.”

Heh.

Opinion here. Big emphasis on Grutter, and on its three criteria for working around the equal protection clause. I think this is really important!

  • Clarification on "permitting judicial review." This directly calls out a bunch of the existing fig leaves for AA, as they don't line up with other applications of strict scrutiny.

  • Affirms that booting Asians is, in fact, stereotyping. Duh.

  • Points out the lack of a measurable end date.

Presumably, when Harvard and UNC roll up a new admissions process, the resulting court case will be far more tractable. The defense looked terrible, and half of their arguments were categorically thrown out. Multiply that by the number of programs across the country which are getting overturned, and this is a real win.

There are also some direct shots at the progressive zeitgeist, mostly about how poorly it fits the prediction made in the 90s and 00s. This...is not a good look when being accused of partisanship. But I think it is the smart choice. 90s-era race-blindness is a much better position for the right than the more fringe opinions.

Speaking of which--NBC is really underselling Sotomayor's dissent. They framed it as railing about progress, but neglected to mention her best argument.

In fact, this Court has recognized as compelling plenty of interests that are equally or more amorphous, including the “intangible” interest in preserving “public confidence in judicial integrity,”

She goes on to list several other examples of random bullshit that the court said was compelling. Their decision is creating additional complexity in a system which wasn't actually causing splits of authority. While I'm sympathetic, I think the rest of the court's reasoning holds up.

California officially banned racial quotas in universities in the mid-90s. Schools responded by doing detailed evaluations where the results just happened to exactly match the now banned quotas.

Yes, but now with Bakke and Grutter out of the way, these admissions policies can be challenged in federal court with the full arsenal of anti-discrimination case law.

There will be a check box on the evaluation form that says "Applicant discussed their experience as a member of a URM and how that ties in with how they would contribute to the University" and that will satisfy the courts. Roberts handed them a talisman to use.

Exactly, and even if this is against the spirit of the law it will be another decade before it gets back to SCOTUS and by then it’ll be more evenly balanced.

Quotas have been illegal since the Bakke case in 1972. The Prop 209 ban was re affirmative action more broadly. And the gap between black/Hispanic acceptance rates and White/Asian rates is indeed lower than it was. But then the overall numbers mean little, since admissions decisions at UC are made not at the system level nor the campus level, but at the college level (eg the College of Letters and Sciences or the College of Engineering at a given campus). I don’t know what the numbers look like at individual colleges.

Even with its efforts in recruitment and retention, Black students represented only 3% of the incoming 2022 freshman class, or about half of what they represented in 1995.

Asian students made up 43% of Berkeley's freshmen in the fall of 2022, up from 37% in 1995.

It did work in California and the in-state student demographics of colleges like Berkeley and UCLA did - for many years - genuinely reflect who the highest performing students in California were. Since 2018 the UC system has done everything possible to stealth-implement affirmative action, with some success.

Still, the proportion of African American students at UC Berkeley is half what it was in 1995, and only 3%, whereas at Harvard and Yale it’s 12-15%.

UCLA is back to its pre-ban demographics.

Even by hugely reforming its admissions process over 20 years, radically changing its course offering to appeal to more black students, implementing possibly the country’s largest and most significant outreach program to black high schoolers, and eliminating test scores from consideration entirely, they’re at 8%.

In 2021, 18% of incoming Harvard students were black.

If the court had taken the wording of the California proposition, that would have been a much better judgment.

About goddamn time!

I'd say I hope for a similar end of AA/reservation in India, but we're even more far gone at this point with low odds of a return. Not as bad as places like, say Lebanon or South Africa, but the rotten practise runs rampant.

Not only is it bad for the commons, because a rational Bayesian does notice that someone's surname suggests they're from a demographic benefiting form heavy AA and thus likely to be a worse doctor/programmer/engineer, therefore they should be avoided. If AA wasn't in effect, then the people who did genuinely have merit and achieved their results through hard work wouldn't be tainted with the same opprobrium.

Further, it's inevitably poisoned younger generations and ended any hope for a caste blind society. I went from not giving a shit about caste myself to seething vitriolic rage after the trajectory of my life and professional career was forever derailed because my parents, with one of them being a literal penniless survivor of a genocide, didn't luck into that magical Scheduled Caste/Tribe certificate that guarantees passage on the easy lane.

I never hurt anyone or took what was rightfully theirs, and yet my odds of getting into med school and then into a residency program became god knows how many times harder, and all outside my control. I certainly won't let my kids fall into the same trap.

India is too far gone, but at least I can relish the distant bonfire of maybe a few of the more egregious grifters being burned at the stakes they built, though I agree with others that this is a step in the right direction.

Edit: Funnily enough, AA in India was nominally supposed to have an expiry date and also limits on how large a chunk of things could be reserved. Funny how that expiry date was decades ago, and now the practise is so entrenched it's political suicide to fight it. You take away their inch before they steal the mile.

Edit: Funnily enough, AA in India was nominally supposed to have an expiry date and also limits on how large a chunk of things could be reserved. Funny how that expiry date was decades ago, and now the practise is so entrenched it's political suicide to fight it. You take away their inch before they steal the mile.

It's the same in Malaysia, where I grew up (for context, I am Malaysian Chinese, though I live elsewhere now). The part of the Malaysian constitution (Article 153) that legitimises special rights for Malays was rationalised on the basis that this would speed up their economic and social development to standards enjoyed by Chinese and Indians. The Reid Commission, which helped draw this up, recommended that the article be reviewed in fifteen years to see if it should be repealed. Safe to say that the article is still in place today (as well as all the Malay privileges it implies) and continues to be rationalised by people as Actually Being A Good Thing. This always happens the same way. "It's a temporary measure to alleviate disadvantage, we swear!..." and then it never goes away.

People actually killed each other over this historically, May 13, 1969 being by far the most infamous example. What happened was that a general election was held that was contested on a major scale by non-Malay-based opposition parties (the DAP and Gerakan) that held stances on Malay rights that contrasted starkly with those of the Alliance government. They managed to topple the Alliance government from power in three states, and almost eradicated their two-thirds majority in Parliament. There were victory parades in Kuala Lumpur which were mostly led by and participated in by Chinese, which provoked the Malays, who announced a procession and came from the rural areas into the city. A fight between some Chinese and Malays eventually escalated into a situation where Malays went into the Chinese areas of the city and started killing people. And after this event, there was no correction (or at least, not in the direction you'd expect). The Tunku (the then prime minister) stepped down from office, and the government was re-organised to further favour Malays with the New Economic Policy.

This kind of stuff is incredibly dangerous, and this ruling, as far as I am concerned, is a very good thing.

The Malaysian system is great for Malaysian Chinese. You own the vast majority of profitable industry (excl oil and gas) in the country, run most profitable businesses, are disproportionately extremely wealthy and are no longer hunted by the Malays. To compare to my own people, the only country in which we have ever done as well as you (relatively) was in inter-war Hungary. Otherwise, neither European nor American Jews have ever been as disproportionately overrepresented among the wealthy and powerful as Malaysian Chinese are in Malaysia. And now, unlike in the 1960s, the CCP and China’s trade relationship with Southeast Asia guarantees the rights of Chinese Malaysians to some extent.

It always surprises me when Chinese Malaysians complain because you guys get the whole country for free, and all you have to pay for it is relatively meagre affirmative action. Take it from me, market dominant minorities elsewhere would kill for that deal.

Firstly, I fail to see why an ethnic group doing well in a specific country justifies discriminating against them in law and policy, especially considering that ethnic groups are not monolithically rich or poor and economic policies based on economic status are always less questionable (there's also the question of what the erosion of meritocracy does to a country). Secondly, I'm not entirely sure what "relatively meagre affirmative action" means to you, but I don't think quotas in education (like the 90:10 racial quotas in matriculation programmes), race preferences in government contracts, discounts on property purchases, access to a reserved slice of public share offerings, among other things, count as "meagre". I mean, I suppose in return the Malaysian Chinese are granted the incredible "privilege" of not being hunted anymore.

Either way, the disillusionment of Chinese Malaysians with the current system is reflected in the phenomenon of "brain drain". Often Chinese Malaysians jump over to Singapore, where there are both better prospects and where the ruling party is better at promoting meritocracy than the Malaysian government. If they want to lose human capital, they can go ahead and keep doing what they're doing, but people are going to leave for places which don't shoot them in the knee for the horrific crime of doing well.

Ah, China-chads being such overachievers that at least 3 countries need to actively suppress them so that most other ethnicities don't get jealous (Indonesia, Singapore and the US, that I know of).

At least Singapore can offer a reasonable tradeoff of most people being significantly richer than they would be if they lived in any other neighboring country. (The US can too, but not to the same degree)

At its very best, the practise is zero sum, and in practise, negative sum because less talented candidates get opportunities and drag down those who could have made the most of it.

I think the problem in India is more that public sector jobs are often seen as more desirable than many private sector ones, at least with the exception of the tiny minority of Indians who go work for a top ‘MNC’ (and most of those probably studied abroad or at an IIT). There are gazillions of pointless public sector sinecures in India and wiping them out would do more for the country than even getting rid of affirmative action would.

It’s always funny when you see Hindu nationalists rail against the SC/ST designation though, until they realize that it’s the one thing that keeps so many poor Hindus voting for them and that they’d abandon the BJP and its affiliates in a second if they stopped it.

The problem is that public sector jobs are the gibs and spoils that demagogues use as the bait in identitity politics. It's a political nightmare to revoke, and interest groups are incredibly militant about it.

I'm not aware of riots over AA in the US, at least in the past few decades, but an entire state in India is currently going to hell because of the attempts of a single minority group to wrest benefits from the recognition of their lack of privilege, and people are dying over it.

It's a largely coup-complete problem for the foreseeable future.

public sector jobs are the gibs and spoils that demagogues use as the bait in identitity politics.

Not just demagogues. Public sector jobs are nominally welfare in disguise (edit: borderline sinecures) and the number of positions increases over time in the West.

universities [can still] consider how an applicant's race affected their life "concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university"

Quality of character: The resilience borne of having grown up in the oppressive anti-Black racial landscape of the United States

Unique ability: The ability to navigate hostile white environments as a Black person in a racialized body.

Don’t think for one second the judges didn’t know what they were doing. They’re not morons, they managed to allow states to ban abortion with minimal loopholes. This ruling is deliberately designed to allow everything to continue.

The problem is that Roberts is practically a progressive on this issue, while Coney-Barrett has personal circumstances that obviously make hardline opposition to affirmative action less likely. Thomas, Gorsuch, Alito and Kavanaugh are only four alone, even if they had wanted to say something else.

Edit:

In a footnote to the majority opinion in the case, Roberts indicated that the decision does not apply to the United States military academies.

So the military even received an explicit carve-out. Wow.

What is ACB personal circumstances? Only thing I can think of is Notre Dame’s 85% Catholic quota. But I assume you can get around that since it’s not a race but a choice to be Catholic and anyone is allowed to be Catholic.

Two adopted black children.

Barrett has several adopted children, IIRC two of which are from Haiti and would presumably benefit from affirmative action.

Catholics that conservative don’t send their kids to Ivy leagues, they send them to either community college and then a commuter school or to small catholic liberal arts schools. Her kids don’t need affirmative action at either- in one case because the admissions requirements are to be able to spell your own name and in the other because they don’t use it anyways.

For graduate studies sure, but the children of scotus justices can expect to get in to a high prestige grad school anyways.

They're SCOTUS justice kids, they don't need AA. IF anything the optimal move if she wanted her kids to prosper would be banning uni AA while preserving it in corporations, so that they end up some of the only Black ivy grads coming out.

Quality of character: The resilience borne of having grown up in the oppressive anti-Black racial landscape of the United States

It's easy to see how this will be used as a loophole, but I think what they're going for is the almost certainly true idea that it requires far less innate talent to be a straight-A/high SAT asian student from Palo Alto than it does to be a straight-A/high SAT black student from Detroit, and if you're solving for something like, "admit the student where our treatment effect will be the largest" then you'd prefer that black student over that asian student.

the almost certainly true idea that it requires far less innate talent to be a straight-A/high SAT asian student from Palo Alto than it does to be a straight-A/high SAT black student from Detroit,

This doesn't seem obvious, unless you are having innate talent do the heavy lifting. What do you mean by innate talent, and is there any evidence for your claim?

Asking anyone who might be willing to answer - what's the cynical take on why the military got a carve-out here? Honestly, I'm confused by this exemption and I'm having trouble imagining what prompted it. A cursory look at the "military officer affirmative action" pro and con discourse doesn't show me any novel or compelling arguments I'm not seeing already in the "affirmative action in higher education" discourse.

Maybe military academies will argue that they have other purposes besides mere education and some sort of racial discrimination might be helpful, like if they want more Arabic-speaking officers or if they need more officers comfortable with Russian or Chinese culture, or if they want say a Samoan officer able to lead Samoan troops on a mission in American Samoa, they might want to consider race in some sense.

I suspect that the Congressional nomination process for service academy applicants complicates the role of race in admission and that is a separate issue from traditional college acceptance processes.

Don’t congressmen usually nominate anyone impressive who meets the other requirements?

Right, but this is about what to do with the exceptions not the usual. What I am basically saying is that if an Asian-American from California gets rejected and an African-American from Georgia gets in, the system for how it happened is different for Harvard than it is for West Point and trying to come up with a one-size fits all for both situations is a more difficult than just trying to fix the non-military schools.

The military already measures the hell out of everything, so they dodged some of the main arguments. There's also a bunch of historical baggage about segregated units, cannon fodder, and avoiding an officer caste.

Sotomayor's dissent actually goes much further into this. In the main opinion, the majority really just says "no military academies are party to this, we're not binding them."

The footnote says:

The United States as amicus curiae contends that race-based admissions programs further compelling interests at our Nation’s military academies. No military academy is a party to these cases, however, and none of the courts below addressed the propriety of race-based admissions systems in that context. This opinion also does not address the issue, in light of the potentially distinct interests that military academies may present.

No cynical take is needed. The Court spent pages and pages on whether the interests served by affirmative action at regular universities are substantial enough to survive strict scrutiny. The interests of military academies might well be different and hence might survive strict scrutiny,and the issue was technically not before the Court, so it makes sense to leave that question for another day.

This was very helpful, thank you!

YW

It’s probably just because the military receives an explicit carve out to everything.

Does the exemption only apply to the four service academies, or does it also apply to Texas A&M and the citadel?

Just the academies, as far as I can tell.

It may just be that there's other relevant legislation applying to the military academies.

I don't know whether my take is accurate, but if I had to guess I'd say that unlike Harvard, the military does actually struggle to find qualified recruits - and if they didn't have the flexibility to lower standards, it would have an impact on military preparedness and national security.

West Point/Annapolis/etc are hard to get into, at least as measured by acceptance rates. They're not that far off from other elite American universities.

they managed to allow states to ban abortion with minimal loopholes

I'm confused by this statement. Wasn't, "states can decide what to do on abortion" the entire explicit point of Dobbs?

Yes, but I’m saying that SCOTUS didn’t go halfway or waver or preserve a bit of Roe or something, they tore it down and handed it to the states with no limitations. This is because most conservative SCOTUS judges are religious Catholics or otherwise conservative Christians. On AA, they left in these loopholes because at least some of them are probably not, in fact, staunchly opposed to the practice.

I think it's simpler than that. The conservatives on the court actually have principles, the most important of which is "don't legislate from the bench".

Dismantling Roe made sense because Roe was an illegal imposition by a previous court on the legislatures of the states. With the AA decision, the court is doing the least necessary to preserve Constitutionality while not overly involving themselves in the workings of universities. (Note: I think they didn't do nearly enough here, and that universities will continue to racially discriminate against whites and Asians with impunity).

Despite what people believe, the conservative court is not just a party-flipped version of the liberal courts of the last 90 years. It's decisions are based on interpreting the law, not making it.

universities [can still] consider how an applicant's race affected their life "concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university"

Yeah, this just sounds like an explicit invitation to make the "enriched by diversity" argument. Which my suspicious self has always assumed was chosen precisely to avoid the 25 year time limit SCOTUS previously gave on the need for AA.

Might as well have circled the goat path.

the decision leaves open the ability for universities to consider how an applicant's race affected their life "concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university".

Which is a loophole you can drive the whole edifice through. Thanks for nothing, Roberts.

It's a good decision, sir.

I suppose this is as good a place as any to ask, what role does Thomas's opinion hold when it comes to lower court rulings? He wrote his own opinion after all, that had to count for something, but Roberts has the main opinion and that obviously counts for more.

what role does Thomas's opinion hold when it comes to lower court rulings?

Approximately the same as if he had posted it on Twitter instead.

Well, slightly more. While they aren't binding precedent, they do regularly cite concurrences or dissents of cases—it happened a bunch in this opinion, in Plessy, Grutter, and others, and Thomas especially likes citing his own dissents and concurrences, I believe.

Sure, but the Supreme Court can cite whatever it wants. They cite things like the Articles of Confederation or the Magna Carta all the time. There is really no difference between citing a noncontrolling Justice Story opinion, and citing his Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States. The court would have no problem citing a tweet if the opportunity arose.

That's the point of Roberts here. In any case where he knows full well the vote is going to upset the status quo and he cannot stop it (like he did when there was a more consistent 5-4 majority), he by pure happenstance writes the most moderately worded and least status-quo upsetting decision which can be written and still signed on to by the "majority." If this had been a 5-4 majority opinion with Roberts in the minority, this would have been a far stronger opinion.

My understanding based on rumor from within "conservative" legal circles is that he attempted to do the same thing in the Dobbs decision, including looking the other way as it was leaked because he failed to get the majority to sign on to his more watered-down version and edits.

Surely, we'll get that leaker any day now; apparently the most concealed leaker in the history of leakers despite it being known with a decent amount of confidence within a couple days due to the meta data in the document and the plausible leak vector to a sports writer.

"At the same time, as all parties agree, nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise... despite the dissent’s assertion to the contrary, universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today. (A dissenting opinion is generally not the best source of legal advice on how to comply with the majority opinion.)"

Roberts does specifically mention application essays as unacceptable. That does restrict one of the simplest, most pervasive methods universities currently use to discriminate based on race. Although I agree they'll be back in 10 years to decide if something qualifies as "other means" in a new case. That was probably going to happen anyway.

He doesn't establish application essays as unlawful. Just an application essay which say "I'm black" or whatever. He explicitly allows for application essays with "discussion [of race] is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university". That will be transformed into giving high weight to a pro-forma recitation of how being of a favored minority race matters.

Relatedly, some applicants might be able to use the essay to imply their race in a clever way that gets them in

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna742586

Stanford knew this kid was South Asian though, he didn’t get in by tricking them.

Roberts might honestly tell himself that all he’s doing is allowing applicants to write about their lived experiences in their essays, but in practice he surely knows that what he said will be cited endlessly to maintain the current regime this supposedly bans.

Just Roberts Things, although what’s worse is that the others could have passed something stricter without him. This isn’t even a pyrrhic victory, it’s actually worse than anyone on the right expected.

Hold on you incorrigible blackpillers, wouldn't it be worse if they actually upheld AA and the majority opinion was Jackson's ?

I'm pretty sure @The_Nybbler predicted that the supreme court would uphold roe and AA and that Musk's takeover of twitter would fail.

I'm pretty sure I did not predict the Supreme Court would uphold Roe. I've made several predictions about Musk's takeover of Twitter, though I don't have convenient links to them.

When roe got struck, you refused to update because it hadn‘t taken effect. When Musk was buying twitter, you refused to update because the deal wasn‘t finalized. Source. Now AA‘s struck and it‘s the same spiel.

Of course, if they‘d upheld, you‘d consider it a validation of your perspective. Do you ever update in the other direction?

When roe got struck, you refused to update because it hadn‘t taken effect.

When Dobbs got leaked. But in that post I made no predictions; I merely refused to update prematurely.

Are you updating now, belatedly?

Often 'refusing to update prematurely" is an excuse not to update at all, like the guy who needs 1000 hours of research 'as a starter' before he can change his mind on HBD.

Certainly I agree that Supreme Court is allowing abortion bans by states. As for Musk, I think the jury is still out; Twitter is definitely better for now but he just turned it over to Linda Yaccarino, who is literally straight out of the mainstream media.

More comments

Not worse than what I expected.

Affirmative action in universities wasn't going to last.

The upper middle class/lower upper class stops being woke when it impacts them. Defunding the police is fun, but they still want rigorous security around their lower Manhattan office. Affirmative action gave too many seats to non whites making it harder for the children of the lower elite to get into college. The Asian problem will be fixed with an increased focus on sports, extra circulars and personality.

Regime stability is nearly always prioritized over ideology. Promoting a sizeable group of lower Iq people into the elite threatens the long term viability of the American empire. Harvard graduates are put in positions of power, and an increasing portion of the graduates were simply not meeting the standards. The issue is exacerbated by lower entrance standards necessitating lower educational standards during the degree. The result is mediocre people who have studied subjective topics and lack skill and knowledge. Now that we are reentering an era of great power competition, having the Pentagon staffed by people who didn't make it there based on merit is shooting oneself in the foot. The political radicalism of the affirmative action students was probably viewed as a positive a few years ago, as they were seen as committed to left-liberalism. Today, there is probably increasing concern that the radicalism has gotten to a point at which the loyalty of junior members of the elite is questionable. The state department can't be staffed by people who believe the US is a white supremacist state that needs to be destroyed.

Defunding the police is fun, but they still want rigorous security around their lower Manhattan office

The wealthier and whiter you were, especially if you lived in Manhattan, the more likely you were to vote for the far-left ‘defund the police’ candidate in the last New York City mayoral election.

In fact, the only reason that the moderate former cop Eric Adams won the election was because poor black and latino New Yorkers in the outer boroughs voted for him.

Regime stability is nearly always prioritized over ideology

Or AA was the regime stabilizer. It would have been very awkward for elite institutions to remain vastly white while the rest of the country was supposed to be "reckoning with race".

EDIT: It also bought off the most enterprising black elites. Inside the tent, pissing out and all.

My goodness but that article is incredibly nakedly biased. Little context, multiple scare quotes from the Left, basically zero indication as to why the majority might think what it does. Is this the news Americans are getting?

Hyup. That’s pretty standard from the US legacy media.

Good news is that these types of outlets are absolutely getting their lunch eaten by alternatives and will likely die out as the boomers die out.

The alternatives eating their lunch are biased as badly. It's going to be hard to find online news sources with a favorable view of the decision.

One hopes, but the ability of existing interests to simply fund them as propaganda organs means they'll probably persist quite a while past their natural expiry date, even if their readership drops away to basically nil.

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