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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   34966 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023

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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.

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