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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   34923 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".

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.

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.

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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

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