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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   34932 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.

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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