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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   34929 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".

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.

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.

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