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Notes -
affirmative action is officially unconstitutional.
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.
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.
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".
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