Will SCOTUS Can College Affirmative Action?

'I don’t detect much hunger among the conservative majority for some kind of middle-of-the-road resolution.'

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Happy Wednesday! We joked recently about a rash of cheating scandals hitting niche sports. Just when we thought we were out of the woods: It seems cheating allegations have divided the professional cornhole community after revelations that players boil, sand, and hammer, or soak  their beanbags in vinegar in pursuit of a lighter, slicker toss.

“I think it’s funny that anyone believed it would be all friendships and rose petals forever in cornhole,” one aficionado commented. “Now the dirty underbelly is being exposed.”

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

  • Saudi Arabia has reportedly shared intelligence with the United States that suggests Iran plans to attack targets in the kingdom and an Iraqi city where U.S. troops are based, putting U.S., Saudi, and neighboring states’ militaries on higher alert. Saudi officials said Iran planned the attacks to distract from internal protests sparked by the September death in police custody of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman detained for allegedly violating the country’s religious dress code.
  • Prosecutors allege the man who attacked Paul Pelosi in his home last week also planned to target “a local professor, several prominent state and federal politicians, and relatives of those state and federal politicians” and that he told police he planned to hold House Speaker Nancy Pelosi—whom he viewed as the “leader of the pack” of the Democratic Party—hostage and break her kneecaps if she “lied” to him. The attacker on Tuesday pled not guilty to state charges including attempted murder and is being held without bail ahead of trial. He also faces federal charges, including assault and attempted kidnapping. U.S. Capitol Police reportedly have surveillance video of the invasion of Pelosi’s home, but didn’t notice the break in among the department’s 1,800 monitoring cameras until an officer spotted police lights flashing in a video feed.
  • Outgoing Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro did not concede in his first speech since losing a runoff election to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on Sunday, but he didn’t contest the election results either—and his chief of staff Ciro Nogueira said he was authorized to work with Lula’s transition team. Bolsonaro supporters have been protesting the results, and Brazil’s highway police said Tuesday demonstrators had blocked roads in 267 locations.
  • Pfizer announced Tuesday that, in a clinical trial, its vaccine for respiratory syncytial virus (RSV)—which kills 100 to 300 children in the United States each year and hospitalizes nearly 60,000—was 69 percent effective at preventing severe RSV cases in babies under six months old. The shot is delivered to women during pregnancy, ensuring newborns have antibodies upon birth. Pfizer will seek approval from the Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and—if that approval is granted—the vaccine could be on the market as soon as next fall.
  • With about 84 percent of the vote counted Wednesday morning, Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing alliance appeared likely to win a narrow majority in Israel’s fifth election in less than four years, which saw the highest voter turnout in decades. Exit polls also showed the extreme right-wing Religious Zionism/Otzma Yehudit party—known for harsh stances against Israeli-Arabs—winning as many as 15 seats, which would give the once-fringe party a powerful role in a Netanyahu-led governing coalition.
  • Despite the Federal Reserve’s best efforts, the U.S. labor market remained tight last month, with the Bureau of Labor Statistics reporting Tuesday there were 10.7 million job openings in the United States at the end of September—up from 10.3 million one month earlier. The quits rate—the percentage of workers who quit their job during the month—held steady at 2.7 percent month-over-month, and the number of layoffs and discharges ticked down slightly from 1.5 million to 1.3 million.
  • The University of Florida’s trustees voted unanimously on Tuesday to select Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska as the school’s next president despite pushback from some students and faculty over his politics. The Republican senator previously ran a small Christian university in Nebraska and taught at the University of Texas at Austin. He’s expected to accept the job and resign from the Senate in December, subject to approval from the university’s board of governors. Under Nebraska law, the state’s governor will appoint a replacement for Sasse, and a special election will fill the seat in 2024.

Affirmative Action on the Ropes

The facade of the U.S. Supreme Court. (Photo by Liu Jie / Xinhua via Getty Images)

When the Supreme Court weighed in on the use of affirmative action at University of Michigan Law School back in 2003, it narrowly held that the practice could continue “to further a compelling interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body.” But writing for the 5-4 majority, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor seemed to put an expiration date on the ruling: “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.”

She may have been off by five years.

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  1. Avatar photo
    Grego4nier

    I think the best possible outcome for college admissions is for colleges to reject any “holistic” considerations whatsoever. I think students’ identities should be masked by numbers—applicant #10,765 rather than Ken Murphy, Irish-American, legacy—and then the colleges should select students entirely based on test scores. This would eliminate both legacy admissions and affirmative action, and every single applicant can be judged solely on their academic ability. If affirmative action goes on too much longer, it will engender a lot of resentment on behalf of the high-performing students because there will always be the perception that they were not allowed in because some under-represented minority with lower test scores was admitted.

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  2. Rch22

    QOTD: Race-conscious admission should continue as long as legacy-based admission does. Abolishing the latter would solve some of the problems the former tries to address. Honestly, it's hard to believe these elite schools actually care about racial injustice while they continue to advantage the children of their alumni.

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  3. David_S

    QotD: Two wrongs don't make a right. You can't fix discrimination with more discrimination. The fact that so many supporters of affirmative action argue it's NOT discrimination (even though if the races were reversed, they would argue it IS) shows you that deep down they know this is the wrong solution.

    Whenever we look at a problem like having fewer hispanics and blacks represented in college (and specifically elite colleges), you should never try and approach the problem by fixing it on the back end (which is exactly what Affimative Action is). You should look at the source. If minority groups are struggling to get into college because their preparation for college at the K-12 level is lacking, then we should be laser focused on improving K-12 education for minorities. It's as simple and straightforward as that.

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  4. Paulkempf

    Although Americans in leadership positions are drawn from a broad array of alma maters, when Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar says "college is the training ground for America’s future leaders" she's referring to a handful of elite institutions. In that regard, I'm not sure it's generally appreciated how committed these places are to identifying and recruiting applicants who've demonstrated leadership potential: class presidents, student council presidents, team captains et al. For both the selected and the selector it's a win/win: the future leader gets to network in a world class environment, and her subsequent career success adds luster to the reputation of the university that presumably shaped her. It's not necessary to sympathize with UNC or Harvard--I don't--to appreciate why this is an issue of such importance to them. To their way of thinking, their future reputations depend on credentialing the (multiracial) elites of tomorrow. You can perceive this mode of thinking, however wrongheaded, in their reported dismissals of Asian candidates. The theme of their rejections, not leadership material. I suspect they justified their rejection of Jews in the same manner.

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    Jimtung

    Kudos to the team for noting the controversy around the VF/PP article. Such a noting is intellectually honest, and worthy of praise.

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  6. Chip

    QOTD: On balance, I continue to favor affirmative action for now because of the strong sense that we haven't come close enough to making everything right (understanding that we will never perfectly get there) and have not attained the healing we need. Unfortunately, I can't set a timetable on the matter because I have no idea when (in terms of a time period from now) we'll achieve sufficient correction and healing. But ending affirmative action now does not seem the right course of action to me.

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    Cpreilly11

    Solving discrimination with discrimination seems like a poor long term strategy. This is especially tenuous when the recipient of the "good" discrimination is not the beneficiary of the bad discrimination. Seems like many schools resort to aggressive use of race in their general admissions to make up for a lack of diversity in their legacy admissions. Schools claim their product, an education, is better served by both selective admission and diversity of race. The same schools then allow money via legacy admissions to compromise both selectivity and diversity.

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    Paul Hoover

    QOTD: I don't like affirmative action. Colleges should weigh applicants the same way that reasonable people weigh others: based on the wholeness of their personhood, character, and experience. I understand that some people of certain races are carrying the albatross of historical, illegal discrimination -- and as white male, I can never truly "understand" the impact of that experience. But not every member of those certain races carries the same burden, and we can't remedy past discrimination by continuing to discriminate for or against people based on race.

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    Stephanie

    QOTD: This is tangential, as I’m not really knowledgeable enough to be pro or con on affirmative action.

    What I came here to say is that I read an excellent article (forget where—some liberal publication—The NewYorker, maybe?) on Harvard’s, among other Ivy League schools, admission policies, which mentioned the insulting way Asian students’ personalities were judged—referred to also in TMD.

    But its main point was that diversity admissions made up a trifling proportion of admissions. (5%?) Almost half the students admitted were legacies (children of alumni), many of whose standardized testing scores were significantly lower than non-legacies. Other students who cut the line, so to speak, and were also not subjected to as-strict criteria were athletes and the children of donors.

    These students are arguably more of a barrier to well-qualified students getting in than the racial group because there are so many of them.

    So even if racial factors are eliminated, it’s not going to open many slots in the freshman class, seems like.

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    Jonathan

    I’m surprised that TMD not only leans into the lab leak theory of COVID bur presents it as the mainstream view. Lab leak is a distinct minority view among virologists. I’m not saying it’s impossible and I’m interested in the evidence for a lab leak (I certainly do not have a dog in the fight). But most relevant experts do not think COVID escaped from a lab in Wuhan. It’s relevant to make clear which argument is mainstream and which is more on the fringe with experts.

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    1. Clint

      Not arguing with you; serious question:

      How do you know that it's a minority view? At the beginning of the pandemic, Peter Daszak created the impression of a consensus without being at all open about his own skin in the game or how much influence he had.

      I don't have a strong view one way or the other, but I'm skeptical of any claims of a "majority" or "minority" position after Daszak's behavior. I probably tend to lean toward a natural origin for the virus but that the pandemic was started by a lab accident. Most of that is a reaction against Daszak though and not based on any particular evidence.

      I don't know enough about virology or the mechanisms of viral evolution to even know whether a "majority" view is meaningful. Is that something that most virologists can look at quickly and have a good idea, or should we only care about the views of virologists who specialize in coronaviruses?

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