Lee Bollinger “laments the ruling by America’s Supreme Court against affirmative action.  Universities need to pursue diversity by other means, says Columbia’s president.”

As I complete 50 years of university leadership, including 21 years as president of Columbia, I am sorry to see the Supreme Court end a process that has greatly benefited American society. I continue to believe that the country’s obligation to remediate past discrimination is far from complete.

The Healey-Driscoll Administration, along with over 100 Massachusetts Institutions of Higher Education, “dedicated to equity” stated:

Massachusetts will always be welcoming and inclusive of students of color and students historically underrepresented in higher education.  We want to make sure that students of color, LGBTQ students, first generation students, and all students historically underrepresented in higher education feel welcomed and valued at our colleges and universities.

President Reginald DesRoches of Rice University in Houston said he was “greatly disappointed” by the decision but “more resolute than ever” to pursue diversity. “The law may change, but Rice’s commitment to diversity will not [.]”

At Schenectady’s Union College, President David Harris stated the “widely expected” decision will impact the private institution that he said is “race conscious in its admissions process.”

However, “Chief Justice John Roberts said that for too long universities have “concluded, wrongly, that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned but the color of their skin. Our constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.”

Each of these schools constantly states that they are committed to diversity so if race cannot be taken into account, how will the colleges and universities deal with this?                     

Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky explains “how he has secretly enacted a policy of racial discrimination in faculty hiring -- which is illegal in California. If he is ever deposed he will state that he is going ‘to deny I said this to you.’”

In states that already banned affirmative action, colleges responded by recruiting more low-income students, hoping that wealth would act as a proxy for race.

Another approach is to put greater emphasis on students who have overcome adversity. Legacy preferences where children of alumni are given admissions boosts are being examined as well.

Standardized tests like the SAT and ACT may become optional.  In fact, during the pandemic, hundreds of colleges made entrance exams optional and there is a growing push to make the change permanent.

It is important to note that diversity and inclusion programs which have become code words for Left-leaning and Marxist ideas have now become big business.  College diversity and inclusion offices “rake in sky-high salaries as debt-saddled students face rising costs.” In fact, “Robert Sellers, Michigan's vice provost for equity and inclusion and chief diversity officer...  took in $431,000 annually [.]”

Martha Bradley-Dorsey asks 

Just how much taxpayer money is being spent on DEI, and what are the offices doing? In order to find out, I began a research project for CSPI to gather basic budgetary information across a large number of universities. Unfortunately, it failed miserably. 

Cutting the project several ways, I first cast a wide net to find budget information for 200 publicly funded universities from all 50 states’ budget officials. While nearly all responded to my ‘public-information law’ requests, I learned that many state fiscal officials don’t maintain any detailed university budget information. Considering that public universities receive about $171 billion in government funding [emphasis mine] annually, it was frustrating to find out that information about how money was spent was not easily available.

It has become a permanent diversity-industrial complex and universities will fight to maintain a system of racial spoils, even as Chief Justice Roberts warns that ‘universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today.”

Now that affirmative action has been in place for over a half a century, how has it actually fared?  In A Dubious Expediency: How Race Preferences Damage Higher Education, Michael Barone writes that “Good intentions all too often produce bad results.  Racial quotas and preferences in high education... [which were violations of the Civil Rights Act of 1964] have not only harmed colleges and universities but have hurt most of all the intended beneficiaries.”

Ramesh Thakur writes that

The primary victims of the US universities’ race-based admissions for several decades have been Asian-Americans. Yet, in another irony, the mother of all affirmative action programs, along with the many pathologies that arise from them and fossilize into a settled and stable equilibrium, is India.

India is the biggest laboratory in human history for affirmative action policies mandated by the constitution. However, by institutionalizing affirmative action in favour of any one group, the actions inescapably discriminate against individuals from other groups, alienate them, feed their sense of grievance and can contribute to a growing militancy --without necessarily helping the most needy.

Every affirmative action produces an equal and opposite sectarian reaction. If a government frames public policy in a group-conscious way, it cannot expect groups suffering relative deprivation to ignore group identity. For any one student admitted under a racial quota, only one alternative person would have succeeded in a merit system. But hundreds of rejected students end up feeling aggrieved and resentful for having lost out...

Notwithstanding the Supreme Court ruling, many “universities have made no secret that, regardless of how the Court ruled, they would continue to bring to campus students who wouldn’t have made the cut if they had not been black.” How can universities do an end-run around the Supreme Court?

To salvage its rapidly diminishing fortunes, the College Board itself has joined the bandwagon. Tucked into [The College Board] SAT digitization project is the disclosure that test items will be removed if different races perform differently on them. The College Board thus aims to create a Harrison Bergeron test, rigged to equalize outcomes by race.

The next step for universities is to concoct a set of proxies for race that are facially race-neutral in order to deliver ‘enough’ blacks to campus. Socioeconomic preference is the leading criterion. The University of California system already deploys it with increasing finesse; Asian families in California have reported the devastating impact of the preference.

Not to be outdone, Biden announced actions to promote diversity and without any shame, the U.S. Department of Education maintains that diversity, equity, and inclusion training are consistent with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

In fact, the “diversity conceit” flies in the “face of our colorblind Constitution and our Nation’s equality ideal.”

What seems to be hidden in this entire issue is that “traditional public schools are dumbing down their curriculum, either in favor of ideological indoctrination or just to hide academic outcomes.”  Why, for example, has California stopped offering algebra in eighth grade and calculus in high school?  Is it any wonder black and Hispanic students will not get into Harvard based on test scores alone?  In reality, we wouldn’t need affirmative action if K-12 Schools actually worked.

Paul Frijters writes that “not only do our children have lower IQs and a reduced capacity to think abstractly, but the mobility of young people is lower.”  He asserts that bureaucratic bloat needs to be reduced. Moreover, universities have become “businesses run for personal glory and profit of its management, rather than an institution servicing a public good function that reflects the desire for knowledge in a whole community.”  In addition, “mediocrity and cowardice” too often describe today’s schools of higher learning. 

Bruce Thornton applauds the Supreme Court decision but states that “it is going to take a lot more lawsuits adjudicated in the Supreme Court to stop universities from violating” the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act,” in order to ensure equality under the law.”

Eileen can be reached at middlemarch18@gmail.com

Image: RawPixel

This post has been updated to add a final paragraph inadvertently omitted during publication.