The United States Supreme Court is wrong in its ruling Thursday that affirmative action is unconstitutional. The easiest way to understand why is to consider what, if not race, colleges can still consider when evaluating students for admission.
Can they use athletic ability as a guide? Sure! How are the Big Ten supposed to field competitive football teams otherwise?
Can they give special consideration to legacy applicants — the children of grateful alumni? Of course. If the college goes broke it can’t admit anybody, and multi-generational bonds bring home the bucks.
Foreign students paying full freight? Check. Hollywood stars stepping back from the limelight? Double check.
As anyone knows who has ever taken a prospective freshman tour, led by a perky sophomore fiercely proud of her ability to walk backward while delivering paean of praise to alma mater, colleges consider all sorts of qualifications. If they need someone from Idaho so they can say they enroll students from all 50 states, the bar is nudged downward for an Idaho applicant. If the band is short on trombones, then this is the lucky day for rising seniors who list “trombone” as their passion.
But being Black or Asian, apparently, doesn’t affect one’s life the way, oh, being captain of the high school chess team does. Not according to the Supreme Court. Ruling in two lawsuits, against Harvard and the University of North Carolina, it decreed that their efforts to ensure an integrated college violated the 14th Amendment guaranteeing “equal protection under the law.”
Or in Chief Justice John Roberts’ words: “The student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual — not on the basis of race. Many universities have for too long done just the opposite. And in doing so, they 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.”
Sure it does. Our history used race to winnow out all sorts of things, from which water fountain you could drink from to which section of Chicago you could live in. And it’s ironic that a nation that for so long oppressed so many exactly because of the color of their skin, now so loudly decries the practice of accepting students onto the escalator of academic success for the same reason. Turnabout, it seems, is not fair play.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor called the decision “disturbing” and spoke from the bench about how her own life — she is the only Latino on the court — is an example of the value of affirmative action.
I understand whence the complaint comes. It was less than a decade ago that my own two bright boys were playing the collegiate musical chairs game, hoping their white Jewish posteriors would end up in the best academic seats when the music stopped. I remember the distinct impression that, despite their top test scores and boatload of extracurricular activities, the shade of those rear ends might be holding them back.
But you know what? They still got into top schools, and we didn’t sue anybody. Some kind of criterion must be used, and schools want to present a multicultural face to the world.
When you are distributing scarce, coveted resources like admittance into Yale, applicants have to be winnowed somehow. You could say, yes, let’s have one standardized test. But on closer examination that test turns out to be skewed toward one group or another. The value “Let’s not have everyone at commencement be white — or Asian, or Jewish — or whatever” is as valid a consideration as “We need a good quarterback.” I’d argue it’s more important.
Then again, I recognize that systemic racism still grips the country, and the people who installed this Supreme Court do not. Vigorously ignoring that fact is the go-to strategy of conservatives, and give them credit: it works. Just as women lost the right to decide when to have babies last year, so now college administrators lost the ability to create student bodies that reflect the nation around them.
Not a cause to despair — the court made a point of saying you could still judge how race affects a person’s experience — so the essay will become even more important. This ruling merely makes it harder to achieve a racially balanced result. Which is the entire point.
